If local police enforce immigration law, con artists, rapists, and murderers can target illegal immigrants with impunity, because their victims will be scared to go to the police. This is obvious to anyone who thinks about it at all.
That you get instances like Sheriff Tommy Thompson of Harris County pledging to get his deputies trained in immigration law (via Kuff) simply means that the people involved have decided that illegal immigrants are sufficiently immoral that they deserve anything that happens to them. This is the same ethical system that justifies torturing random Arabs because they're bad people. (How can you tell they're bad? They confessed under torture!)
It's a popular ethical system, and it is completely wrong. The notion that a bad person deserves anything that happens to them is antithetical to any concept of fair justice, antithetical to the rule of law, and antithetical to Christian morality, as well as the ethical systems of all the world's other major religions and philosophies.
It is popular because it's simple: Bad things should happen to bad people! But that is immature and naive, the ethical analysis of a child who has considered only the core of his idea. It takes something more like experience and wisdom to consider the edge cases. Very bad things shouldn't happen to slightly bad people! Things that are bad in one way shouldn't happen to people who are only bad in another way. And so on.
Again, the people like Sheriff Tommy Thompson have decided that those cases just don't matter. They think it's fair that only some people are protected from crime.
Fifty years ago, the same thinking, that only some people were worth protecting, led to sundown towns. Ten years from now, perhaps only the people living in walled enclaves will be worth protecting.
As it happens, Sheriff Tommy Thompson is up for election this year. Adrian Garcia would like to replace him. I think it'd be a good idea.
Posted by Greg at May 1, 2008 2:03 PM
Just for a change (ha, ha) I will play Devil's Advocate for a moment. How does this differ from other criminals being afraid to go to the police for help when they themselves are the victim of a crime? If a drug dealer is mugged of the money he earns from selling drugs, he might be rightly afraid that if he goes to the police, even if they catch the mugger, the dealer may well also be held accountable for his own crimes. The dealer in this case must make the decision as to whether the possible good of reporting the mugging outweighs the possible bad of getting his own self prosecuted for dealing.
I suspect that you will say that being a drug dealer is not the same as being an illegal alien, and you may be right. But they are both illegal, so to many people it just doesn't make sense to prosecute the first and not the second. If the police see someone breaking the law, the thinking goes, they are supposed to do something about it. Why is it so heinous to want law enforcement to enforce the law?
The difference I would focus on is that a criminal of type X should still be able to expect protection against crimes of type Y. An expert in white collar fraud can still call the police if they're mugged or their car is stolen.
And as a practical matter, a white collar criminal can expect that the policeman responding to his car theft isn't going to investigate his accounting. But Thompson is getting his deputies trained to recognize illegals, so when they respond to a complaint, it is the equivalent of testing the complainant's accounting to see if he might be a white collar criminal.
I would also argue that it's pretty clearly good policy to focus our efforts on the crime that threatens the safe running of society the most. It is more important to stop violent crime than it is to stop immigration crime, so discouraging illegals from reporting that sort of crime is bad policy.
Now, I understand Giuliani's "broken window" policing in NYC (although its effectiveness is widely disputed), and it makes a certain amount of sense: It's at least theoretically worthwhile to try and de-establish a culture of lawlessness and disorder. You can argue that having a lot of illegals around fosters a culture of lawlessness in the same way. I will merely argue, at least in partial refutation, that a crime that is essentially bureaucratic or regulatory in origin is much less threatening to public order than a broken window or other sign or act of violence.
You can argue that having a lot of illegals around fosters a culture of lawlessness in the same way.
I don't think anyone can actually argue that, even.
Undocumented immigrants (can we get away from calling them "illegals" maybe?) generally don't try to attract attention and are pretty hard workers.
"Fosters a culture of lawlessness" in the sense that onlookers see someone not being punished for a violation of the law and think themselves more likely to similarly go unpunished for a violation of some other law. Not in the sense that the [*]-immigrants are committing other crimes. As you say, they're mostly not committing crimes (although it would seem likely that like the other marginal immigrant groups in American history, there's going to be a significant, if still minority, endemic criminal element).
"Undocumented" is at least as biased a term as "illegal", just biased in the other direction. And there are terminology fights to be had over "immigrant" versus "alien", too. I don't have a neutral term to offer. Maybe "unprocessed non-citizen".
Actually, no, we cannot get away from calling them illegal. By being here without permission, they are by definition breaking the law. They are here *illegally*. Are they a large part of our economy? Obviously, yes they are. Do they always break other laws while here? No, of course not, many are, as you say, pretty hard workers who, for a variety of reasons, don't try to attract much attention. But why should I have to pretend that they are just undocumented, as if to imply that we just forgot to make a note that they were here?
As for a comparison to white collar accounting criminals, if it was somehow obvious that they were breaking the law, then I would expect the police to look into that too. Let's go back to my drug dealer analogy. A dealer has his car stolen, and reports it to the police. The police recover the car, and when they look inside it, the back seat is full of drugs. They didn't do any investigation, per se, it just became obvious that a law was being broken. You'd probably expect the cops to do something about that, right?
Now, what if the same dealer walked in to the station to report his car stolen, and the cops noticed obvious signs that they guy was a dealer. Enough that they had probable cause to search him. Would you want them to ignore that, just because the guy had his car stolen?
I will now attempt to address Angelo's latest by citing the example of the Kobolds in the Basement.
Let us say, for argument's sake, that a group owns a house, and it is very nice, and they like living in it, except -- OH NOES! -- there are kobolds living in the basement! Kobolds, as everybody knows, are devious and untrustworthy, and are generally regarded as being poor roommates. Some of the homeowners want to get rid of the kobolds; some aren't so sure; but the majority rules, so the group votes that kobolds shall be declared illegal and immediately expelled.
Let us say that our homeowners seek to root out the kobolds, but are not quite successful in their aims. Kobolds are masters of hiding and whinging to get out of trouble, so despite the best efforts of the household, the kobold menace persists. Furthermore, the walls of the house have lots of holes and windows that new kobolds are continuously creeping into; and, of course, kobolds are a notoriously fecund lot. Hence, even though the householders spend lots of resources and effort in exterminating the kobolds, the population never goes down. This frustrates some members of the homeowning community quite a bit, but amuses others. This, however, is another story.
So, our home-owners must come to terms with the reality of the kobold presence in the house. What now? The practical-minded homeowner recognizes that an illegally-present community of kobolds, despite its illegality, can be very useful. They keep the rodent population down; they repel other types of obnoxious pests; they can be bribed into filling in tunnels and widening others if provided with food and shiny objects. On the other hand, a kobold population that is allowed to revert to their antisocial ways can be very dangerous; they can knife people while they sleep, or steal the silver, or poop in the water reservoir.
It is therefore recognized by the homeowners that, if they must have kobolds in their house, they want to at least have kobolds that can follow some basic rules. They announce to the kobolds (by shouting down the dumbwaiter shaft, generally) that they plan on being nicer to agreeable kobolds, and possibly even leaving especially juicy babies for them to eat if they are really good.
"Does this mean we can stay?" the kobolds squeak in return.
"Hell no!" reply the homeowners. "If we catch you, you're still toast, you miserable buggers! But the more decent you behave, the better things will go for you."
And so an era of peace is entered. The kobolds do not steal or make pests of themselves. Indeed, the kobolds begin to take on the menial tasks of the household - emptying trash, dumping bedpans, etc. -- because they discover that even the meager rewards left by the homeowners enrich their lives far more than they ordinarily could simply by being miserable little kobolds. The homeowners discover, if they ever bother to think about it, that their lives are much better with the kobolds around.
Eventually the kobolds realize this too, and it galls them that even though the humans are living pretty good lives with them doing all the dirty work, it still doesn't stop the homeowners from occasionally trapping an unlucky kobold and giving it to the cat to play with. The bravest and wisest kobold writes a note and leaves it for the humans to find. It reads:
LAZY HUMANZ: U HAS IT TU GUD WIT UZ KOBOLZ DUIN UR CRAP WURK! U SHULD LET US LIV HEER ALLA TIM CUZ WE BEEN SO NIZ! Y U GOTTA KILZ KOBOLZ 4 NO GUD REAZON? USUCK!
The humans reply, again via the shouting approach, that the kobolds are high. Just because they are industrious doesn't mean they have earned the right to live in the basement! They're still vermin and they had better not forget about it! And then the humans engage in a massive hunt just to show the kobolds they mean business, and they bag about six of them after a full week's work, and then things settle down again.
The wise humans, however, recognize the importance of having law-abiding kobolds. The division between kobolds and home-owners is artificial; they all live in the same house and they share the same society. Violence, theft and anarchy within the kobold community is the same as violence, theft and anarchy in the human community. If one kobold starts stealing, the humans want the other kobolds to turn the awful creature in, because they benefit from a lawful existence as much as do the humans. If they don't reward such behavior -- if, instead, they play no role in encouraging kobolds to behave themselves -- they'll soon have a basement full of midnight knifers.
It doesn't matter that the kobolds are there illegally. Any legal system wants to encourage the rule of law for everybody, even the otherwise lawless. An organized society is based upon the notion that following laws upholds the general good, and even if some of the laws are not being followed, we still want to encourage the following of the rest.