Tag: immigration

I am beginning work on a series of columns on illegal immigration in the suburbs of Central Jersey, focusing on the difficulties the undocumented face and looking at:

• whether undocumented students who graduated from New Jersey high schools should charged in-state tuition at state schools (currently, they pay out-of-state tuition);
• whether immigration status should be considered when drive’s licenses are issues;
• the services that are available and needed, especially at a time of economic upheaval.

I’ve got a long list of interviews lined up, but I’d like to hear from readers of this blog and of the various Packet newspapers, so send me an e-mail at hkalet@centraljersey.com and tell me what you think.

Bound Brook Councilman Jim Lefkowitz wants the Somerset County borough to target undocumented residents, blaming them for an increased need for rental housing and the potential for an increase in crime.

The councilman also said it is well-documented that an increase in illegal aliens correlates to an increase in the crime rate.

“Studies show that illegal immigrants cost taxpayers much more in public services than they pay into the system via taxes,” Lefkowitz states in the summary of his resolution.

The councilman — a Republican councilman up for re-election — wants the borough to require local landlords to “obtain proof their tenants are legal residents,” and require “police to determine the legal status of any person arrested and to make sure that if any illegal alien is taken into custody, that person is turned over to federal Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officials.” He also wants “the borough to deny any contracts to a firm that hires illegal aliens.”

I’m getting tired of this kind of story, not the least because it just allows this elected xenophobe to recycle the kind of bogus mythology that demonizes Latinos. Consider this, from a 2001 study on immigration and crime:

In the 1980s and 1990s researchers have concluded, or at least have lent support to the conclusion, that immigrants commit proportionately no more than and possibly even fewer crimes than native-born citizens. The General Accounting Office, analyzing FBI records, found that foreign-born individuals accounted for about 19 percent of the total arrests in 1985 in six selected major cities.8 The foreign-born represented 19.6 percent of the aggregate population. While “foreign-born” can mean refer to citizens as well as aliens,9 the study makes an implicit case that immigrant crime is in line with the rest of the country.

In 2007, The Arizona Daily Star reported on another study:

WASHINGTON — Immigrants — both legal and illegal — do not raise the rate of crime in the United States, according to a study released Monday.

In every ethnic group, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are less educated, said the study by the Immigration Policy Center, an immigrant-advocacy group in Washington. This holds especially true for Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans, who make up the bulk of the illegal population.

The authors of the study say it dispels the common notion — which they say is propagated by excessive media coverage of crimes and gang activity — that immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans.

“The misperception that immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, are responsible for higher crime rates is deeply rooted in American public opinion and is sustained by media anecdotes and popular myth,” said Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociology professor at the University of California-Irvine. “This perception is not supported empirically. In fact, it is refuted by the preponderance of scientific evidence.”

The incarceration rate of U.S.- born men 18 to 39 years old in 2000 was 3.5 percent — five times higher than the incarceration rate of their immigrant counterparts, the study found.

The report — which analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau, police records and other sources — also shows that a large increase in illegal immigrants has not resulted in a rise in crime. Since 1994, violent crime in the United States has declined 34 percent, and property crime has fallen 26 percent. At the same time, the illegal immigrant population has doubled to around 12 million.

This, of course, raises the question as to what studies our Bound Brook councilman is referencing.

Not that it matters. Mr. Lefkowitz appears to be of the same ilk as Tom Tancredo, the famously anti-immigrant Congressman who barely registered on the radar screen during the Republican presidential primaries, politicians who view undocumented workers as unworthy of being here, as people (or something a bit less) who contribute nothing. I admit that I am stereotyping, but I’m getting tired of hearing this kind of nonsensical drivel from the xenophobic right.

A reminder from The Baltimore Sun that draconian measures taken against immigrants and noncitizens — whether we are talking about denial of rights or denial of benefits — always seem to come back to bite the least fortunate among us:

Just as feared, a hateful effort to prevent illegal immigrants from getting health care through Medicaid has taken its greatest toll instead on Americans.

Hundreds of thousands of needy people, many of them children, are believed to have been denied Medicaid coverage or dumped from the Medicaid rolls over the past year because they can’t produce the documents now required to prove eligibility, according to The Sun’s Gady A. Epstein.

The absurdity of this requirement played out in agonizing detail for Renell Francine Ray, a 50-year resident of West Baltimore, who lost her Medicaid benefits because she couldn’t get her birth certificate from Virginia without a valid state ID – and couldn’t get a valid state ID without her birth certificate.

Congress, with the most virulent anti-illegal-immigrant lawmakers no longer in control, should move quickly to repeal this outrage. It was a poorly crafted solution to a problem more fantasy than fact that hurt the people it was supposed to protect.

Doesn’t it always work out this way?

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