A New Library for the District of Columbia, Legacy or Not

kmccook says:

ID theft a red herring
Rocky Mountain News-Littwin: ID theft a red herring in Tuesday’s raids.December 14, 2006.

As far as I can tell, the bust was a major bust.

As far as I can tell, ICE agents spent 10 months in which they
planned, they plotted, they investigated, they synchronized their
watches. And eventually, on the day itself, many would even don their riot
gear. They did everything but call in the Marines, who, I guess, have
enough on their plate.

And on Tuesday morning, 1,000 ICE agents raided Swift meatpacking
plants in six states.

It wasn’t just a raid, of course, on any illegal immigrants who dare cut
our meat. This was a raid to defend Americans against identity theft. ICE
agents arrested 1,282 people. You saw the headlines. You saw the photos,
including the one with the guy in chains. I thought that was a nice
Gitmo-style touch.

And a day after the raid, homeland security chief Michael Chertoff,
whom many of us hadn’t seen since Katrina, broke down the numbers at a
Washington news conference. There were 1,282 arrested – of whom 65 were
charged with felonies. That’s as in 65. For the math-impaired, that’s 5
percent of those arrested. And of those 5 percent, not all of them were
even arrested for identity theft.

The other 95 percent were your standard, garden-variety – and often
garden-tending – illegal immigrants, the kind you can find on any
street corner, without need of riot gear.

I can see the headlines shrinking now. I can see the confused look on
readers’ faces.

At the Greeley plant, they arrested 262 people. And 11 were charged
with felonies. Of the 11, some were charged with re-entering the
country illegally, some with identity theft.

The ICE people won’t break the numbers down further. I’m guessing
they’re embarrassed. You’d be embarrassed, too. They had TV copters
flying overhead. They had families wrenched apart, just in time for
the holidays. And, after the big multistate ID theft raid, they have fewer
than 62 people actually charged with identity theft.

Somebody, please, get me rewrite.

I’ll take it another step, Those arrested at the plants did not
actually forge documents. They did not actively steal anyone’s ID.
They paid someone for a Social Security number in order to get a job. To
use the drug-trade analogy, they were buyers, not dealers.

That’s it. That’s the raid. I hope everyone got a crime-stopper’s
badge.

Look, I know it’s illegal to use someone else’s ID. It’s illegal to
use any kind of illegal documents. Those who have them will face
charges – and some will even go to jail. That’s fine. That’s the game as
it’s played – lure people across the border with a promise of jobs and no
way to get them legally.

The rest will face an administrative charge – it’s only a civil
offense to be in this country illegally – and most will be deported. And
many of those, if we can trust history, will return – whether or not
anyone bothers to build a wall (prediction: no one ever will).

No ID forgery ring was found. No crime spree was thwarted. We hear
the investigation, to find the actual forgers, is continuing. In
other words, keep the riot gear handy.

What we saw, once again, was ICE taking a fly swatter to try to bring down
an elephant.

The funny thing is, Swift apparently followed the rules on hiring. It used
the Basic Pilot system by which you can check employees’ Social Security
numbers. It just doesn’t check if more than one person uses the same
number. Some numbers show up dozens of times. Is Colorado a Third World
country?

It’s a joke, like our immigration system is a joke. Our immigration
policy – if you want to call it that – doesn’t work. That much we
already knew. What we still haven’t figured out is how much we care
whether it works.

ICE wants you to care. If you read the headlines, you’d have thought that
illegal immigrants at the Swift plants were stealing IDs out of our
wallets and using our credit cards to buy Xboxes at the mall.

What’s happened here is that ICE has tried to conflate two stories.
One is ID theft, a favorite of on-your-side local TV news, and, yes, a
serious problem. The other is illegal immigration, a complex problem, and
an entirely different one.

And yet, listen to Chertoff.

“This is not only a case about illegal immigration, which is bad
enough,” he says. “It’s a case about identity theft and violation of the
privacy rights and the economic rights of innocent Americans.”

Sure, and that raid a while back at Buckley, netting all those
roofers, was about national security.

So, what was the Swift raid about? Was it just about headlines? Fear-
mongering?

It was obviously a major blow for Swift, which may follow the laws
but knows – as everyone knows – that it hires illegal immigrants to
do the invigorating work in its slaughterhouses. Swift sent away 400
workers before the raids. It lost 1,200 more in the raid. That’s a lot of
bacon at stake.

So, the blow could be a warning to those who hire illegal immigrants. But
I’ve heard a better theory: Given a new Congress, it could be a spur to
get companies like Swift to encourage their representatives – who, it
turns out, often listen to multibillion-dollar companies – to produce a
real immigration package, to produce a guest worker program, to allow a
way for workers here to become citizens.

It’s a long shot. I can’t give you exact odds. But hey, if there’s
anything we can learn from this raid, it’s that a 5 percent chance is
plenty.

[email protected]

MORE LITTWIN COLUMNS »

To print this page, select File then Print from your browser
URL:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columni sts/article/0,1299,D
RMN_86_5212746,00.html . ======================= Librarians and Human
Rights http://www.cas.usf.edu/lis/mccook/librariansandhum anrights.htm
—An Injury to One is an Injury to All.