Undocumented Leaseholders

I lived and worked overseas for a total of about eighteen years. If I had ever worked illegally in any of those foreign countries and if I’d been discovered, whatever country I was working in would have put me on a plane and sent me home immediately. Same thing would have happened if I were in their country illegally, working or not. I’d be expelled without fanfare. Most foreign countries don’t screw around with this stuff, it’s one and done.

Unfortunately, in this country we have the most bizarre view of what we should do when lawbreakers sneak into the country illegally or do not leave as they have agreed to do. Here’s the clearest picture of it that I’ve seen:

Now, as the result of a series of misunderstandings and coincidences, I live in the great socialist people’s republic of California. Here we have lots of “sanctuary cities” where the city officials have agreed to break Federal law and shelter illegal aliens, including those foreigners who have committed further crimes while they are here. I discussed how San Francisco’s role as a sanctuary city led to a young woman’s murder in Gimme Shelter.

There’s a local joke among the few realistic residents of the worker’s paradise, goes as follows.

It isn’t politically correct to call the foreigners who are in California illegally “illegal aliens”. That’s a big no-no, it shows you don’t truly care about people and you are a worthless breath-wasting excuse for a human being. 

Instead, the politically correct term is “undocumented Democrats” …

But how we name things is important. It is vital to tell the truth in naming. These are foreigners who have broken American law. The most accurate term for them is “foreign criminals”. For years they were known by a slightly gentler term, “illegal aliens”. But they are not “undocumented” anything. The problem is not that they don’t have documents.

The problem is that they broke the law, and we call people who break the law “criminals”, not “undocumented”. Let me give you an example to make this perfectly clear.

Suppose you’re on vacation and some guy jimmies a door to get into your house and simply moves in, cooks in your kitchen, eats your food, and sleeps on your couch … do you call him an “undocumented leaseholder”?

Telling the truth about this also clarifies the situation of those people brought here as children. Breaking the law requires intention, which they did not have. So they are in another category, because they are clearly not criminals.

You see why telling the truth about this is so important? It assists us in making these important distinctions.

But I digress. As a result of my geographical misfortune, as well as my extremely left-wing youth, I thought I’d seen every kind of uber-socialist madness imaginable. But real life always exceeds paltry human imagination, particularly mine, and this is no exception. From Reuters this AM:

Undocumented worker sues San Francisco for violating sanctuary law

By Alex Dobuzinskis
 
An undocumented immigrant from El Salvador is suing San Francisco alleging police violated the city’s sanctuary city policy by turning him over to U.S. immigration authorities after he reported his car stolen.
 
The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday on behalf of Pedro Figueroa Zarceno, 32, in federal court in San Francisco against the city and its police chief for violating his right to due process and breaking an ordinance barring municipal employees from cooperating with federal immigration authorities seeking to deport a person.

Figueroa walked into a police station in November 2015 to report his car stolen, according to the lawsuit. Two days later, the car was found and when he went to recover it, he was handcuffed and led outside where federal immigration agents were waiting for him, the lawsuit said.

You can’t make this stuff up … and look, just like the joke suggested, we now have a new politically correct term for people who enter the US illegally. Whether or not they are working, they are now “undocumented workers” … I despise this kind of NewSpeak, creating this homey image of young Pedro Zarceno energetically beavering away at some useful job, when the reality may have nothing to do with that at all.

Let’s be clear. Whatever else he may or may not be, young Pedro Zarceno is assuredly a criminal who is wanted by the law. If he is working, he is taking a job away from a citizen. That is the reality.

Now, we can respond to that reality in many ways. We may decide to decree that Mr. Zarceno is not a criminal. We may legally forgive him his crime. On the other hand, we may indeed convict Mr. Zarceno of the crime of entering the country illegally and put him on the next plane back to El Salvador. Or we may kick the can down the road and continue to ignore the fact that he’s a wanted criminal.

But no matter what we do, and no matter whether we call him an “illegal alien” or an “undocumented worker”, Mr. Zarceno has indeed committed a crime. Disguising or minimizing that via bland NewSpeak euphemisms for “foreign criminal” is an attempt to obscure the ugly reality.

On a more serious note, in this discussion we also need to be clear about another name. We see several kinds of arrangements called “sanctuary cities”.

In the simplest one, the cop on the street and the detectives investigating crimes are told NOT to ask people about their immigration status. This is claimed by some people, including policemen and various Police Chiefs, to make the investigation of crime easier. I find this somewhat hard to believe. I don’t like talking to cops and I’m a citizen, albeit with a … well … checkered past. I don’t see illegal aliens suddenly changing their tune and becoming talkative about say the murderous Zeta drug cartel just because of some police promise that they won’t be asked about their immigration status.

And despite looking, I can’t find any actual observational data that says that not asking about immigration status helps prevent crime. Might be there, I’d be happy to see it, but I didn’t find it.

Next up the sanctuary city ladder is where every municipal worker, not just cops, is instructed not to ask about immigration status. This one is bizarre, because it means that the city registrar of voters may be barred from determining if the person wanting to vote is a citizen …

From there the sanctuary city issue gets serious. Those “sanctuary cities” listed above are street legal, they don’t involve breaking Federal law at all. No law says cops have to ask about your immigration status. But then you get to cities like San Francisco, where all city employees are not just barred from asking, but are specifically barred from cooperating with the Federal Government. How can that possibly be legal?

Finally, the most serious are the cities like San Francisco where they will not honor a “Detainer” from the Immigration Department. A detainer is a notice to all cities that someone is wanted by the Immigration Department. Often these people have committed serious crimes. San Francisco refuses to hold someone who is wanted by the Immigration Department. Doesn’t matter if they’re murderers. San Francisco sets them free.

The most bizarre part? If a US citizen is wanted for seven felonies and gets arrested in San Francisco, he doesn’t get out of jail …  but if he is an illegal alien, they give him the keys to the city. And if they don’t give him the keys to the city, well … as today’s news shows, then he sues San Francisco for not giving him the keys.

The sad news in all of this is that our immigration system is broken from top to bottom. Everything needs fixing—physical and electronic barriers at the border, visa controls, vetting, underage border crossers, clogged immigration courts, sanctuary cities, overstayers, computer systems, insanely complex regulations, refugees, fake refugees, terrible communications both inter- and intra-agency and with the public, the list goes on and on.

And while I likely will not like some of the new policies and rules that will need to be put into place to solve all of this, at least we have people coming into power who are taking the problem seriously, rather than trying to peanut butter over the cracks in the system by pretending that foreign criminals are just undocumented leaseholders …

Best wishes to all, whether they are legally in their country of residence or not. Karma is like hitting a golf ball in a tiled bathroom, so I have great faith that the universe is unfolding as it should.

w.

As always, I ask that commenters QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS THAT YOU ARE DISCUSSING, so we can all have clarity about your subject.