The latest news of the day is about
Immigration and Customs Enforcement releasing 36,000 convicted
criminals who are in the country illegally and legally. This
information is being presented as an anti Obama campaign. No matter
how bad Obama is made to look he will continue to be president for 3
more years. What's important, is this narrative distracts us from the
real message contained in those numbers.
To fully understand the numbers we must
know that the initial report listed 87,818 immigrants who were
released, 36,007 were slated for deportation. All of my numbers will
come from the complete list of 87,818. Of this huge number of
criminals, most were convicted of driving under the influence of
alcohol or drugs , of which many were slated for deportation.
When we break the numbers down, less
than half of the 87,000 or 36,000 were violent criminals. When it
came to rape and murder we find the numbers are much lower. Now this
has been reduced to the worst case, let's look into who is at fault.
Homicide -------------------------------- 184Kidnapping ------------------------------ 228Voluntary—manslaughter ------------- 14Sex offenses ----------------------------- 727Sexual assault --------------------------- 426
The USA has one of the largest prison
populations in the world. We are filling them with people who are in
some way connected with drugs. I don't want to get into the drug
prohibition debate at this time, but it has to be mentioned if we are
to understand the problem we are looking at today.
Because prisons are overflowing, state
prison systems are looking for any way possible to reduce their
populations. One of many avenues are early release programs, another
is to push them into the federal system – in this case ICE. Federal
immigration facilities are also at capacity. Because we are dealing
with a system that constantly operates at full capacity, if someone
enters, someone must exit.
In the case of immigrants, if the
nation of origin refuses to take them there is nothing to do other
than to release them, especially when the order of release comes from
a judge. I also have no doubt some of the releases are politically
motivated or that the inmate has agreed to become an informant.
Many of the the immigrants illegally
residing in the country are visa overstays. That means they entered
the country legally, but when their student or work visa expired it
wasn't renewed for many different reasons. In 2004 DHS reported 2.3
million overstays. Numbers seem to vary, but estimates range from 25%
to 45% of the total illegal immigrant population to be overstays.
From Fair US:
Following the first terrorist attack
aimed at destroying the World Trade Center in Manhattan in February
1993, , Congress in 1996 mandated the establishment of an electronic
matching entry-exit system in the Illegal Immigration Reform and
Immigrant Responsibility Act. Section 110 of IIRIRA required
implementation of an automated entry and exit control system at the
nation’s ports of entry to document the entry and departure of
"every alien" arriving in and leaving the U.S. by September
30, 1998. However, before steps were taken to implement that system,
objections from the tourism industry and others derailed
implementation of the security measure.
As usual the
problem comes down to government failing to do its job for political
reasons. Each day it becomes less popular for politicians to pass or
enforce strict immigrations regulations. For this reason we cannot
see an end to the problem of illegal immigrant criminal releases onto
American streets. The only way to keep violent criminals in prison is
to reduce the intake of non violent criminals. In part, this is
another symptom of the war on drugs.
Most of the blame
can be placed on politicians and bureaucrats who refuse to install a
proper tracking system for all people entering the country. Those
same politicians and bureaucrats seem to take identity theft and
using fraudulent Social Security numbers as a joke. In one of the
latest immigration legislation packages we were to forgive those who
have used false identification or stolen Social Security numbers with
the intent of fraud.
Few people
understand how these social security numbers are used. They don't use
them to gain employment, but to gain legal status in the country.
Illegal immigrants will used a social security number to obtain a Tax
Identification Number from the IRS. It is the TIN that is used to
gain legal employment in the country. The IRS has a policy – at
least in previous years – of not checking the Social Security
number to insure it is being lawfully used.
We have a federal
government that has inflated itself to the point of losing control.
We can blame individual politicians, but the problem lies in the
system itself. We have elected people whose main objective is self
perpetuation. Almost every action is to insure they maintain the
office they hold. They will cater to groups and individuals who will
feed campaign coffers.
When Americans pass on simple talking
points without looking into the facts they feed the bloated
politicians and their self perpetuation. Until we evoke real change
there will be none. All we can do as citizens is to not become a part
of the problem. It's time to end the two party oligarchy.
Sources:
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