Minutemen not watching over funds (Simcox Questioned Over Funds)

A growing number of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps leaders and volunteers are questioning the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars in donations collected in the past 15 months, challenging the organization's leadership over financial accountability.

Many of the group's most active members say they have no idea how much money has been collected as part of its effort to stop illegal entry -- primarily along the U.S.-Mexico border, what it has been spent on or why it has been funneled through a Virginia-based charity headed by conservative Alan Keyes.

Several of the group's top lieutenants have either quit or are threatening to do so, saying requests to Minuteman President Chris Simcox for a financial accounting have been ignored....."

"..... The Minuteman organization has not made any financial statements or fundraising records public since its April 2005 creation. It also has sought and received extensions of its federal reporting requirements and has not given the Minuteman leadership, its volunteers or donors any official accounting. A financial statement promised to The Times by Mr. Simcox for May was never delivered....."

Law enforcement and federal and state governments are notoriously deficient if you go looking for stats on how many crimes are committed by illegal foreign nationals on our soil.

So, a concerned citizen is forced to go to what sources are availabe. Here's one...a United States congressman:

Those are two of the situations here, Mr. Speaker. And then as some other things flow through my mind, and I look at the situation here in the United States, we are quite a country. And we have had a lot of people pour into the streets of America over the last several weeks. It has been rather astonishing to watch the foreign flags unfurled in the streets, the American flags flown upside down, the Mexican flag flying on top of the flag pole at a high school in California with an upside-down American flag right underneath there.

It is interesting to watch the second wave of demonstrations, when they seemed to take the coaching a little bit better and put on white shirts and flew more American flags. Of course the foreign flags were also in their midst although in significantly fewer numbers.

And then on May 1, the International Workers Day, the day where the socialists and communists around the world take to the streets to march and demonstrate, that was the day that it appeared that the movement for advocating for illegal aliens in America apparently was co-opted by the socialist communist movement in the world. Some of the descendents of the Workers World Party, the Communist party front, I will say, here in the United States and also ANSWER, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, those organizations, socialist organizations at best, more akin to Marxist organizations, are bringing people to the streets to demonstrate in the United States.

What a concept, Mr. Speaker, to get people to walk off their jobs, to walk out of their schools and plug the streets and refuse to do business with anybody that is, I will say, a non-Hispanic American, and then argue that this is a day for all immigrants, when they are seeking to punish their employers and punish the merchants that they would normally do business with and by walking out the schools, somehow figure that they are punishing the schools instead of the students. Not a very rational approach. And I dubbed it Biting the Hand That Feeds You Day. Because the punishment, if there was any, was to be delivered to the people that were most inclined to be supportive of illegals in this country.

And so, perhaps a million, 1.1 million, 1.3 million people took to the streets on Monday of this week to send a message all across America that they are demanding that they get a path to citizenship and hopefully a fast path to citizenship.

And I would argue, Mr. Speaker, that, you know, they came into this country and did so illegally. They argue that they are not criminals. But in fact, it is a crime to enter the United States today. Passing the law that makes it a felony makes it a penalty greater than, it is 6 months in jail and deportation if you enter the United States illegally today. And if the House Resolution 4437 should pass the Senate with the President's signature on it, it would make it a felony. That would be a year and a day penalty instead of 6 months. But regardless, it is still a crime to enter the United States. It is a crime to go to work in the United States illegally. And it isn't that they are not criminals. They break the law every day they go to work.

But I fault, Mr. Speaker, not just the illegals. In fact, I put it in this opposite order. I fault the government of the United States, the Federal Government. For the last 20 years, the enforcement effort has diminished incrementally year by year for the last 20 years. And the Federal Government has the first responsibility to defend our shores, defend our borders, defend our national security. But they let the situation get out of hand to the point where there are 3 to 4 million illegals who poured across our southern border within the last year. The Border Patrol stopped 1,159,000. That would be for 2004. For 2005, that number would be about 1,188,000. Now, they adjudicated for deportation in 2004, 1,640 was all. And some of those out of that 1.2 million or so that they did stop, some of those were taken to the border and sent back through the turnstile. Some were released on their own recognizance because it wasn't a logistically feasible thing to do to send them back.

Well, some of them come back the next day. Some of them come back within hours of the time that they are sent back to their home country.

This number keeps growing and it keeps ballooning, Mr. Speaker, and we must do something. And I think Democrats and Republicans agree that we need to control our borders.

As Congressman Gingrey says, when you are in an emergency room in a hospital and you get a patient that comes in and they are bleeding all over the place, you don't stop and debate about what you are going to do, how you are going to clean up the mess; you stop the bleeding first and you stabilize the patient. And that is what we sought to do here in this House with H.R. 4437.

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Stop the bleeding, stabilize the patient, get control of our laws, enforce them, and then begin a debate on what to do about how to get the patient rehabilitated again, after we get this patient stabilized. We can't do both of these things at once, Mr. Speaker. But we do need to do some things to pull this country together.

Mr. Speaker, again, it is important for us to bring some stability to this immigration issue. It is a national security issue. This is a national security issue as much as the global war on terror is a national security issue. And the statistics that I have looked at tell me that we have a slow-motion terrorist attack going on in the United States that comes across our southern border.

Now, some will say that if I point out the crimes of anyone coming into the United States, that somehow I am labeling everyone who illegally comes into the United States as a violent criminal. And of course, we know that is not true.

About 11,000 illegals cross our southern border every day. If they were all murderers, we would double our murder rate practically just with 1 day's supply. No, that is not the case. But the crimes that are committed by those who enter this country illegally are in significantly greater numbers than the crimes that are committed by American citizens, to the extent that 28 percent of the inmates in our prisons in the United States are criminal aliens, 28 percent. And that includes our city, our county, our State and our Federal penitentiaries. And they vary only 1 or 2 percent above or below, but they average 28 percent. And it costs us $6 billion a year to provide for the incarceration of the criminal aliens, and that is just the Federal dollars to speak of. And once we reach down into the cities, into the counties, there are other numbers out there that would grow that greater and greater. It is a minimum of $6 billion. And these numbers that I have come from, their SCAAP funding, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Plan. And all States don't apply for SCAAP funding. So we know that these numbers are low numbers, not high numbers. But it is certain that there are more. I am just not certain how many more. But I can stand on 28 percent.

Now, that means then that criminal aliens are committing 28 percent of the crimes in the United States. And so that means 28 percent of the murders, 28 percent of the rapes, 28 percent of the violence and the assaults and battery, first- and second-degree murder and also manslaughter attacks are committed by criminal aliens.

Now, I think that is one of the reasons that I believe the illegal population in America is greater than those numbers that we are seeing. And I can't imagine how, if 3 to 4 million come into the United States, and we may be direct, we tell over a million, 1.2 million, go home, but we don't have any verification that they actually go home or stay home. Some we do verify they went home, but we can't verify that any of them stayed home; this population is growing.

The Border Patrol would say that there is another 2 to 3 million that get by that don't get stopped every year compared to the million that get stopped. So if this number in the United States is 3 million or more extra every year, some will die, yes, and some will go back home. That is true. And some will become citizens by hook or by crook, but there will still be a significant increase in the United States. And I think that number increases substantially, perhaps 2.5, maybe even as much as 3 million a year. That would take us on up to 20 million or more in this country, not 11 or 12 million. That is a more reasonable number. And if you think that the numbers could be 20 million or more, then it is easier to understand how you could have 28 percent of our criminal aliens in the penitentiaries. So this problem is a lot larger than most people think. And it comes down to this: If we had enforced our borders, if we hadn't allowed any illegals to come into the United States, if we would have enforced our domestic laws so when people violated immigration laws internally, domestically; if we did those things, then we wouldn't have illegal aliens in America to commit the crimes. And that would equate and extrapolate down to 12 fewer murders every day, 13 fewer people that die at the hands of negligent homicide, primarily the victims of drunk drivers, at least 8 little girls that are victims of sex crimes on a daily basis, and that number could be well higher than that because the average predator, perpetrator commits and is convicted on at least 3.6 victims. And that is the ones we find out about. There are many others that are not reported. In fact, they statistically say that there might be only 10 percent that are actually reported. These numbers are small numbers. They are the conservative side of the numbers, not the larger side of the numbers.

This is a slow-rolling, slow-motion terrorist attack on the United States costing us billions of dollars and, in fact, thousands of lives, and we have an obligation to protect the American people, and that means seal and protect our borders. And if we are able to do that, down the road a few years, once it is established, we could have a legitimate discussion about whether we could have a guest worker plan, whether we could open the greencards. But today we haven't demonstrated that there is going to be enforcement. And without that demonstration of enforcement, I am not willing to go a step further and to insist that there will be enforcement.

But in this country, Mr. Speaker, we need to have cultural continuity. We need to pull together as a people. We need to pull together under our civilization, under a common cause, a common sense of history, a common language. And a common language is essential to any country.

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In fact, I went through the World Book Encyclopedia. I went to the almanac and looked up all the flags of all the countries in the world, set it down beside the World Book Encyclopedia, looked them all up to see what is the official language. Every country that is registered in the almanac with a flag, what is their official language? Every single country in America has at least one official language, except the United States of America. We do not have an official language. We just have a common language called English. All the rest of the countries saw the wisdom of binding and tying any country together with a common language.

The Israelis, when they established their country in 1948, and I believe that anniversary was just yesterday or the day before, they established it from 1948 until 1954. In 1954, they established Hebrew as their official language, and they did so because they needed a common language to bind them together, a common form of communications currency, if you will, Mr. Speaker.

So people have understood that throughout the ages. That is something that has been known since Biblical times, how powerful a common language is.

Mr. Speaker, I propose that we move that kind of legislation and that we establish an official language here in the United States and do so for the purposes of pulling our people together.

We are being fractured by worshipping at the alter of multiculturalism. When that first came forward and I dealt with it, however many years ago, 30 years ago, perhaps, or more, when I first began to hear the term multiculturalism diversity, I really actually thought, fine, this sounds good, gives us an opportunity to recognize other cultures, other civilizations. People have things to be proud of. It is constructive. It is positive. And I went my merry way as kind of an endorser of multiculturalism and diversity.

As the years unfolded, Mr. Speaker, I came to a different conclusion. I came to the conclusion that identity politics were tearing America apart. Our rights come from God, and they are guaranteed to individuals, not to groups. God blesses us all equally and creates us all in His image; and He does not draw distinctions between us based upon skin color, ethnicity, or any other characteristics that we might want to be part of. And yet we insist upon dividing ourselves up and calling it ``diversity.'' And I think ``diversity'' really stands for ``division.''

So I did a little experiment. I went on the Web page at home, Iowa State University, typed in ``multiculturalism'' and looked up the student organizations that are there. It is quite an interesting list, all identity

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politics. It starts with African Students Association, and there are 50 of them, and it ends with Zeitgeist. And in the middle of that you will see the Identifying as M.E., the Multi-Ethnics. That is one of my favorites. They could not come up with a label, so they called themselves Multi-Ethnics.

But you have Amnesty International, Asian Pacific American Awareness Coalition, Benefiting the Education of Latinas in Leadership Academics and Sisterhood, Black Graduate Student Association; and before you can get there, you need to be part of the Black Student Alliance, the Brazilian-Portuguese Association, the French Club, the Iowa State Ukrainian Club, the Japanese Association, the Kenya Students Association, Latino Heritage Month. The list goes on and on and on, Mr. Speaker, 50 strong, identity politics, all of them viewing themselves as somehow disenfranchised, not having the same kind of access or the same kind of privileges or opportunities or rights maybe as someone else. Except for those that identify themselves as the Identifying as M.E., which stands for Multi-Ethnic. So they finally found one that was generic.

Perhaps I fit in there also, Mr. Speaker. But I thought, well, that is Iowa State and they are a Midwestern fairly conservative institution.

So what about Berkeley? So we typed in Berkeley and did a little search on student organizations there. The University of California, Berkeley, they came up with 118 of these identity politics groups on campus there.

We are using up our resources supporting organizations that are designed to identify the differences in us, not the commonalities, designed to divide us, not to pull us together, Mr. Speaker. And it is in the end going to pull us apart, pull us irrevocably apart, if we do not pull ourselves together and provide for some cultural continuity.

So I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that we need to establish English as the official language of the United States. We need to stand up together and say, enough of this identity politics, enough of this division politics, enough of the idea that you cannot be an American unless somehow you are part of this beautiful multicultural mosaic with a particular identifier on you.

It was good enough for Teddy Roosevelt to be just an American. In fact, he insisted upon it, Mr. Speaker. And I insist upon it as well, that we must pull together in that fashion. And if we fail to stay in touch with our Constitution, with our history, with our commonalities, if we fail to pull together in the same harness, Mr. Speaker, then shame on us. This country will be weaker; and this country, in fact, may not survive the attacks that are upon it.

So, rather than go into the balance of the solutions for America, Mr. Speaker, I just would conclude with this, that they are doing great work in Iraq. We are committed there. We must follow through and finish the task, whatever it takes. We have the resolve to do that.

We are watching as millions pour across our Southern border, and we are establishing some policy here in this city over the next few weeks that will establish the destiny of America. If we do not have the will to establish our border and control our border, we cannot be a Nation, if we let people come into America illegally and then they are the ones that are establishing our immigration policy, not us here in this Congress.

The Constitution gives Congress the authority, Congress the responsibility, to establish immigration law. We need to do that. We need to do that after a national debate.

But we will hear story after story after story of how people have put down their roots and now we cannot ask them to go back. But I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that what we need to do is seal the border, build a fence to do that, build it as tight as we need to to make it effective. We need to end birthright citizenship that is creating these anchor babies.

We need to shut off the jobs magnet by applying employer sanctions, by passing my legislation, which is called New IDEA, H.R. 3095, which is the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, that lets the IRS remove the deductibility of wages and benefits paid to illegals. When that happens, it will take the cost of a wage from, say, a $10 wage to an illegal, by the time the taxable component are factored in, take it on up to $16 an hour. That gives the American a chance to do the work or someone on a legal green card, rather than someone who is here illegally.

This is the United States of America, Mr. Speaker. We need to stand on defending our borders. We need to seal the border. We need to build a fence. We need to end birthright citizenship. We need to shut off the jobs magnet, pull ourselves together as a Nation in unity, and people will go back home when their job opportunities start to dry up here. We will not have to make that decision for them. The decision will be made. They got here on their own. They can go back on their own. It is not a matter of trying to deport 12 million or 22 million people.

But I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that if the Senate passes and this House should pass and the President should sign a guest worker program that might well have 22 million people who have a fast track to citizenship, they will also be able to invite in their immediate family. If each one of them invites just simply four of their immediate family in, a father, a spouse, and a couple of children, just four, that means 88 million new ones that are not calculated here. Add that to the 22 million or so that are here, and you have the entire population of Mexico brought into the United States in a single generation. If that is our intent, we ought to have the will to stand on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and say so, rather than do this in some kind of way that opens the gate and lets the American people find out about it after it is too late.

With that, I thank the Speaker for his indulgence.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_illegal_alien.html

The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave
Heather Mac Donald

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.

The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.

Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.

But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.

It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.

I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”

Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and stay in the business.

Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang “Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer (known on the street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.

The ordinarily tough-as-nails former LAPD chief Daryl Gates enacted Special Order 40 in 1979—showing that even the most unapologetic law-and-order cop is no match for immigration advocates. The order prohibits officers from “initiating police action where the objective is to discover the alien status of a person”—in other words, the police may not even ask someone they have arrested about his immigration status until after they have filed criminal charges, nor may they arrest someone for immigration violations. They may not notify immigration authorities about an illegal alien picked up for minor violations. Only if they have already booked an illegal alien for a felony or for multiple misdemeanors may they inquire into his status or report him. The bottom line: a cordon sanitaire between local law enforcement and immigration authorities that creates a safe haven for illegal criminals.

L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the immigration felony.

Though such a policy puts the community at risk, the department’s top brass brush off such concerns. No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say. Just put them under surveillance for “real” crimes and arrest them for those. But surveillance is very manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for getting a violent felon off the street and for questioning him further, it is absurd to demand that the woefully understaffed LAPD ignore it.

The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims. But in any case, this official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators: deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status police already know.

The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned the council: “This is going to open a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.

But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes, but such anxiety can never equal a politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department to work closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang members off the streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness’s life at risk.

But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a federal law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan Lewis told the L.A. Police Commission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to look at Special Order 40.”

Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After their brief moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown more adamant in defense of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the scandal-plagued Rampart Division had cooperated with the INS to try to uproot murderous gang members from the community, local politicians threw a fit, criticizing district commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station houses. In turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now, big-city police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary policies as the politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring.

Immigration politics have similarly harmed New York. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize people.” Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government. Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most devastating attack on the city and the country in history.

New York conveniently forgot the 1996 federal ban on sanctuary laws until a gang of five Mexicans—four of them illegal—abducted and brutally raped a 42-year-old mother of two near some railroad tracks in Queens. The NYPD had already arrested three of the illegal aliens numerous times for such crimes as assault, attempted robbery, criminal trespass, illegal gun possession, and drug offenses. The department had never notified the INS.

Citizen outrage forced Mayor Michael Bloomberg to revisit the city’s sanctuary decree yet again. In May 2003, Bloomberg tweaked the policy minimally to allow city staffers to inquire into immigration status only if it is relevant to the awarding of a government benefit. Though Bloomberg’s new rule said nothing about reporting immigration violations to federal officials, advocates immediately claimed that it did allow such reporting, and the ethnic lobbies went ballistic. “What we’re seeing is the erosion of people’s rights,” thundered Angelo Falcon of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. After three months of intense agitation by immigrant groups, Bloomberg replaced this innocuous “don’t ask” policy with a “don’t tell” rule even broader than Gotham’s original sanctuary policy. The new rule prohibits city employees from giving other government officials information not just about immigration status but about tax payments, sexual orientation, welfare status, and other matters.

But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming additional workload.

The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house, aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation) has forced immigration officials to practice a constant triage. Long ago, the feds stopped trying to find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the country illegally through stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who have been deported following conviction for an aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with 20 years in jail).

That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS investigator Mike Cutler, who worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s, explains. “If you arrested someone you wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss and start a bidding war,” Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks, threw a couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.' The boss would turn to another agent: 'Next! Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed over an old lady, and had a gun.' ” But such one-upmanship was usually fruitless. “Without the jail space,” explains Cutler, “it was like the Fish and Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear and let them go.”

But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and take him across the border. Second alternative: detain him pending removal. Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to final orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a notice asking the deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him. Results: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run letters disappeared, a number that was even higher—94 percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring countries.

To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks like complete indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to Congress about the Queens rape by illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator defended the city’s failure to notify the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the ground that the agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time again been unable to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said last February. “When we reach them on the phone, they require that we write a letter. When we write a letter, they require that it be by a superior.”

Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John Mullaly a former NYPD homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent of the drug dealers and other criminals in Manhattan’s Washington Heights were illegal. Were Mullaly to threaten an illegal-alien thug in custody that his next stop would be El Salvador unless he cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing that the INS would never show up. The message could not be clearer: this is a culture that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. If policing’s broken-windows theory is correct, the failure to enforce one set of rules breeds overall contempt for the law.

The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that would allow immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release he could be immediately ejected without taking up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988, immediately bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent such an army of criminal aliens (who have extensive due-process rights in contesting deportation) and so would have to request delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available. In 1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of their deportability. They included 1,198 aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.

Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The INS was a creature of immigration politics, and INS district directors came under great pressure from local politicians to divert scarce resources into distribution of such “benefits” as permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away from criminal or other investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the INS refused to join an FBI task force against Haitian drug trafficking in Miami, fearing criticism for “Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after Hispanic activists protested a much-publicized raid that netted nearly two dozen illegals, the Border Patrol said that it would no longer join Simi Valley, California, probation officers on home searches of illegal-alien-dominated gangs.

The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early 1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship in record numbers to preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton administration, seeing a political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in 1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed robbery, were naturalized.

Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can keep them in the country indefinitely. Federal probation officers in Brooklyn are supervising two illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi citizenship—who look “ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a probation official, but the officers can’t get rid of them. The Jordanian had been caught fencing stolen Social Security and tax-refund checks; now he sells phone cards, which he uses himself to make untraceable calls. The Saudi’s offense: using a fraudulent Social Security number to get employment—a puzzlingly unnecessary scam, since he receives large sums from the Middle East, including from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism, so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Currently, he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a minor offense would not be prosecuted, but the government, fearing that he had terrorist intentions, used whatever it had to put him in prison.

Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the country, but the two ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly fighting their deportation. “Due process allows you to stay for years without an adjudication,” says a probation officer in frustration. “A regular immigration attorney can keep you in the country for three years, a high-priced one for ten.” In the meantime, Brooklyn probation officials are watching the bridges.

Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens, the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come back. They can’t make it in Mexico.” The tens of thousands of illegal farmworkers and dishwashers who overpower U.S. border controls every year carry in their wake thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists who use the same smuggling industry and who benefit from the same irresistible odds: there are so many more of them than the Border Patrol.

For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part and parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period. For decades, the INS had as much effect on the migration of millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the immigrants themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens living fearfully in the shadows, seemed to regard immigration authorities with all the concern of an elephant for a flea.

Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the hundreds of illegal day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York, in front of money wire services, travel agencies, immigration-attorney offices, and phone arcades, all catering to the local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists). “There is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like the dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping that an SUV seeking carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t worry, because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I need the papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers.”

Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor inconvenience to the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter, crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them, but with six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught. In illegal border crossings, you get what you pay for, Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the coyotes will abandon you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into New York from Los Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her across the border. “Because I pay, I don’t worry,” he says complacently.

The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an impregnably militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as migrants know they can easily get work, they will find ways to evade border controls. But enforcing laws against illegal labor is among government’s lowest priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.

Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite investigations, not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak. That’s no accident: though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the fraud-proof form of work authorization necessary to enforce that ban. Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free number to the Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers verify work eligibility would result in discrimination against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work illegally.

The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker is actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will nearly always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find an employer guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration authorities seized nearly 2 million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.

For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the employment charade. If immigration officials ever do try to conduct an industry-wide investigation—which will at least net the illegal employees, if not the employers—local congressmen will almost certainly head it off. An INS inquiry into the Vidalia-onion industry in Georgia was not only aborted by Georgia’s congressional delegation; it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the spirit of the employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups are ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers understandably fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.

Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry. Everywhere, illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at taxpayer expense; 13 states offer them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been pushed to grant illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state tuition. One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to credentialize illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its blessing to this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make it a boon to money launderers, immigrant smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.

Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican government, that feature signs calling for “no más racismo.” Immigrant advocates use the language of “human rights” to appeal to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They attack the term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed, grouses Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you need to be forgiven.”

Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S. owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive their kids to school,” said California assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that people he stops “get in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce the law emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, Joaquín Avila, a UCLA Chicano studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of apartheid.

Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders. Quite the reverse. By a huge majority—at least 60 percent—they want to rein in immigration, and they endorse an observation that Senator Alan Simpson made 20 years ago: Americans “are fed up with efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of any people—to decide who will join them and help form the future country in which they and their posterity will live.” But if the elites’ and the advocates’ idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.

However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and incoherent immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a minimum, authorities should expel illegal-alien criminals swiftly. Even on the grounds of protecting non-criminal illegal immigrants, we should start by junking sanctuary policies. By stripping cops of what may be their only immediate tool to remove felons from the community, these policies leave law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.

But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning to flash gang signals and hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City, “every high school has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to 14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 18-year-old Mexican. Such pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn about U.S. law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it. “Institutionalizing illegal immigration creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.,” observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.

For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide what our immigration policy is—and enforce it.

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