Just like the deficit, undocumented aliens didn't seem to scare the Right while Bush and the GOP were in power. Now that Obama and the Democrats are in power, these issues suddenly have become crises for the Right. So is the Obama administration lax on enforcement of the immigration laws? Actually, it turns out that more undocumented aliens are being deported now than under Bush. And, more important, the Obama policy for deportations is a lot smarter than Bush's. Read on for the details.
Yesterday the New York Times ran an article that said that the Obama administration is not enforcing the immigration laws when it comes to a certain class of undocumented aliens: students who came to the United States without papers when they were children.
Does this mean that the Obama administration is lax on immigration laws, necessitating draconian laws such as Arizona passed? Not quite. Many readers of that article doubtless overlooked a key phrase in the opening sentence:
The Obama administration, while deporting a record number of immigrants convicted of crimes, is sparing one group of illegal immigrants from expulsion: students who came to the United States without papers when they were children. [Emphasis added.]
Today, on the Times's Economix blog, there's a more detailed accounting of these deportations. The University of Syracuse’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which slices and dices government data releases, looked at the data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and found that
during the first nine months of FY 2010, 279,035 non-U.S. citizens were removed from the country as a result of ICE enforcement. This number is ten (10) percent more than the same period during FY 2008 — the last fiscal year of the Bush administration. This represents almost a doubling of the rate of removals that have taken place during the past five years...
Even more interesting, the data reveals that the most important group of undocumented aliens who were removed were those who committed crimes other than overstaying their visas. ICE has been targeting people who have committed "serious crimes," such as national security violations, homicide, and sexual assault.
In other words, ICE is targeting exactly the kind of people you want to get rid of. If people in Arizona are unhappy about the alleged increase in crime caused by undocumented aliens, they should be glad that ICE is targeting these criminals and not using the broad-brush policy that their recent law sought to impose.
Here's a graph from the article showing the percentage of deportees who were criminals (i.e., for crimes other than merely being here illegally) over the past 5 years. You can see a dramatic shift in the first quarter of this year.
So Sarah Palin and the other right-wing carpers can shut up about Obama's failure to enforce immigration laws. Given the fact that ICE does not have unlimited resources, he's doing exactly what he should be doing.