Cost Effective Nativism

by digby

This is worthy of some serious push back from the blogosphere. For the past couple of days, the GOP has been circulating the fact that the Democrats refused to let the Republicans in the House strip their bill of the parts making illegal immigration a felony. This has been greeted with some “analysis” on the part of the media that the Democrats are just as hypocritical as the Republicans on the issue of immigration. The GOP is reportedly running ads on spanish language media saying Democrats voted for the bill to make illegal immigration a felony.

But that is misleading. Nathan Newman goes to the congressional record and finds out what the real argument on the House floor was when the amendment came up:

Mr. Chairman, under current law, illegal entry into the United States makes an alien subject to a Federal criminal misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of 6 months in prison…

In the base bill, the maximum penalty for illegal entry was increased to a year and a day, and the same penalty was set for unlawful presence, to make the enhancements for these offenses consistent with the other penalty enhancements of the bill.

The administration subsequently requested the penalty for these crimes be lowered to 6 months. Making the first offense a felony, as the base bill would do, would require a grand jury indictment, a trial before a district court judge and a jury trial.

Also because it is a felony, the defendant would be able to get a lawyer at public expense if the defendant could not afford the lawyer. These requirements would mean that the government would seldom if ever actually use the new penalties. By leaving these offenses as misdemeanors, more prosecutions are likely to be brought against those aliens whose cases merit criminal prosecution.

For this reason, the amendment returns the sentence for illegal entry to its current 6 months and sets the penalty for unlawful presence at the same level.

The Republican argument was that they wanted to make it a felony, but because it would enable the defendants to have a jury trial and have access to a lawyer, they were afraid that it would cost too much. They argued that they would get far more prosecutions against the “aliens” if they kept it at the misdemeanor level.

Now, we know that they were having second thoughts about this provision, probably doing some polling that it would inflame the latino community. And Democrats certainly did want to hang this bill around the GOP’s neck and succeeded in doing so. But the Republicans’ stated reasons for trying to withdraw it were hardly because it was wrong to use such harsh methods, only that it would cost too much and would allow the “aliens” to have a lawyer and a fair trial. The Republican party, as we know, is very much against that fundamental American principle these days. They know who’s guilty and they don’t need no stinkin’ judges or juries telling them otherwise. (Unless you’re one of the legions of Republican criminal suspects, that is.)

It would be very helpful if the Democrats got this out to the spanish language media too. This idea that the Democrats were the ones who voted against removing the felon language is becoming CW. There is no reason for them to take a hit with the latino community about this when we know that they were not really in favor of the felon language. As Nathan Newman says:

This is a bow to the impossibility of revving up millions of criminal trials, but it’s all about how to most effectively criminalize undocumented workers.

And by the way, isn’t it interesting that the Bush administration didn’t exactly put its foot down either. All it did was request that the penalty for the convicted felon be lowered to six months. And here I thought old George was such a big latino lover.

.