Look, I argue about Arizona’s immigration law, and about people’s response to illegal immigration in general, but it’s not because (as the rabid anti-immigrant crowd is wont to insist when anyone doesn’t toe their particular line) I think illegal immigration is laudable. Of course it’s not. It is, however, a question of costs, benefits, and priorities.

Sure, illegal immigration is illegal. It’s right there in the name. It’s a violation of U.S. law, plain and simple. But so are other things. That’s the point, the rabid anti-immigrant crowd will say: it’s illegal and it’s causing horrible, terrible harm to America.

And that’s my problem: (a) the harm it’s causing is open to question, and (b) other illegal things cause equal or worse harm. It really feels like a group of people is highly dedicated to finding the harm because they’ve already decided that immigration is bad. Which makes you wonder why they really think it’s bad.

I posit that you can’t (with good data) make a serious case that immigration is destroying America, so it’s one of many issues with pluses and minuses and some serious, serious costs if we want to eradicate it.

You want to know what causes a lot of harm, both economically and physically? Bad driving, especially speeding. Traffic accidents killed almost 34,000 Americans last year, with speeding being a main factor in about half of those cases. This costs American taxpayers (even those who don’t blatantly and repeatedly break the law) billions and billions of dollars. Those numbers are many times higher than any estimate of the costs of illegal immigration. People are breaking the law and killing Americans and getting a slap on the wrist. The law is the law! What part of “illegal” don’t you understand? Unsurprisingly, however, I don’t hear Rush or Glenn calling for the National Guard to patrol roads and root out the problem, though. Nobody is pushing for speeding to be a mandatory felony with prison time. I don’t notice anyone demanding that we suspend the constitution so we can be sure to apprehend every speeder in Arizona. Why not? Would it not be OK to give the police a mandate to check the traffic record, outstanding unpaid speeding tickets, etc., of anyone they interacted with who fit the profile of a chronic reckless driver or speeder? You know, a male between 16 and about 25? Domestic violence call? We’re going to have to also check to see if you need to be sent to jail for an unpaid speeding ticket while we’re here.

No. No one is saying that, despite the far higher death toll from illegal speeding than from illegal immigration.

If the anti-immigrant movement is really only concerned about our safety as Americans, then the question of why they aren’t pushing for tough penalties and profiling of those who commit much more dangerous crimes is a good one. It applies to speeding, white-collar offenses, safety violations in coal mines, hunting accidents, and a whole passel of other things where the illegal behavior of a few harms many. Why have the anti-immigrant crowd picked their particular crusade instead of one of the many others where the economic and human harm is so much more clear and egregious? The answer to that will tell us something about the mindset of those pushing the anti-immigrant agenda.

The facts about illegal immigration are not yet fully known (though there are some useful data on several issues), and they often shift with funding sources or ideological biases. It seems clear that illegal immigration has risen in the past two decades, though we are far from the historical peak. Illegal immigrants occupy lots of jobs, though how many of those would be taken by Americans otherwise is debatable. Immigrants pay taxes and social security (not always knowingly), and their purchasing dollars go into the American economy. Even the service fees on the money they send back home contribute to Wells Fargo’s revenue. There is some evidence that illegal immigration boosts the economic fortunes of the middle class while harming the poor. You’d think the Tea Party would be all over that.

Some illegal immigrants take advantage of social services like medicaid, emergency rooms, food stamps, education, etc. Others are arrested for crimes, sometimes violent. It is extremely difficult to gauge how many crimes are committed by illegal immigrants, but only the most obviously anti-immigrant organizations “find” a percentage greater than those committed, per capita, by long-time American citizens. Muddying these waters is the fact that some immigrants come to the US specifically because they are criminals or they want to commit crimes (e.g., human traffickers, smugglers, drug dealers), and others are recruited into crime because of their immigrant status or their legal vulnerability (e.g., the drug industry, prostitution, gang membership). Balancing these criminal elements are the many more illegal immigrants who are, essentially, family members looking for jobs and trying to stay as far from official notice as possible.

Some studies find that the net economic impact of illegal immigration is positive, and others that it’s negative, though even these clarify that it’s not much, compared to the benefits doled out to legal Americans. You can argue that even a single dollar given away to an illegal immigrant is too much, and you’d have a solid basis to argue. Would you also argue that we need to catch every single white-collar embezzler, pot-smoking college kid, or stock fraudster in America, no matter how much of our tax money that takes? Why not?

Down here near the border (and in Arizona, New Mexico, and California), the issues get more polarized. These areas bear the brunt of the costs of the Mexico-US drug trade and some of the most negative consequences of illegal immigration. We also have disproportionately large numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants who don’t seem to cause any harm. Places like South Texas, where most of the people are Hispanic, demonstrate ambiguity about enforcement; you get both strong pro and con opinions expressed, with plenty of “meh” in between. Places where Anglos make up the tax base tend to show much more consistently anti-immigrant sentiment.

Illegal immigrants do not outnumber the legals. They also don’t show some kind of rabid resistance to acculturation into American society. Overall, my take is that the majority of illegal immigrants are similar in many respects to legal American citizens, espousing similar values about family, freedom, and economic choice. Maybe that’s why so many Americans have such an opposition to them.  It would seem that most of those who cause the most problems are associated with the situation where the richest country on earth (with the most voracious appetite for recreational drugs and underaged prostitutes) is situated right next to a country still firmly in the developing world. Bad problems, to be sure, and they need some serious solving; but blaming immigration for the drug trade is like blaming BP for our dependency on petroleum.

I have problems with our immigration laws and philosophy, sure. We are ideologically (and some biologically) descended from illegal immigrants. Our forefathers in many cases hosed the Native Americans (who were doing just-fine-thank-you-very-much) to no end, squatting by the tens of thousands on their land and refusing to leave, killing the legal residents instead of respecting their laws. Well, we’ve been here two centuries, and the US is awesome in many respects, so perhaps we should forget about that, but it’s still pretty hypocritical to claim that we are “original” or “native” Americans and ban everyone else. Jesus had a parable about stuff like that.

Maybe immigrants are bringing nasty diseases like tuberculosis to the US. OK, then we need to issue a LOT more work visas. This will bring those coming here for upstanding reasons (wanting jobs) through the legal checkpoints where they can be screened for such conditions. And maybe there’s too much drug money and trafficking going on (all right; there most definitely is). Then we need to put our money where our mouth is and stop smoking weed and snorting blow. Seriously. But immigration is not the problem, in itself. It’s a red herring for entitlement, spoiled adolescent thinking, and probably a good dose of xenophobia.

Reporting from Phoenix – Central American immigrants travel long distances to come to the US, and they like to do it illegally.

But since the Grand Canyon State began enforcing immigration laws with border cameras, immigrants are raging against the machines: They have blocked out the lenses with Post-it notes or Silly String. During the Christmas holidays, they covered the cameras with boxes, complete with wrapping paper.

One dissenting citizen, who wanted his cheap immigrant labor to continue to work for below minimum wage, went after a camera with a pick ax.

Arizona is the only state to implement “photo enforcement,” as it’s known, at the border.

The cameras, paired with other technology, photograph individuals crossing the international border at non-approved locations. Violators are then arrested, fined, and deported–or sometimes sent to prisons or jails.

In California, border cameras are illegal, but Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed a program to add technological enforcement capabilities to 500 border watch areas to generate revenue for the 2010-11 budget. The proposal is unlikely to be a part of the Legislature’s upcoming budget recommendations.

State Assembly Budget Committee Chairwoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) has described the proposal as “silly.”

“It’s using big-brother tactics to balance the state budget,” she said. “It’s outlandish.”

That’s certainly been the reaction in Arizona, where the cameras have incited a mini revolt.

Initially, the cameras were thought of as a revenue generator, expected to bring in large amounts of revenue in the first fiscal year of operation, and to protect the state from a wave of Mexican criminals.

But from October 2008, when the program began, to October 2009, the cameras generated much less money than expected for the state’s cash-strapped general fund.

As of September, only 38% of issued violations were paid, the report said. Most violators refuse to pay.

This doesn’t mean the program lacks defenders. The number of border-crossers dead from dehydration investigated in 2009 was the lowest in 15 years, a figure that Lt. Jeff King of the Arizona Department of Public Safety attributes to tough laws and photo enforcement.

“We believe the cameras should stay up,” said King, who is the district commander for the program.

The program was designed to encourage people to pay the fine and not fight their violations: No record is kept of violators who pay their fines and voluntarily return to the southern side of the border.

But, critics note, that hasn’t stopped people from wanting their day in court. About half of the total violations issued are still pending because people have ignored the fines or have requested hearings to challenge them, according to the state Department of Public Safety.

The violations put an “inordinate” load on the immigration courts, said Terry Stewart, a court administrator with Maricopa County. People have flocked to request hearings, and at one point last year, one court branch had cases set up through 2011.

“You just have irate litigants and irate defendants coming in, just mad at the entire photo immigration enforcement system in general,” said Steven Sarkis, a Maricopa County justice of the peace.

The most high-profile protester has been Raul García, who has achieved statewide fame through his efforts to fight the tickets with a monkey mask. The 47-year-old has allegedly illegally crossed the border at least 40 times.

His defense?

There’s no way to prove that he was the border crosser wearing the mask, he says. Lots of people, he adds, are Hispanic males between the ages of 18 and 30 with medium build, dark hair, and monkey masks.

García says he doesn’t fancy himself a criminal.

Amid empty soda cans on the floor of his white station wagon are various rubber disguises, including the famous monkey mask, a Frankenstein, koala, panda bear and a ghost mask that glows in the dark.

So far, four of García’s cases have been dismissed, and he’s been found responsible for seven. The remaining 29 are pending, said VonTesmar’s attorney, Michael Kielsky.

In December, the Maricopa County courts launched a pilot program specially designed to handle the photo enforcement hearing caseload. On one particular day, about 30 people sat in various courtrooms to fight their tickets.

Norma Gutiérrez of Cave Creek, Ariz., came prepared with a manila folder. “How do you know that is my face?” she asked the judge. “How can you tell from that blurry photo?”

With each question, Judge Don Calender’s irritation became more apparent in his monotone voice.

“Were you there at that time, yes or no?” he replied. “Were you illegally crossing into the United States, yes or no? It’s pretty simple.”

In the end, she paid the fine. Gutiérrez, 58, said she basically lives on the freeways in her work.

Among the dissenters fighting photo enforcement are members of a citizens group, the Arizona Citizens Against Photo Immigration Enforcement.

In Maricopa County — where 92% of Arizona’s violations occur — volunteers have been on the streets for about a year, gathering signatures for a 2010 ballot initiative to remove the cameras. On a December afternoon, Jaime Cantú, chairman of the group, and two volunteers gathered signatures at an Arizona State University basketball game.

As ASU fans in maroon and yellow shuffled into the game, a mother with children in a Toyota Prius gave an opposing view as she drove past.

“Photo immigration enforcement keeps people alive with kids and affordable housekeepers, whoo-hoo!” she yelled.

Many people, however, were eager to sign the petition. One couple even took a snapshot with a sign saying “BAN Photo Immigration Radar!”

“It’s a fraud,” said José Jiménez of West Phoenix, who posed with his girlfriend. “It’s a big scam.”

The Arizona Legislature is considering multiple bills to alter or end the photo immigration enforcement system. Gov. Jan Brewer is encouraging the Legislature to place a referendum on the November ballot — so voters can decide whether to scrap the system.

Another dissenter is Ferdinando Saenz, a judge for the Arrowhead Justice Court, who has called the cameras a constitutional violation. He rejects every photo immigration violation that comes before him.

So far, Saenz says, he’s dismissed more than 7,000 violations, potentially worth more than $1 million.

[note: this article was modified from Nicole Santa Cruz's well-written article in the LA Times. The original article is about Arizonans rebelling against cameras that attempt to enforce speeding laws. I changed a few words here and there because I get a kick out of stirring the pot, especially when doing so might make a point about the highly dubious practice of picking and choosing which laws we wish to enforce and which ones we feel entitled to ignore]

Despite being a hypocrite (at times, a raging one) I really despise hypocrisy. Which is kind of hypocritical of me, now that I think about it. One of the most ridiculously hypocritical things I know of is the “why should I have to press 1 for English” meme (typical link). Seriously, it makes my skin crawl. Don’t the people who say this have any sense of the horrible, horrible irony?

Of note, I never ever see this phrase trotted out in left-wing venues, in left-of-center venues, or centrist venues. This seems strictly a right-of-center conservative American complaint. Actually, let’s call a spade a spade: this is more of a whine.

Now, I’m not gonna say liberals ain’t whiny. They are plenty so. But I’m talking about conservative whiners right now. And why is this a hypocritical whine? Because of two little concepts you might have heard of: capitalism and democracy.

Right-of-center ideologies in the U.S. generally support ideas about business and government that are, well, conservative. If the Founding Fathers wanted a constitutional republic, then we should stick with it and stop trying to tweak the system. If our economic system has been capitalist for 200 years, then we should leave it alone and stop trying to regulate the corporations built up by the hard labor of good Americans. But when the ethnic demographics of the country start changing, this becomes problematic for some people.

It’s business’ God-given right to make money in nearly any way they can, so leave them alone, you bloated and inefficient government folks. Unless those corporations start to respond to a shift in American demographics and try to make money by offering service that shifts toward ethnicities that are not mine. We need English-Only rules. They should apply to all businesses, no matter what.

And we’re a constitutional republic, so our leaders have the responsibility to represent their constituencies… oh wait, unless their constituencies are brown and speak a different language. Nevermind. There oughta be a law.

The whole concept is similar to John Stewart’s recent observations that Republicans seem to believe that it’s only wrong to criticize America  if Republicans are in charge of it. The principles seem to shift when their consequences hit a little too close to home.

Maybe the problem is a clash between two conservative positions: do we stick with the old rules or with the old outcomes? If the former, then we should let the businesses and government respond to demographic shifts. If the latter, then we should, by all means, protect the status quo.

The problem with that analysis is that the ideology of the conservative worldview seems to support living by a consistent set of rules, whereas statements like “WSIHTP1FE” ignore those rules in favor of an Us-Versus-Them mentality. Maybe there are really good reasons (that I do not understand) for the apparent flip-flopping, but from the outside it just looks like another group of people whose ideology is a disposable mask for more crass, selfish, and unflattering human tendencies. Rules, schmules. Protect the people who sound like us.

Once there were some people who longed for a better lifestyle. Things were not so good for them, back home; so, they left. They didn’t exactly  have permission to enter the country they were headed to, but they really wanted to be there, so they just went. These people looked, dressed, acted and smelled different from the people who lived in their new homeland. Some of these locals welcomed them, while others were decidedly hostile. The foreigners showed up a few at a time at first, then more and more, until eventually they started to outnumber the locals.

The newcomers brought strange food and weird customs; and despite claiming they were trying to get away from their native country, they resisted giving up their ties to it. One thing that ended up causing a lot of trouble was that most of them refused to learn the language in the new country. Many problems could have been prevented if they had  tried a little harder in this area.

Some of the foreigners were gracious and courteous to their hosts. Others were jerks, taking advantage of every gift or benefit offered, then demanding more. Plenty of them sort of pretended that there were no problems, while they took advantage of the resources and goodwill of the locals. They weren’t all bad people; but they had lives to lead, and they needed what the locals had. The locals shared. Or they complained. Or they resisted. Or they sat back and watched until it was too late.

In the end, the tensions were never really resolved. Instead, the two groups separated themselves, mostly living in communities isolated from each other, clustering together with people more similar to themselves. However, some of the locals began to act more like the foreigners, who now outnumbered them. In fact, the foreigners weren’t really foreigners anymore. In fact, they mostly ran things now. Life was never the same for the people who used to be the locals.

The End.

(photo: Chris Seufert)

I’ve ranted about illegal immigration before, and how annoying it is when people go all warmongerin’ about it (sometimes more so after they go all presidentin’). Thinking more about it, the thing that bothers me the most about increasing punishments for immigration problems is this: the foul does not match the harm.

I’ve never disputed the idea that immigration laws should be enforced. The rule of law must be upheld even when we disagree with the finer points¹. And I know there are illegal immigrants who cause harm to the people or resources of the United States². But the trend toward upping the punishment ante is not reasonable. Put them all in jail? Charge them all with felonies? Give them all long prison terms? These punishments do not match the crime.

Now, I may not be a big-city lawyer, but it seems to me that the severity of criminal punishment in the U.S. is based on at least three things:

1. The amount of harm done by the criminal act
2. The intent of the person who committed the crime
3. The moral “wrongness” of the act (or the extent to which it violates our cultural ideas of right/wrong)

Extreme punishments for illegal immigration fail on all three of those points. Lemme splain:

1. Harm: As I’ve mentioned before, our best data suggest that the overall amount of harm done by illegal immigration is not nearly as high as the sky-is-falling doomsayers (*cough*Bill O’Reilly*cough*) would have us believe. Yes, there is harm from some illegal immigrants, but so far it looks like it’s less (on average) than the harm from good old God-fearing lifelong American citizens³. That’s the criminal angle, anyway. Economically, it appears that illegal immigrants are a net benefit to the U.S. economy.
2. Criminal Intent: I’m sure there are some illegal immigrants who come to the U.S. with the intention of doing something bad to Americans. But again, our best information suggests they are a small minority. The vast majority of illegal immigrants (especially Latin American) come here with motives like “earning a living,” or “escaping political repression back home,” or “eating three meals a day, for once.”
3. Moral Wrongness: I don’t know about this one… how wrong is it to sneak into another country? Is it like trespassing? We have long traditions about the wrongness of murder, rape, theft, robbery, incest, arson, etc., but I don’t think most of us really have a common sense of just exactly how bad sneaking across a border is, in and of itself. In fact, there are plenty of Americans who think national borders should be open (including those American presidents who called for the Iron Curtain to be lifted). I suggest that it’s not very high on the wrongness scale to sneak across the border. It is wrong in the sense that it does violate law, but not much beyond that.

So, there’s some harm done (personally, but not economically), there are some people who have evil intentions, and it’s some kind of wrong, in itself, to come to the U.S. without permission. This is clearly, I think, not the national crisis it’s sometimes made out to be. Problems? Yes. Threat to All That Is American? Hardly. Now, I’d like to compare illegal immigration to another legal violation that frequently happens in the U.S.:

Speeding vs. Illegal Immigration

Speeding. You know, driving faster than the speed limit. This is estimated to have caused over 13,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2005⁴. Also over 40 billion dollars in property damage, healthcare and other costs. The penalty for speeding is generally a fine. And points on your license. In extreme or repeated cases, a person may get jail time⁵ or a really large fine, or have their license revoked. Rarely is there an arrest. Almost never does speeding become a felony. Speeding generally stays at the same level of criminality as the traditional “status offense” of illegally entering the U.S., almost never rising to the level of felonies and demonization recommended by people on the Fox Network for illegal immigrants. For comparison…

• How many American citizens are killed or injured as a result of illegal immigration each year?⁶
• How much money is lost by the U.S. economy as a result of illegal immigration⁷? Note for this one that most experts (who aren’t being paid by conservative political groups) agree that there’s a net gain, especially since illegal immigrants’ wages get taxed.

I am open to being wrong, if there’s reliable data⁸, but it seems to me unlikely that immigration is going to exact the toll in life, injury and property that we rack up by speeding. Even if we break it down on a per-person basis (should we? I don’t know), I doubt the situation will change⁹.

So, if speeding costs more than illegal immigration, shouldn’t speeding be punished more severely, especially in cases where there is no reason to suspect criminal motives in the immigration? My sense of justice says “yes.”¹⁰

So, what’s it going to be? Should illegal immigrants be punished less severely than speeders, or should speeders be punished more severely than they are now? Felonies for speeders? Automatic prison time for speeding? These would certainly make our highways safer.

What is (IMHO) Actually Happening

The reason certain people on TV (O’Reilly and his ilk) continue to exaggerate the numbers of illegal immigrants, and insist in the face of all reliable evidence that they cost this country huge amounts of money and human life, is because they know that their viewers do not like the idea of immigrants coming to our country, and these viewers don’t always know why they don’t like it. So, the doomsayers feed them a plausible reason: it must be that the immigrants are dangerous and expensive. They must be stealing from us. They must be hurting us. Now, people who don’t like the foreigners can indulge their instinct to punish and punish, telling themselves they’re protecting America.

I suspect the real reason for insisting on increasing punishments for illegal immigration is a basic discomfort with things (and people) who are strange to us. Otherwise, the suggested punishments would fit the crime.

1. I also advocate revising our immigration laws to be more in line with the realities of both the justice and economics of the situation [↩]
2. because they always make it into the papers [↩]
3. One might argue that, since some illegal immigrants commit robberies and murders, therefore all of them should be punished more harshly, just for sneaking into the USA, but that’s certainly not what we do in other domains. We have not heard Republicans, for instance, proposing restrictions on foreign business involvements when some foreign businesses commit fraud or other crimes. [↩]
4. sorry; no more recent data from my websurfing [↩]
5. extremely rare for speeding without other violations [↩]
6. Let’s say, not including casualties incurred on the job of policing the immigration regulations or border, as those particular problems are tied to immigration policies, not just the act of illegal immigration… otherwise, it’s like saying marijuana is lethal because people get killed in drug raids [↩]
7. again, not including the cost of immigration enforcement [↩]
8. please let me know if you have some [↩]
9. That would be, FYI, a net of about $160 per illegal immigrant per year, and 1 citizen death per about 18,000 illegal immigrants. If the made-up number of 200,000 illegal immigrants were correct, we would need a dozen murders of U.S. citizens per year, committed by illegal immigrants, just to match those from speeding [↩]
10. This is a somewhat separate issue from enforcing immigration through border security, which can take non-punitive forms. Some of those ideas and their implementation are also problematic, but for different reasons [↩]

El Pipe (Insert Phallic Symbol Comment Here)

The more I learn about immigration, the more incomprehensible the standard conservative–and occasionally liberal–talking points become. Immigrants are criminals. Immigration is bad for the U.S. Immigration breaks down “family values.” Fred Thompson vocalized the most paranoid claims at the Prescott Bush Awards Dinner (in 2007, I think): “Twelve million illegal immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women, and children around the world.” Continue reading →

A couple of nights ago, my friend Brad and I had a discussion. It got me thinking, as I often do, about mi patria (the United States), its role in the world, and its future on the international stage. This morning, while trying to find a citation for homicide rates as (lousy) indicators of overall crime rates, I ran into a 2005 article titled “The next 50 years: Unfolding trends,” in what appears to be a good peer-reviewed academic journal.

The article has a section titled “America’s Retreat.” He predicts the end of U.S. international dominance by about 2050, with clear signs starting a few decades ago, and becoming more apparent very soon. He cites a lot of economic indicators, such as national debt, increasingly weak currency, and huge (and increasing) trade imbalances. He has graphs (pretty ones) and apparently rigorous data analysis. Some nifty excerpts from the article, after the jump. Continue reading →