• Mollie Tibbetts, R.I.P.

    From But But Sanctuary Cities! Blue Wave@21:1/5 to All on Mon May 24 03:01:00 2021
    XPost: alt.fan.states.iowa, alt.politics.immigration, alt.journalism.newspapers XPost: sac.politics

    The role of immigration policy failures
    How responsible is immigration policy for Mollie Tibbetts’s
    murder?

    The chief culprit, obviously, is the murderer himself, Mexican
    illegal alien Cristhian Rivera (if that’s even his real name).
    But immigration control is one of the elemental responsibilities
    of the national government, and it failed in this case. As
    Senator Tom Cotton put it: “Mollie would be alive if our
    government had taken immigration enforcement seriously years
    ago.”

    But there are different levels of culpability. The government
    bears the greatest share of blame when the authorities have an
    illegal alien in custody, they know he’s deportable, they
    release him anyway, and he goes on to commit more crimes. For
    example, it’s not too much to say that the elected and appointed
    officials of San Francisco were accomplices in the deaths of
    Kate Steinle and the Bologna family because of that city’s
    sanctuary policies.

    The least share of responsibility would accrue to our
    immigration policies if an alien managed to infiltrate the
    country undetected and then had no interactions with government
    or any other institutions of our society before committing his
    crime. Given how unserious we are about immigration enforcement,
    our policies would still warrant a share of the blame, but the
    responsibility would be more diffuse and indirect.

    The Tibbetts murder falls somewhere in between. Unlike the
    killers of Steinle, the Bolognas, Menachem Stark, Jamiel Shaw
    II, Drew Rosenberg, Grant Ronnebeck, Reginald Destin, and
    others, Tibbetts’s killer was not shielded by a sanctuary
    jurisdiction and is not believed to have been previously
    arrested and released (though we may learn more in the coming
    days).

    On the other hand, Tibbetts’s killer is reported to have lived
    in the United States for seven years, from age 17, and worked at
    an Iowa dairy farm for four of those years. He worked on the
    books, having used a stolen identity to get past the Social
    Security–number check (not E-Verify) used by his employer. His
    lawyer said that the killer “diligently filed tax returns
    legally with the IRS.” He had a car registered in someone else’s
    name and managed to drive for years without a license. He had a
    child with a high-school classmate of Tibbetts’s, meaning he was
    presumably listed as the father on the birth certificate.

    That’s a lot of interaction with our institutions. That an
    illegal alien can do all that — for years — without raising a
    red flag represents a profound failure of policy. For instance:
    He used someone else’s identity to get the dairy-farm job — was
    the rightful owner of that identity notified when his Social
    Security number was used to check employment eligibility? If I
    make a change online to my bank account, I receive an email
    notifying me of the change so that if it was done improperly I
    can alert the bank. There is no such notification for the use of
    our most important personal identifiers, and the Social Security
    Administration resists the very suggestion of coordination with
    the immigration authorities to identify illegal aliens in the
    work force.

    The killer filed tax returns, presumably using the stolen
    identity. Was the victim of this identity theft notified that
    another tax return was being filed in his name? Again, no — the
    IRS refuses cooperation with the Department of Homeland
    Security, even when it knows the filer is an illegal alien (as
    when a filer provides an Individual Taxpayer Identification
    Number on the tax return but has a different, stolen number on
    the W-2 form).

    Given that he had a steady, on-the-books job, the killer
    probably had a bank account. Banks have to comply with a variety
    of federal “know your customer” regulations, but verifying the
    authenticity of the killer’s documents (reportedly including an
    out-of-state non-driver ID) apparently was not one of them.

    None of these gaps that allowed Mollie Tibbetts’s killer to live
    here illegally for years is the fault of a lazy bureaucrat or an
    inattentive police officer. They are the result of policy
    choices that weaken our immigration security and enable someone
    like the killer to remain here with impunity.

    Some fixes:

    • I’m not a wall enthusiast, but it remains too easy to
    surreptitiously cross the border with Mexico. Just this week a
    caravan of 128 Mexicans and Central Americans, including young
    children, crossed en masse in Arizona because the border was
    marked only with three-foot-high vehicle barriers designed to
    stop cars but not people.

    • Require systematic, built-in, ongoing cooperation between DHS,
    SSA, and IRS. There is no excuse for one hand of the federal
    government not knowing — not being allowed to know — what the
    other is doing.

    • Mandate E-Verify for all new hires. To root out identity
    theft, the E-Verify bill in the House would require that people
    be notified when their Social Security number was used for
    employment.

    • Require as a condition of receiving federal highway funds that
    all state DMVs participate in E-Verify’s RIDE program, which
    authenticates driver’s licenses or non-driver state IDs
    presented for employment.

    As David French noted yesterday, “While no border can be
    perfectly guarded, we can do better. We simply choose not to.”
    That choice probably cost a young girl her life. And that’s our
    fault.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/mollie-tibbetts-
    immigration-reform/


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