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Friday, July 04, 2008

Immigration Enforcement as a Market Mechanism

Thursday, the Baltimore Sun ran an editorial decrying Anne Arundel County Executive John Leopold's crack down on illegal immigrants. My, oh my! We can't arrest these poor people. We'll promote anti-immigrant feelings!

Hogwash! These people are in our country illegally. What part of that word doesn't the Sun and their left wing fellow travelers not understand?

Entering this country without papers is a crime. The police are supposed to arrest criminals, right?

Besides making a community feel safer and that little thing about actually enforcing the law, there are other benefits from the type of local enforcement efforts being undertaken in Anne Arundel county. Despite the best efforts of our nation's liberal elite, the market works. Always has and always will.

In this case local crackdowns will encourage illegals to move to jurisdictions where enforcement is not so tough. As the illegal immigrant population becomes more concentrated in those areas, the legal, hard working populace in those areas will then be calling for tougher enforcement there. Eventually, a large percentage illegals will either be arrested or concentrated in areas where the feds might actually get around to picking them up.

I have no illusions that we will actually retrieve every one of these unlawful residents. Nor do I believe that we will actually arrest every drug dealer. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

We should not only be encouraging John Leopold, but our own local officials as well to take up the banner of the fight against illegal immigration.

G. A. Harrison publishes Delmarva Dealings and contributes to Salisbury News and Red Maryland.

cross posted at Red Maryland and Delmarva Dealings

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very good post G.A. and I agree with you that we must enforce our immigation laws much better than we do now. Too much drug traffic comes in with the illegals and we must stop the terrorist element as we stop the illegals!

A. Goetz

Bob said...

It's a matter of national security