ICE-ing Detainees

Xiu Ping Jiang is a mentally ill Chinese woman. She has spent the last year in an immigration jail in Florida. Because detainees in deportation cases have no right to attorneys, Xiu has no help when she goes before immigration judges. Not that it would help. She is so mentally ill that she cannot help herself, even if helping herself means letting a lawyer talk for her. Xiu Ping Jiang is one of hundreds of mentally ill and chronically ill immigration prisoners whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) puts at risk with its detention policies.

Xiu's mental illness is becoming worse because of her detention. She is not on medication and has not seen a mental health specialist. Although her behavior is bizarre, she has been judged competent to participate in immigration proceedings. Her sisters, here legally, are afraid that she will die in detention.

President Bush, for all his talk of small government, created a vast security industry in the wake of 9/11. ICE has carried out workplace raids and made a great deal of public relations noise about ridding the country of illegal immigrants. It has pressured local law enforcement agencies to do its job for it, resulting in all kinds of misadventures, including the deportation of American citizens.

What it has not done, nor can it do, is get illegal immigrants to go home of their own free will.

The recession caused some repatriation. The recession did not hit Mexico as early as it hit the United States. Because illegal immigrants are usually motivated by economic concerns, many went home.

Back in his golden days, President Ronald Reagan decided that amnesty was a brilliant solution to illegal immigration. It sent the wrong message to people wanting to come here. Millions of people now believe that if they can remain on American soil long enough, they will become legal citizens. It worked for the generation before them. Thanks again, Mr. Reagan.

Migration is part of life on earth. Those who would close our borders to ensure economic security are fooling themselves. The only way to keep people out is to remove all the differences between different places. Making every "where" the same is the only way to remove the motivation for migration, and even that is not guaranteed.

Immigrants would not come here if there were no opportunities for them. Removing those opportunities for them removes them from us. According to the Social Security Administration, illegal workers actually benefit the system. Many illegal immigrants pay into Social Security with no hope of ever collecting. Given the present state of that institution, it might make sense to give them legal status without citizenship in return for their continued support of our elderly.

If the people who wanted immigration reform wanted to scare immigrants, they have. If they wanted to make sure that immigrant communities mistrusted the non-immigrant communities around them, they got their wish. If the reformers wanted to stimulate the economy by filling jails and employing thousands of people to keep thousands others in captivity, that job is also done. If the idea was to make the United States a bad guy bully in the eyes of millions of people, it's done, too. But if they had any other goal, they have failed.