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 he Justice Department's
decision to track down and deport 6,000 Middle Eastern aliens who've
been ordered to leave the country attracted howls of protest from
all the usual places earlier this week. The government has a list
of more than 300,000 deportable immigrants. Critics wondered why
Middle Easterners should be singled out.
One of the
more peculiar arguments against the Justice plan could be heard
on NPR. Reporter Barbara Bradley introduced listeners to Joan Fitzpatrick,
"an immigration law professor at the University of Washington
[who] says it wasn't the Middle East that produced the two people
now in custody who the FBI believes may be affiliated with al Qaeda."
Her point was that Zacarias Moussaoui is a native-born French citizen
and Richard Reid is a native-born British citizen.
This conveniently
overlooks that fact that all the September 11 hijackers were outright
Middle Easterners. The 22 men on the FBI's most-wanted-terrorists
list aren't exactly
a diverse bunch, either.
Hardly anybody
protesting the new policy has bothered to acknowledge that people
marked for deportation simply ought to be deported. "A dragnet
approach to law enforcement — rounding up men based on national
origin rather than suspicious behavior or credible evidence —
is highly questionable," said Wade Henderson of the Leadership
Council on Civil Rights, in the Washington Post.
Each of the
aliens on the government's list has already been ordered out of
the country. By remaining in the United States, they've broken the
law. That's not a suspicion — it's a fact.
The majority
of these scofflaws are Hispanic. By focusing resources first on
Middle Easterners, however, the government is merely performing
a necessary triage. Like an emergency-room doctor confronting a
bunch of patients, it has to start somewhere — and there aren't
many Mexicans in al Qaeda.
It's worth
asking why we're in this situation in the first place. The answer
is that government simply hasn't been serious about deportation.
"Congress has created a situation of immigration lawlessness,"
says Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. "It's
like broken-windows policing — if you don't keep up with law
enforcement, you will end up with bigger and bigger problems. You
create an atmosphere where people wink at the law: They jump turnstiles
in the subways or, in the case of immigration law, they ignore deportation
orders because they know they can get away with it."
And pretty
soon the government has a long list of deportable aliens and it's
forced into the unpleasant necessity of deciding which ones must
go first.
Bush,
Year One
Ramesh Ponnuru's take.
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