Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Can We at Least Ship the Illegal Illegals Home?

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by

James A. Bacon
in

More than 21,000 of the 215,769 individuals housed in local jails in the last fiscal year could not prove their U.S. citizenship, reports Tim McGlone with the Virginian-Pilot, quoting details in a Virginia State Crime Commission report released Tuesday.

If it’s any consolation, few of these guys are hardened murderers or drug dealers — most of the offenses were related to alcohol or driving without a license. But they aren’t exactly upstanding citizens either.

We can argue until we’re blue in the face whether illegals as a group are just hard-working souls filling jobs that Virginians won’t take, and the degree to which they impose a burden on Virginia taxpayers. But we now have documentary proof that some 21,000 individual illegals spent time in jail. Accounting for some 10 percent of the inmate population, they imposed an undeniable cost on local governments. Slam dunk. End of argument.

We can also argue until the cows come home whether various proposals to crack down on illegal immigrant would sweep up a lot of innocent legal immigrants just because they have the wrong accent or skin color. But when you’re counting illegals in jail, you don’t have to round up any innocents. You don’t have to hunt anyone down — we’ve caught them already! They’re sitting in jail!

It’s one thing to defend people who enter the country illegally but otherwise live blameless lives. It’s quite another to defend those who come here illegally and proceed to commit crimes and misdemeanors. To be fair, the number appears to include not only those convicted but those who were charged but not yet convicted. Still, if the militant activist groups defending illegal immigrants can’t make this one concession — that illegals already sitting in jail should be sent home — it seems to me that they lose the right to be taken seriously.

(I do foresee one tricky problem: What if the illegals refuse to reveal which country they emigrated from? Where do you send them? You can’t give someone a one-way ticket back to Mexico City because he “looks Mexican.” What if he’s Honduran or Guatamalan? You can’t ship someone back to Russia because he “looks Slavic.” What if he’s Polish or Czech? Someone will have to think that one through.)

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32 responses to “Can We at Least Ship the Illegal Illegals Home?”

  1. Lyle Avatar
    Lyle

    My guess is that many of those whose country of origin can’t be determined might be identified in partnership with other governments. I heard something about Mexico offering this sort of program.
    The main issue for me is the illegal employer problem. People are clever. As long as they can get higher paying jobs in this country, they’ll keep trying to get them. How could employers phase this practice out economically? Is government enforcement necessary? Is it even possible without losing market share to other nations with low wages?

  2. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Yup, all we need is around 12 million for airline tickets, for this exercise in revolving the door.

  3. NoVA Scout Avatar
    NoVA Scout

    I have more confidence in certain kinds of criminal activity being adequately punished here than in certain other countries. If someone commits a crime here, it should be punished here. It seems bad policy to deport the offender. Perhaps the better solution is to enter into treaties with other countries that commits them to reimburse the affected jurisdiction for the costs of incarcerating their nationals. Of course, we would have to make reciprocal commitments. Of course, this is a federal issue and all energies should be focussed on federal solutions.

  4. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    If you pay me what it is costing to keep them in Jail, I’ll bring them here to live and work on the farm. I’ll pay them more than what they were earning illegally, and have money left over. Then they are not in jail, not illegal, gainfully employed, and we are getting a better ROI than when we paid to keep them in jail.

    Everybody is happy, right?

    RH

  5. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Why is illegal immigration suddenly such a BIG issue with the right wing? Is it because the Bushies have screwed up everything else?

  6. Groveton Avatar
    Groveton

    You break the law by illegally entering the US.

    Strike One.

    You break the law by well … breaking the law. Now you are in jail.

    Strike two – you’re out!

    Why should we pay for punishing these criminals? Deport them for illegally entering the country.

    If you can’t determine originalo nationality – send them to New York.

    New York became a sanctuary city, where illegal immigrants enjoy some measure of protection, through an executive order signed by Mayor Ed Koch in 1989, five years before Giuliani became mayor in January 1994.

    But if Giuliani inherited the policy, he reissued it and seemed to embrace it.

    At a June 1994 press conference, Giuliani decried anti-illegal immigration policies as unfair and hostile.

    “Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens,” Giuliani said at the time. “If you come here and you work hard and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you’re one of the people who we want in this city. You’re somebody that we want to protect, and we want you to get out from under what is often a life of being like a fugitive, which is really unfair.”

    Source: ABC News

  7. Toomanytaxes Avatar
    Toomanytaxes

    I’m in the middle on illegal immigration. I oppose amnesty, but do not believe it is possible to engage in wholesale deportations. The solutions are aggressive enforcement of existing laws, most especially against employers; and attrition. Virginia used to be a slave-holding state and the desire to have dirt-cheap labor remains among many business people in the Old Dominion.

    Illegal immigration is imposing huge costs on state and local taxpayers. For example, Fairfax County Public Schools spent $407 million over the last five school years to address NCLB issues with non-English-speaking children. These kids are not the children of the mainly educated,legal immigrants from around the world, but those of illegal immigrants. The results were bad. Many schools failed to make adequate yearly progress.

    I’ll not argue NCLB is perfect. I’d never support keeping any kids from attending public schools, but it is insane to import poverty so that the resurrected slave-holding class can again prosper. We need enforcement of our immigration and related laws.

  8. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Republicans will also be Republicans. In the U.S., they gave us the failed policies of Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld, Craig, etc. In Virginia, we get a screwed transportation bill and abusive driver fees. They are likely to pay the piper come November
    Their solution? Run against illegeal immigrants. Make it seem like there is a crisis of epic proportions. Play to the baser elements of popular prejudice. Keep America clean of those unwashed. Be a new Know-Nothing or maybe a Kluxer. Make sure we all speak English and are properly White Anglo Saxon Protestant. It’s a new form of White Supremacy and it’s perfectly acceptable.

  9. NOT ED RISSE Avatar
    NOT ED RISSE

    Migration is a universal human right.

    Employing the world’s poor is far better than sending tax dollars to third world dictators.

    The real political problem with immigration is it shows how bankrupt our socialist welfare, health care, social security, and education systems are.

    But if you are truly conservative and want to end this massive theft of individual property by the government, you should be glad to see the entitlement system collapse sooner rather than later.

    Democrats love entitlements and think the party will never end. Republicans seem to just want to extend the life of middle class socialism a few more decades.

    Sooner or later, the bankruptcy and inherent theft of mass entitlement programs will become obvious in a global economy.

    Countries that have already privatized retirement savings will come out the winners.

    Get rid of entitlements, get rid of socialism, and the immigration of Hispanics would be a non issue except for offending the aesthetic sensibilities of suburban liberals who don’t like multiple families living in one house together next door.

    War and entitlement debt will bankrupt the American empire, and sooner rather than later we will be begging for more citizens to help pay the debt off.

    Let’s get the debate started about what fundamental change in human governance should really look like.

  10. Groveton Avatar
    Groveton

    Interesting comments. Except that the original article was about illegal aliens who have committed crimes (beyond the crime of entering the US illegally).

    Isn’t deportation a legitimate sanction against those who have been convicted of crimes while illegally living in the US?

    Or, should we pay to house these people in our jails so that we can release these criminals back into an illegal existence in the US.

    Continuing … didn’t 9/11 show us that we need to have border security? Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out who is coming into the US? This seems more like a national security issue than a question of “helping the poor” or Republican vs. Democrat. Maybe we should let a lot of people legally immigrate into the US. However, we should definitely know who they are and we should do our best to only allow those with good intentions into the US. Frankly, this should be a liberal position. The illegal border crossings that use coyotes, cost the illegal aliens their life savings and are full of hazards are an abomination. I would expect that those with a liberal viewpoint would want secure borders, legal and organized immigration and a safe process to let people into the US. However, it seems that the liberal love for the common man does not extend to a mother carrying an infant across the Arizona desert at night while a coyote takes every penny the poor woman has saved in her entire life.

  11. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Groveton: Touche!

  12. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    So, will these one day be known as the Jose Crow laws?

  13. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Anonymous 7:51, I don’t know, *will* they be remembered as the Jose Crow laws? Maybe you can tell us in what way laws designed to limit illegal immigration resemble those used to enforce a segregated society.

  14. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Because both are/were blatant appeals to racial animus and stereotyping in an effort to win votes and maintain political power. The politics of hate. The politics of fear.

    As some of your other commentators have noted, the economics behind all this are far more complicated and the worst thing that could happen to the American economy would be for all the illegals to leave suddenly today.

    The existing punishments for a business hiring someone, for example, are just fine — if enforced. I think the idea that a business could face the “ultimate punishment” of being competely shut down will make a federal prosecutor less likely to push for a conviction, not more. But the voter appeal of that idea is easy to imagine.

  15. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Anonymous 10:08, You raise a legitimate point about the harsh sanctions against companies who hire illegals. To me, that’s the most troubling aspect of the proposal.

    But to criticize the motives of the people advancing the proposals as “blatant appeals to racial animus and stereotyping,” you are engaging in your own “politics of hate” and “politics of fear.”

    Rather than debate the proposals on their merits or demerits, you try to dispense with debate altogether by labeling your opponents as hateful racists.

    I could just as easily argue that you and other foes of the legislation are the ones playing to racial stereotypes and the politics of hate. What makes you so pure? The fact that you stereotype white people instead of stereotyping Latinos? I could argue that you and other grievance mongers seek to gain political advantage by keeping Hispanics on the liberal plantation in perpetual fear of whitey. I could hurl such charges, which would be as irresponsible, as based on a lack of knowledge about you, and as divorced from the merits of the case as the demeaning stereotypes you toss around… But I won’t. I’m so sick and tired of being labeled a racist and bigot myself, that I’m tempted to. But I’d like to keep the debate on a higher plane.

  16. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “…tell us in what way laws designed to limit illegal immigration resemble those used to enforce a segregated society.”

    I think there were laws designed to prevent blacks from migrating to white neighborhoods, or to have that effect.

    “Migration is a universal human right.”

    Does that mean you support the migration of urban residents to the suburbs and beyond? Or should we have Urban Crow lawd designed to keep them in the cites, or to have the same effect?

    Should we get rid of socialistic land use laws designed to protect the aesthetic sensibilites of neighbors?

    “…sooner rather than later we will be begging for more citizens to help pay the debt off.”

    Right, so which of the following costs provides the highest higest ROI?

    1) Continully buying airplane tickest to send them home? (You can’t send a Salvadorean home through Mexico on the bus, they don’t want them either.)

    2) Continully paying to keep them in jail?

    3) Spending resources to crack down on employers? (This might lead to more poverty and more crimes of desperation, raising the costs of 1) and 2)

    4) Spending resources to find a way to legalize and educate them so we can collect taxes legally?

    5) Spend the money to have a massive roundup and send them all home tomorrow, and put up a wall to try to keep them out. Launch a federal research campaign to develop automated ladscape and labor machines, (voice activated, in Spanish).

    6) Pay the racists and bigots enough so they won’t mind being around “Anything That is Different or Strange”.

    RH

  17. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    I admit to being guilty of stereotyping politicians!

  18. NOT ED RISSE Avatar
    NOT ED RISSE

    Groveton

    Jim Bacon said, “If it’s any consolation, few of these guys are hardened murderers or drug dealers — most of the offenses were related to alcohol or driving without a license.”

    Virginia does not allow “illegals” to obtain a license so of course they drive without a license.

    As for alcohol, imagine if Virginia passed a law and said anyone ever arrested for drunk driving or public intoxication in any state could not migrate to Virginia.

    The simple fact is the USA became an empire precisely because it created a massive free trade and free migration zone across the entire continent.

    Imagine if all 50 states set their own migration rules.

    What a disaster for freedom and prosperity that would be.

    The 9-11 security issue is a smokescreen. I do not know many Islamic extremists who are Hispanic.

  19. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Really?

    How many Islamic Extremists do you know?

    ;-).

  20. NOT ED RISSE Avatar
    NOT ED RISSE

    Isn’t the English language fun to twist?

    How about this.

    I do not know of any Islamic terrorists who are Hispanic.

    The 9-11 security issue is still a smokescreen.

    What if every county and city could set their own migration rules?

    Why, Prince William County could build a border fence and start checking the immigration status of the drivers in vehicles coming from Fairfax County on I-66.

    Think of the millions of jobs we could create (with higher taxes of course) by hiring border guards and inspectors for every locality.

    Let’s not just make employers responsible. Let’s require consumers to verify the legal presence of everyone they do business with. Does the cashier at Chipotle have the proper papers? Does the non-English speaking cook at Five Guys flipping the hamburgers have the proper papers?

    If you make everyone responsible for this insidious discrimination of the world’s working poor, we will get beyond this nonsense very quickly. Most people would hang their head in shame, rather than ask a hard working non-English speaking dirt poor immigrant to migrate back and starve in some corrupt third world country.

    Oh, I forgot, they park too many older cars in front of their homes. That does it, anything less than a BMW in front of my neighbor’s house hurts my property values.

    Oh well, screw the poor.

  21. not jim bacon Avatar
    not jim bacon

    nobody cares

  22. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Jim Bacon

    Apparently some Swiss want to take it one step further and deport the entire family if someone commits a crime.

    http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070901/D8RCI31O0.html

    “GENEVA (AP) – The campaign poster was blatant in its xenophobic symbolism: Three white sheep kicking out a black sheep over a caption that read “for more security.” The message was not from a fringe force in Switzerland’s political scene but from its largest party.
    The nationalist Swiss People’s Party is proposing a deportation policy that anti-racism campaigners say evokes Nazi-era practices. Under the plan, entire families would be expelled if their children are convicted of a violent crime, drug offenses or benefits fraud.”

    In the name of security of course.

  23. NOT ED RISSE Avatar
    NOT ED RISSE

    Glad to see somebody else on the net agrees with me.

    “Traveling, without interference by some government official, is a fundamental human right.”

    http://www.lewrockwell.com/fisk/fisk14.html

    “There is no such thing as a person whose very nature makes him illegal. Nobody is born into a state of illegality.

    The U.S. Constitution enumerates the rights we all possess as individuals. It doesn’t grant them nor does it claim to be exhaustive or authoritative on the subject. It is quite specific as to who possess rights; people; persons. In other words, anyone who can fog a mirror has rights.

    Geographical location is thus not a barrier to the endowment of one’s rights. We possess rights by virtue of being alive. Merely being alive can never be construed, either morally or logically, to be an illegal act.

    An alien is generally defined as a person who is a citizen of another country or state. If you travel from Texas to Arizona, you are an alien there until you have complied with Arizona law on the matter of legal residency. That only means you are entitled to certain privileges such as less-expensive college tuition, a driver’s license issued by the state, etc. It does not mean that you are illegally in the state until such time as you become “legal.” A state doesn’t have any legitimate power to deny your rights, but it can deny you certain privileges if you are an alien.”

    Great article by Rick Fisk. Worth reading and thinking about.

  24. Groveton Avatar
    Groveton

    not ed risse and Anon(s);

    C’mon guys.

    Citizenship is a lot different than traveling from state to state.

    And the US Constitution? It clearly grants Congress the right to regulate immigration. Article I, Section 8, “To establish a uniform rule of naturalization”.

    There is no universal right to migration from outside the US inside the US Constitution.

    I think this debate needs to be had in two parts:

    1. The process of immigration – How does someone immigrate to the US legally, what do they have to demonstrate prior to immigration, what do they have to demonstrate prior to citizenship, etc.

    2. The policy of immigration – How many people should be allowed into the US, what countries of origin should be allowed what number of immigrants, etc.

    You have to have a working process if you want to have a working policy.

    My problem is that we don’t have a process that works. So, naturally, we don’t have a policy either.

    I want to fix the process and then fix the policy.

    The process should allow for legal immigration within a reasonable timeframe of application. Today, it does not.

    The process must penalize illegal immigration effectively – both immigrants and those who emply them. Today, it does not.

    Once the process is fixed, I am in favor of pretty liberal immigration policy. The US economy needs more people than the US birth rate provides.

    I am in favor of steady immigration.

    I am opposed to illegal immigration.

    For all his faults, Pres. Bush put forth what I thought was a well reasoned immigration law.

    However, it dies among the special interests of Congress.

    What a shame.

  25. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Groveton, In your most recent comment, you are the voice of reason. Thank you for articulating the position better than I.

  26. NOT ED RISSE Avatar
    NOT ED RISSE

    Groveton

    You are confusing two issues, migration and citizenship.

    “Naturalization” is the process of conferring citizenship.

    Millions of people migrate around the planet without ever obtaining citizenship in the country they live, work, and eventually die in.

    What a pitiful world it would be if everyone maintained that humans had no inalienable right conferred by their Creator to live anywhere except within the geographical confines of the political jurisdiction where their parents were citizens at the time of their birth.

    Any human who is not a physical threat to someone else has a right to travel, live, work, play, or invest, anywhere in the world irrespective of the artificial political boundaries inherited from the past.

    Obtaining citizenship is another matter. Fluency in English, proficient knowledge of American history and government, belief in private property rights and individual liberty, twenty years residency, etc. would be a reasonable place to start for American citizenship.

    But a human being certainly doesn’t need all that to flip burgers or clean hotel rooms so they can feed their kids and make a better life for themselves.

    What is so threatening about freedom?

  27. Groveton Avatar
    Groveton

    Jim Bacon:

    Thank you for your comment. Coming from you – it is a compliment indeed.

    Not Ed Risse:

    You are very articulate and I think your heart is in the right place. However, I have to wonder about some of your ideas, including:

    “What a pitiful world it would be if everyone maintained that humans had no inalienable right conferred by their Creator to live anywhere except within the geographical confines of the political jurisdiction where their parents were citizens at the time of their birth.”.

    I find that sentence beautifully written but a bit difficult to understand.

    Do you think that people have an inalienable right to live anywhere they please regardless of the laws of that place?

    The inscription on the statue of liberty reads:

    “Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”.

    I really, honestly believe that those words should be as true today as the day they were written.

    However, I also believe that the goals annunciated on the statue of liberty can be achieved in an organized manner. The United States should welcome immigrants. However, they should do in an organized and disciplined manner.

    In addition, a guest worker program makes perfect sense to me.

    So – where is the argument?

    Do you think that the present system of disorganized and illegal immigration is OK?

  28. NOT ED RISSE Avatar
    NOT ED RISSE

    The system is broken and screws the poor, the persecuted, and the disadvantaged.

    One of my employees, a naturalized American citizen from south of here, spent over 5 years and thousands of dollars in legal fees to obtain permission for his wife and two children to immigrate.

    What a waste, what an injustice, and I witnessed it firsthand.

    These hardworking dirt-poor humans are screwed by the middle class sensibilities of spoiled Americans who don’t want to look real poverty in the face.

    Rosa Parks is a heroine for defying an unjust law. Any law that prevents the entry of an otherwise law-abiding human is unjust. Any poor downtrodden human who immigrates in defiance of such an unjust law is a freedom rider and deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom

    Thanks for listening.

  29. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Screw u. i do’nt want any more junk cars in my neighborhood.

  30. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    NOT ED RISSE:

    It was a joke 😉 about the islamic hispanic extremists.

    I’m with you. The noise we are making over this is ridiculous and demeaning.

    If we have 12 million “illegals” then it is the law that is screwed up not the migrants. Face reality and move on.

  31. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    I am glad for some sanity on this blog.

    Thanks for clarifying a very rye sense of humor I should have picked up on.

  32. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “….whose only crime is driving without a license VA won’t give them… pretty well hits it on the head.

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