“Remove” vs “Return” tells the real immigration story
by digby
If you are confused by the conflicting reports of deportation statistics for illegal immigration, read this explainer from Anna O. Law. The problem is that we are dealing with various definitions of what constitutes deportation. And it turns out that the Obama administration is not the ogre on this issue that we thought. Apparently, the confusion comes from the differences between “removal” and “return” which often get conflated. Removals would be what we would normally think of as deportation — finding illegal immigrants in our midst and kicking them out of the country with all the legal ramifications that goes with that. Returns are people who are refused entry. They don’t ever appear in a court and thus have no record and suffer no penalties like not being allowed to apply for legal entry or being incarcerated if they’re caught in the future.
It turns out that the Obama administration’s higher statistic apply to the latter category which is obviously the more benign one:
To understand deportations under Obama, it’s more helpful to look at the ratio of returns and removals. Compared to his predecessors, Obama has deemphasized removals and concentrated on returns. His numbers reflect a deliberate shift in strategy to exercise prosecutorial discretion to aid longtime immigrant residents who have family ties and no criminal backgrounds besides the immigration law violation. In recent years, two-thirds of Obama’s overall expulsion numbers consist of returns of people who have previous final orders of removal and who are recently arriving entrants.
It must be noted that none of that helps the residents and their children who live in the shadows and are forced to deal with possible deportation. It changes nothing with respect to the desperate need for comprehensive immigration reform. But it does suggest that the Obama administration has adopted a more compassionate policy than his predecessor if you look beneath the surface of those statistics.
It’s a sad comment on our politics that the administration can’t make that case for itself. But unfortunately, if they admitted what they were doing they’d be portrayed as soft on “illegals” and would likely have even less of a chance to get immigration reform passed. It’s a sick system we have here.
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