Letters to the Editor
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Attn: Liberals with their heads in the clouds
For a moment, put yourself in another American citizens' shoes. How would you feel if your teenage daughter was killed by a drunk driving illegal alien? No, don't bring up fair trade coffee or Iraq or anything else. How would you feel if your teenage daughter was killed by an illegal alien who was drunk behind the wheel? How would you feel about this issue?
I imagine you would agree with Mr. O'Reilly more than Mr. Rivera. Maybe not.
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Head firmly attached to neck
I would feel the same if my daughter was killed by any drunk driver, extreme sadness and anger b/c my daughter was killed. The illegal in this case should have been deported prior to the accident, but all drunk drivers should not be on the road. This is a tragedy which plays very little into the illegal immigrant problem as a whole.
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Immigration not simple problem
People often talk about how their ancestors were immigrants, but they were legal, so that's different. Well, before the Chinese Exclusion Act, all immigration was legal. There was no such thing as an 'illegal immigrant' till we decided we wdidn't like the Chinese. And those immigrants coming from Europe were starting to be kind of swarthy, so we added them to the newly created 'illegal' category. So yes, racism was historically the root of our immigration laws. However, that doesn't necessarily still apply. I agree that there is a huge problem with wage-deflation. But when someone loses their job at a meat-packer (an immigrant-dependent industry for generations - ask Poles in Chicago) because the owner wants to pay less than $15 an hour, the person to blame is the owner, not the immigrant. If we had laws mandating a living wage, the jobs would not be here for illegal immigrants, and they wouldn't come. And if NAFTA required the same working conditions in Mexico as in the US, they wouldn't come.
The most likely cause of drunk driving accidents around where I live are teenaged drivers. Should they be deported?
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Just Another Example
This is another example of how practically everyone considers themselves an expert on crime and how to reduce it. I hear over and over again, once people learn that I work in the criminal justice field, how we could reduce crime if we only [fill in the blank].
Then take your pick of the solutions: locked every offender up for life, made prisons harsher, forced people to get a license to have a child, cut body parts off, and on and on. Pointing out that some of these have been tried and have failed doesn't help. The retort is that we didn't make things harsh enough, or didn't chop off enough body parts, etc.
There are interventions and techniques that have been shown, via extensive research, to work. Punishment is not one of those and has never been shown to change behavior, it only drives it under ground. Punishment is about what society, the victim, etc. need to feel that justice has been served. There's nothing wrong with that, and offenders do need to be punished. But, as long as we try to rely on punishment as a primary means of changing behavior, we will get more of the same bad behavior.
So, the fact that Bill O. and Geraldo are spouting off about this topic as if they were indeed experts is emblematic of the wider problem, a lack of true understanding about the nature of crime and punishment. It's fine to have opinions about our systems of justice, but how about basing those opinions on research, not political agendas.
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Re: the Professor
You make a good point regarding the racist origins of immigration laws, but it is a mistake to infer from the history that all opposition to immigration now is inherently racist.
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Attn: Conservatives with their heads in the sand
Especially "Mikes Pace"
Nice try bringing out that same old conservative crap that they used on Dukakas way back in the 80s. The answer is that I'd be upset at the drunk driver, because he was drunk and driving. I might even be upset at him for other reasons that have nothing to do with the event, because he is illegal, because he is an immigrant, etc. In the end though, it doesn't matter how I feel in the heat of a moment.
We are a nation of laws, not of emotion and calls for vengance. The crime is drunk driving and that's what should be punished in accordance with the law.
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Population expansion
ann1960:
The rate at which the world population is expanding has slowed significantly since the 1970s. It is even conceivable that an equilibrium can be reached soon. Food production is in no way struggling to keep up with the population expansion. There is far more food produced every year than is required by the world population. The problem lies in distribution, not production. Poverty, farming subsidies, corrupt governments, poor infrastructure, etc... all prevent people from receiving the food they need.
Increasing worldwide living standards, especially if it can be done in a "green" way, will do far more to feed the hungry than by filling more warehouses with surplus food. It will also eliminate illegal immegration. If there's no compelling econominc reason to come to the USA, they won't. Why risk coming to America illegally if the living standards are reasonably similar in Mexico, China or wherever else you're from?
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Try to Follow the Logic
I'm not a big O'Reilly fan by any means and the throw-down between him and Rivera was disgraceful, but what Sampson, Koppelman, Rivera, and most of the readers seem to be missing is the basic assertion that O'Reilly made: Alfredo Ramos was in custody previously but was released, only to go on to kill. O'Reilly pointed out that IF the law were followed to the letter, Ramos would have either been in the custody of INS awaiting deportation or no longer even in this country. The authorities who had Ramos in their custody said - accurately or not - that it wasn't their responsibility to check Ramos' immigration status or notify INS. Illegal immigration is a Federal matter, not a municipal or state matter, so the argument went. True or not, Ramos was in custody as a potential criminal, was released, and then went on to kill someone while driving drunk. You don't have to trace the causality all the way back to Ramos' birth (as Sampson does in his "kill all male children" analogy), but simply go back in time to when the authorities had the opportunity to do something but didn't. The rest of the melee between O'Reilly and Rivera obscured this simple point and it became about the two of them scoring political points. Maybe O'Reilly's eventual conclusion was that illegal immigrants cause the crime rate to go up, but his initial assertion was about one specific illegal immigrant and whether his case was mishandled. Agree or disagree with that point rather than opening up a whole debate on how law-abiding a much larger population is or isn't. It's just another red herring that further obscures the fact that maybe we should put more immigration-status authority in the hands of local law officials so that they can't pass the buck and avoid responsibility.