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All illegality not created equal Tuesday, Aug 9, 2005 By John Brummett What part of illegal do you not understand? That's what the foes of illegal immigrants always ask. They think illegality is the trump card. If you remind them that they, too, came from immigrants, they'll say their ancestors followed the law. If you call them selfish about wanting to keep this country to themselves, they'll say they support legal immigration. If you suggest they might be racists, they'll cry low blow. If you tell the more extreme that their professed devotion to the law hardly jibes with their vigilantism by which they engage in citizen patrols of the border, they'll say someone has to enforce the law, since the government won't. So, I thought I'd tell them the part of illegal I don't understand. It's the part by which smoking marijuana is illegal. But some authorities pay no attention to it, and hardly anyone goes to jail for it anymore because law enforcement is busy with dealers and with epidemic abuse of more insidious drugs. Even for meth addicts, we've set up drug courts to emphasize helping them instead of punishing their law-breaking. It's the part by which the sign says the freeway speed limit is 65. But I'm going 75 and people are passing me, and the trooper on the side of the road lets all of us breeze past. He's only interested in someone going even faster than the law-breaking normal traffic flow. Yes, the law is the law. But there always are priorities and practicalities. We don't have enough jail space for simple pot smokers. There aren't enough hours in the day to cite every driver who fears squashing by an 18-wheeler if he stays within the speed limit. So, the feds convicted a woman for selling stolen identities to illegal immigrants who'd come from Mexico to handle poultry entrails for little more than the minimum wage at an Arkadelphia plant. It's better than no job at all, which is what these Mexicans had at home. The woman stole people's identities. She reaped illicit profit. I say throw the book at her. Just don't round up all the 119 gainfully employed illegal immigrants in Arkadelphia trying to make a better life for themselves and relying on the woman's fraudulent documentation. It's a simple principle with established precedent: Prosecute the dealer; spare and rehabilitate the individual user. Are you thinking I shouldn't equate pot smokers and speeders with illegal aliens? I suspect you're right. Pot smokers and speeders don't perform vital functions for the American economy. I apologize to illegal aliens. Let these hard-working people continue to get their American-born kids ready for American schools, and to cheer them at Little League. Let the plant run at full production. Tell these workers and others similarly discovered that they may remain in the country so long as they stay employed and out of trouble. Make that arrangement contingent on their following a clearly prescribed and well-assisted path to naturalization. Something akin to that kind of amnesty was how the Reagan administration handled the matter. It's how the Bush administration seems at times to lean, recent police work to the contrary, such as last week's in Arkadelphia. Feds raided the plant and rounded up all the illegal workers for a trip to a detention center to await deportation hearings. They left 30 children separated from their parents, banished to charity or to be wards of the state, or hidden with friends or relatives because their parents, scared by the ordeal out of their unsophisticated wits and fearing similar trauma for their innocent children, denied having them. If we want to enforce the immigration law, the place to do it is the border, not the poultry plant. If we want to make the country safer, we'll have to separate mass murderers from their caves, not hard workers from their jobs and children from their parents. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
