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Commentary: Immigration and common sense
On the prickly subject of immigration raids, the judicial branch is moving in the right direction. And the executive branch is moving in all directions. In a stunning rebuke of how the government has previously gone about prosecuting illegal immigrants, the Supreme Court this week unanimously ruled that a heavy-handed federal identity-theft law cannot be used against illegal immigrants who simply use fake Social Security numbers to get jobs. Focusing on intent, the high court said that workers would have to know that the identification numbers they were using belonged to a real person who they intended to harm. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the idea of prosecutors using the ID theft law to coerce guilty pleas -- as they did after a May 2008 raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa -- hinged on chance. For those who randomly pick Social Security numbers, Alito wrote, "If it turns out that the number belongs to a real person, two years will be added to the defendant's sentence, but if the defendant is lucky and the number does not belong to another person, the statute is not violated." The justices made the right call. Even as someone who gets into hot water with immigration reformers because I continue to support immigration raids as a necessary enforcement tool without which there will probably be no reform, I never bought the argument pushed by the Bush administration that those who were rounded up were guilty of identity theft...
Posted on Sunday, May 10, 2009By
tinaelizabeth
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