Deportation Disorder
Why it’s okay to start with Middle Easterners.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
January 10, 2002 10:30 a.m.

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.