This is a good point, but I think it is a short-term problem. As I mentioned earlier, there two ways to reduce the incidence of illegals: 1) remove those that are her and 2) prevent more from coming in. While the problem you cite may slightly increase the number here, that, I feel, is more than offset by the securing the border down the road. I think the two most important/effective things to be done right away are securing the border and going after employers of illegals.
Forgot: I’m not surprised that the article states that illegal immigration has increased since the building of the fence. As I know you are aware, there has been virtuall zero effort to do anything about this issue until about a year or two ago. Even after 9/11, all we got was a little lip service and the advice to go shop.
I don’t agree that the two parts should be separated in this way. Deporting illegals when we have a porous border and economic incentives for people to cross the border illegally is simply “shuffling cards.”
I think the data is equivocal here. For example, the bulk of the revenue for my local governments comes from property taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes, excise taxes, and various business taxes. All of these are passed indirectly to the underground economy.
As for income tax and payroll taxes in general, these are the most easily avoidable, but it is the responsbility of the employer to collect these taxes.
What I’m saying is that I don’t view taxation of the underground economy as being the same issue as illegal immigration. They overlap to some extent, but for all I know, if we were to get rid of all the illegal immigrants tomorrow, the underground economy would shift to legal immigrants and citizens. While I think we should implement a tax system that properly taxes the underground economy, I don’t view this issue as something that should get tied into the illegal immigration debate.
If we look at the economy as a whole, rather than just focusing on taxes, I think the data is even more equivocal. Like it or not, various people are benefitting from illegal immigration, and illegal immigration may provide a net benefit as a whole (depending on whose study you look at). Even if it were to provide a net benefit, I would still be against illegal immigration for other reasons.
But as to the issue of wasting my money–I stated this earlier. I don’t want my local government to focus resources (spend my tax money) doing things that will then be systematically undermined by the Federal government. If the Federal government was taking serious steps to control illegal immigration, then I’d be amenable to my local government spending time this way.
There’s 2 different points here. The first is that the police department says that it will compromise their ability to police safely. If you want me not to side with my cheif of police, you’re going to have to produce an argument that it will not. The bulk of the LAPD’s argument has already been touched on in this thread twice.
Aside from this, let’s say the police arrest someone who they normally would release on bail. I don’t want them to hold this guy in county lockup for a week waiting for the Feds to get around to dealing with his immigration status. If the Feds wanted to tap into the local arrest database (which they already can do), and run down the police station and pick him up as he’s being released, I have no problem with that.
I think I’ve explained this. Shinyville has limited resources and has to prioritize what issues they deal with. The priority for Shinyville is dealing with crimes that affect property and safety. Shinyville feels that using its own resources to deal with the immigration will impact its ability to deal with these other crimes. I defer to Shinyville.
I hadn’t heard this. Can you provide a cite? The last I heard, the Senate rejected funding.
Is this a hijack of your own thread?
Yes, I think illegal immigration is a problem. Generally, I think we should seal the borders, come up with an easy and accurate ways for employers to determine employment status, crackdown on employers who hire illegal immigrants, and deport immigrants who are in the country illegally. Generally, I’m opposed to English-only proposals and generally, I’m in favor of some sort of limited amnesty. I’m also in favor of renegotiating trade agreements in specific ways to alleviate the problem. But the devil is in the details. Once we start getting into specifics, I find that many of the proposals that come out of the anti-illegal immigration camp are counterproductive, wastes of money, unconstitutional, or even racist, which is why I tend to stay out of these debates.
And this thread topic is a perfect example for me. It is a proposal that I think is both counterproductive and a waste of money.
As it happened, inmigration was IMHO a factor in the last election, but not as the Republicans expected.
As I noticed, your 2 solutions exclude many other options that are more likely now since Republicans (that were more likely to approve punitive immigration policies) have less power now.
Agree or not, those are the two ways to reduce the incidence of illegals in the country. Period. Now, if you think that a porous border makes deportation a waste of time, you may have a good point. I do not know how many people deported come back. I fear the number is quite high. That is one reason I suggested having him serve time then deporting him. And if he comes back, lock him up for a longer time and deport him, etc.
I’m not following you here. No, the underground economy does not equal employment of illegal aliens. But I would guess that the illegal population makes up a huge part of it. I’m not sure why you brought this up. They both are problems that should be remedied. Taking care of illegal immigration will solve one problem and make at least a big dent in the other.
I’m glad to hear it. And I think it doesn’t matter squat if people benefit from it. Not one person should be able to reside here illegally. There is no job that they do that a legal resident would do. The employer would simply have to pay a wage to make it attractive. That’s the market at work. One of the often overlooked victims of a large illegal population is the degree to which the lower wages for unskilled citizens. The fact that unions and minority groups, who are usually overrepresented in that labor pool, aren’t up in arms about it is baffling.
That’s fair enough. But you still seem to be ignoring the fact that a criminal would be removed from your town, even temporarily. But doesn’t your argument here go more to witnesses than the criminals themselves?
Why? He’s already locked up? And something like over 70% (no, I don’t have a cite) of illegals who are released until their court date never bother showing up for trial. How does that make you safer? Seems to be quite the opposite.
Good. It’s a start.
But this is a theory. Not all towns hold to that theory. But since there is no way to prove or disprove it’s effectiveness, as a theory I guess it’s as good as the one on the other side of the coin.
A porous border combined with economic incentives–but yes, that is my point.
Yeah, but this is basically a fungible commodity here (I don’t like to use these terms with people, but there you go). If you suggest he serves time for other crimes he’s committed–yeah, no argument. If you think he should serve time for violating immigration laws when he wouldn’t otherwise serve time–well, I’m not sure I’d agree, but that’s a Federal deal, and I don’t want him serving time in the county lockup for it.
I brought it up because I thought you were making an argument that illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes, which I think is a bogus argument. If you weren’t, I’ve misread you. But your statement that illegals cost more in government services than they pay in taxes is counter-intuitive to me, and I’ll need to see some data before I accept it.
That’s one of the reasons I’m against illegal immigration. If we need extra unskilled workers, we can let them in legally, but we’ll never be able to figure out how many unskilled workers we need with this size of an illegal population.
I don’t think the argument solely goes to witnesses. I think in densely packed immigrant communities in big cities, the lines between who is a witness or is a criminal or is someone simply swept up accidently are often difficult to discern.
I’ve been thinking we’re talking about arestees. That’s a distinct group from criminals, particularly in a city like LA, where the police are–ok, I’ll be tactful here–a bit overzealous. Furthermore, not all drug violations are jailable offenses. If someone is convicted for a crime and is serving time in jail, and the Feds want to go get him, fine by me. What I don’t want is the local county lockup being used as a way station for people solely for immigration issues until the Feds get around to doing something.
Well, if you want to produce empirical data, I’ll look at it. But it is a theory that a number of major cities have embraced at various points in time. If the police department in tiny-town has a different strategy, that may work for them, but it doesn’t translate to what will work in an extremely large city with an already high illegal immigration population.
I need to clarify my argument about arestees here a bit more. The LAPD already reports immigration status for certain types of crime (and as I said, if the LAPD wants to turn someone over who’s got a kilo of cocaine, fine by me).
What I’m worried about is low-penalty crime that usually wouldn’t warrant jail time or might not even warrant arrest. The LAPD is already strained, and we shouldn’t be adding burdens on to them unless there is a real benefit for doing so.
For example, someone might be stopped by the police for a crime that usually only warrants a ticket. Dragging him down to the police station because they think he’s an illegal immigrant temporarily takes an officer of the street. That makes me less safe and costs me money.
Or, say the crime is a finable offense, but not a jailable offense. Putting the guy in lockup while the Feds sort out his immigration status means less space for people who need to be jailed. It’s not as if we have an infinte amount of space in our jails or as if its free to keep people in our jails. That makes me less safe and costs me money.
If the Feds want to insert themselves into the process somehow so that it doesn’t place a burden on the LAPD, fine by me. But what people here seem to be asking is that the LAPD insert themselves into a Federal process at a cost to the LAPD.
BrightNShiny, your argument is very close to the one the LAPD and City Hall use to justify their policy of not reporting illegals to the feds. They say that if illegal immigrants were afraid of being reported, they wouldn’t talk to the police, and it would be harder for the police to keep order.
Call me cynical, but I think this policy has little to do with helping the police do their job and a lot to do with helping illegal immigrants evade deportation. I can see that in some cases, a cop might make a judgment that it’s better to turn a blind eye to someone’s immigration status if it means getting vital cooperation in solving or preventing worse crimes. But cops and prosecutors everywhere already have that kind of discretion - a cop is not going to bust a hooker if it means losing her cooperation in trying to find a murder suspect. But the LAPD doesn’t leave it up to the individual cop. It prohibits all cops from turning a suspected illegal immigrant over to the feds unless he’s done something really heinous. It takes away a tool the police could use to “encourage” cooperation over concern that the police would…do what…enforce the law? Or is there some imagined potential for abuse of illegal immigrants? For all the ethics problems the LAPD has had, immigrant abuse is way down the list. Southern California is full of cities with large illegal immigrant populations, and you just do not see the police systematically harassing illegal immigrants who are otherwise law-abiding.
Look at something like speeding. Now, if a woman was going down the 405 at 90 miles an hour and when the cops pulled her over, she told the police that she was being chased by her homicidal ex-husband and would the police please help her, it’s within the police’s discretion to ignore the speeding and go after the husband. But what if the LAPD made a policy that the police are no longer allowed to stop speeders, under any circumstances, on the pretext that it might distract from a more serious crime? Ridiculous. Nobody would stand for that. Yet that’s their policy toward illegal immigration.
The concrete problem is this: an illegal immigrant gets busted for armed robbery, and it turns out he’s also a gangbanger. He does his time and gets deported. Then he walks back across the border and goes right back to his old neighborhood (at this point his mere presence in the U.S. is a felony), knowing that he can look the cop who originally arrested him right in the eye in broad daylight and not worry about getting hassled. This is not an unusual occurrence - think about how many thousands of illegal immigrant gangsters are in LA and how many could be deported just like that, if only the LAPD would do it.
If the second-largest city in the United States feels that it cannot keep order without countermanding federal law, doesn’t that suggest that illegal immigration is a major problem and should be reduced by all Constitutional means? Did you know that 95% of the homicide warrants in LA County are for illegal aliens? This is a serious, serious problem, and it’s only going to get worse with the ethnic and business lobbies tying the police’s hands.
Besides, if you were an illegal immigrant in LA, and you had to keep bars on your windows because the 18th Street gang (mostly illegals) was terrorizing your neighborhood, wouldn’t you want the police to deport the gangsters? I know I would.
And I know that that 95% bit was debunked to kingdom come several times and yet, why do I know that people that post that will never complain against the ones that gave them that false information?
That’s only one of my arguments. I posted the other argument in my previous post.
I can either listen to the Chief of Police, or I can listen to anonymous posters on the internet. I don’t mean to appeal to authority here, and I’ve already said that I’m willing to look at studies that counter the LAPDs view. But every city I’ve lived in (all of them big, high-crime cities with large immigrant populations) have taken this view.
Depending on how you define really heinous, I have no problem with that.
I haven’t made an argument that the police would systematically harass illegal immigrants.
You’re example uses two different crimes, both of which are in LAPD purview. If one of the crimes was say, illegally fishing on a Native American reservation, I’d rather let the Tribal Police deal with that than involve the LAPD.
Again, my argument is concerned with low-penalty crime. Why are you discussing armed robbery with me?
No it doesn’t. It argues for reducing it by means which do not create more problems than they solve.
The rest of your argument deals with homicide and gang banging–all high penalty crimes. I’ve already said I’m fine with the police turning over high-penalty criminals, and the LAPD pretty much already does this.
I misread this part, I think. You want the police to be able to pick up someone who they know is an illegal immigrant, even if they have no evidence of another crime. Is that correct?
Then what’s the problem with using the threat of deportation as a law enforcement tool?
I don’t think I’m getting my point across.
Case-by-case discretion as to whether the police report illegal immigrants to the feds: OK with me, already in effect everywhere.
Blanket policy to prevent cops from ever snagging someone for an immigration violation: sending the message to illegal immigrants that it’s OK to flout the law, because we’re not going to enforce it
What do you think would happen if the LAPD’s policy were to be put to a vote?
I dispute your claim that the 95% figure has been debunked.
Neither of the links you provided has any statistics pertaining to Los Angeles.
The only argument I’ve seen that the 95% figure is wrong is that the LAPD supposedly doesn’t keep track of the immigration status of fugitive murder suspects, which it in fact does. The people you quoted do not understand the policy.
The Snopes piece was interesting. Not only does it not debunk the 95% figure, but it also grudgingly accepts much of a long “outrage-of-the-week” list someone was emailing around.
By the way, the reason the number is so shockingly high is that the Mexican government almost never extradites murder suspects to the U.S., because they don’t think murderers should get capital punishment or life imprisonment like we do. So where do you think a Mexican murderer is going to go after he does the deed?
I want the police to have that option. If they end up abusing it, we can reconsider.
It may be so that there is a large number who are illegals involved in the warrants, but besides being a stadistic that ignores the overall picture (wonder why is that the number is not mentioned with the overall crime rates?), the problem is that it remains an undocumented point.
It ignores that a recent report showed that inmmigrants (both legal and illegal, are less likely to comit violent crimes.
And then there is the fact that also Americans with immigrant parents from Mexico are likely to also escape to Mexico after a violent crime, making your numbers even more suspect. So the point remains: that 95% number is bogus.
No sweat on the miscue - I didn’t do a great job of responding to your comments. After your first post I went back to re-read to make sure that I wasn’t dodging something.
My undestanding of your points:
Cost of adding status to the booking process is too much under a strained system:
I hear what LAPD is saying. However, this is another crime committed that needs to be managed. I think that the booking officer is MISSING critical information if he does not capture residency status. If illegals are committing crimes in excess of there portion of the population, we should know it. Pretending it does not exist does not help the debate - it instead potentially hides it. I am a big believer in data, and the data is poor. Perhaps there is a compromise here - get SSN as part of the process, check it against the database, see what happens. Note it in the DB at least for someone else (immigration) to follow-up as they chose.
The data already exists if the feds want to get it.
This SEEMS to contradict your statement that they can not gather the data. Is it there or not? Is it made easily accessible to the Feds or not?
If there is enough there for the Feds to comb through the population of convicted felons in the California penal system and find illegals, then my ire can be directed at the Feds for not doing their job. All I want is for the State / Local to make it easy for the Feds to do their work - not to do the work for the Feds.
Deporting a Felon just means he sneaks back in.
I did not say deport a felon rather than lock him up. The current system, as far as I understand, is that first you serve your time - THEN you get deported. I have an issue with letting a guy out of county or state jail after serving his time and letting him back on the street if he is also an illegal immigrant, tourist, or other non-citizen without legal permanent residency status. If you come to my country and break the law (I am using felony here as trigger, not misdemeanor) - then you are going to wear the orange jumpsuit. On the day you have served your time, you get hauled off to the Fed holding pen to await the next charter flight of non-resident criminals we are deporting.
To be clear - I do NOT want beat cops checking status when they pull people over for a traffic violation, interview witnesses, or do their DARE time at the local school. I want to simply start with checking the status of all convicted felons and deporting them after they serve their time. I added in that I think we should consider status when setting bail, as I THINK that an illegal is less likely to show back up for trial than someone here legally.
I also agree that there is much more to this than just the local police checking status at an opportune time. We need to decide what to do at the border, and how to deal with employers as well. Finally we need to decide how much cheap labor we want in our nation, and how to manage it.
The cops are just one part of the puzzle - but they ARE a part.
GIGObuster, your cites do not refute the 95% figure.
The “nearly half” number is from 1985 - that was over 20 years ago, and just before the illegal immigrant amnesty of 1986. The proportion of illegal immigrants in the population of LA has exploded since then. If it was “nearly half” then, it could easily be 95% now. Also, that figure was just Mexican nationals who were presumed to have fled the country. It didn’t count illegal immigrants who were not Mexican, or who were not suspected of having fled the country.
The OC Register study was for the country as a whole and did not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. It includes Chinese grandmothers as well as Mexican gangsters. While interesting, it has no bearing on fugitive murder suspects in Los Angeles.
I think in your last point you were saying that some of the fugitives could be U.S.-born children of Mexican parents and therefore not illegal immigrants. But the 95% was clearly for illegal immigrants only. If you add in U.S.-born children of Mexican parents, maybe the figure would be 98 or 99% instead of just 95%.
I’d like to point out that the 95% figure comes from testimony before Congress by a well-known policy analyst. Though you may disagree with her point of view, it would be rather stupid (not unprecedented, but really unlikely) to just make up a statistic and commit perjury in order to advance a political agenda.
So…if a cop in LA sees a guy walking down the street who he knows has already been deported once after committing a crime, do you or do you not think the cop ought be able to arrest the guy on the spot and turn him over to the feds?
Cite please, stop the tap dance. Just because you say so does not mean you can get away by not showing where they got the information, based on the new reports, it is very likely the percentange is even less than 50% now. You still have to show why this is less likely than you new “estimates” here.
And I say “estimates”, because that is what even the policy analyst is working with.
Her 95% number remains unsourced. And only when a red flag like that appears is than then I consider the source:
That “well-known policy analyst” has for her credentials a Masters in English, and being a Fellow at the Manhattan institute, her testimony was based on contributions she did for Newspapers in LA and not even her own reports, and she is not a reporter, she came from the editorial sections.
Also, one should be curious of how specific the time it was to get that number: “in the first half of 2004”, even if one can accept the 95% at that time, it should be clear that the long range, trend or the overall picture has been omitted, knowing where she has been contributing lately, I can make the educated guess why she is not showing us the big picture.
On top of that, in her testimony, before she even mentioned the unsourced information, she had to admit that:
Estimates, no real data in the end. Since the real data overall shows a different picture
I have to say that concentrating in the particular LA example is done with the purpose to mislead and attempt to say that the problems for that specific area are happening elsewhere (even if one accepts the 95% number)
I have no doubt though that there is indeed a crime problem with illegal elements, but using discredited or incomplete data is not the way to go on . I have to blame more the war on drugs and the federal government not doing enough in this case, and I do think the refusal to fund all the things that need to be done means that Republicans are not the ones that will do what is needed.
In the end, I agree with others that are not impressed with that policy analyst’s testimony. She has the knack for misleading others, I grant you that. No wonder she is at Fox now.
You’re being unreasonable. The cite is the same cite given by MacDonald when she was pressed on it - she got it from the LAPD warrants section. You gave a bunch of links from people whose only grounds for criticizing the figure are that LAPD supposedly doesn’t track immigration status of murder suspects, and I’ve told you why those people are wrong. I strongly doubt you would be equally skeptical of data from, say, the Ford Foundation. I’m not going to personally go over to City Hall and ask for the data, and neither are you, and even if I did, you (and dear old Snopes) have already said “Yeah, but that statistic is misleading or irrelevant because of this and that and…” so let’s just drop it.
You never did answer my question about whether the LAPD should be able to arrest an illegal alien solely on the basis of immigration status when that illegal alien is known to be a previosly deported felon.
