My two cents on the immigration debate

I hate to say it, but President Bush just may be right about this one. As far as my understanding goes (which is, as a rule, fairly limited), his proposals for immigration reform appear to be the most progressive we've seen for a very long time.

Once again, I was reading the latest article by Orson Scott Card to be published on The Ornery American, and I am convinced.

The only exception that I will make is this: having once worked as an officer of the law, it was once my DUTY to arrest people who broke the law. As long as the immigration laws that are currently on the books are in effect, it is our duty as law-abiding Americans to adhere to it.

That being said, there ARE many different motivations for breaking the law and there should be a penal system that recognizes that an illegal immigrant who has done nothing more than work three jobs to support his/her family here should be treated much differently from an illegal immigrant who deals drugs or commits acts of violence against others.

I strongly suggest that you go and read Card's article. Part of my dislike for my former job is related to what he has to say, only he says it much more eloquently than I ever could (after all, he is a WRITER; I am just an IT professional - for now, anyway).

In my old job, our work was divided into two broad categories: dignitary protection and criminal investigations. Our criminal work was directly related to U.S. visa and passport law. I worked in the five boroughs of New York City and northern New Jersey to investigate violations of our passport laws, and I can easily say that 99.9% of my cases were simply instances of illegal immigrants attempting to get a U.S. passport for work purposes.

Most of my cases involved Dominicans posing as Puerto Ricans on their passport applications, which is clearly outlined as a federal offense on the application itself. While the infraction is considered a misdemeanor, with a prison sentence maximum of 2-3 years, the process of arresting an illegal alien for this offense automatically forwards their case on to ICE, which then turns around and investigates their status. If they are found to be here illegally, they will be deported.

While the process for deportation is long, I have seen cases of families being torn apart in the end - one example is that the parents, who are illegally in the U.S., are sent back to their home country, and their children, born in the U.S. and therefore American citizens, are being placed under the care of social services.

There are some agents who are really militant about prosecuting these people and seem to take sadistic pleasure in the violent upheaval of these people's lives; and there are others, like me, who see the injustice of it all, take away all the illegal documentation, warn them about repeat offending, and advise the U.S. Attorney's office not to pursue the arrest. However, most of my former colleagues didn't seem to have an opinion on the matter - it was simply their job and that was that.

Personally, I couldn't stomach the day-to-day realities of what we were asked to do for this country. I am a fairly rigid person - I believe stoutly in structure, planning, organization... Law didn't seem like such a stretch. Until you see how these people live and who they are.

The neighborhoods in which these people live are appalling. Sometimes it looks like the trash trucks haven't been through in years. The buildings are decaying, there are empty or burnt out lots surrounding homes that families actually live in. And then there's the criminal element that takes over. Gang members walk the streets brazenly. The corner market hides its employees behind several inches of bulletproof glass.

The interiors don't always get much better. Cockroaches. Filth. These people don't always have the time or money to invest in themselves, let alone their habitation. Too much of their time is spent in keeping food on the table. They live what outwardly appears to be unhappy, unfulfilling lives.

But their hope is toward the future. They work hard in the expectation that their children won't have to suffer so much and receive so little. The importance they place on family is a lesson many of us would do better to adopt.

The important thing here, however, is that they WORK HARD. For the most part, these individuals are no stranger to hard work. A few of the people I investigated were even reporting to the IRS every year. All these people want, and have ever wanted, is to be able to work and provide for their families, maybe even raise their children in better circumstances and with more opportunities than they had.

In the end, I didn't want to enforce America's laws (not on these matters, anyway). The extent to which we as Americans can legally harass these people, who are otherwise upstanding citizens, is criminal. Working to arrest and deport illegal immigrants is contrary to my nature and I couldn't go home every night, safe in the conviction that what I was doing was right. We were punishing the wrong people, who I believe were acting out of desperation to keep their jobs and provide for their families.

And now we as a people are propogating the wrongs already in place. By failing to act on immigration reform, we are giving in to our basest nature - that tendency in ourselves to make snap decisions about a person because they are different (black, Jew, gay, Mexican, wearing a turban...) and then persecuting them for that difference.

President Bush's plan may not answer all the evils, but it is a great big leap forward. We owe it to our beliefs as Americans to make the changes necessary to decriminalize our immigrants.