Thread: Crime is crime, no matter who does it

http://www.newsobserver.com/164/story/476995.html

Martha Quillin, Staff Writer
From his desk in the Alamance County Sheriff's Office, two days' drive from America's Southern border, Randy Jones can see how Mexico's criminal element lives.
In Jones' view, these are the people who drink and drive, and when they crash into someone, they run. They traffic in staggering amounts of marijuana and cocaine, which they market all the way up the East Coast. They devise elaborate means to transport and deliver these illegal drugs, which they guard with expensive, high-powered weapons they're not legally entitled to own. They run in gangs whose initiations include stabbings and robberies. When they're caught, they look like first-timers without records because they use false names and fake IDs.

Mexican police are powerless to deal with these scoundrels; they're living in the United States.

"It's not an immigration issue per se," says Jones, who retired from the Burlington Police Department after 30 years and now handles public information for the sheriff's department. "We're looking at a crime issue."

Jones noticed North Carolina's first wave of illegal immigration a decade ago. At checkpoints, he and other officers often found people behind the wheel who couldn't speak English, had no driver's licenses and no identification. The local office of the state Division of Motor Vehicles saw something happening, too. The DMV workers began calling police when driver's license applicants arrived in groups, carrying crude replicas of Social Security cards and other documents. Some even had copies of North Carolina's written license tests translated into Spanish, marked with the correct answers.

Jones, 52, has a social science degree, has made several trips to Mexico and has spent many hours interviewing illegal immigrants accused of crimes to try to understand the social issues that might have played a part. But he is a plain talker with no use for political correctness, and he doesn't accept cultural differences as an excuse for domestic violence, or drunken driving, or running from the scene of an accident.

"That's not diversity," he says. "That's criminal behavior. It doesn't mitigate it or make it right if you move it back to Mexico."

The problem with current U.S. immigration policy, Jones says, is that it encourages the most desperate residents of other countries to try and cross the border illegally. If people are willing to commit a crime just to get here, what kind of behavior can we expect from them once they arrive?

In Alamance County, 70 miles west of Raleigh, 40 percent of those arrested for driving while impaired are illegal immigrants, he says, as are 70 percent of those charged with drug crimes.

"They're not trying to live the American dream," Jones says. "They're trying to exploit it."

If people are willing to commit a crime just to get here, what kind of behavior can we expect from them once they arrive?

Why doesn't everyone understand that statement? Maybe not all who come here illegally will continue to break laws, BUT I tend to think that most do. They have to lie almost every day about their status, create forged documents, etc....so much criminal behavior started by crossing a border.