How many ‘resources’ does it take to send out a letter and get the criminals to walk on in vs. hunting down people whos location is unknown?
This was a nice, quick, and cheap way of grabbing some illegals. Nothing more, nothing less.
Yeah maybe Robert, but it lacks a certain element called common fucking sense. I mean, did whoever came up with this plan consider the fact that we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot by staging mass arrests? Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Wat to go INS!
>> This was a nice, quick, and cheap way of grabbing some illegals.
For what purpose? What was gained? And what is the price? Very little was gained, if anything. The price is the goodwill of a lot of people who are in the best position to support the US. There are hundreds of thousands of people from those countries in the US. Do you think it is a good idea to make enemies out of them? Do you think the people in friendly countries will read about the USA rounding up muslims and it will have no effect?
The ‘fact’ that we are shooting ourselves in the foot by enforcing our laws? How so?
<Ashcroft>He’s obviously a sleeper agent, probably recruited by Bin Laden himself, and he’s merely using you as cover.</Ashcroft>
The problem is that the ineptitude of the INS has led to the current practice with people staying in the US, on expired visas, due to paperwork snafus and processing times measured in seasons. The sharp divide between legal and illegal gets blurred when the authorities cannot process cases in a manner that lives up to the laws. If you have every intent to live up to the law, but the authorities charged with upholding the same laws make it impossible to do so, where does that leave you ?
While this is, admittedly, a pretty bad situation, as long as people could more-or-less count on the INS tacitly accepting their status if they didn’t do anything overly stupid, most would seek to legalize their status as soon as they could. Noone actually wanting to remain an illegal alien will voluntarily show up at the INS. (This latest snafu is going to change that, of course.)
It would be fun if it wasn’t for the lives they mess up.
S. Norman
I married an Israeli in 2000, the INS forms were some of the most stressful complicated, and counterintuitive forms I have ever filled out. We are now getting a divorce, but we are still legally married and are not even legally seperated and yet, she was never contacted about her Green Card. She is here legally with a valid work permit, but was here illegally on a tourist visa until she got her work permit.
The INS is nightmarish. She showed up early in the morning, like around 6 AM for a 9AM appointment with the INS. It happened to be snowing that day. She had to wait out in the snow from 6 AM til they showed her to her 9AM at 11AM. That sounds like a violation of human rights to me. I don’t know about you.
The INS is one of the most ridiculous organizations in the world. They are highly inefficient and people’s lives are ruined because stupid people who can’t be bothered to learn their jobs are the ones adjudicating the process.
Robert: Do you think that just because something is a law that it’s logical?
There was an interesting feature in the Economist Nov 2-8th issue about migration in the world. It pretty much made America out to look far ahead of the curve as far as immigration policy goes. That’s a frightening thought, with as bad as it is here, I’d hate to see it elsewhere.
Freer immigration is the next step to true globalization. We however like to point at boogeymen like Mohammad Atta and say that we need stronger immigration procedures because of that, however the truth is, people like him are still going to get in, and the human cost to enforce it is WAY too high. Relaxed immigration and integration are the future, not this draconian bullshit.
This was a racist policy, and I’m not going to call it anything but. I don’t care if these people were in violation. I am sure they’ve gotten a ticket for speeding in the past, should they be deported for that too? Even immigrants deserve rights in this country. I am sick of the idea of second class citizens.
Erek
There were NO letters sent out to individual non-citizens. In my understanding, INS’ databases have no way, as things stand now, of running off a list of people of a given nationality, nor of a list of people who have overstayed visas. Hell, half the time they can’t tell you whether any given individual whose visa has expired has departed the U.S., even if he/she has. They simply can’t keep up with the data entry. A friend of mine was once ordered deported, in absentia, to South Africa, nearly 2 years after he actually left; by sheer coincidence, when I worked for immigration court, the papers initiating the deportation case against him crossed my desk. To make a long story short, some schmuck signed for the certified letter from INS, in his name, and never forwarded it to him; INS had never managed to match the little white index card he handed in when he left the U.S. for good to his file, so they had no idea he’d left. I did tell him what had happened, but since he had no plans to return (and was an 18-year-old at the time who considered himself invincible), he never straightened it out.
The only notification provided to immigrant communities has been a few announcements, which have been picked up by the press; who knows how many people saw them? Or understood how to comply, given 30 days’ notice and with limited or no knowledge of English in many cases? There have been many reports of people showing up at local INS offices to register, and INS officials having no idea what to do with them.
Given that INS has hundreds of thousands of change-of-address notifications sitting in boxes due to lack of data entry manpower, the idea that this registration B.S. will help them keep track of anyone at all, let alone potential terrorists, is ludicrous at best, and Orwellian at worst (or maybe McCarthyistic?). INS can’t do anything halfway useful with the information it has now, so why is it wasting resources gathering more data it has no ability to correlate with anything? If you want more bang for your enforcement buck, and you want to round up the maximum number of out-of-status people with minimum effort, you go after the Hispanics, not the Arabs/Muslims. But they have a political voice in this country, see? The politicians don’t want to go pissing off the Hispanic vote…
Just an aside, but I get the sense that every immigration service in the Western world is something like this. When I was living in England and trying to get residency, I was informed that I should try to show up at Lunar House (the oddly descriptive name for the UK’s main immigration centre) at 6AM, so that I could be seen by the end of their working day at 5PM. For some reason, I was delayed and didn’t make it there until 8. When I gave up at 3 PM, there were still 150 people ahead of me in line. I had to stay at a friend’s house and come back the next day.
My ex-wife tells me that France and Norway (Norway! Can you believe it?) are not much farther ahead. So I don’t just think this is an American problem.
As another aside, I’m a bit interested as to exactly why the British press is having a field day with this story. They do the same damn thing with everybody they pick up on the flimsiest of immigration violations, only they (until very recently) stuck them in a prison camp (Campsfield, outside of Oxford).
Regardless. I can’t find what mechanism they actually used to get all these illegal immigrants to come in (public notice, infomercials, whatever), but they used it. Efficient use of resources.
We shouldn’t ‘go after the Hispanics’. We should go after the illegal hispanic immigrants.
Nope. But it is the law of the land. Who gets to decide when we no longer need to follow a law? There are plenty of laws and regulations that I positively despise, yet I break not a one of them.
According to INS spokesman Francisco Arcaute, only those immigrants who have violated immigration laws or are wanted by law enforcement for a crime have been detained. I am stunned that people take issue with this.
The issue that people take is that these immigrants could have followed every single letter of the law, but due to the INS’ incompetence, be breaking the law.
If the INS requires me to send in a change of address ten days after a move, and I do, yet the INS doesn’t process it and therefore puts me in violation of immigration laws, who’s fault is it?
The point also is that this is not an across the board policy but it is only selectively applied to certain nationals of certain countries and the backlash is going to be worse than anything they achieve by this. It is a really stupid thing to do.
Arresting only black motorists for speeding would also be enforcing our laws. It would suck just as much as this.
Please, do explain where the “human rights violation” occurred in the situation you described.
If we were busting people from the Middle East/ N.Africa/ South Asia exclusively, I’d say you had a point. Since I believe that a Mexican or two and maybe a few Chinese are deported annually as well, I think some people are overreacting.
You show your ignorance. Please read the thread. As Eva Luna said, it is only nationals of certain countries who are required to register. Mexicans are not required to register. RTFT.
It is just MHO…but I think you all are making some big assumptons that are not really true about the INS and immigration in this country.
Everyone here on this thread seems to think that:
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The INS isn’t doing what it is supposed to do.
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The government wants to stop illegal immigration.
I submit that the INS is doing exactly what it is meant to do. The INS is not much more than a dog and pony show for the American public. The INS has a slow, tortuous process to let in a small but steady stream of new citizens, but they have absolutley no capability to enforce the deportation orders they give out.
Somewhere along the line, this country decided that it wanted second class citizens. Somewhere else along the line this country realized that it depended on second class citizens to keep the economy going.
By keeping up the charade of “fighting” illegal immigration, America has the power and option to do pretty much whatever it wants to our new “working” class. By having laws that were never meant to be followed, the government can pretty much do whatever it wants to illegal immigrants. When the government needs a policy change, they don’t have to worry about voters or civil rights, all they have to do is cite several immigration laws the illegal workers have broken and then pretend that enforcing those laws were the motivation.
The entire “system” of illegal immigration in this country is designed to create and maintain a large undocumented working force.
The basic framework of the sytsem is like this:
Politicians make a big public fuss about the state of immigration.
The INS stays FUBAR, which has two effects:
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It makes becoming a legal citizen (or documented worker) nearly impossible.
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There is virtually no risk for being an illegal immigrant.
Illegal immigrants get low-paying jobs (by our standards). By their standards they are doing ok, and even make enough money to send money home.
America is happy because we get cheap labor to do stuff we don’t want to do. Foreign countries are happy because their people are sending American dollars back home.
If at any time we get too many illegal workers here, (or the "wrong kind’ of workers) we can tighten the screws without ANY discussion at all. The government just cites countless laws that haven’t been used in years while the American public stands up and cheers because the government is finally “doing something.” The American public can keep it’s blinders on and pretend that they haven’t benefitted countless times because of illegal immigrants throughout the years. (through lower prices in…paint jobs, landscaping, restaraunts, car repairs…etc…etc…)
It’s a pretty sick game.
IndependentVoter, I agree with your assessment. A large part of the economy relies on illegal immigration and there’s no way the country could just shut it off without serious negative effects. Rather than admit it and act accordingly, the situation is just meant to be an unspoken compromise. In any case, selectively enforcing laws like this is pretty dumb as it will surely backfire.
Make immigration ilegal and only criminals will migrate!
Update: two of my firm’s clients, legally present on work visas but who were out of the country on business until after the registration deadline for their respective nationalities, went to INS to register as soon as they re-entered. They were detained, and are currently in deportation proceedings.
This is pure, unadulterated bullshit, and I predict a LOT of federal lawsuits over it. Civil rights, differential enforcement, the works.
These are highly qualified professionals, here legally, the kind of people we supposedly WANT here, and we’re treating them like criminals. Now how can anyone figure this isn’t discrimination based on nationality?