Effective Immigration Control

Written By: Gary K. Silberman, Esq.

On the heels of yesterday’s post about the the Arizona immigration law and the controversy surrounding it, here is an example of the federal government’s efforts to focus immigration enforcement on those areas that are likely to have a greater impact on immigration control, rather than focusing on those areas that create controversy and publicity.

Secure Communities is a high tech program that is designed to identify unauthorized immigrants by scanning the fingerprints of everyone who is booked into a jail. Those fingerprints are run through both FBI criminal history and Department of Homeland Security immigration databases. This program is in place in 467 jurisdictions in 26 states and Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to have this program in every jail in the country by 2013. As opposed to the Arizona law, this program focuses on those accused of committing crimes and, perhaps even more importantly, screens everyone instead of relying on “reasonable suspicion” that a person is an unauthorized immigrant.

This is an effort to narrow the focus of immigration control so as to minimize the possibility of racial profiling and the intrusion into the lives of U.S. citizens and immigrants/tourists with proper documentation. It also minimizes the problem of disenfranchising crime victims and witnesses (the disincentive to report illegal activities for a victim or witness who is an undocumented immigrant, based on the belief that contact with law enforcement may have negative consequences for the person reporting).