Papers Please: Texas governor signs immigration bill

                     

     Texas Senate Bill 4 is a disaster. Proponents claim that it is in the best interest of the state of Texas and its citizens. That is false. It will make police detention more common for the average person. It will lead to longer traffic stops with more intrusion by the state into citizens’ private affairs. The so called “papers please” law will also allow more potential for abuse of power, such as racial profiling. The law is unpopular with human rights advocates as well as police themselves. Several police departments and sheriff’s offices from the largest cities in Texas have spoken out against the law. 

     One complaint against SB 4 is that state and municipal law enforcement agencies have no legal jurisdiction to enforce immigration regulations. Texas is the seventh state to enact its own law regarding illegal immigration. It joins Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah in its attempt to combat illegal immigration through state statute. The problem with this approach is that immigration is the purview of the federal government. All six immigration statutes that precede SB 4 are under judicial review and face the possibility of being overturned by the courts. The reason for this is that the state has no authority to enforce federal law. By passing these types of laws, states are asking their local police departments to do the job of the federal government. 

     Proponents believe that aggressively enforcing immigration laws will curtail crimes such as gang activity, human trafficking, and drug smuggling. However, that is backwards thinking. By trying to verify citizenship and deporting every undocumented migrant they come across, police are going to be less focused on those serious crimes. There are already laws against gang violence and human trafficking. Police are free to pursue the arrest of those violating those laws. And if those they arrest for existing laws happen to be in the country illegally, they are free to refer that person to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But looking for the immigration violation first before the commission of a crime over which the police would normally have jurisdiction is a woeful waste of time and resources.  

     This leads us to the next complication imposed by SB 4. City police departments are notoriously understaffed. Asking police to determine the immigration status of all those they come into contact with and then detaining those deemed to be here illegally is yet another diversion of manpower and resources that would be better spent elsewhere. Austin is one of the main so called “sanctuary cities” that prompted the consideration of this bill and one of its leading opponents. The Daily Texan reported in January 2016 that Austin Police Department had at least 118 vacancies, leading to delayed response times and burdening officers with forced overtime. Dealing with immigration issues would further exasperate this problem in all of Texas’s metropolitan areas.  

     Fear of deportation will make law-abiding people avoid police at all costs. This means crimes will go unreported. Victims will be afraid to seek help. Witnesses will be unwilling to come forward. Attempting to enforce immigration laws will make the police’s job that much harder. Many people in low income areas are already suspicious and distrustful of police. How can a state legislature not see that they would be putting their law enforcement at a disadvantage with this new law? 

     Many interactions with the police, the most common of which being a traffic stop, are, by nature, intrusive. Many of us have been on the side of the road with a cop asking us all sorts of things that are none of their business and have no pertinence to the reason they stopped us. “Where are you going?” “Where are you coming from?” “Is there anything in the car I should know about?” What do these things have to do with my supposed failure to use a turn signal? Checking your immigration status is yet another violation of every citizen’s rights. It makes no difference if you are here from another country legally or illegally or if you are a natural born citizen. The very nature of asking you to prove your citizenship is a violation of your constitutional rights.  

     While many police officers are coming out in opposition to SB 4, there are still others who will be all too enthusiastic to enforce it. Police abuse of power is a real problem. By giving police more powers, you increase their potential for abuse. Racial profiling is ostensibly illegal, but it still happens. To apply the law equally, every single person who comes into contact with the police would need to have their citizenship verified. This would be cumbersome to the police and its entire infrastructure. It would be frustrating and invasive for the private citizen. So in actuality, the law is likely to be selectively enforced. This selective enforcement will necessarily bring about unfair racial discrimination. People will be checked on the basis of their skin color, their command of the English language, their accent, or because they just plain don’t seem like they are from “around here”. We need to be looking for ways to reduce subjectivity in law enforcement, not introducing new forms of it. 

     In an attempt to appear fair, police in Tuscaloosa, Alabama courted international embarrassment while enforcing their own immigration law in 2011. Detlev Hager was taken into custody in Tuscaloosa after presenting police with his German driver’s license. Nobody can accuse them of bigotry or xenophobia if they enforce their ludicrous law on a white man, right? The problem was that Hager is an executive of Mercedes Benz, one of Alabama’s largest employers. Mitch Ackerman, executive vice president of Service Employees International Union had this to say of that incident, “It is really ironic and showed the absurdity of this law. Here you have a foreign employer who has brought many workers jobs ... caught in this web that is supposed to bring jobs.” 

     The border is a social construct, and one that ultimately does more harm than good. Future generations will look at the idea of national borders as one of the cruelest fictions we have imposed on society. The government is saying, “Sorry, kid. You were born on the wrong side of my imaginary line. So you stay on that side of it. I don’t care how good it is here or how bad it is where you came from. I don’t care that the poor conditions on your patch of dirt are largely my fault. We don’t want you here.” I believe that human migration will one day be seen as an essential right.  Until that day, we should not be burdening our first responders with the responsibility of enforcing the border.