Thread: Editorial: Virginia's illegal immigrant blues

Editorial: Virginia's illegal immigrant blues
The Old Dominion should take care that Congress' failure to reform immigration laws doesn't produce bad state policy, too.

Gov. Tim Kaine railed last week that there is "real bankruptcy at the federal level" on immigration policy, and he's right.

Still, an explosion of illegal immigrants has created cultural frictions and some real problems in Virginia communities that won't be silenced by "blame Washington" rhetoric, apt as it is. If Congress won't act, residents of these communities are determined to, and grass-roots pressure is building on the state to back them up.

Thus, a Virginia State Crime Commission task force is considering a proposal for a state-run, 1,000-bed detention center exclusively to hold illegal immigrants arrested by local police, but charged with nothing so serious as to land them in prison for a long time.

There is a certain logic behind the proposal:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn't have the resources to keep up with millions of undocumented aliens.

Communities beset with social and public safety issues as a result of this economics-driven migration press local police to act as an arm of ICE and identify and detain illegal immigrants when they are arrested on some other charge.

But -- uh-oh -- ICE doesn't have the resources to pick up most of the detainees. State Sen. Ken Stolle, the crime commission chairman, says local jails in Virginia notified federal authorities of about 12,000 illegal immigrants in 2006; ICE picked up about 690.

So, the thinking goes, build a sort of huge holding pen for detainees who haven't commited any major crime and can't be put in prison simply to await deportation.

But they could be held indefinitely in a detention center?

The idea is ripe for human rights abuses.

There is a purely practical reason, though, to doubt that this proposal will fly.

Virginia doesn't have resources to spare for holding potential federal deportees. The task force made it clear that ICE would have to pay for the detention center and its operations, possibly through a daily charge for each inmate. But ICE, remember, doesn't have the resources to enforce the immigration laws.

Which brings the problem back to the root that Kaine talked about during his live monthly radio show on WTOP in Washington. "It's an outrage," he complained, "that the federal government has basically had a consensus that the existing immigration laws don't work, they won't enforce them and they won't come up with a set of laws that they are willing to enforce."

Right. But that merely states the problem. The governor said later he'd be willing to partner with the federal government on the detention center, as long as Washington paid for it.

That plan might look to Virginians like at least a partial solution, mirage though it may be.
http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/wb/133981

I would suggest the Virginia whiners have a chat with Sheriff Joe Arpaio......he can tell them EXACTLY how to do it, and CHEAPLY.

Originally Posted by CitizenJustice

I would suggest the Virginia whiners have a chat with Sheriff Joe Arpaio......he can tell them EXACTLY how to do it, and CHEAPLY.

Yep...a few tents and some pink underwear seems to do the trick!