SoCo Magazine - May 2008 - (Page 44) On March 27, just past the deadline for this story, Rhode Island’s Governor Carcieri signed a six-point executive order to address illegal immigration in Rhode Island. According to the Providence Journal, the order will: • Allow the Department of Administration to determine if all executive branch employees are legal (through a federal government program called E-Verify) • Give state agencies the right and authority to notify people who have had their identity robbed or misused by illegal immigrants applying for benefits • Allow state police to receive training to help ICE when arresting illegals, and allow the State Department of Corrections personnel to investigate the immigration status of prisoners and prepare documents accordingly (through a memorandum of agreement with ICE) The order also requires that companies involved in business with the state be required to use E-Verify, and calls for the parole board and corrections department to cooperate with ICE when dealing with parole and deportation of illegal aliens, according to the Journal. The Journal also reported Carcieri as saying during the press conference on the subject in late March that the federal government has “ignored” the issue for decades and that illegal immigration has become “epidemic,” with a resulting increased cost burden to taxpayers. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 40,000 illegal immigrants are in Rhode Island. also subject to arrest and removal). “It’s a goal of ICE to remove criminal aliens from the U.S.,” Bernier says. “We have officers who review the foreign-born population in jails. They are subject to removal. We launch a detainer: When they get out of jail, they come to ICE custody for removal. Our job is to enforce immigration law, including people here without authorization, though our priority is criminals. Our mission centers around public safety and national security.” Last year, ICE agents worked alongside federal, state, and local law enforcement to capture illegal transnational gang members and associates, leading to a total of 59 arrests in Boston, according to an ICE press release. ICE’s tip line is 1-866-DHS-2ICE. So who speaks to this issue beyond protocols and legalese? Very few modern Americans. A business owner in Providence recently asked to see the social security cards of two Spanishspeaking customers and threatened to call immigration. This resulted in a “stop the hate” campaign that will be directed at educational forums in schools, businesses, universities, and other locations. Maybe the Providence storeowner overreacted, but making it a race issue further obfuscates the problem. Racial politics make great refuge for difficult problems and ensure the real issue is not addressed. Brand someone a racist, and you stop the conversation. He who controls the language controls the world. So I dug backwards roughly 100 years. Times like these call for words from Roosevelt (Teddy, not Franklin). The following excerpt is from a letter to the American Defense Society, written in 1919, three days before he died: In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. Roosevelt wrote these words long before times of political correctness and reflexive accusations of racism. Here’s what he said about hyphenated Americans, from The Theodore Roosevelt Treasury, A Self-Portrait from His Writings: The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else. Imagine Roosevelt speaking this way today? People would be hunting him down with pitchforks and torches. America is a land of immigrants, but it is also a land of laws that is free to judge the maintenance of its national boundaries. The issue of illegal immigration in the U.S. today is handled largely through the federal government, with the cooperation of state and local law enforcement. Whether deportations will result in reduced risks to security and decreased costs depends on how well the enforcement of both national policy and our national borders are maintained. Perhaps a reduction in illegal immigration will result in the reasonable increase of legal immigration. These concerns are sharply punctuated by terrorism and the increased costs of living not always shared by illegal immigrants (some, indeed, use free services they couldn’t get in their own country).
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.