Criminals at the border?

NY Times:

When Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, announced that the Obama administration would send as many as 1,200 additional National Guard troops to bolster security at the Mexican border, she held up a photograph of Robert Krentz, the mild-mannered rancher who was shot to death on his vast property. The authorities suspected that the culprit was linked to smuggling.

“Robert Krentz really is the face behind the violence at the U.S.-Mexico border,” Ms. Giffords said.

It is a connection that those who support stronger enforcement of immigration laws and tighter borders often make: rising crime at the border necessitates tougher enforcement.

But the rate of violent crime at the border, and indeed across Arizona, has been declining, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as has illegal immigration, according to the Border Patrol. While thousands have been killed in Mexico’s drug wars, raising anxiety that the violence will spread to the United States, F.B.I. statistics show that Arizona is relatively safe.

That Mr. Krentz’s death nevertheless churned the emotionally charged immigration debate points to a fundamental truth: perception often trumps reality, sometimes affecting laws and society in the process.

Judith Gans, who studies immigration at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, said that what social psychologists call self-serving perception bias seemed to be at play. Both sides in the immigration debate accept information that confirms their biases, she said, and discard, ignore or rationalize information that does not. There is no better example than the role of crime in Arizona’s tumultuous immigration debate.

“If an illegal immigrant commits a crime, this confirms our view that illegal immigrants are criminals,” Ms. Gans said. “If an illegal immigrant doesn’t commit a crime, either they just didn’t get caught or it’s a fluke of the situation.”

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The tone of this article is that if the people coming here illegally are not criminals then it is no biggie. Certainly crime is one reason some people support border security, but that has rarely been the focus of this blog. The exceptions are when convicted criminal aliens that should have been deported commit crimes. That is a clear case of if ICE had done its jobs the victim would not have suffered.

The larger question is whether we are going to control the immigration process or not. We have an orderly process for immigration and then we have illegal immigration that can include criminals and terrorist and who knows what, because no background checks are run on those sneaking across the border.

You can have all the empathy in the world for the sneaks, but that is not a good reason to ignore the rule of law. These people are jumping the queue ahead of those who play by the rules and if there is no consequence for the queue jumpers we will only have more of them. Are we going to control the process or let those who do not obey the law control the process? That is the issue.

I don't carry a brief for the Arizona law. If Obama and the rest of his administration were doing their job, there would be no need for the Arizona law. That is what makes the decision to sue the state so perverse. It is an in your face slap that says we are not going to enforce the immigration laws and you should not do anything to make us. Politically it may appeal to the small open borders base of the Democrat party, but to the majority of voters the administration is on the wrong side of the immigration issue, regardless of whether anyone thinks the illegals are here to commit crime. Whatever crime they commit, would not happen if the immigration laws were enforced properly.