This amnesty wasn’t good enough: "Operation Scheduled Departure" departs

"600 Words by Esther J. Cepeda"

Let us join together and give a collective sneer to library fine amnesties. Parking ticket and gun amnesties, too. You see, they’re just so stupid!

It’s so ridiculous to imagine that after years of not paying parking tickets or returning books for fear of fines, that anyone would be idiotic enough to "turn themselves in" and pay a way-reduced penalty from the fines they’d otherwise be on the hook for.

If you, for instance, didn’t pay your $20 expired-meter parking ticket, then parked in a fire lane to the tune of 250 bucks, then let the compounded late fees balloon up to over $2,250, you’d presumably be a plain moron to just fork over the original $20 and go on your merry way.

This is the argument of that segment of immigration activists who will accept nothing less than full amnesty and "an immediate moratorium on all raids and immigration enforcement and deportations" for illegal immigrants.

These are the same people who ensured that "Operation Scheduled Departure" – a plan whereby illegal immigrants would be spared workplace and home raids and jail time prior to deportation if they turned themselves in to government offices in North Carolina, Chicago, Phoenix, San Diego, and Santa Ana, California.

Never mind that the government has also – rightly so, I add – been criticized for disastrous workplace enforcements, such as the raid in Postville, Iowa, which left illegal immigrants confused about the rights they’re guaranteed even while in this country illegally and ripped for shoddy to downright inhumane treatment in holding centers.

Nope, giving people who knowingly violating laws and already appealed to an immigration judge and been sentenced to return home a small measure of control over the date and time to say goodbye to their loved ones was ridiculed by the activists.

Mr. Joshua Hoyt, Executive Director of the Chicago-based "all or nothing" Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights was quoted in the New York Times story announcing the end of the initiative thusly: "A cynic would say they are going to say, ‘See, we tried to be nice,’ " he said. " ‘We don’t abuse people. Now we’re going to get tough because they didn’t come forward when we tried to be nice, so now we’re going to be mean.’ "

He was more than a little cynical when, in his nearly impeccable Spanish, told Chicago’s daily Spanish-language newspaper Hoy that, among other things, he considered the government’s offer to let people turn themselves in after a 90-day window in which to settle their affairs, arrange travel and prepare for a new life back home, "the theater of the absurd."

Maybe. Maybe not.

Yes, with all the lefty activists spouting about how the U.S. should "give back Texas," and the salivating-for-warm-bodies union bosses telling the very people who would benefit from this sort of "get out of jail free" card that they’d be fools to go for it, it was an almost sure bet that the whole thing was going to be a flop. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, of the 457,000 "fugitive aliens" who would have been eligible for the program only eight came forward.

And oh, the courage of those eight who broke away from what, to my eyes, looks like a pro-illegal-immigration mafia!

In fact, widespread shoulder shrugging by these "rights groups" accompanied Friday’s announcement of the campaign’s end, along with indignant defenses that they had nothing to do with its failure. "Plenty of said it was a silly idea and not going to work, that the undocumented may be illegal but they are not stupid," Hoyt said.

The gentleman doth protest too much. And he thinks that those of us who aren’t illegal immigrants are too stupid to differentiate between stupidity and honest ignorance on the part of the many illegal immigrants stuck in our no-man’s-land of enticing jobs and miserable laws.

The pro-immigration activists need to start making better decisions for the people they have appointed themselves to protect.

Steering their people away from fulfilling an immigration judge’s order to leave the country – after having gone through all the paperwork and petition processes to stay, and been denied – is simply irresponsible and cruel.

Maybe not as cruel as denying a cancer-ridden illegal immigrant medical care until he dropped dead while in custody, or bamboozling a whole heard of illegal immigrants out of their legal rights in a cow pasture, but the pro-illegal immigration activists’ theater is getting more absurd by the minute.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the "600 Words" & "Pregunta del Dia" columns, and is also the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for the Illinois Student Assistance Commission. Her views and reporting do not necessarily reflect those of ISAC. "600 words" is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Comments

[D Mora]

I disagree with your idea that Operation Scheduled Departure is anything but a publicity ploy on the part of ICE and Homeland Security. The case of Jason Ng (immigrant who died of untreated cancer while in ICE custody) demonstrates that not all of these 457,000 “have gone through all the paperwork and petition processes”. In fact I’d say the current immigration court system offers very little due process. Mr. Ng could have applied for the Scheduled Departure program, except he didn’t even know he had a deportation order against him! Oftentimes persons who do not appear in immigration court are sentenced to deportation, even when it’s the government’s fault. Mr. Ng was sent a letter to appear at a court date for his overstayed visa, to a non-existent address! I think the consistent criminalization of undocumented workers will keep them too afraid to even try to adjust their immigration status unless there is a real offer of amnesty. This applies to people, again like Mr. Ng, that become eligible for a visa (through marriage or other means) but are arrested when they go to their appointments with immigration officials or must serve 5 or 10 years in exile before they can return. Finally, I think some great work was done by pro-immigrant folks such as the immigration lawyer Rosalba Piña, who through a column in Hoy newspaper and the national call-in radio show “Linea Abierta”, explained thoroughly the legal implications of the program, saying, as always, that it may benefit some and harm others.