More than 21,000 of the 215,769 individuals housed in local jails in the last fiscal year could not prove their U.S. citizenship, reports Tim McGlone with the Virginian-Pilot, quoting details in a Virginia State Crime Commission report released Tuesday.
If it’s any consolation, few of these guys are hardened murderers or drug dealers — most of the offenses were related to alcohol or driving without a license. But they aren’t exactly upstanding citizens either.
We can argue until we’re blue in the face whether illegals as a group are just hard-working souls filling jobs that Virginians won’t take, and the degree to which they impose a burden on Virginia taxpayers. But we now have documentary proof that some 21,000 individual illegals spent time in jail. Accounting for some 10 percent of the inmate population, they imposed an undeniable cost on local governments. Slam dunk. End of argument.
We can also argue until the cows come home whether various proposals to crack down on illegal immigrant would sweep up a lot of innocent legal immigrants just because they have the wrong accent or skin color. But when you’re counting illegals in jail, you don’t have to round up any innocents. You don’t have to hunt anyone down — we’ve caught them already! They’re sitting in jail!
It’s one thing to defend people who enter the country illegally but otherwise live blameless lives. It’s quite another to defend those who come here illegally and proceed to commit crimes and misdemeanors. To be fair, the number appears to include not only those convicted but those who were charged but not yet convicted. Still, if the militant activist groups defending illegal immigrants can’t make this one concession — that illegals already sitting in jail should be sent home — it seems to me that they lose the right to be taken seriously.
(I do foresee one tricky problem: What if the illegals refuse to reveal which country they emigrated from? Where do you send them? You can’t give someone a one-way ticket back to Mexico City because he “looks Mexican.” What if he’s Honduran or Guatamalan? You can’t ship someone back to Russia because he “looks Slavic.” What if he’s Polish or Czech? Someone will have to think that one through.)
