On Monday, March 19, 2018, 10:51:37 PM PDT, Shawn K. Quinn <[email protected]> wrote: On 03/20/2018 12:23 AM, jim bell wrote: > 'victimless crimes', such as ... illegal re-entry to America
>I agree with the other examples you cited, but I would not call illegal (re-)immigration a victimless crime in all circumstances. I agree our immigration laws are broken as currently written and enforced; however, dealing with illegal aliens takes resources away from the rest of us, especially given that they often do not pay the appropriate amount of taxes back into the system compared to someone here legally. I agree that there are not always sharp demarcation lines between victimless-crimes and crimes with a victim. Further, there are crimes with a few clear victims (murder, assault, robbery) and crimes where the victimization is diffuse (counterfeiting, which arguably victimizes anybody using a currency). When I suggest that illegal re-entry is a 'victimless crime', that does not mean that there are not other crimes which illegal re-entry employs (such as people-smuggling) and further, crimes that it enables: Any crime subsequently committed by a person who is illegally present in America. Kate Steinle's case in San Francisco is an excellent example of this. These crimes are ENABLED because the illegal alien is in America. If he is out of America, he might still commit crimes, but they would be crimes that some other government would have to deal with. Also, keep in mind that the U.S. government doesn't need to actually convict these people of some crime, in order to expel them. Put simply, if the government had actually been enforcing immigration law for the last 30+ years, there might easily be a half-million illegals in America, rather that what I suspect to be, 20 million. (the figures bandied commonly about, 11-12 million are nonsense.) So, if ICE actually did its job, much of the crime associated with illegal aliens simply wouldn't occur. In that case, it wouldn't matter whether we call illegal re-entry "victimless" or "with a victim". Generally, it wouldn't occur, or at least not nearly as much as today. According to this statistic, 31% of all people currently in Federal prison are known or suspected illegal aliens. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/58-766-in-federal-jails-are-known-or-suspected-illegals-31-of-all-prisoners Is this merely an accident? This chart shows the number of Federal prisoners since 1980: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/population_statistics.jsp#old_pops When I was released, in 2012, the number of prisoners in Federal prison had, I believe, hit a high-water mark of about 219,000 or so. Keeping 31% of illegal aliens means that the BOP can employ that many more prison staff, etc. Jim Bell ×
