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 escribing
the criminal-alien provisions being reviewed by the Supreme Court
this week, the American Civil Liberties
Union's website
calls them "anti-immigrant laws" that in 1996 "tore
down our national welcome sign to immigrants." The New York
Times touts the provisions as "actions Congress took against
legal aliens at the height of the national anti-immigrant fervor
in 1996." The AP says the law was "enacted five years
ago amid what critics call an anti-immigrant fervor."
These amazingly
similar descriptions wouldn't necessarily be suspicious, except
that they are comically false. It is a hard, cold fact that the
criminal-alien provisions at issue emanated from the most pro-immigrant
office on Capitol Hill — Sen. Spencer Abraham's office. Indeed,
it was Sen. Abraham who spearheaded the fight against restrictions
on legal immigration that same session.
Evidently,
Abraham did not assume "immigrant" was synonymous with
"felon." Nor did the Senate Judiciary Committee, which
passed Abraham's criminal-alien amendments in lopsided votes.
The ACLU claims
the change effected by the 1996 law required that immigrants convicted
of certain felonies be deported. No longer, the ACLU says, could
criminal aliens simply "pay their debt to society" and
"go on with their lives." The New York Times repeated
the claim, stating: "The legislation Congress approved ...
required the deportation of immigrants convicted of certain crimes."
Suppose you
were just born yesterday. Would you believe that immigrants who
commit felonies in this country were not subject to deportation
until the 1996 Congress thought of it? In fact, noncitizens whose
conception of the American dream was to come here and commit felonies
had always been subject to deportation.
The problem
was: Deportable criminal aliens weren't being deported. Legal legerdemain
had so bollixed up the system that the Immigration and Naturalization
Service was deporting only about 4 percent of convicted criminal
aliens per year.
Consequently,
by 1996, roughly half a million deportable criminal aliens were
happily residing in the United States, committing new crimes and
having illegitimate children — whom the criminals would then
cite as "family" to avoid deportation. Just a few years
ago, a California congressman stated that "in Los Angeles County,
more than half of incarcerated illegal aliens are rearrested within
one year."
At the rate
the INS was deporting criminal aliens, it would have taken 23 years
to deport all the criminal aliens living in the United States —
assuming no immigrant ever committed another felony. (Sometimes
you have to dig a little deeper than reading the ACLU's press release
to get the all facts.)
What the 1996
law did was reduce the copious "review" for orders of
deportation entered against convicted criminals. The criminal conviction
itself was still subject to every pointless, dilatory tactic permitted
felons who are U.S. citizens. But the order of deportation could
no longer be gamed to avoid deportation without end.
The AP insanely
claimed that the "legal question basically boils down to this:
Do immigrants living in the United States legally but without citizenship
have the same rights in federal courts as U.S. citizens?" Um,
actually, we don't need the Supreme Court to answer that. You just
need to think about it for two seconds to realize — the answer
is no. Immigrants can be deported. Citizens — even extremely
undesirable citizens like reporters — can't be.
The only question
before the Supreme Court is whether Congress really meant to limit
the number of time-consuming administrative and court hearings that
could be demanded by criminal aliens before the INS deports them.
Also straight
from the ACLU website, the Times and AP recount various sob
stories about harmless felons about to be deported under a cruel
and heartless law. Typically the criminal offense is described as
a "minor drug charge" committed many years ago on a dare.
News stories
about criminals of any sort always have to be read like Manhattan
real-estate ads. If an elevator is not mentioned, it's a fifth-floor
walk-up. If the ad does not expressly say "grt vu," the
apartment looks onto a brick wall. If it doesn't state "bathtub,"
there isn't one.
The ACLU's
lead plaintiff — the man the ACLU chose for their test case
to challenge the law — is one Enrico St. Cyr. According to
the Times, Enrico "entered the United States legally
in 1986 but was convicted of a drug charge early in 1996."
You can search the entire Lexis-Nexis archive and you won't get
more information than that on Enrico's crime.
In fact, despite
his notable accomplishment of having "entered the United States
legally," Enrico is a major narcotics trafficker. He was already
serving time on one drug trafficking charge when he was sentenced
to 10 years on another.
But you'd have
to look beyond the ACLU press release to know that.
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