Here’s a new twist on the old sob story [1] genre: instead of an illegal alien whining about America defending its sovereignty, the subject is immigration judge Robert Brack who gripes about separating families, as headlined on Saturday’s Los Angeles Times front page:
Wait, who’s separating families? What about the perps who choose to break US law with the purpose of stealing American jobs?
Even if illegals don’t directly rip off the employment of a US citizen, the presence of millions of foreigners drives down wages overall, as we know from the principle of supply and demand. As immigration George Borjas reported in “Immigration and the American Worker,” [2] a 2013 CIS paper, “An increase in the number of workers leads to lower wages.”
Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime, and American workers are the ones who suffer. Any illegal who is working at a US job has committed theft, and should be locked up.
Brack complains long and loud about sentencing illegal aliens, but he soldiers on, perhaps because of receiving a generous paycheck of $201,100 a year as a federal judge [3] from the taxpayers.
Below, the man whom the Christian Science Monitor called “America’s busiest judge.” [4] in 2014.
The article was also printed in the San Diego paper:
Crackdown on immigrants takes a toll on federal judge: ‘I have presided over a process that destroys families’ [5], San Diego Union-Tribune, May 24, 2018
Day in, day out, immigrants shuffle into Judge Robert Brack’s courtroom, shackled at the wrist and ankle, to be sentenced for the crime of crossing the border.
The judge hands down sentences with a heavy heart. Since he joined the federal bench in 2003, Brack has sentenced some 15,000 defendants, the vast majority of them immigrants with little or no criminal record.
“See, I have presided over a process that destroys families for a long time, and I am weary of it,” said Brack one day in his chambers in Las Cruces. “And I think we as a country are better than this.”
Brack’s court in rural southern New Mexico is swollen with immigration cases, the migrants brought to his courtroom by the dozen. They exchange guilty pleas for “time served” sentences, usually not more than two months on the first or second offense. They leave his court as felons.
For years, federal authorities in this area along the New Mexico border have taken a distinctively hard-line approach to enforcing immigration law, pursuing criminal charges rather than handling cases administratively. Essentially, authorities here have already been carrying out the “zero tolerance” policy Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions unveiled in April, when he announced that all immigrants who cross the border will be charged with a crime.
Together, the Border Patrol and U.S. attorney’s office in New Mexico bring charges against nearly every eligible adult migrant apprehended at the state’s border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That amounted to 4,190 prosecutions last fiscal year.
Vigorous enforcement in New Mexico is a result of ample bed space in the state’s border county jails and a “fast-track” system that prosecutes nonviolent migrants quickly. The state also doesn’t face the volume of illegal crossings that south Texas does, for example.
“It is an efficient process,” says U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico John Anderson. “That is one of the key features that allows us to implement 100% prosecutions.”
For Judge Brack, it’s a punishing routine. And it has been building for a long time. Back in 2010, the judge had been on the federal bench seven years, his docket overloaded with immigration cases, when “at some point I just snapped,” he said.
He sat down to compose a letter to President Obama to call for a more compassionate approach to immigration, one that would keep families together and acknowledge that the demands of the labor market drive immigration:
I write today because my experience of the immigration issue, in some 8,500 cases, is consistently at odds with what the media reports and, therefore, what many believe.
I have learned why people come, how and when they come, and what their expectations are. The people that I see are, for the most part, hardworking, gentle, uneducated and completely lacking in criminal history. Just simple people looking for work.
(Continues)
If there’s one thing America doesn’t need, it’s millions of additional uneducated foreigners. Judge Brack must believe in the idea of America as a flophouse that exists for the betterment of the Third World, rather than a nation that protects its law-abiding citizens. Importantly, the tech future of employment requires a well educated workforce, not Hondurans with a fifth-grade education [6].
Anyway, on a planet where the population is approaching eight billion persons, the dissatisfied of the world need to stay home and fix their own countries.