George Will, certainly a conservative if there ever was one, has written in support of comprehensive immigration reform in a recent column GEORGE WILL COLUMN: Immigration reform can stem drug crime.
By: GEORGE WILL, Washington Post
PHOENIX — Police Chief Jack Harris, a solid block of a man with a shock of thick gray hair, is stolid and patient, but there are limits.
Clearly, he is weary of explaining that this is one of America’s safest large cities, with declining rates of violent crime and property crime.
Unfortunately, there are the kidnappings.
There were 368 reported kidnappings for ransom here last year — perhaps more than anywhere else, other than Mexico City, where kidnapping is such a long-established industry that the wealthy sometimes buy kidnap insurance.
It’s hard to know how many kidnappings occurred there or here: Many are not reported because it can be dangerous to do so. And because they are settled before there is time to report them. Getting a finger severed from the kidnap victim often speeds ransom transactions in Mexico. Not here yet.
In any case, law-abiding citizens here are rarely at risk. Most of the kidnappings are drug smugglers and human traffickers preying on one another.
Some of the smugglers who bring in drugs from Mexico bring people, too, along desert trails and through dry washes, to “drop houses.”
Regarding both drugs and people, Phoenix is a transshipment point: Most of both are distributed to other states. But some of the people become pawns in horrific transactions. A person in the U.S. might pay, say, $2,500 to have someone smuggled into the country, and then might get a phone call: Pay another $5,000, and we will stop raping or torturing — do you hear the screams? — the person you want.
A small “drop house,” with no functioning toilet, may, Chief Harris says, hold 60 people — he has seen 100 — in squalor. Fifty of them just want to move deeper into America in search of work, but all of them might have only their underwear; their clothes having been taken away to prevent them from running away.
The cross-border traffic in narcotics and people is, Harris says, just one way globalization is shaping crime. When the U.S. tightened controls on supplies of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the precursor chemicals for making methamphetamine, American motorcycle gangs were pushed out of the business. The production of those drugs moved to Mexico, where drug makers imported ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from China.
Phoenix’s familiar sorts of crimes have not much to do with most of the city’s immigrants, legal or illegal. They commit a smaller percentage of the crimes (10 percent) than they are of the city’s population (24 percent). But the lurid crimes that are giving this city an unmerited reputation as dangerous represent the seepage of the Mexican cartels into his city.
For them, Harris says, “The answer is not in Phoenix. The answer is in Washington. “We know how to close a border,” says Harris with acid dryness: “build a wall” and deploy “machine gun nests.”
But “I personally think that is stupid.” For now, however, the U.S. “has turned immigration policy over to Mexican thugs.” So, we have reached a point at which barbed wire, car batteries and acid become the business tools of kidnapper-torturer-extortionists.
With a force large enough to police the nation’s fifth-largest city, Harris can deploy 60 officers to deal with one kidnapping. That would be impossible in smaller cities, to which such crime might be driven by success here. But “don’t give me 50 more” officers to “deal with the symptoms.”
Rather, Harris says, who was raised in a rough Phoenix neighborhood, give me comprehensive immigration reform that controls the borders, provides for whatever seasonal immigration the nation wants, and one way or another settles the status of the 12 million who are here illegally — 55 percent of whom have been here at least eight years.
For those whose profession it is, law enforcement sometimes seems like bailing an ocean with a thimble. Harris wants not a bigger thimble, but a smaller ocean.
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