Editorial: Proceed with care on immigration

01/05/2006

Star Tribune
Last update: January 04, 2006 – 9:03 PM

In proposing a crackdown on illegal immigrants Tuesday, Gov. Tim Pawlenty showed his political radar to be as acute as ever. Immigration to the United States has reached its highest level in a century, with the result that many Americans are worried about the nation’s ability to police its borders and anxious about unfair competition in a sluggish job market.

But political acuity is not the same as intellectual coherence, and that is plainly lacking in the governor’s immigration framework. It’s hard to understand, for example, why the governor has made immigration a banner issue in a state whose foreign-born population is far below the national average. It is equally hard to understand why he placed the emphasis on crime Tuesday—his strategy paper is loaded with references to methamphetamine use and human trafficking—when it’s not clear that immigrants, legal or illegal, commit serious crimes more often than anyone else in Minnesota.

Still, the governor says he wants to differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants—a key distinction—and the seven tactics he outlined Tuesday deserve a hearing. Some are good, some are bad and some require a closer look. Cracking down on the use and manufacture of false IDs is certainly a good idea; they create headaches for local police departments while spawning an underground industry of their own. It’s also a good idea to send a team of law-enforcement agents off to brush up on federal immigration law, a quagmire if there ever was one.

On the other hand, compelling local police officers and sheriffs’ deputies to serve as federal immigration agents is a bad idea. It’s certainly true that Washington does an inadequate job of enforcing immigration law, but it’s quite another matter to say that local authorities should take over the job. Mayors and county commissioners say this amounts to another unfunded mandate, while many local police chiefs say that making visa inquiries would alienate them from immigrant communities and subvert their ability to investigate other crimes. There’s no reason why the governor should substitute his judgment for that of local police chiefs and mayors on this question.

Perhaps the most intriguing, and complicated, proposal on the governor’s list is to impose bigger fines on businesses that violate immigration law. Federal statistics suggest that hundreds of Minnesota employers hire undocumented workers, and work is plainly the chief magnet for immigrants. But Congress tried in 1986 to make employers an arm of immigration enforcement, and the law was a notorious flop. A good, thorough series of hearings at the Legislature might explore if and how the concept could work better.

With Tuesday’s news conference and last month’s report on the cost of illegal immigration, the governor has managed to conflate three highly volatile and quite separate topics: crime, welfare and immigration. Minnesota needs to know more about how these issues overlap—and how they don’t—before it breaks new ground in immigration enforcement.