When Is A Crime Not A Crime?

When it's jaywalking illegal immigration. After all, jaywalking is an infraction. Sort of a crime, but not really. White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Munoz recently compared the federal crime of illegal immigration to jaywalking. "If you were running the police department of any urban area in this country, you would spend more resources going after serious criminals than after jaywalkers."

I guess Munoz is telling us that illegal immigrants are unserious criminals. Until now, the usual simile was "it's like spitting on the sidewalk." But many people don't realize whey spitting on the sidewalk is a crime. It was the major cause of the spread of tuberculosis in the early twentieth century. Today, that curse is returning to our urban centers, largely from immigrants who have not been screened for communicable diseases (where's Ellis Island when we need it?).

There's also a sound reason for prosecuting jaywalking. It's dangerous. It gets pedestrians killed, often including children accompanying a jaywalking adult. It also has a tendency to cause traffic collisions as drivers are forced to make dangerous maneuvers to avoid hitting the jaywalkers. Every year, dozens of jaywalkers are killed and thousands injured. So maybe it's not such a small deal after all.

Apparently, Munoz has also never heard of James Q. Wilson's "broken windows syndrome." Mayor Rudy Giuliani did, and by prosecuting violators of the building and safety codes in New York City, he used the minor infraction of neighborhood nuisance to cut the rates of drug-dealing and gang murders dramatically. But comparing illegal immigration to jaywalking, spitting on the sidewalk, or even broken windows reduces a crime that has long term and vast effects on the essence of American citizenship and national security to a nullity. That's foolish and dangerous.

What is really odd about Munoz's speech is that she is not directly attacking the secure borders/deportation advocates. Her speech was actually in response to the latest amnesty initiative by her own boss. The Obama administration has already put a huge dent in the immigration and deportation process with its recently-instituted policy of suspending deportation proceedings for those not already convicted of serious crimes other than their initial illegal immigration. That action created an instant backlog of over 300,000 cases.

But Obama's action is clearly not enough to satisfy Munoz. She wants to make illegal immigration a slap-on-the wrist, go-and-sin-no-more infraction. Says Munoz: "We have 10 million, 11 million undocumented people in this country and it's abundantly clear to anybody who's paying attention that we're not going to deport that entire population." OK. So that means we should do nothing? The logistics of deporting that many people is indeed well-nigh impossible. But so what? Do we stop prosecuting crimes of all sorts simply because we can't prosecute them all? It's a fake argument.

Munoz will not be satisfied until illegal immigration is rendered legal by whatever means necessary. And she relies on the fact that our immigration laws are truly in need of reform. She just simply wants to eliminate all the enforcement provisions of current and future immigration law in order to establish a de facto open borders policy.

We'll never be able to deport all illegal immigrants. That's a reality. But we can sure deport a whole lot of them. And of course there should be exceptions. Off hand, I certainly support a fast track to citizenship for those illegals who arrived here illegally solely because their parents brought them with them, if they have served honorably in the American armed forces and have a clean criminal record after their arrival in the United States.

Munoz said: "But we also all understand that [the administration's executive action] doesn't solve our immigration problems. In order to do that, we need the Congress of the United States." Munoz is right about that--for all the wrong reasons.