Illegal Immigrants Are Not Criminals

It seems that there are many people out there who misunderstand the difference between illegal and criminal. The chief evidence that I have for that is the sheer number of bloggers that claim that being an "illegal immigrant" means that one is a criminal. That's like saying that driving 5mph over the speed limit is the same as being a drunk driver.

I can let you know this right now. If you have ever gone 5mph over the speed limit, your are an illegal driver. That's right. You. If you've gone 10mph over the speed limit, I'd say you're probably a very illegal driver. But speeding is not criminal. Drunk driving is criminal. When you drive drunk, you can go to jail and get probation, when you go 5mph over the speed limit, you can only be fined. It is purely an accident of history that the police arrest criminals and hand out speeding tickets. Just like a grocery store that has a pharmacy, you can get your oysters and your Viagra in the same place, but that doesn't mean that you have to have a prescription to get oysters.

Similarly, with the IRS, if Capone misunderstood which moving costs were legitimate tax credits and which moving costs were not, he would get zinged in an audit because what Capone did was illegal. However, Capone was not a criminal for misunderstanding the IRS code. If that were the case, we would all be criminals because the IRS code is about as coherent as a one legged aardvark doing the electric slide. Al Capone was a criminal because he purposefully hid income from the police. That is Tax Fraud, and that is a crime.

Many people have latched on to the word illegal in the description of people's immigration status and equated that with criminal, but they are simply wrong (or hateful, or ignorant, or stupid). They are annoyed about the fact that police can't deport people who are illegal immigrants when they are pulled over for speeding, but of course there must be restrictions on what the police can do. We can't allow police to enforce codes that are not criminal. If we did that, the next time a police officer pulled you over, he could run an audit of your taxes and demand back payment before you were allowed to leave. That same officer could hold business owners until they brought their businesses up to code. That same officer could then interrogate you on whether or not you had committed any labor violations, and then use that information to make sure that your grass is short enough in front of your house, that you don't have any cracks in any of your windows at home, and that you have cleaned up all the dog poop in your backyard. A world where illegal means criminal is called a police state. If people want to create one of those here, they are going to have to go through me first.

There are a significant amount of studies that have proved that people who are in violation of immigration laws are far less likely to commit crimes. That is probably because if you or I steal a Snickers bar, we would probably get probation, maybe serve 90 days, but if an illegal immigrant drives without his seat belt (which is a crime, not a traffic code violation in most states), he could be deported. Most of the other Nationalist Purificationist's claims are also bogus. Illegal immigrants are less likely than the general population to default on a mortgage, are more likely to be actively working, practically never collect unemployment benefits or social security, and seldom use public medical services.

Overall, as has always been the case, illegal immigrants are some of our best citizens. The hated Chinese immigrant population of San Fransisco in the 1850's (nicknamed the yellow tide) developed the powerful California economy, while the despised Japanese immigrant population of the 1940's never once committed any act of sabotage on U.S. shores and the famous Japanese battalion on the Pacific front suffered the greatest percentage of wounded and killed soldiers of any battalion in the U.S. Army. Other immigrant populations that were the objects of scorn include the English, the German, the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews. Oh and lets not forget about the Africans. They were legal immigrants by American standards. The greatest irony of our nations recent anti-immigrant fervor is their theme song "God Bless America" which was written by an immigrant Jew while our borders were still so open with Russia that there were no visas or passports. In those days, the illegal immigrants were mostly from China and Japan because the U.S. put quotas on the number of immigrants that we could accept from those countries. Those illegal immigrants were the ones who brought us such American fare as fried chicken, canned salmon (and tuna) and used irrigation techniques that managed to turn the barren California landscape into what is now a huge agricultural industry.

Perhaps it is the failure of the progressive wing of this country that instead of explaining to people what illegal actually means, we chose to PC-the-whole-thing-up with the term "undocumented worker." First of all, the term is false because they are usually documented somehow. Also, the term inherently restricts those people from getting services that may put them into the documentation status. As long as they are "undocumented" workers, we are limited in arguing that they should be able to receive the same protections as documented workers, because those protections naturally require documentation. Also, the term leaves the word "illegal" in the irresponsible hands of the Nationalist Purificationist crowd that wants to criminalize those who are not. It is time to use our privilege to reclaim the word illegal. We should all refer to ourselves as illegal drivers, illegal home owners, and illegal employees. The baffled questions that follow will form the groundwork for putting illegality and criminality into proper context, because if we tell the truth, and they continue to lie, we will always be the more believable.