RSSILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND CRIME
Carolyn Hileman - The Voice | June 10, 2008
RICHARD F. LAMOUNTAIN
Petitions are circulating to put the Respect for the Law Act onto Oregon’s November ballot. If passed, the act will repeal the portion of state law that purports to forbid police and sheriffs from “detecting or apprehending persons whose only violation of law is that they are persons of foreign citizenship present in the United States” illegally. Instead, the act will affirm Oregon officers’ court-recognized authority to partner with federal agencies to enforce immigration law.
Why should Oregonians seek to enlist their law enforcement agencies in the battle against illegal immigration? Mainly, because illegal immigrants’ presence undermines Americans’ most precious inheritance: the rule of law. Another reason, as statistics demonstrate: Illegal immigrants commit more serious crime than the population at large.
Jim Kouri, a vice president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, reported recently that two-thirds of illegal immigrants have been arrested and 61 percent convicted at least once. The Federation for American Immigration Reform recently summarized a federal government study that showed “deportable criminal aliens were more than half again as likely to be incarcerated as their share of the population.”
Criminal aliens, scholar Edwin S. Rubenstein reports, account for 27 percent of federal prisoners; “80,000 to 100,000 illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes,” he writes, “still walk the streets.”
Recently, the federal Government Accountability Office analyzed the criminal records of 55,000 incarcerated illegal immigrants. It found, Investor’s Business Daily reported last month, “that the average criminal alien was arrested for 13 prior offenses, 12 percent of which were cases of murder, robbery, assault and sexually related crimes; only 21 percent were immigration offenses, the rest being felonies.”
Every day, estimates U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, uninsured illegal immigrants driving drunk kill 13 Americans.
What, specifically, of Oregon? Illegal immigrants employed by Mexican drug cartels smuggle methamphetamine to the metro area; in mid-May, federal agents detained several they say aided a major Portland-to-Woodburn distribution ring.
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