Tag Archives: Immigration

News

How do Mexican immigration laws compare with the Arizona law?

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Mexican leader Felipe Calderon has been doing a lot of complaining about Arizona’s reasonable immigration enforcement law. Calderon, who I normally like because he is conservative, thinks that Arizona’s law is too tough on illegal immigrants.

I wonder how tough Mexico’s immigration enforcement law is? It must be much more compassionate, since he is complaining about our laws, right? Otherwise Calderon would be a HYPOCRITE.

Story from CNS News.

First, what does Arizona’s law say?

The revised Arizona law specifically states that a person’s immigration status can be checked only if an individual is stopped for some other, valid reason. “A lawful stop, detention or arrest must be in the enforcement of any other law or ordinance of a county, city or town or this state,” the revised law says.

You have to be STOPPED for SOME OTHER VALID REASON before they can ask you about your immigration status in the USA. That seems FAIR to me. It’s not racial profiling.

But what does Calderon say about the bill?

Calderon said while he remains “respectful of the internal policies of the United States,” he firmly rejects criminalizing “migration” so that “people who work and provide things for this nation (USA) will be treated as criminals.”

What are thing like in Mexico? Are illegal immigrants to Mexico “treated as criminals”?

By contrast, Mexican immigration law, revised in 2009, gives Mexican officials the right to check people’s immigration status, and if someone is found to be in the country illegally, they can be fined and deported. The law also requires foreigners to register with the government.

More here about the immigration laws of lots of other countries, from Stan at Birds of the Air. (H/T Neil Simpson)

Excerpt:

Mexico: An illegal immigrant caught can be fined $450 and deported, and if they’re caught entering illegally a second time, they can spend 10 years in prison. Furthermore, local Mexican police must assist the Federales in apprehending illegal immigrants, just like the Arizona law requires. (Of course, it’s only “intolerance, hate, discrimination” if it’s done outside of Mexico.) (On a side note, it’s illegal in Mexico for non-citizens to protest government actions.)

It turns out that American treatment of illegals is the most compassionate of all, and the complainers from other nations are HYPOCRITES.

But some people like hypocrisy – they give it a standing ovation:

And here are the Democrats giving Calderon a standing ovation:

I have a solution. Let’s pass a law saying that our policies and border security will match Mexico’s policies and border security. That should put an end to their complaining, and Obama’s complaining with it.

News

How much does it cost to enforce immigration law?

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Story here from Byron York. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

On April 19, the same day the Arizona Legislature passed the immigration measure, the state’s two Republican senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, unveiled a new plan to secure the U.S. border with Mexico. It’s a combination of completing and improving the border fence, adding new Border Patrol agents, expanding a policy of briefly jailing illegal border crossers, and several other programs already in existence. Although there is not yet an estimate of how much it would cost, the price would be vastly less than the sums going to bailouts, the stimulus, and the planned national health care system.

[…]Start with the fence. The Secure Fence Act, passed by Congress in 2006, specified 700 miles of the Southwest border to be secured with double-layered, reinforced fencing and other physical barriers.

[…]How much would it cost? Given that much of the basic structure already exists, perhaps $1 million per mile. Revamp the whole 700 miles and it’s $700 million.

[…]Kyl and McCain would add 3,000 new Border Patrol agents. A back-of-the-envelope cost estimate is about $100 million per 1,000 new agents, so the plan would cost about $300 million. The proposal also calls for hiring more U.S. marshals, clerks, and administrative staff, which would mean more costs.

[…]Then there is the jailing program, called Operation Streamline, which sends all illegal crossers to jail for a period of 15 to 60 days. When it has been tried selected areas, it has caused the illegal crossing rates to plummet.

[…]There are other expenses. For example, McCain and Kyl want to send a few thousand National Guard troops to the border. When this was done in 2007 and 2008, it cost a total of $1 billion.

The article is a nice little primer on border security measures and associated costs. Don’t forget that illegal immigration actually costs states money for things like increased emergency room usage, increased education costs, increased crime, increased prisons, etc.

We can recover a lot of the costs for border security measures by opening up the country to highly-skilled immigrant workers who pay more in taxes than they use in services, since they are (I think) not even eligible for unemployment, medicare, medicaid or social security – they have to leave when their work term ends.

It’s a national security issue. We have enemies, we need a secure border. Particularly with a naive, weak President whose policies of moral equivalence and appeasement have encourage several attacks on US soil in the past few months.

News

What does Arizona’s immigration enforcement bill really say?

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Byron York writes about the law in the Washington Examiner. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Contrary to the talk, it is a reasonable, limited, carefully-crafted measure designed to help law enforcement deal with a serious problem in Arizona. Its authors anticipated criticism and went to great lengths to make sure it is constitutional and will hold up in court.

[…]The law requires police to check with federal authorities on a person’s immigration status, if officers have stopped that person for some legitimate reason and come to suspect that he or she might be in the U.S. illegally.

[…]Critics have focused on the term “reasonable suspicion” to suggest that the law would give police the power to pick anyone out of a crowd for any reason and force them to prove they are in the U.S. legally. Some foresee mass civil rights violations targeting Hispanics.

What fewer people have noticed is the phrase “lawful contact,” which defines what must be going on before police even think about checking immigration status. “That means the officer is already engaged in some detention of an individual because he’s violated some other law,” says Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri Kansas City Law School professor who helped draft the measure. “The most likely context where this law would come into play is a traffic stop.”

Why was this bill passed? Here’s a hint.

Excerpt:

Three Border Patrol agents are assaulted on the average day at or near the U.S. border. Someone is kidnapped every 35 hours in Phoenix, Ariz., often by agents of alien smuggling organizations. And one-in-five American teenagers last year used some type of illegal drug, many of which were imported across the unsecured U.S.-Mexico border.

These facts are reported in the recently released National Drug Threat Assessment for 2010, published by the National Drug Intelligence Center, a division of the U.S. Justice Department.

Mexico has been complaining about the tough bill, but the bill is much, much less tough than Mexico’s own harsh anti-illegal-immigration laws.