If We Deported Illegal Aliens Who Are Otherwise Criminals, We Would Have Deported Several Members of the Fort Dix Six
I have argued repeatedly that our top priority in fighting illegal immigration should be deporting those illegals who commit crimes in this country. I feel so strongly about this, I think that if I could snap my fingers and change one thing about public policy, this would be it.
It appears that, had we simply followed this simple policy, we would already have deported several members of the Fort Dix Six:
NEW YORK – Several of the so-called “Fort Dix Six” had past run-ins with the law, ranging from low-level drug offenses to driving without a license, according to court records.
WNBC.com has obtained 44 pages of records from the Cherry Hill Municipal Court outlining some of the suspects’ past legal issues. Suspect Dritan Duka has past arrests on charges of disorderly conduct and possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia. He also has six separate speeding and driving with a suspended license infractions, records show. Shain Duka has past arrests on charges of obstruction of justice, hindering apprehension and making physical threats. He also has five separate traffic infractions. Eljvir Duka has past drug counts and at least two motor vehicle infractions. The three brothers are accused of helping lead the plot to shoot soldiers at Fort Dix. They are being held without bail. The fact that at least three of the suspects had past run-ins with the law and are in the United States illegally was brought up on Capitol Hill Thursday.
The story notes that if we could figure out a way to check immigration status during traffic stops, we might have deported Mohammed Atta as well.
Is there any rational argument against concentrating our ICE resources on checking the status of criminals? If we had unlimited resources, it would be productive to deport everyone, but since we don’t, I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t start with the criminals first.
Spot on P.
Justin Levine (b3aba4) — 5/11/2007 @ 6:58 pmStop the illegal occupation of the United States!
…and I don’t mean the Christopher Columbus PC BS.
Perfect Sense (b6ec8c) — 5/11/2007 @ 7:08 pmPat:
Another Drew (8018ee) — 5/11/2007 @ 8:04 pmYou can always start here in L.A. with SO-40, just another reason for low morale at the LAPD.
That assumes the country of origin would take them back. How many years did the Mariel detainees spend in US jails? And that might have gone on forever if they hadn’t started some prison riots.
kishnevi (a117ab) — 5/11/2007 @ 8:17 pmWho says we have to send them back where they came from?
Taltos (c99804) — 5/11/2007 @ 8:40 pmNo, just the irrational one, that no human is illegal–except if you’re an American human and you want to sneak into, say, Mexico or Korea.
Patricia (824fa1) — 5/11/2007 @ 8:59 pmWe don’t need to deport them to their countries of origin. Just out of ours. Twelve miles to the east or twelve miles to the west.
nk (f28d83) — 5/12/2007 @ 3:15 amPatterico, you are so right on this that it’s confusing, confusing why it hasn’t been done already for years. When something is so obvious but is not being done it invites conspiracy theories.
By the way, can anyone tell me by what rationale it is not being done?
I’d also like to know what goes on in the brain of someone who comes here for safety after being protected by US forces in Bosnia who then decides he wants to kill those who welcomed him. Was he treated that badly by someone along the way?
MD in Philly (3d3f72) — 5/12/2007 @ 3:28 amThe Saudis have been pouring billions of dolars into spreading Wahabism among the Balkans, mostly Bosnians and Kosovars. Combine that with an in-bred, insular people who have lived in tyranny, savagery and ignorance from pre-history with only recent exposure to Western civilization in the last decade or so.
nk (f28d83) — 5/12/2007 @ 3:47 amAh, yes, our good friends, the Saudis. The thought seems to occur to me more and more of late that perhaps Saudi Arabia would have been a better choice of countries to invade. …if we wanted to stem the spread of radical Islam and foment democracy, that is.
Harry Arthur (b318a5) — 5/12/2007 @ 4:28 amto eliminate the problem of native countries refusing to take them back, i invented the repatriation module (patent pending), a large steel cage that fits in the belly of most of our cargo aircraft. it has parachute packs on top that deploy automatically after it’s pushed out of the plane at 15,000 feet.
assistant devil's advocate (c0165a) — 5/12/2007 @ 4:42 amWhat about those occasions when it’s better to wait until you have enough on the clowns to get them locked up for a long time? Sounds to me like the Feds were being pound wise, if penny foolish.
Alan Kellogg (d8ffa0) — 5/12/2007 @ 5:02 amParachutes? Why parachutes?
nk (f28d83) — 5/12/2007 @ 5:12 amOne point Pat:
Since you (and others)want to deport the illegal immigrants who are criminals… wouldn’t that be all of them?
If the laws regarding coming into this country are not as important as other laws, why do we have them? Why is it that people don’t want to ‘break up’ a family by deporting the parents (illegals) when they have no problem breaking up said families by putting parents in jail for other crimes?
I like your poisition as it would at least start the process of getting rid of illegal immigrants, but it is not enough without something done on the front end of the crime spree.
(also ie. Traffic stops: wouldn’t a drviers license / ie the call-in, be able to tell you status?)
Lord Nazh (d282eb) — 5/12/2007 @ 5:48 amThe ICE department seems incapable of the simplest functions. They have lost 600,000 people who either overstyayed visas or did not show up for immigration hearings after being released on own recognizance. They lost them. Legal immigration is broken. Ask anyone (Mark Steyn, a legal immigrant has written about this) who has gone through, or tried to, the legal process. I think we need legal immigrants. I would take all we can get who have high school diploma equivalent education, especially from China and other Asian countries. They come to work and raise families.
What we get, partly because of the failure of legal immigration processes, is millions of people with second grade educations who are illiterate in Spanish and speak no English. They flood our workers compensation system where I review their medical records every day. Most are laborers who are worn out at 50. Some are worn out at 25. I was nearly fired for mentioning that a 25-year-old was Spanish speaking and poorly educated, and therefore not likely to benefit from vocational rehabilitation, in a report a couple of weeks ago. Add that to Larry Elder’s list of things you can’t say in America.
To those who say we need all these workers for our economy, they might read this. the cost of amnesty is estimated at two to three trillion dollars.
Mike K (86bddb) — 5/12/2007 @ 7:33 amThe ICE department seems incapable of the simplest functions. They have lost 600,000 people who either overstyayed visas or did not show up for immigration hearings after being released on own recognizance. They lost them. Legal immigration is broken. Ask anyone (Mark Steyn, a legal immigrant has written about this) who has gone through, or tried to, the legal process. I think we need legal immigrants. I would take all we can get who have high school diploma equivalent education, especially from China and other Asian countries. They come to work and raise families.
What we get, partly because of the failure of legal immigration processes, is millions of people with second grade educations who are illiterate in Spanish and speak no English. They flood our workers compensation system where I review their medical records every day. Most are laborers who are worn out at 50. Some are worn out at 25. I was nearly fired for mentioning that a 25-year-old was Spanish speaking and poorly educated, and therefore not likely to benefit from vocational rehabilitation, in a report a couple of weeks ago. Add that to Larry Elder’s list of things you can’t say in America.
To those who say we need all these workers for our economy, they might read this. the cost of amnesty is estimated at two to three trillion dollars.
Word Press is imitating Haloscan today.
Mike K (86bddb) — 5/12/2007 @ 7:35 amYes, but what I have argued for is starting with the ones who are otherwise criminals — i.e. that commit crimes other than the initial crime of illegal entry into the country.
Patterico (5b0b7f) — 5/12/2007 @ 8:25 amMy guess is that the cost of deporting every illegal alien picked up for a criminal offense ould be very high. You’ve pointed out yourself that the numbers we’re talking about are huge. Are we going to start shipping them out of the country in boxcars? Where will we drop them off? Will we put them in concentration camps?
Then there’s the problem of actually prooving someone’s undocumented. How many accidental deportations of actual citizens/residents would start occuring because the system was too quick to pull the trigger on deporting people who “didn’t have papers?”
We aren’t east germany or the soviet union. Although the anti-immigration crowd’s “ideal” situation is starting to look more and more like those countries.
Phil (427875) — 5/12/2007 @ 9:26 amIn L.A. it would be about 34,000 a year. That’s about 93 a day. Bus them down once they have served their sentences.
And where do you come up with this “concentration camps” nonsense? Deport them in the usual way.
Your attempts to make this sound like some scary Communist plot don’t fly. It’s simply a rational suggestion for targeted enforcement of existing laws.
Patterico (5b0b7f) — 5/12/2007 @ 10:22 amWould it cost more (1-time) to send an illegal home than it would (years) to keep them?
Lord Nazh (d282eb) — 5/12/2007 @ 12:23 pmThey should still serve out their entire sentences.
Patterico (3f0708) — 5/12/2007 @ 12:31 pmI keep hearing how impossible it is to enforce the immigration laws.
Yet today, as a citizen, I was driving the speed limit, in a well maintained, insured, currently registered vehicle. I stopped to a complete stop at the stop line at a stop sign.
I was pulled over. The eagle eye of the law, saw that I wasnt wearing a seat belt.
Would I have been in trouble with immigration if I were an illegal alien? I really doubt it.
It’s complete BS that they cant enforce this law – they WONT
We need to throw these traitors out of office
ken a (5028bc) — 5/12/2007 @ 2:30 pmThe probability that the general’s niece will implement Patterico’s proposal is as good as the probability that she will implement mine or ada’s. Not that it is entirely her fault. What can ICE do in an asylum city like Chicago where the administration not only refuses to cooperate but actively opposes immigration law enforcement? I imagine LA is pretty much the same. And it goes beyond on-the-street enforcement. Immigration judges in Chicago are totally demoralized by the Seventh Circuit which bends over backward to reverse their deportation orders.
Moreover, deportation as a remedy works only on the soft targets — those legal immigrants who, having been convicted of a crime and become deportable, choose not to leave their jobs as engineers and computer programmers and go underground as busboys but instead choose to return to their home countries. The fence-jumpers are not going to be deterred. Why should they? They are no worse off than if they had never crossed over illegally in the first place.
If illegal entry were punished by a mandatory ten-year prison term — even if only one in a hundred illegal immigrants was actually caught, convicted and sentenced — then someone “looking to feed his family” might consider that his chances of doing that are better in Mexico than in an American prison. I doubt that we will have such a law any time soon, though.
nk (f28d83) — 5/12/2007 @ 7:12 pmPhil, the key is self-deportation, not government-mediated deportation. Every illegal alien has deported himself or herself at at least one point in their life. About half of the Mexican population has deported itself one or more times over the past 20 years. All that’s needed is for us to enforce the laws we already have on the books and they will go where the situation is more favorable for them. (ie, home)
Terrance (f6ecc4) — 5/12/2007 @ 9:42 pmHow many crinimals from mexico and south america are already in this country?
krazy kagu (c49761) — 5/13/2007 @ 5:59 pmNK: actually, the Balkans have been exposed to Western civilization for as long or longer than the British Isles. The Muslim overlay is only in the last four centuries or so–not very long, compared to the period of time they were ruled by Byzantium or the classic Roman Empire. And portions were ruled by Venice even during the Muslim overlay.
The impression I have is that these men were relatively young, and came here with or under the patronage of relatives. They may have no remembrance of the bad old days under Serbian rule.
There’s really only three possible solutions to the so-called problem. All three require acknowledging that economic prospects in the US are far better than they are in Mexico or the other countries of origin, and as long as that continues people will try to enter and live here no matter what the obstacles are. (The people who use the desert routes in the Southwest and the boat people who come from Haita are risking death
kishnevi (ba7408) — 5/13/2007 @ 8:13 pmalready. If they’re not deterred by death, what do you think they’ll be deterred by? Having to listen to Rush Limbaugh for twenty four hours straight or something?)
The first one is to work to improve economic conditions in those places so that people won’t have as great an incentive to leave.
The second is to change the law to allow whoever wants to immigrate to do so, subject to checks for terrorism and criminal links.
The third is to allow this country to become a third world country, so they won’t have an incentive to come here.
Pick whichever of the three you want. Those are the only real choices.
There may be other options, Kishnevi.
DRJ (c6d1df) — 5/13/2007 @ 8:40 pmBank robbers also risk death. In order to stop bank robberies should we a) make everyone rich, b)allow anyone to make a withdrawal from a bank whenever he wants regardless of whether he has a bank account, or c) shut down all the banks? We can deal with illegal aliens the way we deal with bank robbers by making the destination more dangerous than the journey. Prison for the adults, orphanages for the children. And we will … once the first suitcase nuke is smuggled across the Mexican border and detonated in one of our cities.
nk (f28d83) — 5/14/2007 @ 3:43 amDRJ–so they’ll live under bridges or pay extra rent to cover the landlord’s fines. It won’t keep them out.
NK–there’s a big difference between bank robbery and immigration. Robbery violates the rights of the victims, even when (as in the case of taxes) it is legal and done by the government.* It would be a crime even if there were no law to say it was. Immigration violates no one’s rights. It is a crime only because the legislature has made a law to that effect. This law is in defiance of economic reality. It’s worth all the risks to come from Mexico, Haiti, and all the other places because the economic difference is that great. So either you make the economic differences less–meaning that less people want to migrate here–or you change the law to conform to reality. The reason our immigration laws don’t work is because they don’t acknowledge reality. King Canute had the wisdom to know he couldn’t order the tide to stop rolling in. People who want to restrict immigration have not yet learned that lesson. They think immigrants come here to take advantage of the welfare state. They don’t. They come here to take advantage of the jobs. When you make only a dollar a day, making a dollar an hour is a tremendous raise in the standard of living.
If you hate foreigners enough to kill them for the simple desire to live in a country where they can actually make a living, so be it. And if you actually stopped to think, you’d realize that it wouldn’t be a Mexican migrant who would carry that suitcase bomb across the border, it would be an Arab. And probably an Arab who flew here or drove here from Mexico/Canada with valid visas…
*I’m not crazy. I’m a libertarian. Government is theft.
kishnevi (db1823) — 5/14/2007 @ 6:09 pm“I’m not crazy. I’m a libertarian.”
Great! Forget all this illegal alien stuff. Know of any good pot parties with hookers? 😉
nk (f28d83) — 5/14/2007 @ 6:48 pmKishnevi,
If it’s worth all the risks to come to the US, why do any illegal immigrants leave their families in Mexico? It’s because the risks to their families outweigh the benefits of living in America – especially when it’s so easy to send money back to Mexico. Some immigrants will assume any risks but others won’t. Thus, while increasingly restrictive US policies and serious enforcement (including a fence) will not deter everyone, it will deter some and their numbers will increase as the risks increase. A hundred thousand here and a hundred thousand there and pretty soon we’re talking real immigration reform.
DRJ (c6d1df) — 5/14/2007 @ 7:51 pmDRJ. As Hillel would have said, the more fences, the more smugglers. Here in Florida we have a great fence: it’s call the Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico. Numerous would be immigrants have died trying to cross that fence, including St. Elian’s mother and those Haitians who drowned off Turks and Caicos last week. But they keep coming.
kishnevi (03a14b) — 5/15/2007 @ 5:24 pmNK–I haven’t done pot parties since my wild and woolly youth, the same time period when I registered as a Republican.