Thursday, June 16, 2011

Daily News Editorial: Without true immigration reform, Secure Communities is necessary

THE absence of a coherent national immigration policy leaves leaders at all levels of government to perpetually squabble over the issue and their constituents to constantly wonder what the rules are. It's happening again as some California and Los Angeles politicians seek to undermine a key element of the Obama administration's program to manage illegal immigration.

We ask officials to keep their eye on the ball and remember that public safety comes first.

This week, a state Senate committee advanced an Assembly-passed bill that would let local officials opt out of the federal Secure Communities program, the system that forces police to share arrestees' fingerprints with U.S. immigration authorities.

A handful of other states have already broken away from the program. The Los Angeles City Council passed a motion urging California to pull out, with Councilman Greig Smith the lone dissenter. Seven L.A.-area Congress members have urged Gov. Jerry Brown to pull the plug.

The chance of any such withdrawal is debatable. Brown himself has supported Secure Communities, signing the agreement when he was California's attorney general in 2009 and defending it as a candidate for governor last year. He has argued the program isn't optional anyway, because the feds have sole authority on immigration

matters. He's right.

Of course, if the feds were doing their job on immigration matters, we might not be having this discussion.

Moreover, Secure Communities was designed to focus immigration enforcement efforts on identifying and removing the most undesirable of illegal residents - serious criminal offenders.

Opponents argue the program has strayed from its purpose by casting too wide a net, leading to the deportations of people who haven't been convicted of felonies. Further, they contend that it might actually hurt law enforcement, making illegal immigrants hesitant to interact with police in order to report crimes.

But the civil-rights argument is just dancing around the borders of the issue.

Though data shows Secure Communities has led to the deportation of more non-convicts than felons in some states, this has not been the case in California. From 2009 through February, a reported 11,099 people convicted of serious or violent offenses had been deported from California (nearly one-half of the U.S. total), and 9,957 without criminal histories (a bit more than one-third of the national figure).

All told, including people with lesser criminal records, 35,643 people have been deported from California under the program (again, accounting for slightly more than one-third of the national tally).

That sounds like a good thing.

In the long run, what's needed is for advocates on both sides to meet in the middle and produce comprehensive immigration reform that would achieve border security, offer a path to citizenship for otherwise law-abiding immigrants with roots here, and meet the need for migrant workers in agriculture and other industries.

In the meantime, Secure Communities is a tough approach worth keeping.


A Los Angeles Daily News editorial. To read more editorials from the Daily News, go to www.dailynews.com/opinions.

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_18281200?source=rss

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