Repug (And Now Dem) Immigration Irritation

The New York Times tells us here that…

Nearly three years after the Justice Department found that the nation’s immigration courts were seriously overburdened and recommended hiring 40 new judges, only a few hirings have taken place and the case backlog is at its highest point in a decade, according to a study released Wednesday.

The report, by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan group that analyzes data about federal government performance, found that the shortage of judges had contributed to a 19 percent increase in the backlog of cases since 2006 and a 23 percent increase in the time it takes to resolve them.

As of April 12, Justice Department officials said, there were 234 active immigration judges, an increase of 4 judges since August 2006. At that time a review by the attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, determined that immigration courts were struggling with their case burden and recommended that 40 judges be brought on board.

“It’s a system at its breaking point,” said Dana L. Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco who is president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. “How can a system function properly when it is starved from the critical basic resources it needs?”

And in response, President Obama plans to sink more funding into a program started by Dubya, as noted here (I’m not quite sure of the wisdom of this move, but I’m just presenting the info so you can decide – the spin seems to be that he’s moving towards the issue of immigration reform once more, but we’ll see; by the way, more than a little bit of editorial interpretation in this L.A. Progressive article here, as far as I’m concerned)…

The controversial program gives Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unregulated access to the immigration information of every person in local prisons across the United States. Although Obama may be sending mixed signals as he paves a road to immigration reform-signals that frustrates many of his most steadfast supporters-he also understands that he must smooth the way for immigration reform by restoring the confidence of the American public and prove that the government is capable of upholding the rule of law.

Immigration enforcement is fundamentally a federal responsibility, but state and local governments can and should play a role in helping the federal government remove violent criminals from American society.

Yeah, well, it sounds like state and local governments are already doing that; according to this, Obama would “drop funding for the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program and save $400 million (something Dubya tried but couldn’t do, forcing the cost of ‘incarcerating and prosecuting criminal aliens’ on the states),” but increase funding for border enforcement and the “E-Verify” system used by the Citizenship and Immigration Services department in concert with the Social Security Administration, as well as hiring 80 new agents to identify criminal immigrants in jails.

And no discussion of this topic would be complete without noting the words and actions of His Fraudulency himself, who told us this in 2005…

Since I've taken office we've increased funding for border security by 60 percent. Our border agents have used that funding to apprehend and send home more than 4.5 million people coming into our country illegally, including more than 350,000 with criminal records.

And of course, since we’re talking about Dubya here, none of this information is verifiable.

However, this tells us the following…

Despite assurances it repeatedly gave to Congress, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not used its increased funding to capture the "most threatening" immigrants who have outstanding deportation orders -- immigrants ICE characterized as criminals or terrorists. ICE instead pursued easier targets.
A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

In 2007, only 9 percent of those arrested had criminal records, and 40 percent had no outstanding deportation order. Over 5 years, ICE spent $625 million to arrest 96,000 people, three-quarters of whom had no criminal record.

And…

Showing good numbers became a higher priority for ICE than following its mission -- and so ICE quietly changed its mission. Although ICE repeatedly told Congress that it was focusing its resources on immigrants with criminal backgrounds, when it changed the rules in 2006 it didn't bother to tell Congress. After all, the truth might have jeopardized the increased funding that ICE enjoyed.

And these were the typical ICE tactics to justify their numbers and, thus, their funding…

During [a 2007 in New Haven] raid, lawyers at Yale’s immigration law center said, agents who found no one home at an address specified in a deportation order simply knocked on other doors until one opened, pushed their way in, and arrested residents who acknowledged that they lacked legal status.

Janet Napolitano has "ordered a review of the fugitive teams operation." She should order it to return to its original mission and to stop lying to Congress about its results. While she's at it, she should order ICE agents to respect the Fourth Amendment.

Indeed, our existing lack of policy allows characters like Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (noted here) to continue pretending that he’s keeping us safe by arresting those nasty illegals busy hatching plots, when in reality, the “crime” most of these people are guilty of is faulty-to-non-existent documentation on their status.

It doesn’t take a genius to point out that any sensible discussion of immigration reform precludes a path to citizenship for people doing the right thing. However, that notion taking hold to the point where it will be enshrined in a bill that eventually makes its way to Obama’s desk is as “certain” as our collective realization in this country that terrorists can be safely housed in our supermax prisons along with all other manner of violent offenders who pose infinitely greater threats to our safety.

Hiring more judges and/or clerks and/or agents are all “back end” solutions to the problem that are important in their own right. However, federal legislation that would grant that path to citizenship for the illegals who deserve it is a “front end” way to get a handle on this situation before they become statistics that we have to pay for anyway.

(Another “front end” solution here is to grant them driver’s licenses for work only, forcing them to purchase insurance and quantifying their numbers – they’d have to go a long way to be worse than the people I share the road with now, and failing to do this only forces them further into an underground economy, as noted here.)

Update 6/25/09: A great comment to this Media Matters post tells us the following...

...many of these migrants are being guided into the United States by coyotes working for American companies that like using the abject poor of Mexico for cheap labor rather than pay Americans a decent wage for what is often dangerous work.

We don't have an illegal immigration problem in the United States, we have an illegal EMPLOYER problem. Make the penalties for bringing in people from other countries for the purposes of exploitation stern enough to force compliance, and the immigration part of it will take care of itself.

Amen.