Thread: Northampton County should make feds foot bill for illegal im

www.pennlive.com

Make them pay
Northampton County should make feds foot bill for illegal immigrants.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Rent a bus. That's one task Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli neglected to do before launching another investigation into immigrant workers, a probe that resulted Tuesday in the arrest of 32 employees at Molded Acoustical Products of Easton Inc. Those arrested were charged with using someone else's Social Security number or making up a number to gain employment.

Why a bus? Because Morganelli needs to deliver this problem to the doorstep of federal authorities -- the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service -- rather than burden Northampton County's court system and expect local taxpayers to underwrite his quest to draw national attention to the social, legal and economic problems of illegal immigration and identity theft.

Morganelli is right to enforce the law. No question. Yet the county probably could conduct these raids every week and have no effect on the number of illegal immigrants entering the county. Anything short of deportation is unlikely to change the options for people in such economic straits. For those who are busted and remain here, the choice may devolve into seeking tax-paying jobs with a bogus ID or selling drugs.

Morganelli is correct, too, that employers are enablers of this type of crime. In this case, he said, company officials checked to see that job applicants had Social Security numbers but didn't verify them, even after the company had been warned to do so. If that's the case, Morganelli can pursue stiff fines for employers who repeatedly ignore the law.

Those arrested Tuesday were sent to jails in Lackawanna County and Philadelphia because Northampton County Prison is full. The cost to house these suspects elsewhere could be $50,000 a month, according to prison officials.

Last year at this time, police raided Rapp Brothers Pallet Services and arrested 27 illegal workers. Most were freed after serving a week in jail. Later, President Judge Robert Freedberg argued that Northampton County shouldn't assume the federal responsibility to enforce immigration law.

We hope that Morganelli has worked out an agreement with the INS to process illegal workers and help pay for their detainment so that Northampton County doesn't subsidize a revolving-door approach to prosecution.

Identity theft is a huge problem. Some will argue that there's a big difference between faking a Social Security number to get a job and stealing a number to commit credit fraud. True, but some of those who commit ID theft to get a job might be tempted to obtain a fraudulent credit card. How can law enforcers and judges be expected to become arbiters of an underground economy?

They can't. And county taxpayers shouldn't be expected to pay for busts and incarcerations that do little more than call attention to a federal problem while barely scratching the surface in terms of deterring crime or helping a segment of poor people climb out of a cycle of economic crime.

I don't have a clue where this place is but why not load the bus up and deliver them to DC to the halls of Congress? If every county in every state would deliver illegals to DC maybe they'd finally be able to see first hand what taxpaying citizens have to put up with day in and day out.

Had enuf; Good point people should be specific when posting articles it makes the geographic scale of the problem much more understandable. cheer glenn

I think it is Western Mass. or Pennsylvania, but I could be wrong. cheers glenn