The INS and Illegal Aliens: an Old, Distorted Story

Congressional agreement last week on landmark immigration legislation clears the way for several million aliens in the United States to achieve legal status. But the changes will not end the debate about the social and economic effects of illegal aliens.

Three decades ago we were hearing the same concerns: A rising tide of illegal immigration from Mexico was threatening U.S. security. Illegal aliens were disrupting our economy, taking jobs from Americans and causing labor unrest. They were responsible for communist subversion and the increase of crime along the country’s southern border.

A weekly news magazine noted then that according to press accounts, labor leaders and Justice Department officials, undocumented aliens had created “a grave social problem involving murder, prostitution, robbery and a gigantic narcotics infiltration.” Testifying before a congressional budget hearing, an Immigration and Naturalization Service official claimed that 100 “communists and ex-reds” jumped the border each day.

Now they are more likely to be labelled terrorists, but otherwise the same claims are made today about undocumented migrants. We are asked to believe that illegal aliens are responsible for a 5% rise in crime last year, in the case of my city, San Diego; that the same aliens are cramming San Diego County jails, sapping public benefit programs, smuggling drugs, and--as Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich has alluded--scattering terrorist bombs.

There is little evidence to support these claims. The FBI’s National Crime Index released in August, for instance, showed that San Diego’s rise in crime, attributed to undocumented aliens, was matched by a 5% crime increase experienced nationwide last year, including places where illegal immigration is not a problem.

Most of the information disseminated today about illegal immigration is the result of conjecture, half-truths and plain racist sentiment. In 1953, the INS used these same claims to sway public opinion in favor of its Border Patrol. Criticized as an inefficient, ineffective bureaucratic agency--as its parent, the INS, is today--the patrol was on the verge of extinction through a series of congressional budget cuts. Then came “Operation Wetback.”

The name of this nationwide sweep for illegal aliens speaks for itself. After stirring up public resentment against Mexican immigrants with a large public-relations campaign, the INS embarked on what became a civil-rights nightmare for America’s Latino communities. By 1955, the INS was claiming it had solved the “wetback problem” by deporting or “voluntarily returning” hundreds of thousands of Latinos to Mexico. Not all of them were in the country illegally, however; many were lawful immigrants. A substantial number were U.S. citizens who were deprived not only of their rights as citizens, but of their country as well. But the Border Patrol was saved.

No one can deny that the failure of the Mexican economy is driving new scores of immigrants north to cross our borders illegally. Nor can anyone deny that the flow must be controlled. But it must be understood that the INS is a government agency that carries out its responsibilities in response to which way the political winds blow. It is led by a small cadre of presidentially appointed commissioners who often have no background at all in immigration matters or law enforcement.

Despite INS claims to the contrary, the fact remains that no one really knows how many illegal aliens reside in this country, or what their impact is on crime, the economy, the labor market or the public-benefits system. A U.S. General Accounting Office survey in 1981 reported undocumented population estimates ranging from about half a million to as high as 12 million, a spread so wide as to be meaningless. About the same time the House Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy narrowed that population estimate to between 3.5 million and 6 million. In the mid-1970s, the INS abandoned as fruitless a $1-million attempt to survey the illegal alien population.

For each study that says illegal aliens are taking jobs from Americans and sapping the public dole, there is another saying they create jobs and pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Furthermore, because of this country’s slow population growth, it is now expected we will be forced to import foreign labor to fill jobs by the year 2000.

Equally uncertain is just how voluminous illegal immigration is. The number of immigrants jumping the border cannot be estimated with any accuracy because relevant data does not exist. The INS claims 1.7 million aliens were caught living in or trying to enter the United State during its recently completed fiscal year. For each one caught, the agency estimates, four go uncaptured. INS statistics, however, do not reflect the number of individuals caught but the amount of paper work completed by border agents and INS officers. Each time an alien is captured and returned across the border, a form is filled out. But it has been estimated that it takes an average of four attempts before an alien can successfully cross the border undetected, and it is not unknown for an alien to be caught by the Border Patrol several times in a single night. Each time an alien is caught, another form is filled out.

In effect, the 1.7 million figure represents not the number of individuals caught, but the number of forms completed by immigration officers. Four years ago, the GAO discounted these statistics for those very reasons. “Using the apprehension data . . . for estimating the flow or stock of illegal aliens . . . poses considerable difficulty,” the government report concluded. It also pointed out that increases or decreases in enforcement efforts could radically change these figures, again degrading their viability. The INS has embarked upon a pilot program of computer eye-matching of apprehended aliens in order to acquire more reliable statistics.

How illegal immigration affects crime is also uncertain. The statistics quoted by border-area law enforcement agencies are, at best, guesstimates. In the past, local law enforcement estimates of alien-related crime have been less than accurate. In 1979, for instance, a special committee of the Los Angeles Police Department issued a briefing paper stating that up to 30% of crime in Los Angeles was caused by illegal aliens. High-ranking police officials disputed those findings, however, and the committee admitted that its information came from patrol officers who were likely to suspect anyone Latino of being an undocumented alien.

In San Diego County, local police officers and sheriff’s deputies have been required to mark a box on their arrest forms noting whether apprehended suspects are undocumented aliens, in order to gather statistics on immigration’s affect on local crime. Yet according to a San Diego Police Department internal memo, no proof of a person’s residency or citizenship status is required before arresting officers decide whether someone they apprehend is an illegal alien--the determination is left to the arresting officer’s instincts. After stiff criticism from local Latino groups, San Diego police stopped marking the undocumented alien box on their arrest forms, but other local agencies have continued to do so.

In fact there has never been a competent study on the impact of illegal immigration on local crime. The GAO reported last March that 10% of felony arrests in New York City involved non-citizen aliens, but it did not distinguish between those who were in the country legally or illegally. Last August the San Diego Assn. of Governments was awarded a $127,000 federal grant to study illegal immigration’s impact on local crime. The association’s criminal-justice research unit hopes the study will define whether alien-related crime is being committed by immigrant workers or by professional criminals who make raiding sorties across the border. The distinction is important.

The teeth of the Simpson-Rodino reform legislation, which gained final Senate approval on Friday and awaits the President’s signature, lies in the threat of employer sanctions--employers would face civil penalties from $250 to $10,000 for each illegal alien hired. If alien-related crime is being committed by professional foreign criminals, law enforcement officials will be at a loss to explain how sanctions aimed at honest-working immigrants will thwart those who cross the border simply to burglarize homes. Even if migrant laborers are responsible for the perceived rise, then California law enforcement officials must explain why they have not pushed for reform of the state’s own employer-sanction law (which is largely unenforceable because of its poor wording) rather than depend on federal laws over which they have little influence and less jurisdiction.

Unfortunately, the political rhetoric about alien immigration has already left its racist legacy. Last year, four Marines from the Naval Weapons Center in Fallbrook in San Diego County were arrested for waging a private war on illegal aliens in the nearby hills. In July of this year, a paramilitary group in Arizona, spurred on by INS talk of an alien invasion, took it upon itself to begin “helping” the Border Patrol by patrolling the border armed with loaded rifles.

Outspoken INS officials like Harold Ezell, the agency’s western regional commissioner, have helped spread such fears. “Illegal immigration will destroy what we know as a free society in the next five to 10 years,” Ezell has said. His agents recently took to raiding public transit buses in San Diego and Orange counties, terrorizing Latino bus riders in general.

Ezell’s main qualification for the job was adjunct membership in President Reagan’s California Kitchen Cabinet--his experience was in the fast-food business, as builder of the Der Wienerschnitzel hot-dog chain. He played a key role earlier this year in the formation of an Orange County group, Americans for Border Control, to fight illegal immigration from Mexico. The group was created, its president said, to pressure Congress to pass the legislation sponsored by Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Rep. Peter Rodino (D-N.J.).

The new law, while it imposes employer sanctions, will let illegal aliens--whatever their number--who entered the United States before Jan. 1, 1982, obtain legal status. Rodino said congressional agreement on the bill “shows the big heart of America.” We still need to be wary, however, of the small minds who stir fear and violate civil and human rights for political ends.