Arizona: When it comes to immigration policy, focus on pleasing no one

[Harold Schiffman]

When it comes to immigration policy, focus on pleasing no one Ruben
Navarrette Jr., THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNEThursday, March 06, 2008

You can't please everyone. But when it comes to immigration reform, you're
not on the right track until you're not pleasing anyone. The Phoenix Police
Department has adopted an immigration enforcement policy that is taking
torpedoes from those who think it goes too far and from those who insist it
doesn't go far enough. That's our first clue that the folks in the Valley of
the Sun might have found the sweet spot. The policy change, recommended by a
panel of former government prosecutors, allows officers to question anyone
suspected of a crime about their immigration status and gives officers the
discretion about whether to notify federal immigration officials. But it
prohibits officers from posing such questions to crime victims, witnesses or
anyone stopped for civil violations such as speeding.

Immigrant-rights activists, Latino lawyer associations and civil
libertarians condemn the policy change, calling it a sop to xenophobia. They
worry about racial profiling and prefer the previous policy, which barred
officers from asking about immigration status in most cases. The Phoenix
police union denounces the new policy as "smoke and mirrors." It wants
officers to be able to make judgments about who is in the country illegally
— using the standard of "reasonable suspicion," a lower threshold employed
by immigration authorities. and who is wrong? That's easy. The city is right
and the critics are wrong. I've long been opposed to local police officers
playing Border Patrol agents. The best argument is the one advanced by
hundreds of police chiefs who have resisted having their officers
commandeered into the enforcement of immigration law — that, by making
people afraid to go to the cops for help, you create ready-made victims to
be preyed upon by bad guys and actually increase crime instead of curbing
it.

But that doesn't mean local police should never cooperate with immigration
authorities. That would only add credence to the myth of "sanctuary cities"
in the United States where illegal immigrants can live out their days
sipping margaritas with no fear of being deported no matter what crimes they
commit. But in most U.S. cities, if an illegal immigrant is arrested and
charged with a crime, he is almost certain to find himself with an
immigration "hold" placed on him while federal officials are notified.
Often, he will be deported. The point of demarcation is whether the illegal
immigrant in question is accused of committing an additional crime aside
from the civil offense of coming into the country unlawfully. Once they're
in the criminal justice system, all bets are off. That's not a case of local
cops working as immigration officers. It's a case of local officers working
with immigration officers. Big difference.

What concerns me is when local police officers, who lack the specialized
training that Border Patrol agents receive, try to clean up Anytown USA by
removing illegal immigrants or anyone they think is an illegal immigrant.
Before long, you've got U.S.-born Hispanics caught up in that dragnet. Think
that couldn't happen? It already has, in — how's this for irony — a suburb
of Phoenix. In July 1997, the Chandler Police Department allowed its
officers to pair up with Border Patrol agents to conduct a citywide roundup
of suspected illegal immigrants. They caught about 400 of them, but not
without also harassing and apprehending a number of U.S.-born Hispanics. The
result was condemnation by the state attorney general's office, a series of
lawsuits and a stain on the city's reputation.

The attorney general was Grant Woods, one of the former prosecutors who
wrote the new policy for the Phoenix Police Department. In Woods' report on
the incident, a Chandler police officer was asked what he was thinking as he
was pulling over Hispanic motorists and asking for papers. He replied that
there were various ways to detect if someone was in the country illegally,
including not just physical appearance and English-language ability but also
a "smell" common to illegal immigrants. Your tax dollars at work. There are
those who say we have to evict illegal immigrants to preserve our
civilization. But there's nothing civilized about comments like those.

ruben.navarrette at uniontrib.com

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/03/05/0306navarrette_edit.html

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