Thread: Everyone Wants to Be Salvadoran

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZD ... EyZDY3Yjc=

July 05, 2006, 9:42 a.m.

Everyone Wants to Be Salvadoran
Archaic and senseless at the border.

By Rich Lowry


A lot happens in 20 years — just don’t tell the U.S. government. A court injunction issued in the 1980s enjoined the Immigration and Naturalization Service from swiftly ushering illegal aliens from El Salvador back to their home country because El Salvador was wracked by a civil war. Today, the civil war is long-ended and the INS no longer exists, but the injunction lives on as one of the nation’s most absurd anachronisms.

To its credit, the Bush administration has finally begun to move at the border to end the travesty of “catch and release.” That’s the policy of allowing illegal aliens caught at the border to be released into the U.S. on the basis of an almost-always-ignored promise to show up for a hearing at some later date. The policy never applied to Mexicans — who simply can be sent back over the border — but to illegals from other Latin American countries where it isn’t so easy to repatriate them.

The administration has moved to a more sensible approach of “catch and remove,” but the injunction is keeping it from applying to Salvadorans, which is a problem. In the mid-1980s, Salvadorans were roughly one percent of illegals in the U.S. Since then, the number of Salvadoran illegals has increased, and everyone else wants to try to get in on the action. Illegals apprehended at the border now know to try to claim that they are Salvadoran to exploit this senseless lacuna in our border policy.

Advocates of a guest-worker program and amnesty argue that the migrant inflow here from points south is literally inexorable. Actually, illegal migrants are people, and so they respond to incentives and disincentives. Enforcement matters to them, as is being demonstrated by the two different approaches to catch-and-release on the border.

Hondurans, Brazilians, and Guatemalans are experiencing the new catch-and-remove policy. Department of Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff said, “Even in the last six months, as the word has gotten out, the number of people that we are seeing coming in from those countries has begun to dramatically decrease.” But not for El Salvador: “(It is) the single population that has continued to increase because the word has gotten out to the criminal groups that that’s the one population that does not get detained and removed.”

For Chertoff, the lesson is clear: “Deterrence works.” Another example: When they realized that families couldn’t be detained because there wasn’t appropriate detention space for them, illegals began renting children to pose as family members so that they would be released even if apprehended. Now that we have space to hold families, the number of “families” attempting to cross the border has diminished, according to Chertoff.

The source of the catch-and-release policy in the first place was a lack of enough detention space to hold illegals while various obstacles to sending them home were negotiated. The key to changing it is more detention space and getting illegals back out of the country more rapidly. The 1980s-era court injunction is a roadblock because it created Byzantine procedural hurdles to keep the INS from rushing Salvadorians back into a war zone. Now, El Salvador is peaceful and democratic, but the hurdles remain.

According to DHS numbers, the average stay in the U.S. of someone apprehended from a country other than Mexico is 19 days; for a Salvadoran it is 64 days. This delay makes it that much harder to hold Salvadorans, and they have noticed. In 2005, Salvadorans were 24 percent of border-patrol apprehensions from countries other than Mexico. So far in 2006, they have been 40 percent.

The administration is seeking to get out from under the injunction, and some members of Congress are trying to help do so. Here’s wishing them luck. The main source of public discontent with Washington recently is the sense that it is incompetent and driven by arbitrary forces that make no sense. A maddening example of both is having immigration enforcement hobbled by an archaic court order.

The source of the catch-and-release policy in the first place was a lack of enough detention space to hold illegals

This will be the third time I've said this! Three times a charm.

Tent Cities! It was good enough for the Cubans, it's good enough for our military in Iraq so it will be good enough for temporary housing for illegal aliens being deported. Is there some acreage in Crawford the US Gov. can rent for a few years? On the way to the "Ranch" would be nice.

Dixie