Previous Administrations have Failed US Border Control

by Jaymez

8 October, 2016

 

Most citizens would agree that it is a Government’s role to protect their borders and to deport anyone found to be staying in the country illegally. Yet this appears to be one of the most controversial issues in the US Presidential race.

It is also interesting to note the US media’s acceptance of the Democratic Party’s term ‘undocumented’ or ‘unauthorised’ immigrant, to describe the estimated 11.1 million illegal immigrants they have in the US. It gives a sense of legitimacy, that maybe there is just a matter of paperwork to sort out, for these law breakers.

The illegal immigrants are largely Mexicans (52%), but include others from Central and South America, Asia, Africa and elsewhere, who illegally entered the US, or remained in the US beyond their legally granted student and tourist visas.

A small fence separates densely-populated Tijuana, Mexico, right, from the United States in the Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector.

Democrats and others who appear not to understand the facts are calling Americans who want to stop illegal border crossings, and who want to deport illegal immigrants, ‘racists’. This also appears to be the case in much of the left leaning media, in the US and overseas.

In this debate some argue that there should be an amnesty for people who have lived in the US (illegally) for a certain number of years. That has all the logic of telling people, the longer they have been breaking a law, the more likely they are they will not be prosecuted. Barrack Obama has also spent much of his presidency trying to give legitimacy to an estimated 4.5 million illegal immigrants through two executive memos, which have only recently failed in a Supreme Court tie over challenges against them.

One memo expanded the existing Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals program, (DACA), which since 2012 had allowed immigrants who’d come to the US as children to apply for temporary protection from deportation, and also to apply for work permits.

The other memo, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program (DAPA), would have allowed illegal immigrants who have US citizen or permanent resident children to apply for deportation protection and work permits as well.

Because of the hope that they could stall or even stay deportation and give work rights to illegal immigrant parents, these children have become widely termed ‘anchor babies’.

Most other countries do not grant automatic citizen rights to children born in their country. The parents must be citizens. For instance, just because a pregnant mother might gain entry to Australia legally or illegally and give birth here, the child has no Australian citizenship rights. This is the way it works in most countries.

If Australia had an equivalent problem to the US, that would amount to more than 800,000 illegal immigrants living here.

Imagine if 52% of those ‘illegals’ arrived from our closest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, followed by illegal immigrants from Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Malaysia and the rest of the world. You could see immediately that there would be a huge potential language, education, and cultural gap between the bulk of those illegal immigrants compared to the rest of the Australian population.

Imagine the extra pressure on housing, health services, education, law and order and welfare. Not to mention the huge pool of labour which would work for very little, and thus take all the entry level and low skill jobs in Australia, leaving hundreds of thousands of Australians unemployed. What Australian politician would be happy about that?

Would we be racist, for questioning how the hell they got in? For demanding that we stop the entrance of illegal immigrants and demanding that our laws be enforced by expelling the illegal immigrants already here? After all, isn’t that supposed to be the job of the Australian Border Force?

It would be a non-debate in Australia!

In fact we wouldn’t have let it get to that point. So it is hard to understand why it is such a huge debate in the US. Unless perhaps the middle and upper classes are enjoying the pool of cheap labour? All those illegal immigrants are certainly not helping the poor and working class Americans.

The only matters which would be debatable in Australia, and should be debatable in the USA, are:

• How do you stop more coming in illegally?
• On what humanitarian basis, if any, would some of the illegal immigrants be allowed to stay?
• How quickly can the rest of the illegal immigrants be deported?

This is pretty much the platform that Donald Trump is running on, and should really be uncontroversial.

This would be an even more urgent discussion if it was widely known that, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) using official Department of Justice data, illegal immigrants are responsible for a significantly disproportionate number of violent crimes. This shows up particularly in states with high numbers of illegal immigrants. For instance:

• Between 2008 and 2014, 40% of all murder convictions in Florida were criminal aliens. In New York it was 34% and Arizona 17.8%.
• During those years, criminal aliens accounted for 38% of all murder convictions in the five states of California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York, while illegal aliens constitute only 5.6% of the total population in those states.
• That 38% represents 7,085 murders out of the total of 18,643.

In addition:

• According to the Department of Homeland Security fiscal 2013 report there were 1.9 million “removable criminal aliens” in the USA. That’s 1.9 million convicted criminals out of an estimated 11.1 million illegal aliens.
• Between fiscal 2013 and fiscal 2015, there were 82,288 criminal aliens that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), released into the community instead of deporting.
• A further 200,000 criminal aliens ICE released with some ‘discretion guidelines’ , such as house arrest, ankle bracelets, requirement to check in at police station and so on.
• During that same period there were 18,646 deportable aliens that ICE was seeking which were ignored by ‘sanctuary’ state and local law enforcement authorities.

Given these numbers, and the right for every country to have control over their borders, it is difficult to understand why this matter has been given such a low priority by past administrations including Obama, Bush and Clinton. It has been an abrogation of their prime Presidential responsibility to keep US citizens safe.

Note: There are many ‘fact checking’ sites and articles which attempt to show that illegal immigrants do not commit a disproportionate amount of the crime. Those that conclude it is not a fact commit one or both of the following statistical errors:

• They compare the rate of criminal convictions among the immigrant population versus the US born population. This is a sleight of hand because we are not discussing the many millions of lawful immigrants to the US, just the illegal immigrants. No-one is contending that immigrants are more criminal than non-immigrants.
• They asses the current total prison population in the US and split the inmates between US citizens and illegal immigrants. Again, this is statistical fraud because many of the US citizen prisoners may have been in jail for the last many decades, compared to the relatively recent arrival in the last decade of huge numbers of illegal immigrants. It would be more appropriate to look at the number of convictions of US citizens versus illegal immigrants in more recent years, which is what has been done in this article.