July 13, 2008

New York Times supports illegal activity, identity theft

The New York Times editorial board continues to hit new lows, this time offering "The Shame of Postville, Iowa" (link) about the May immigration raid at Agriprocessors meat packing plant in that town.

Under the old way of doing things, the workers, nearly all Guatemalans, would have been simply and swiftly deported. But in a twist of Dickensian cruelty, more than 260 were charged as serious criminals for using false Social Security numbers or residency papers, and most were sentenced to five months in prison... No one is denying that the workers were on the wrong side of the law. But there is a profound difference between stealing people's identities to rob them of money and property, and using false papers to merely get a job. It is a distinction that the Bush administration, goaded by immigration extremists, has willfully ignored. Deporting unauthorized workers is one thing; sending desperate breadwinners to prison, and their families deeper into poverty, is another.

One wonders exactly what sort of sentence an American citizen would get for the same crime, and the NYT would probably support that citizen being prosecuted instead of making lame excuses. And, one wonders whether the NYT has any sympathy for those U.S. citizens and legal immigrants whose lives were affected by their identities being stolen. While the law occasionally makes distinctions, the New York Times thinks those who engage in identity theft should just be let free, just as long as they're foreign citizens.

The NYT also links to a PDF essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University who's also a federal interpreter and worked in that capacity in Postville. I only scanned the first part, and nothing I saw in that part was anything but an extremely biased screed that, among other things, referred to the ad hoc detention center as a "concentration camp".

And, his and the NYT's prescription is horribly wrong: the U.S. can't serve as a safety valve for every failed country in the world. Those countries' people have to take charge of their own fates. The standard leftwing response is to lay all the blame on the U.S. and justify illegal immigration that way. In other words, the left's policy prescription is to make things worse for all concerned and not really solve the problem.

Posted to Immigration2008a at July 13, 2008 12:39 PM