The immigration mess magnified
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the FBI will continue to share fingerprints with immigration officials. Credit: AFP/Getty Images, 2011
A recent decision by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to suspend the state's participation in a controversial federal immigration enforcement program raises serious concerns about how it operates, but it's a political choice that won't force any real change. This fuss over the Secure Communities Program is just another example of the need for a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's ineffectual immigration system.
New York, Massachusetts and Illinois have now said they want out of the program, which allows the Department of Homeland Security to run the fingerprints, routinely sent by local police to the FBI, through a 124-million-person database designed to find people who are in the country illegally. Immigration officials should continue ratcheting up enforcement, and doing further checks on those who may have committed crimes is a logical focus. Still, federal officials need to take a hard look at whether the Secure Communities Program actually works.
Critics, including immigration and civil rights groups, say it's not catching serious criminals, which is its stated purpose, and in New York that view is supported by the numbers. Ninety-nine of the 139 people caught in the net and taken into custody for likely deportation by immigration officials from Jan. 11 to March 31 had not been convicted of any crime.
According to Cuomo, the program is actually compromising public safety by deterring crime witnesses from working with law enforcement, a perspective shared by the president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York and various police organizations.
Another risk of conscripting local police into immigration enforcement is the possibility that some will profile people they think may be undocumented and arrest them on whatever pretext presents itself in order to have them deported. That's an abuse of the system.
Even though New York has officially ended its participation in the program, police will continue to send fingerprints to the FBI -- as they should -- to determine if people in custody are wanted elsewhere. And Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the agreement for the FBI to share those prints with Immigration and Customs Enforcement will continue, with or without state approval. Meanwhile, the Homeland Security inspector general, who has launched a review of the program, should determine whether that arrangement is doing more harm than good.
But no matter how this imbroglio is resolved, it will be followed by others, so long as the nation is polarized between people who want every illegal immigrant deported and those who want none of them deported. That won't change until President Barack Obama and Congress risk the political fallout and take action on immigration reform.
The nation badly needs a more pragmatic approach to immigration that will enhance border security, do a better job policing employers, provide some route to legalization for the 12 million people in the country illegally and create a more efficient system for legal immigration. Until that happens we're destined to careen from one immigration fight to the next while tempers flare and the problem grows.
