Image from the Boston Herald.
Thieves impersonating law enforcement officials have put Massachusetts immigrant communities in a heightened state of fear:
In the latest hit on Sunday, Chelsea police said two suspects barged into a house on Broadway armed with a gun, phony police badges and a fake warrant and stole cash.
In February, crooks stopped two victims in an East Boston street then flashed a police badge before seizing their wallets.
And in January and December, three homes in Eastie were targeted by two men posing as cops who conned their way in and made off with money and an ATM card.
The same ploy has been used in Everett and Revere.
Legal or illegal, migrants in the United States are in constant fear of running into the police. Even legal migrants can be deported for the smallest criminal infractions. If an enforcement official has the power to end migrants' lives as they know it in the U.S., you can imagine why some migrants would listen to anyone with a semi-official looking badge.
With tens of millions of migrants in the U.S., there is a tremendous potential for abuse here. The men in the sketch above represent some of the worst potential abusers. With fake police badges men like these are terrorizing immigrant communities in Massachusetts and extorting thousands of dollars from them. Worst of all they are tearing at the already strained bonds of trust that immigrant communities have with the police, making them even more vulnerable.
The Boston Globe does a good job of describing the fear in these communities:
The string of burglaries has sent fear coursing through immigrant neighborhoods in East Boston, Chelsea, and Everett, where residents said the crimes have shattered their sense of safety.
[...]
"Everybody is scared," said Jorge Camey, a 42-year-old Honduran immigrant who lives near the latest victim. "This neighborhood is supposed to be safe. But right now they're all scared, and they just don't want to open their doors."
Michael Levenson; Brian R. Ballou - Boston Globe (4 March 2008)
While this terror is disturbing, what disturbs me more are the policies that have led to this terror. Ever since comprehensive immigration reform failed to pass in U.S. Congress, the Bush administration, through an agency under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has ramped up enforcement. It's a fact that enforcement by itself is not going to fix anything. Deporting everyone single one of the 12 million undocumented migrants in the U.S. is impossible. In 2006, even at record pace, ICE was only able to deport 221,664 undocumented migrants.
That's why leading self proclaimed "immigration reduction" groups have been championing a policy of "attrition through enforcement". NumbersUSA describes it this way:
The principle behind Attrition Through Enforcement is that living illegally in the United States will become more difficult and less satisfying over time when the government – at ALL LEVELS – enforces all of the laws already on the books.
Just to emphasize that again, the principle behind attrition through enforcement is to make life for undocumented migrants, "more difficult and less satisfying over time". In other words, knowing that it is impossible to deport every undocumented migrant, the strategy has become making life so miserable for migrants that they leave on their own.
I am not exaggerating this. This is precisely what these "immigration reduction" groups and self-proclaimed "anti-illegal immigration" politicians aim to do. Make life so miserable for migrants, most of whom have no other desire than to work for a decent wage and get ahead, that they leave on their own.
The New York Times has dubbed this "the misery strategy":
Their one big idea is that harsh, unrelenting enforcement at the border, in the workplace and in homes and streets would dry up opportunities for illegal immigrants and eventually cause the human tide to flow backward. That would be true only if life for illegal immigrants in America could be made significantly more miserable than life in, say, rural Guatemala or the slums of Mexico City. That will take a lot of time and a lot of misery to pull that off in a country that has tolerated and profited from illegal labor for generations.
These aren't fringe, extremist organizations that are advocating policies like these. They are at the center of the immigration debate. They are frequently invited to testify in Congress and comment in the media. They are credited with the collapse of comprehensive immigration reform, or what they labeled "amnesty".
Here's an email where Roy Beck, the executive director of NumberUSA, advocated the spread of panic among migrant communities, after a measure threatened to put hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants out of work:
The illegal alien communities – and the outlaw businesses that hire them – are in a panic this weekend.
And they should be.
The panic has spread to your town or city – all across America.
It is most important that all of us contribute to that panic and ensure that it continues. For it is that kind of panic that will eventually lead to millions of illegal foreign workers and dependents going back to their home countries.
Roy Beck
I wouldn't dare suggest that NumbersUSA is responsible for the thievery that Massachusetts immigrant communities have been suffering from, recently. However, making life "more difficult and less satisfying" turns migrants into increasingly vulnerable populations, where extortion and thievery is bound to continue.
I also want to offer a disclaimer in to this post. As the Massachusetts representative for the Choose or Lose Street Team, I'm going to try and approach every subject with as much objectivity as I can, and take my cues from you, my readers. I have a long history with migrants, though, and it's a subject that I don't think any journalist can really maintain objectivity with. In fact, as soon as a journalist uses terms like "undocumented immigrant" or "illegal alien" to describe a certain subset of migrants, they are taking a stand.
As someone that was born in, and spent 18 years of my life in Guatemala, I also tend to sympathize with migrants and see the human side of the debate. When an undocumented migrant is forgotten in a cell for four days, and has to drink her own urine to survive; when an undocumented migrant in detention is denied treatment for a lesion on his penis, ends up having to amputate, and dies from cancer; when legal migrants fall victim to an outdated and broken U.S. immigration bureaucracy, I can't help but feel there's something wrong.
This doesn't mean that I will not cover the other side of the debate. Just send me a message or leave a comment hear if there's anything you want me to cover, and if not I will do my best on my own. I also recommend that you see the brilliant work that other members of the Street Team, like Carl and Anthony, have done on this issue.
It would also be wrong for me to avoid this issue entirely because this is an important issue, and it's issue through which I learned about new media. So as entire communities are terrorized like this, I'm going to cover it for you.