Criminal Aliens, Term Paper Example

The issue of so-called “criminal aliens” is one of the most divisive issues in U.S. policymaking. According to the academic literature, criminal aliens are defined as “noncitizens who are residing in the United States legally or illegally and convicted of a crime.” (Stana, 7) What is most immediately striking about such a definition is how the concept of criminal aliens includes both legal and illegal residents of the United States. The policy with criminal aliens, therefore, does not distinguish between those legal residents of the United States who have not attained citizenship and commit a crime and those who are here illegally. Arguably, one may suggest that this is indicative of a fundamental ambiguity in policy, whereby the two groups are treated equally, despite the further illegality of those who are not residing in the United States legally. However, concomitantly, such ambiguity may also infer a general hostility to the foreigner in America that informs the U.S. policy.  In other words, this policy in its specifics is informed by a general ideological perspective that remains antagonistic to the foreign “Other”, and this is reflected in a certain aggression that determines such policy.

To develop this thesis, it is necessary to look at the specific U.S. policy concerning criminal aliens. Such a general hostility is not only merely a policy issue. As Kevin R. Johnson notes, there is a general sentiment of hostility, both within the American public and its politics: “efforts at punishing ‘criminal aliens’ found popular support.” (115) Such a synthesis of popular support and policy adhering to this support was made manifest in “Proposition 187” in the 1990s, which was passed with a resounding success by voters in California, despite the large number of Mexican immigrants located there. The basic contents of the proposition “included provisions designed to facilitate the removal of ‘criminal aliens’ from the United States” (Johnson, 115), thus indicating that a crucial concern of policy is the deportation of criminal aliens.

Such policymaking is one symptom of the general ideological and political hostility to criminal aliens. As Johnson observes, further policies such as the Immigration Act of 1990 and the 1994 Crime Bill, “included provisions that limited the relief available to ‘criminal aliens’ and attempted to expedite their deportation, aptly illustrat[ing] the harsh treatment accorded them in the political process.” (116) This criminalization of the alien is largely an ideological issue, in which “the image of the predatory ‘criminal alien’ is a powerful one.” (Johnson, 116) Such interpretations are pertinent, insofar as It is arguably such an image, produced by the public imaginary, that informs the policy-making towards criminal aliens as the undesirable Other, to which the various ills of society are conferred. This is not merely an empty conjecture however: to the extent that there is essentially no aforementioned difference between criminal aliens divided along the lines of legal or illegal residents, such policies reflect the general functioning of a social construct that is aversive to the presence of the alien other, as a Mexican ambassador noted in critiquing both U.S. policy and the views of the American public: “There is an equation now in California that goes: Illegal immigrants equal to Mexicans, equal to criminals, equal to someone who wants social stereotypes.” (Johnson, 116) The image of the Mexican as both criminal and alien in the United States thus informs policy decisions such as in California.

Such policy decisions are numerous. As Weissinger notes, “recent immigration legislation attempted to focus on removing criminal aliens from the US” (182), thus demonstrating a clear and decisive world-view that underlies policy towards criminal aliens – deportation is viewed as the optimal solution. Hence, the shift of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (hereinafter: INS) into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),  along with the appearance of the Alien Criminal Apprehension Program (ACAP) can be interpreted as policymaking that stresses the teleological goal of removing criminal aliens from the U.S. as a response to this problem. For example, the ACAP, established in 1991 by the former INS, bears the following world-view, according to Haddal: “the primary purpose of the program has remained – the identification of criminal aliens. Under the current program, criminal aliens are identified by immigration officials as they are incarcerated but prior to their release. By identifying criminal aliens while they are serving a criminal sentence, DHS, in conjunction with the Department of Justice (DOJ), is able to facilitate the removal of criminal aliens while they are in state or federal custody.” (Haddal, 33)

Moreover, the existence of Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) demonstrates the endemic realization that a homogenization of organizations is needed to adequately deal with the criminal alien “threat”; by forming a unified policy, the problem will be easier alleviated. These are conscious organizational decisions that thus speak to the priority of the problematic in the eyes of policy-makers and furthermore underscore the clear solution their policy has outlined: deportation of criminal aliens as solution to the criminal alien problem.

However, despite the clear intent, the machine cannot be said to operate smoothly. Policy is complicated by, for example, the branch of executive bureaucracy, more specifically, the Executive Office for Immigration (EOIR) According to Pantana, EOIR litigation bureaucracy impedes and ultimately paralyzes the clear policy of deportation, insofar as the EOIR “makes a federal case out of every illegal alien and criminal alien resident in the United States.” (Pantana 39)

Accordingly, as Isenburg notes, “an increase in the number of criminal alien arrests would increase the workload of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). Thus, if ICE significantly increases their arrests of criminal aliens, the removal cases will still have to be adjudicated by EOIR before the alien can be removed. In addition, since criminal aliens are subject to mandatory detention, increasing the arrests of criminal aliens will increase the need for detention bed space.” (Isenburg, 57) There thus appears to be a fundamental disconnect between the executive branch and the executive bureaucracy regarding policy: whereas the executive branch’s view of criminal aliens is to a certain extent explicit, executive bureaucracy prevents this policy from being realized in a radical manner.

This certain bureaucratic muddle, although nevertheless fueled by a general hostility to the criminal alien, has thus led to the proposal of the Criminal Alien Removal Act of 2011 in the House of Representatives, which, as suggested by Tom Rooney, a Republican from Florida, will enable “the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deport criminal aliens – illegal immigrant who have been convicted of crimes – upon their release from incarceration.” (Rooney). This demonstrates a further growing concern with U.S. criminal aliens in policy, one which can be viewed as even leading to the violation of fundamental human rights. As Rooney’s phraseology in describing the bill makes explicit, if the bill is passed it will now be permissible to hold “criminal aliens after their sentences end to make sure they can be transferred into federal custody and removed from the United States.”

This is also supported by Republicans in the Senate judiciary, who view the resolution of the criminal alien problem as crucial to the pragmatic functioning of law enforcement. As Under Secretary Hutchinson noted, “the criminal alien world eventually grew to the point that it consumed more investigative hours than any other enforcement activity.” (Siskin, 61) This indicates, once again, the importance conferred to the resolution of this problem in policy, a resolution which is viewed as consistent with unburdening U.S. law enforcement on all levels with a time-consuming task.

Whereas the government is clearly aware of the criminal alien problem, there also exist a large number of special interests groups that attempt to oppose this policy, some of them successfully. For example, “special interest groups in San Diego that influence the investigations of the U.S. Attorney’s Civil Rights Division” (Doughtery 178) have had effects on limiting the deportation of criminal aliens. However, such special interests groups also exist with the intent of supporting the deportation of criminal aliens. According to Clint E. Smith “anti-immigration efforts by special-interest groups raised such specters as the introduction of drug trafficking and terrorist activities among the inflow of undocumented immigrants,” (126) thus leading to what he terms a “petulant debate.” (126) In this regard, it can be considered that the primary influence of such special interest groups on criminal policy lies in how they shapes the public imagination, subsequently swaying them on these issues. Of course, such special interest groups also have influence on the political process, as noted above with the U.S. Attorney’s Civil Rights Division; nonetheless the existence of special interest groups on both sides of the spectrum suggest that their effect essentially cancel each other out. Rather, it is once again the general sentiment of aggression towards the criminal alien that seems to inform the policy: it can be said that these special interest groups exist within a political system that has already made the attempt to curtail criminal aliens a primary imperative of policy.

Further aggravating this general mise-en-scene of hostility towards the criminal alien and all the ambiguities this term includes is the media, a clearly crucial means by which to shape the public opinion on the issue. For example, as Maher writes, the ambiguity in the very term criminal alien as including both legal and illegal non-U.S. citizens is further perpetuated by the media: “In popular media, [policy] has been reported haphazardly as targeting ‘criminal aliens’, ‘criminal illegal aliens’ and ‘illegal aliens’ representing what is arguably a discursive luring between a ‘criminal status’ and an ‘illegal’ status’…Media representations suggest that in popular consciousness undocumented immigrants are often represented as people who have ‘broken the law’ with little differentiation between those who have simply crossed the border and those who have committed much more serious offenses.” (29) Thus, the media, as opposed to serving as a critical corrective to ambiguities and inconsistencies in government policy, has rather only further heightened this ambiguity through their ambivalent reporting on issues related to criminal aliens. This, once again, underscores the point about both political policy and the general popular imagination stigmatizing the criminal alien as undesirable Other, without fully understanding what the phenomenon of the criminal alien means.

Certainly, political parties are crucial to this process of stigmatization. The aforementioned CLEAR bill proposed by the Republican Tom Rooney demonstrates that the criminal alien problem can be delineated along apparent ideological lines between the Republican and Democratic parties respectively. Adherence to a particular party line is thus obviously affecting policy, insofar as one side of the issue lucidly opposes the criminal alien, whereas the other is not so explicitly active in underscoring the resolution to the problem in the form of a radicalized form of deportation. Federal and state policies are thus obviously influenced by the particular parties that are hegemonic and shape policy; at the same time, it is important to note, as with the aforementioned Proposition 157, that states which occupy borders with Mexico are more concerned with the criminal alien problem, despite the high presence of legal Mexicans in these same states. This speaks to the political impotence of this group and the difficulties it has in expressing its voice within the public and political discourse on the issue. Here, a clear ideological decision has been made on the part of those possessive of hegemony to enact policies that are clearly aggressive.

References

Brysk, Alison. Globalization and Human Rights. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

Dougherty, Jon E. Illegals: The Imminent Threat Posed by Our Unsecured U.S.-Mexico Border. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Inc., 2004.

Haddal, Chad. People Crossing Borders: An Analysis of U.S. Border Protection Policies. Washington, DC: DIANE Publishing, 2010.

Isenburg, Bruno T. Immigration Enforcement and Policies. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007.

Johnson, Kevin R. The “Huddled Masses” Myth: Immigration and Civil Rights. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.

Maher, Kristen Hill. Who Has A Right to Rights? Citizenship’s Exclusions in an Age of Migration. In: A. Brysk (ed.) Globalization and Human Rights. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. 19-44.

Pantana, P.M. America: A Purpose-Driven Nation. New York: Xulon Press, 2007.

Rooney, Thomas J. “Rooney Introduces Criminal Alien Removal Act.” Rooney.house.gov. 2011. Accessed at: http://rooney.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3177&Itemid=300078

Siskin, Alison. Visa Waiver Program. Washington, DC: DIANE Publishing, 2011.

Smith, Clint E. Inevitable Partnership: Understanding Mexico-U.S. Relations. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner, 2000.

Stana, Richard M. Information on Criminal Aliens Incarcerated in Federal and State Prisons and Local Jails. Washington, DC: United State Government Accountability Office, 2005.

Weissinger, George. Law Enforcement and the INS: A Participant Observation Study of Control Agents. Washington, US: University Press of America, 2005.