Immigration Policy from Leviticus, or what the Bible says about Arizona SB 1070???

Leviticus 19:34 New International Version ³⁴ The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.


Well, I suppose if we took Leviticus for our law, we'd be putting homosexuals to death. 

Arizona SB 1070: A Legal Nightmare

Two immigration attorneys agree that this law will overwhelm the court system with lawsuits.

This law is popular with conservatives. But I always thought conservatives hated judicial activism and "the trial lawyers." The trial lawyers are going to have a field day with this one.

Every law raises some issues which are going to be open to interpretation, and which have to be settled by the courts. This law was written in a deliberately ambiguous way, which in my view is irresponsible.

FAIR (the organization that wrote the law) also has attorneys who file lawsuits. Gee, do I detect a pattern?

SB 1070 is chasing law-abiding citizens out of the state

"The immigration law creates a difficult situation for both legal and illegal residents," said Jay Butler, director of realty studies at Arizona State University. "Some illegal residents may have planned on leaving the Valley anyway because they can't find jobs. But I have talked to young Hispanics who are residents and so are their parents and grandparents. And those Hispanics plan on moving to other states because they don't want to be perceived as second-class citizens."

I'm going to keep appealing to the documentary 9500 Liberty until somebody watches it and tells me what is wrong with it. In that documentary, it was indicated that Prince William County suffered a lot of collateral damage, especially where the foreclosure rate was concerned, which increased at a rate far in excess of the other counties in Virginia. Foreclosures were already a problem in Arizona, and I am convinced it will get worse thanks to the new law.

What Price Enforcement? Another reply to Vallicella on SB 1070

   Let's try to generate a racial profiling scenario to see what is wrong with it. Profiling can take on different levels. Local law enforcement is expected to be a main player in the fight against illegal immigration. What that results in, is that anyone who looks like a lower-class Hispanic is targeted for what I call "fishing expeditions." Being Hispanic, perhaps along with evidence that the Hispanic is lower-class, is considered sufficient for "reasonable suspicion." People who look like lower-class Hispanics are pulled over on "tickytack" violations, other groups are not. When there is a loud music call about white people playing the Stones too loud, the police ask them to turn the music down. If the music is in Spanish, and the people look like lower-class Hispanics, papers are asked for. Whites get that 10 mph cushion with the speed limit, Hispanics are pulled over if they are so much as 1 mph over the limit. Everyone knows the police don't pursue every possible offense; they pick their battles. But in the hope that they will be able to get an illegal immigrant deported, they pick their battles with Hispanics differently from the way they pick their battles with the rest of us. "Legitimate stops" are generated on other ostensible grounds, but their real purpose is to ask a Hispanic about his immigration status.
      What this means is that, not just the immigration laws, but many other laws are enforced differently depending on the whether or not a person looks Hispanic. Or, perhaps only those police officers who harbor anti-Hispanic prejudices will enforce the law in this way, but citizens will have no protection against that kind of special treatment. That's the sort of thing I'm concerned about. I'm not willing to pay THAT price to enforce the immigration law. We are entitled equal protection under the law, and there should not be different rules for different racial groups or social classes. Can you agree that the above scenario would be a bad one? The fourteenth amendment guarantees equal protection under the law.
           Please note that I am concerned about how our citizens are treated. One group of citizens will be treated differently because of the color of their skin.
           Now, remember that Brewer says that the bill will be enforced without profiling, so I take it she thinks that there is such a thing as profiling, and that 1070 won't involve that. We are still waiting to see the specifics on how the law will be enforced. The question I have is whether the law won't result in a whole lot of undue litigation, whether it will be interpreted in such a way as to avoid the above scenario, and if it doesn't involve profiling, will it be an effective law at all, or just a symbolic gesture.
       Yes, some of the worst fears about the law are generated by its opponents, and that has resulted in the departure of some people. Whether those people are only illegals, or whether Hispanic citizens have left because they fear unequal treatment by law enforcement, is not completely clear. However, that doesn't make the law effective. Assuming that the law is implemented in a way consistent with the Constitution, will it continue to be effective?
          I have no problem with the immigration law being enforced at the border, where it should be enforced, and at the workplace, where some sort of workable ID will be more effective. I just hate the idea of a whole class of people, most of whom are law-abiding citizens, being treated differently by law enforcement because of the color of their skin.

Do I support open borders?

Bill Vallicella asked me.

No. But I strongly suspect that barriers to legal immigration are probably excessive. We do have to keep out people with criminal records.
I think it's probably a false dilemma, or a straw man, to claim that anyone who wants to reform the immigration system simply wants open borders. It also doesn't follow that all "path to citizenship" programs are simply amnesty. Those that I have heard proposed involved paying a penalty, and earning citizenship. (I realize there are a wide range of fairness issues involved in all of this, but the idea that such plans involve our just forgetting that people are here illegally doesn't seem right to me at all).
This is an Ed Montini column which discusses the effort of Tyson Nash, the hockey player (not related to the Suns Steve Nash, apparently), who, in spite of being a model citizen, came close to being deported. It seems to me that I could ask whether we could make immigration easier without advocating open borders.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2010/05/21/20100521Montini0521.html
I am also convinced that we've have to combine a partial immigration reform with an increase in border security. I'd rather stop them before they come in than send them back after they've settled in and started contributing to our community.
As for the illegal immigrants that are already here, there are questions in my mind about what the economic impact of their removal from our community would be. The departures from Prince William County in Virginia, which was the basis for the movie 9500 Liberty, showed that it resulted in a lot of economic harm, and an increase in the rate of foreclosures. In short, illegal immigrants are a mixed curse, since they become part of our community and do contribute to its economy, pay taxes, etc. I'm not even sure it's physically possible to deport all of them, anyway. That flaming liberal Michael Medved said that in order to send all of the back you'd need buses that, laid end to end, would stretch from Tijuana to Seattle.
On the other hand, the people that actually do transport these desperate people over the border are, so far as I can tell, the worst sorts of criminals, and surely we can hit them as hard as possible.
I seriously doubt that 1070 is going to result in very many deportations. The cost in ill will between the Hispanic community and the rest of us, to my mind, far outweighs the improvement in will provide in law enforcement, which I suspect will be minimal.
So, without actually having done a full cost-benefit analysis on all of this, I would say start with security at the border, make the process of immigration more rational but don't just throw it wide open, and then provide some path to citizenship that involves a serious penalty and isn't just simple amnesty.
A fence? Yes, if it would work, no, if it wouldn't.

The Fifty Per Cent Solution

What's wrong with SB 1070?


Well, my main concern is with the "reasonable suspicion" clause. That strikes me as horribly vague. Some people think that when they see a lower-class Hispanic-looking person who speaks Spanish much better than English, then we can reasonably suspect that they are illegal immigrants. We already have a county Sheriff who goes fishing for illegal immigrants.




In our state, most illegals are Hispanics, but most Hispanics are not illegals. If you define your conception of what it takes to have reasonable suspicion, and on my blog I made an un-remarked-upon recommendation that we have reasonable suspicion just in case we have objective criteria leading to the conclusion that it is more likely than not that the person is illegal, then you could at least eliminate the worst of the profiling problems. You can't just stop a Hispanic and make an immigration status inquiry, because being Hispanic is not sufficient for it to be more than 50% likely that the person is here illegally.


It isn't just a racial issue; most illegal immigrants make less money than people here legally, and they are more likely to be monolingual Spanish speakers or poor English speakers than their legal counterparts. But if these criteria are going to be sufficient to justify and immigration inquiry then, since such in inquiry is considerably discommoding to its object, it runs afoul of a basic conviction that law-abiding citizens should not be treated differently by the government because of race, color, or national origin.



If these criteria are not sufficient, then I have doubts as to whether the law will actually get much of anybody deported. So my "fifty per cent solution" may result in the law not result in invidious profiling, but it might also render the law ineffective.



 

Reasonable Suspicion and a Preponderance of the Evidence

One article I read made the case the "reasonable suspicion" is in a family of terms including "preponderance of the evidence." A preponderance of the evidence seems to me to be require a better than 50% likelihood. That's why it was so easy for the civil jury to find O. J. liable for the double murders, even though he was acquitted in criminal court. Civil court requires a preponderance of the evidence, criminal court requires that it be beyond reasonable doubt. It seems to me that one way of construing SB 1070 so as to avoid some of the most serious concerns about it would be to construe "reasonable suspicion" in just this way. While most illegals in Arizona are Hispanic, most Hispanics in Arizona are not illegal, and therefore merely being Hispanic should not be sufficient to generate reasonable suspicion so defined. Even criteria like lower-class clothing, playing Spanish-language music, and communicating mostly in Spanish would not be sufficient for reasonable suspicion. Though I suppose standing on the sidewalk of a Home Depot looking for day-labor work might be sufficient.

The point is, if a person is asked for papers, there has to be sufficient objective evidence that makes it more than 50% likely that the person is here illegally. (I admit that being a subjectivist about prior probabilities makes this recommendation more difficult.)

I kind of doubt I'd vote for the bill if I were a member of the State Senate even with this gloss. But it would certainly help if it were understood in this way.

Is the Profiling Charge Trivial?

Steve Hays of Triablogue: Victor Reppert has made a shocking discovery. Thankfully, it took a man of his philosophical acumen to ferret this out. Reppert just discovered that laws disproportionately impact lawbreakers. Yes, you heard me right. Laws discriminate against outlaws. They have the insidious potential to single out non-law abiding citizens.

For example, laws against drunk driving single out drivers. By contrast, laws against DUI don’t profile joggers or swimmers–only drivers.

It’s appalling that in this day and age we still have such pernicious laws on the books. Time to stage a protest. Riot in the streets.

My reply: Hence, if a law is typically broken by a certain group, that group will on one level be disproportionately affected by the law. So the mere fact of disproportionate impact doesn't show that there is any invidious profiling.

However, it is possible that a law might have a disproportionate impact of one group as opposed to another that affects people who don't break the law. In other words, if a law, say, the law against illegal border-crossing, is violated by Hispanics far more than any other group, then if we try to catch them, there will of course be a completely benign disproportionate impact.

However, that doesn't dispel all objections to profiling, as some people seem to think that it does. It might turn out that a law not only affects law-breaking Hispanics, but also law-abiding Hispanics. If, let's say, the Maricopa County Sheriff were to perform a "crime sweep" in largely lower-class Hispanic areas as a sort of fishing expedition for illegal immigrants, using other statutes as a pretext for making stops that might lead to a paper check and a possible deportation, what we will find is that many law-abiding Hispanics will be caught in the net. Even if the vast majority of illegals are Hispanics, the majority of Hispanics are here legally.

Now, we can argue from here that the disproportionate impact on law-abiding Hispanics as opposed to law-abiding Anglos and African-Americans is a price worth paying to crack down on illegal immigration. That would be another argument. However, the implicit argument in this kind of statement, that the charge of racial profiling is invariably trivial, doesn't work.

No fishing, please: a conservative Arizona Republic columnist challenges SB 1070

Here is that Robert Robb column from the Republic again. Again please note he's a conservative columnist who supports border enforcement, you will find that he thinks that so long as the "reasonable suspicion" arises in the course of ordinary police investigation of other crimes. That is what the law intends. However, he thinks the law doesn't provide adequate protection against what I would call "fishing expeditions," such as the ones Joe Arpaio has been engaging in.


Consider the following:

Case 1: An officer sees a car with a broken tail light. He stops the car, asks for a DL, notices that the people look Hispanic and don't speak English, and can't produce a license. The officer calls ICE.

Case 2: The officer sees a older-model car with a Spanish-language radio station bumper sticker. He notices the people look Hispanic. He THEN looks at the car closely for an onstensible violation and finds one, one that he would let pass if the people in the car looked like Anglos. He makes the stop, and if the DL is not produced, he calls ICE.


The trouble here is that, from the point of view of public record, these two stops are indistinguishable. The first officer is not fishing, but the second is.

Fishing expeditions are going to harm citizens and legal immigrants, because a group of people (and actually this could include Hispanic-looking people who aren't Hispanic at all, such as Bhutanese refugees). I consider that unacceptable.


Another set of cases I'm concerned about, which Robb doesn't talk about, are cases with pedestrians or passengers, not to mention cases where the police are called to a home but ordinarily ID is not required. If an officer comes to a home to tell them to turn their music down, he doesn't normally ask for a license. But if the music is in Spanish, and the people look like lower-class Hispanics, should he ask for papers? To me, that's fishing also.

Please notice that Robb makes a distinction between a disproportionate affect on Latinos, which he thinks is inevitable given any attempt to enforce immigration laws, and inividious enforcement, which he thinks the law either allows for or fails to effectively prevent.

One test of a law would be that if a law results in a group of law-abiding citizens being systematically treated differently by government and law enforcement as opposed to other groups of law-abiding citizens in virtue of the color of their skin, then something is wrong with the law. You should be able to go about your business, and if you obey the law, your should be treated just like everybody else.

Immigration, health care, and trusting the government

Joseph A. at Bill Vallicella's site wrote: Victor shows some deep distrust of law enforcement officials - he mentions how there's plenty of Mark Fuhrmans on the police force, and basically asserts that he doesn't trust them to enforce laws like this appropriately. But Victor also typically argues very much in favor of giving government far more authority and responsibility than it now has (see his views on health care, etc.) I just find it odd that he's very worried, deeply worried, about the actions of individual police officers operating at a local level - suggesting that they pose a problem/threat we're not going to be able to adequately address - but not nearly as worried about endowing federal bureaucrats with vastly more far-reaching powers.


Bill replied: That is just inconsistency on Reppert's part. As I said, skepticism about government and its law enforcement agencies is integral to American conservatism. The skepticism is shared by libertarians and paleo-liberals.


I reply: I don't trust the government in the area of health care. I only trust them more than I trust the insurance companies. Having to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea, I choose the deep blue sea.


I believe in sin, which means that I believe that we need to be protected from Leviathan monsters. Sometimes those monsters are governments. Sometimes they are corporations.

The big issue between me and opponents of any kind of health care reform is the fact that insurance companies do exclude on the basis of pre-existing conditions, and make it impossible for many people to get health insurance who can't get it through their employers. They engage in what I consider to be unethical cost-cutting measures to avoid paying claims, including rescinding medical insurance when people get sick. In the end, some people have to be trusted to make these health care decisions, but the market-driven health care economy needs, at the very least, regulation from either God or the government to prevent what I consider to be an injustice. You may not. You may think it's just free market economics, and inability to buy health insurance is no different and no more unjust than the inability to buy a starter home or a late-model car because you can't afford it. But I think it's an injustice, and I have to trust somebody to right that injustice. Unfortunately, it looks like it has to be the government, even though the government, like everything else, is run by sinners.


But, in the case of the immigration law, I think you have a problem if too much is left to "reasonable suspicion." This piece, by conservative Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb, (the attempt to attribute all opposition to measures like SB 1070 to "liberalism" is about on the same level as attributing all support for it to racism), makes the case that there is a systematic potential for the law to justify fishing expeditions of the sort that Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been doing for years.

Illegal immigration, grand theft auto, and racial profiling

Here is a comment from one of the comment box, which is something one typically hears in the 1070 debate.

Racial profiling is a red herring; if 99% of the illegal aliens in a state are hispanic, then hispanics are going to be targeted in any enforcement of immigration law.

I don't see that this follows. Suppose 70% of car stolen in the Phoenix area are stolen by Hispanics. It doesn't follow that the police, in tracking down car theives, need to consider ethnic status in their procedures for finding car theives. 70% percent of the car theives they catch them will be Hispanic. That doesn't mean that profiling or anything like profiling was involved.

Vagueness, Lawsuits, and SB 1070

I was asked whether I thought that bills like Arizona SB 1070 are motivate entirely or even mostly by racism.

The answer is no. I do not think that people who support bills like 1070 are motivated by racism, and, interestingly enough, neither does Attorney General Holder. There are certainly non-racial reasons for wanting to control illegal immigration.


However, sometimes people slide from resentment against illegal immigration to resentment against Hispanics, and people sometimes presume that people are here illegally because they are Hispanic, they speak Spanish, they are lower-class, etc. Resentments about illegal immigration can be a mask for racism, and those who have those resentments sometimes can attach those resentments towards Hispanics as a whole, as opposed to illegal immigrants. The movie 9500 Liberty shows just how these distinctions can end up getting blurred, and when they are blurred, you can get a slide into racism.

Perhaps the most efficient way to fight illegal immigration is to develop some kind of DNA-matched ID card for all citizens to have. You can't get a job if you don't have one. However, a lot of people will think this is too big-brotherish or even mark-of-the-beastish to be acceptable. You can also increase security along the border and prevent entry that way. I would support either measure if done in a feasible way.

When she signed the law Governor Brewer said that racial profiling was against the law and that she would enforce the law in such a way as to be in compliance with the prohibitions against profiling. Is she wrong about that? Should she just not worry about profiling?

My question is whether you have a workable law if you are trying to enforce the law and abide by the profiling laws at the same time.

I would have thought conservatives would object to the law for exactly the reason that they support tort reform. Whether a immigration inquiry is initiated is a matter of somebody's "reasonable suspicion????" The subjectivity of the law's terminology means that all sorts of things have to be settled in court, and that is not where conservatives, last I checked, like to see things settled.

If you are going to use state and local law enforcement to make immigration inquiries, you need a set of procedures as fixed as the procedure whereby you and I are asked for our DL, registration, and proof of insurance when we are pulled over by the police. As it stands, police departments are climbing the walls on this law, because they know they can be sued for profiling, but 1070 also says they can be sued for not enforcing the law.

Something that Vallicella, in his responses to this issue, has not covered is this. There are cases where the police come out but don't ordinarily ask for identification, such as when an officer comes to a house on a complaint about loud music late at night. I would argue, in such a case, that if the people in the house appear to be lower-class Mexicans, if they are playing Spanish-language music, that is not a reason for an officer to initiate an immigration investigation. Vallicella mainly talks about the kinds of police stops that involve the showing of identification in any event, but I wonder what he thinks of these other kinds of cases.

I am also concerned about police enforcing "tickytack" violations such as a cracked windshield or driving less than 10 miles over the speed limit, which they would let slide if the person were white, because of a desire to go on a fishing expedition for illegal immigrants. I can imagine the Mark Fuhrmans on our police forces jumping at the opportunity to do that.

It seems to me that there are two replies which have to be kept separate. One is "this is not profiling" and the other is "what's wrong with profiling?" But if it really isn't profiling, why do people then argue that profiling isn't wrong? You can take this position. You can say that illegal immigration is a huge problem, that most illegals are Mexicans, at least in these parts, and that law-abiding legal aliens and citizens who happen to look like Mexicans are simply going to have to suck it up and deal with a certain amount of profiling if we are to have a society safe from the menace of illegal immigration. But, if you take that position, then you have to say SB 1070 doesn't go far enough, and that Brewer effective emasculated the law by insisting that it be enforced in accordance with laws prohibiting racial profiling. Does anybody want to go there?