Thread: OP-ED:Identifying a remedy for illegal immigration

Perry: Identifying a remedy for illegal immigration

By DAVE PERRY
The Aurora Sentinel
Published: Thursday, January 8, 2009 8:42 PM MST
It’s come to this, Aurora. You can either kiss your privacy goodbye, or you can empty your wallets.

A state panel looking into how best to handle illegal immigration issues has pretty much come up with the conclusion that there’s little anyone can do other than the feds.

Big surprise.

The panel was convened and confabbed for four months after an illegal immigrant with a long, long rap sheet got in a horrific Aurora car crash that killed a 3-year-old boy in an ice-cream shop and two women in another car.

What would have been a heinous tragedy has become a call to arms against illegal immigrants because Francis M. Hernandez, who is accused of causing the crash, was born in Guatemala, a country in Central America, and not Guadalupe, a city in southern California, where Hernandez grew up. Had Hernandez been issued a U.S. birth certificate, or if Hernandez had gained citizenship, it seems that these three appalling deaths would have somehow been less tragic.

That’s just wrong. The state panel missed the point about the real tragedy here. It wasn’t so surprising that Hernandez had been able to slip through immigration police fingers for so many years, even though he had been arrested more than a dozen times, it’s that he was able to avoid jail after 12 arrests — no matter where he was born. He successfully gave authorities 12 aliases and two dates of birth besides the fact that none of those pseudonyms were citizens.

If you think the disagreeable thing about Hernandez is that he illegally moved to the United States as a little boy, you’re wrong. He has been accused several times of assault, larceny, impersonation charges, and he’s been accused of a long list of traffic offenses. He doesn’t even have a driver’s license. Despite all that, he was able to walk away and commit more crimes.

It has little to do with him being an illegal immigrant. There are hundreds of thousands of stories just like this one that center on deadbeats born right here in the USA. It’s easy to pretend to be someone else. It’s easy to rack up DUIs and get right back in the car and go get another one or kill someone while drunk behind the wheel no matter where you were born. Hernandez and every other illegal immigrant don’t make up even a small pile of the mountain of U.S. citizens with rap sheets just like this one.

The problem is, we are so concerned about protecting our privacy, that we make it easy for criminals to protect theirs, too. It’s all for naught, Americans lost any real sense of privacy when the first Social Security number was issued. By the time the first computer database of credit card holders allowed shops and restaurants to phone in for authorizations, it was all over. Your birth date, Social Security number and everywhere you can stick your credit card, logon to the Internet and turn on your cell phone is a daily diary of just about everything about you, including what you think.

Get real. The only people who do enjoy any sense of anonymity and privacy are criminal societal dropouts and illegal aliens. They never register their real identities. They don’t use ATMs. They don’t charge their groceries at Whole Foods. They don’t play by the rules, and we don’t make them. We don’t make them because we want to believe that a national ID system would be a huge invasion of who we are, where we go and what we buy and read. As if anyone cares what we all watch, read and listen to, other than Amazon and Netflix.

The state panel suggested that the feds open up their national database of fingerprints to help track criminal illegal aliens. Others want local police to spend millions of your tax dollars enforcing immigration laws and trying to sort out who’s lying and who’s not instead of doing a job of protecting the public that’s already hard enough.

Instead, we should standardize what we already do, creating a reliable ID system that honest people can use against those who aren’t. We already prevent the government from tapping into private databases that know so much about us that you can get a quarter-of-a-million-dollar mortgage in a matter of hours. We will all benefit by allowing the government to simply acknowledge that we are who we say we are. A database with information about those who are contacted by police with an ID, can truly stop what happened here.

That kind of change might have kept Hernandez from having a part in the deaths of three innocent people, and there’s no doubt such a change will prevent the senseless deaths of others in the future.



Dave Perry is editor of the Aurora Sentinel. Reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com.

http://www.aurorasentinel.com/articles/ ... 263758.txt

Others want local police to spend millions of your tax dollars enforcing immigration laws and trying to sort out who’s lying and who’s not instead of doing a job of protecting the public that’s already hard enough.

This is where you lost me. (directed at the author of this article) I want ALL government agencies to enforce the law! This bullcrap of that is a federal, not state, responsibility is just that, CRAP!

Originally Posted by Ratbstard

Others want local police to spend millions of your tax dollars enforcing immigration laws and trying to sort out who’s lying and who’s not instead of doing a job of protecting the public that’s already hard enough.

This is where you lost me. (directed at the author of this article) I want ALL government agencies to enforce the law! This bullcrap of that is a federal, not state, responsibility is just that, CRAP!

I had to re-read that a couple of times myself.

After doing so, I think the point the author was trying to make was not against ALL law enforcement agencies assisting in enforcement of immigration law but, rather, that local police departments.....which obviously do not have the same kinds of budgets that the feds do....should not be expected to spend millions of dollars, which are needed to protect their local communities, on immigration issues when the feds should, rightfully, be picking up the tab for it.

And I have to say that I agree with that assessment. Local police departments should not have to choose between whether to spend their limited resources on protecting us from ever increasing crime rates or dealing with the responsibilities that the federal government has shirked.

It's not that he came here illegally as a child, it's the fact he was arrested more than a dozen times and a basic fingerprint check should've caught it. It's as though law enforcement has been told "When you run acrosss an illegal, just let 'em go."
Can you imagine being arrested for writing hot checks, and being able to get away with it by using an alias?..
Say what you will, but it's apparent to me our gov't has taken a position that says illegals are not treated the way Americans are. Damn shame...