Thread: Illegal immigrant roundup a fantasy

Published: 03.15.2007
Kimble: Illegal immigrant roundup a fantasy
MARK KIMBLE
Tucson Citizen
So now it's 10 down and 11,999,990 to go. Or maybe it's 10 down and 19,999,990 to go.
No one really knows. But for those who say we should just round up all illegal immigrants and ship them home, last week's highly publicized raid in Sierra Vista should be proof that such a comprehensive roundup is impossible.
Yes, maybe we could do it. But at the rate we're going, it's likely that global warming will turn this entire planet into a steaming, lifeless lump of coal before we can find and deport everyone who is in the United States illegally.
Jim Kolbe, who during 22 years in Congress heard it all, says the raid illustrates how difficult and expensive it is to track and arrest employed illegal immigrants.
And the owner of a local pecan company says this is proof that the United States must rethink the entire issue.
Friday's raid at a Sierra Vista drywall company was clearly meant to generate headlines that would scare employers out of hiring illegal immigrants.
The numbers were epic:
The investigation took 16 months. It involved Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol, the Cochise County Sheriff's Office and the Sierra Vista Police Department.
When the raid occurred, nearly 200 law enforcement officers took part. They served 11 federal search warrants at 37 locations.
Eight people were arrested, including the president and some managers of the company.
And the illegal immigrants at the center of the investigation? Ten were arrested. Ten.
It probably went smoothly with 20 cops available to escort each of those illegal immigrants.
The Pew Hispanic Research Center estimates that 10 percent of all workers in Arizona are illegal immigrants.
According to 2005 census figures, that would be 445,000 illegal immigrants in the state. Federal officials say that's conservative.
How many illegal immigrants are there in the United States? Pick a number. The most commonly accepted one is 12 million, but that's a year or so old. Others say 20 million. No one knows.
Let's say it's "only" 12 million. This raid resulted in the arrest and deportation of 0.000083 percent of the illegal immigrants.
By my calculations, at this rate, it's going to take an incredibly long time to track down all of them.
Meanwhile, how many people entered the United States illegally during that 16-month investigation? How many entered on the day of the raid? I bet that on Friday, the inflow greatly outpaced the outflow.
And this raid seemed like picking the low-hanging fruit. Raiding a construction subcontractor working within a few miles of the Arizona-Mexico border and finding illegal immigrants? Who would have thunk it?
I'm sure the men and women who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement are fine people. But their job is impossible. They are hopelessly outnumbered.
"Just round them up and deport them." How often did we hear that during last fall's political campaigns? Hard-liners in every race said the immigration issue is easy to solve: Just find all the illegal immigrants and arrest them.
That's impossible.
"Look at all the resources and the thousands of man-hours," said Kolbe, who retired two months ago after 22 years representing southern Arizona in the U.S. House. He heard many people urge the arrest of all illegal immigrants.
"This just illustrates the incredible difficulty of doing that," Kolbe added. "What you need is some reform that is comprehensive in nature."
Dick Walden, owner of Green Valley Pecan Co., looks at it from another point of view - as an employer who struggles to find legal workers. But he has come to the same conclusion as Kolbe.
"We need to create a pathway for those who are here without proper documentation so they can becomes responsible citizen partners in our country, holding jobs and become part of the above-ground economy," Walden said.
"Our economy, our standard of living and our lifestyles would change dramatically if we pull 12 million people out of our economy."
Looking at the "huge amount of money" spent on the Sierra Vista investigation, Walden said, "I don't think we can afford it. . . . We're going to kill the economy if we keep this up."
Indeed, we would. Last week's raids prove that this round-'em-up-and-deport-'em mantra is nothing but an expensive fantasy.
Mark Kimble appears at 6:30 p.m. and midnight Fridays on the Roundtable segment of "Arizona Illustrated" on KUAT-TV, Channel 6. He may be reached at mkimble@tucsoncitizen.com or 573-4662.
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http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/opinion/44914.php

Someone articulate want to answer this guy?

W

I'm not articulate so I was reluctant to add my 2 cents, but couldn't resist. This is the comment I left for him:

Dear Mr. Kimble:

You took another bite out of the same old apple. You're right, it won't do a darn bit of good to send 10 home while 10 thousand are walking in. Answer to problem: Secure our borders, make em knock and ask permission before coming in. Turn off freebies, jobs and anchor babies to ILLEGALS and enforce the immigration laws already on the books, they'll deport themselves.

It's late so maybe tomorrow.

The EOIR is the biggest culprit, it should be abolished.

EOIR -- The missing link of immigration reform
The four-letter word of the immigration debate

By Juan Mann

Have you ever heard of the Executive Office for Immigration Review? If you're unaware of the crushing bureaucracy of the EOIR, you're not alone. In surveying recent developments in the immigration reform debate, it appears that United States Attorney General John Ashcroft, Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner James Ziglar, and many reform-minded columnists including Linda Bowles and Thomas Roeser have never heard of the EOIR either.

So I want to let you in on a little secret. The key piece of the puzzle in immigration reform is the four-letter word of the Department of Justice: EOIR.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review is a little-known agency within the Department of Justice that conducts administrative hearings to start an endless bureaucratic process of hearings and appeals that literally makes a federal case out of the deportation of every single illegal alien or criminal alien resident in this country. The EOIR system is synonymous with delay, delay, delay. And as every insider will tell you, "it's not over until the alien wins." According to their web site, "the Executive Office for Immigration Review was created on January 9, 1983, through an internal Department of Justice (DOJ) reorganization which combined the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) with the Immigration Judge function previously performed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Besides establishing EOIR as a separate agency within DOJ, this reorganization made the Immigration Courts independent of INS, the agency charged with enforcement of Federal immigration laws."

What a mistake! The federal government created a separate agency to decide the cases and hold the keys to the detention cell for every single alien that the INS detains in the United States, while insuring that the each alien's immigration case is kept in perpetual bureaucratic limbo. This experience of creating a system designed for failure should serve as a warning to those embarking on reorganizing the INS again. In order to avoid another bureaucratic nightmare, the EOIR - this pruned branch of the INS, this evil twin of the most hated agency of the DOJ - must be gutted, eliminated or rendered unrecognizable with its functions streamlined or parceled out to other agencies who can do the job.

It is time for the public to know just what a bureaucratic boondoggle the EOIR represents. The EOIR's nationwide "United States Immigration Court" and its Byzantine appellate body known as the "Board of Immigration Appeals" is the little-known stumbling block to streamlining the process of removing illegal aliens and criminal alien residents from our country. The EOIR is the bureaucratic delay for which the INS is continually flogged by the press. It is the bureaucracy behind the INS bureaucracy. Combine this pointless bureaucracy delay with the prolific mismanagement and misallocation of resources that is the INS, and our nation's enemies have little to fear.

Though aliens might temporarily "lose" their cases at their first hearings with an EOIR immigration judge in Immigration Court, they can always appeal to EOIR's clandestine Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church, Virginia. If that doesn't work, they can go to appellate court again in the federal circuit courts. Months and years pass with every step of the process. Virtually every alien detained by the INS on immigration violations is waiting for or has already had hearings before the EOIR. The entire detention operation of the INS is geared toward serving up aliens to the bottleneck of all endless legal bottlenecks -- EOIR's Immigration Court system. Given this endless hearing and appeal process, the INS cannot possibly detain every alien while waiting for the resolution of these cases. So when faced with EOIR bureaucracy, the INS turns around and releases most aliens to the streets. And while their cases grind on through the process, the aliens continue living in the United States. It is the very existence of the EOIR that is to blame for our country's failed deportation system. The current plan by United States Attorney General John Ashcroft and Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner James Ziglar to restructure the INS (by splitting its mission in two) leaves the entire structure of the EOIR and the immigration court system intact. This plan does not address the chronic problem of lack of detention space for the illegal aliens that the INS actually knows about. Without reforming the EOIR hearing system bureaucracy, the split-function INS reform proposal amounts to nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Amazingly enough, no one outside of a small group of lawyers and government employees know that the EOIR exists. But when it comes to the federal government actually deporting aliens, no agency is more important. All roads lead to the EOIR. Unless aliens want to leave on their own (or through INS administrative or expedited removals), the INS cannot actually physically remove any alien until the EOIR gives the order. Reform-minded columnist Thomas Roeser is on the brink of exposing the EOIR bureaucracy. Roeser recently wrote that "[t]he Immigration and Naturalization Service has acknowledged that more than 250,000 illegal immigrants it ordered deported remain in the United States!" The problem is that the INS does not order aliens deported, the EOIR does. In Immigration Court proceedings, the INS must wait, and wait and wait many years for the EOIR system to run its course before the INS can remove the alien. Columnist Linda Bowles is also stalking the EOIR bureaucracy, though perhaps unwittingly. She is absolutely correct in stating that "[t]he United States has no operative immigration policy." While hot on the trail of the EOIR, she comes close to unmasking it, but focuses on the INS instead. "[O]f the 8 million to 10 million illegal aliens who live in the United States, between 250,000 to 300,000 of them have been brought to court and sentenced to deportation by federal judges. After their court hearings, these illegal aliens simply walked away and disappeared. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) does not know where they are or what they are doing and has no plans to round them up and see that they leave the country."

Ms. Bowles has just highlighted the EOIR-caused inefficiency of the system. The "court" system she describes is EOIR's Immigration Court. But the "judges" are really bureaucrats in black robes hired by the EOIR, not nominated by the President. These "immigration judges" are hearing officers who don't "sentence" anyone. These DOJ lawyers may claim to be "federal judges" at cocktail parties, but they are definitely not "federal judges." They work for a federal executive agency within the Department of Justice. They even have their own federal government employee union. The public deserves to know who they really are and what they are doing with American tax dollars.

The EOIR's bench of Immigration Judges is a largely alien-sympathetic bunch, made up of many former activist legal aid lawyers, agenda-driven private immigration attorneys and "sleeper" liberal attorneys from within the Department of Justice. There are exceptions, but the EOIR as a group is generally pro-alien. Immigration Judges who order criminal aliens deported and have the courage to deny discretionary forms of relief in Immigration Court are a rare breed. Immigration Judges operate within the esoteric world of immigration law where most aliens find a way to prolong their stay in the United States somehow, whether legally or illegally. From the alien's perspective, the longer they remain in the EOIR system, the better. Aliens "win" just by being in it.

Even if every foreign terrorist and their fellow alien conspirators were rounded up tomorrow, under the current deportation system, they would all be set up for hearings before EOIR Immigration Judges. The process could last years. And if detained, the Immigration Judge would have the opportunity to lower or eliminate the immigration bond that was set by the INS to hold the aliens in custody. Unfortunately, most bond reductions are granted as a matter of routine. If things somehow turn sour in court for the aliens, and if not detained, they can always disappear without a trace, never to be heard from again. Just as there is no mechanism in place for tracking and rounding up non-immigrant visa over-stayers, the INS has no practical way to find aliens after release on parole or immigration bond. Remember, the aliens in Immigration Court proceedings have already been arrested. They're the ones that the INS actually knows about; yet they are released from detention anyhow. The federal government receives $1,500 or $5,000 or $7,500 (for example) of immigration bond money for each alien released through this revolving door; yet the costs to our nation are enormous.

As long as the EOIR is around, there will be no immigration reform in the United States. If the EOIR remains intact, throwing money at the U.S. Border Patrol or splitting the INS into a million pieces will do nothing to streamline the removal of foreign nationals who have violated our immigration laws. To cut the bureaucratic red tape out of the deportation process and streamline our labyrinth of immigration law, the EOIR's Board of Immigration Appeals and Immigration Courts need to be disbanded. No matter what becomes of the INS, no reform of America's immigration system will be complete until Congress does one more thing: abolish the EOIR.

Juan Mann is the proprietor of the only immigration reform web site that exposes the bureaucracy of the EOIR. He dedicates his work to the principle that one man's opinion can make a difference.

December 21, 2001

http://www.vdare.com/mann/missing_link.htm

First, Close the border with armed military,we pay them we should be able to use them to protect our country.

Second, I have heard no one say round them up and deport them. It even sounds stupid.
Seems to me it is much more sensible to first fire Chertoff, the man is worthless and incompetent, There must be one capable man in this country who has the courage to inforce our laws.

Then attrition through enforcement is the only reasonable way, make it a felony to hire an illegals, fine employers and make it hurt, second time throw them in jail.

Make it a felony to be here. Period.

Stop giving anything to illegals that should go to citizens only, first of all STOP citizenship to anchor babies!! no education, food stamps, etc.

People will go home and the ones that don't will be deported.

The real question is how are they going to process 20 million people, back round checks finger print, etc.
How long are they going to wait for these people get processed before they start deporting the ones that will not qualify to stay. 1 year 2 years 3 years , without the border closed how many more will be here by then.

This is nothing more than open season for forgery and false documents, and the cost of all of this is going to be astronmical to the taxpayer.

And then you have to ask your self do we need citizens who can not take care of themselves and are going to drain every social system we have built, that was meant for citizens in time of need, and not for another countries poor and uneducated, it is already being abused by our own citizens we don't need another country helping with that.

Ok so maybe we will need some guest workers(hense the word guest), they go home when the job is done. If they don't, it will be a felony and they will not be able to return. period.
Ag workers especially, why can't a farmer tell immigration how many workers they will need for the season, give them a green card and tell them to report back to the border and check in when the work is done. Just why is this so hard, and if any other employer needs workers prove you have tried to get them with some real effort. I just don't see in this day and age with our kind of technology we can not do this.

Why do they feel they have to give citizenship away with out people earning it, how can they possibly no the real value of being a part of this country, and it isn't much of a melting pot when the majority of people are coming from one country in masse.

This may not be perfect, but we have enough intelligent people in this country to come up with a sensible idea with out giving citizenship to millions of lawbreakers. This is why our congress can not get anything done, because they can not get the idea of amnesty out of their heads so they can come up with real solutions.

It is tough and sounds a little cold, but if people do not respect your laws I say, what else can we do, in 10 years we will face the same problem if it is not fixed for good it will be to late to fix at all the next time , as we are running out of time to get it right.

DO NOT REPEAT 1986, WE KNOW IT DOES NOT WORK!!!

STOP SAYING WE CAN'T!!! ( CAN'T, NEVER DID DO NOTHING )

If we give these millions of illegals some type of legal status, do you think they will work cheap anymore? No way! Many of them have organized and won't work for less than 10 bucks an hour. Then companies will complain that we need MORE immigrants to do the jobs legalized immigrants won't so.

I believe the theory that the reason pecan and fruit growers can't find affordanle help is because Mexicans don't want that work anymore. They prefer year-round jobs, like construction, food preparation, cleaning services.

The truth is that our leaders(?) will not enforce the law. They promised that in 1986, they are promising again. If comprehensive reform passes we will be dealing with 50 million more illegals in 10 years. Simply giving legal status to these law breakers only encourages more lawbreaking.

If we really got tough and ALLOW our local cities and states to enforce immigration law things "might" change. Some states would have to be FORCED to enforce. We can't even force the Feds to enforce. IF WE COULD WE WOULD NOT BE IN THIS MESS.

SOMETHING NEEDS TO CHANGE

Yes, maybe we could do it. But at the rate we're going, it's likely that global warming will turn this entire planet into a steaming, lifeless lump of coal before we can find and deport everyone who is in the United States illegally.

So, the guy likes to give credence to myths. There is no (anthropogenic) global warming, and there is no reason we can't deport illegals. I'll leave off with the global warming rhetoric for now, but here's the deal with deportations:

The flaw with the argument that says that you can's "deport 12 million illegal immigrants" is that it presumes that every single one of them would have to be rounded up and loaded onto a bus or airplane and shipped back across the border. It's a false premise.

The fact is that illegals come here because there are massive incentives for them to come and few repercussions. Let's start by looking at the incentives.

Illegals face little or no chance of arrest or deportation unless they commit a serious crime, and even then deportation is not certain. At the same time, they earn vastly better wages than at home, have access to taxpayer subsidized handouts like foodstamps and free education. They get essentially free healthcare by abusing our emergency medical system. They are catered to intheir own language by greedy businesses and institutions that don't care how destructive their illegal existence here in the US happens to be so long as there's a buck to be made. Because of that, they are often preferentially hired over legitimate labor.

The lack of serious repercussions for violating our immigration laws is well documented. There are almost never criminal sanctions unless the alien in question has also committed a serious crime such as rape or murder. Deportation is rarely more than a temporary setback. Without fear of loss of liberty (incarceration), there is little in the way of a deterrent factor to immigration enforcement.

The solution? Eliminate the incentives and increase the liabilities. Eliminate ALL benefits to illegals, including foodstamps, education and all but emergency healthcare of the life or death variety. Increase sanctions against those who hire illegals to the point that employers will no longer risk hiring them. This should include a strictly enforced fine structure that multiplies with each additional offense until the sanction includes mandatory jail time and forfeiture of the business. As far as liabilities go, include confiscation of all assets, including bank accounts, automobiles and real property, held by illegal aliens. For repeat offenders, include mandatory prison sentences at hard labor, preferably building the border wall. With no prospect of finding a job, no government benefits to enjoy while looking for a job, and the prospect of loss of assets and prison time if caught, there would be such a massive exodus back across the border that I-35 southbound would be jammed for weeks.

http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=F ... ht=#316675

Jim Kolbe, who during 22 years in Congress heard it all, says the raid illustrates how difficult and expensive it is to track and arrest employed illegal immigrants.

"Just round them up and deport them." How often did we hear that during last fall's political campaigns? Hard-liners in every race said the immigration issue is easy to solve: Just find all the illegal immigrants and arrest them. That's impossible.

http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=F ... highlight=

The men were among 35 charged in December with using fake or stolen Social Security cards or resident alien cards while working at a plant in Montville owned by Dicar, Inc.

All 26 defendants, who had no prior convictions, will be enrolled in the Pretrial Intervention Program for one year and will emerge with clean records if they comply with the conditions.

ICE generally places priority on illegal immigrants who commit crimes, but a PTI enrollment is not technically a criminal conviction.

You don't need to "round up" people who have already been caught.

"Just round them up and deport them." How often did we hear that during last fall's political campaigns? Hard-liners in every race said the immigration issue is easy to solve: Just find all the illegal immigrants and arrest them. That's impossible.

The only people I hear this from are people who are for Amnesty or OBL who use this to make the rest of us who want are laws enforced sound like we want the impossible. This is their saying not ours.

Our solution is attrition through enforcement, is that so hard to understand. STOP TWISTING IT INTO ROUND THEM UP AND DEPORT THEM!!

They do like to "twist", don't they? I guess CrocketsGhost summed it up for me along with the statement regarding ICE priorities. Being here illegally isn't necessarily crime enough to deport. They get to stick around and commit more crimes. In the case of the Dicar employees and identity theft, another crime, their "punishment" is to learn the English language. There's no need to track, raid or "round up". They just ignore them when they and their crimes are handed to them.

"Eliminate the incentives and increase the liabilities", makes perfect sense to me.