Friday, June 22, 2007
Immigration and terrorism, criminal justice and interdiction
This couple of paragraphs rather nicely captures my point of view on a number of subjects:
The toughest thing for me in this debate is that we should want an accurate accounting of everyone who is in the country. But, as Ramesh notes (and as I've acknowledged before), you can't get that without offering illegals some kind of legal status. I could swallow hard and go along with that if (a) the problem were not so large (you can't responsibly do it with 12 to 20 million people) and (b) I were satisfied that the government was both capable of enforcing and determined to enforce the immigration laws — I don't think either has been demonstrated, and I doubt that either could be. (For example, no matter how earnest and competent I think Mike Chertoff is, and I know him to be top-shelf on both counts, he cannot convince me that a DHS under a President Hillary Clinton would enforce the laws when he is gone.) Since the problem is too large, and offering legal status is likely to make it worse, that means the cost is too high to justify the benefit of accounting for everyone who is here — no one is saying that wouldn't be a real benefit; it's just not one we can afford.
The main reason I favor the attrition strategy (see, e.g., here) is that, contrary to comprehensive reform, it recognizes our immigration situation for what it essentially is: a crime problem. Crime problems are not "solved," they are managed. Why do we object to treating terrorism as if it were a crime problem? Because when something is regarded as merely a law-enforcement matter, that implicitly means we tolerate some instances of it. We never round everyone up. It is not desirable or possible to eradicate all instances of crime — a government that tried such a thing would have to intrude over-bearingly on the freedom of innocent people. We only tolerate such crisis-time intrusions when dealing with something like terrorism. Terrorism has to be stopped because the cost of tolerating even some few instances of it is too high. But drug trafficking and fraud, to cite two common, contrary examples, are not in that category. They, like immigration, are problems we manage. We don't pretend to arrest every offense; we enforce aggressively and strategically enough to deal with the most serious offenders and discourage the rest. The enforcement is modulated until the level of crime is tolerable.
Regarding immigration like a crime problem is the succinct answer to the comprehensive-reform crowd's best rhetorical device: The searing question, What are you going to do about 12 million people? The answer is: The same thing I do about the millions of drug felonies that happen yearly.
Read the whole thing.
3 Comments:
By 
Georg Felis, at
Fri Jun 22, 11:09:00 PM:
This comment has been removed by the author.
By Georg Felis, at
Fri Jun 22, 11:15:00 PM:
Is it permitted to suggest that perhaps we should not allow people illegally in the country to participate in elections or withdraw funds from the social welfare net? Or would that be considered racist (or whatever Modern Society calls discriminating against people committing a crime)?
(edited to remove inadvertent insult)
By TigerHawk, at
Sat Jun 23, 08:12:00 AM:
Well, I think part of the idea in the "attrition strategy" is to make life hard enough on illegals that it will be relatively less attractive for potential illegals to try to come here. That said, it is not obvious that the only purpose of the social welfare net is to benefit the person who receives the "welfare". In some situations, we want the person to receive the benefit, even if they themselves would prefer to do without. Certain kinds of medical care come to mind, especially with regard to infectious disease, and primary and secondary education.
