Immigration enforcement program to be shut down

The cost is minute so the cost-saving excuse is a transparent lie

The Obama administration is starting to shut down a program that deputized local police officers to act as immigration agents.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have trained local officers around the country to act as their agencies' immigration officers. Working either in jails or in the field, the officers can check the immigration status of suspects and place immigration holds on them.

The program, known as 287(g), reached its peak under President George W. Bush, when 60 local agencies signed contracts with ICE to implement it. But that trend slowed significantly under President Obama— only eight agencies have signed up since he took office, and none has done so since August 2010.

Now, in their proposed budget for the upcoming year, Department of Homeland Security officials say they will not sign new contracts for 287(g) officers working in the field and will terminate the "least productive" of those agreements — saving an estimated $17 million. All the contracts between ICE and local police agencies run for three years, so that portion of the program could be finished by November when the last contract for field officers expires.

In its budget request, DHS said officials instead will focus on expanding Secure Communities, a program that checks the fingerprints of all people booked into local jails against federal immigration databases. The followup work in those cases is done by ICE agents, not local police.

"The Secure Communities screening process is more consistent, efficient and cost-effective in identifying and removing criminal and other priority aliens," the department explained in its budget request.

The program had been criticized by Homeland Security inspector general reports, which found that local officers were not being properly trained and there was not enough oversight to ensure that local agencies weren't using the program to engage in racial profiling.

A study last year by the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, found that immigrants developed "fear and mistrust of authorities" when they realized that local police could act as immigration agents.

The main complaint Friday from groups that oppose 287(g) was that the program isn't being terminated immediately, and that its replacement — Secure Communities — is not much better.

"The 287(g) program has been repeatedly called into question by advocates as well as the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, and should be terminated rather than sustained with taxpayer money," said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. "The Secure Communities program is surrounded by grave concerns about the impact to public safety, community policing and civil rights abuses."

Defenders of the program, such as Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, say Homeland Security is "putting politics ahead of public safety" by cutting back the 287(g) program. She said Secure Communities is helpful but that local officers working in the field are better able to identify illegal immigrants who may not have their fingerprints in federal databases, making it harder to identify them.

She said some agencies such as the Colorado Department of Public Safety have used their 287(g) officers to suppress drug and human smuggling, gang activity and identity theft and said many sheriffs and police chiefs prefer the program to Secure Communities.

"The problem for ICE is that while they may feel that they get political brownie points for this kind of gesture, in reality what the anti-enforcement groups want is for them to end 287(g) and Secure Communities, not curtail (them)," said Vaughan, director of policy studies for the center. "So it's futile — they end up making everyone on both sides angry."

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Mass immigration, and how Labour tried to destroy Britishness

Throughout the tenure of the last Labour government this newspaper, and others — while praising the huge contribution immigrants had made to this country in the past — attacked the laxity of what were supposed to be our border controls.

It was clear the very nature of our society was being changed by a new kind of uncontrolled mass immigration — and without the British people ever having been asked whether they supported the policy.

Labour arrogantly accused its critics of racism — though most of the incomers were white — and of scaremongering. It claimed it had no choice but to open our borders to the nationals of ten mainly ex-Soviet bloc countries which joined the EU in 2004. The truth was that — as other EU countries which restricted immigration from these states proved — it did have a choice.

The cynicism did not end there. Such, Labour claimed, was its commitment to ensuring that only people with a right to be in Britain could come here that in 2008 it set up the UK Border Agency. The truth, unfortunately, was very different.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has announced that the agency is being wound up next month precisely because it is useless, and the officials who ran it — rather like the borders they supposedly policed — were out of control.

Despite the strong threat from international terrorism, the evidence of eastern European criminal gangs infiltrating Britain, and our overburdened public and social services, 500,000 unchecked people were let in to Britain via Eurostar between 2007 and last year, while countless so-called students were just nodded through.

Though Labour clearly left the system in a shambles, it should be noted that it has taken almost two years for this Government to admit the mess our immigration procedures are in, and to do something about it. So Mrs May’s department — and notably the Immigration Minister Damian Green — also have a case to answer.

They seemed unaware that their officials, too, were ordering the relaxation of controls. Yet while the Coalition has been derelict, Labour was downright malign.

The game was given away in 2009 by Andrew Neather, a former Labour Home Office and Downing Street adviser, who revealed that mass immigration was a deliberate policy by the Left to change the social fabric of the country and to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.

This appalling policy was never discussed publicly because Labour strategists feared it would upset the party’s traditional white working-class support. For self-interested political reasons, the public could not possibly be consulted.

Mass immigration gratified the Left in two ways that have inflicted enormous damage on our country. It furthered the bogus notion of multiculturalism — undermining national identity and common values, and preventing the successful integration of immigrant communities into the British cultural mainstream.

Moreover, at a time of growing economic crisis, it added an enormous number of people to Labour’s client state.

Recent immigrants were grateful for their admission to the country, and for the costly safety net of the welfare state that was provided for them: a gratitude that, Labour hoped, would help it garner more votes at elections.

That aside, it is generally accepted that new arrivals to a country — who are often relatively impoverished — are more likely to vote for Leftish governments. So although present ministers have much explaining to do, this cocktail of ideology and blatant gerrymandering is of the Left’s making.

In the interests of creating a society with which Leftist ideologues felt comfortable, and which would help shore up Labour’s vote at elections, the wishes of the vast majority of the British people, and their security, were ridden roughshod over.

The idea of multiculturalism was advanced with varying degrees of stealth over several decades by politicians, civil servants and council officials. Its doctrine was spread in schools and in teacher-training colleges.

Weak as it so often is, the Church of England appeared to welcome it, even though it posed a mortal threat to that institution. The BBC, never to be found wanting when political correctness was required, suppressed any debate about mass immigration, took the tenets of multiculturalism as its gospel and preached it to the nation.

Internationalism is one of the core principles of the Left. It abhors the nation state, which it sees as a foundry of bigotry, racism and aggressive nationalism.

The Left has always understood this: that if you manage to wreck a national culture and a national identity, you shatter the ties of history and nationhood forged over centuries.

Although there used to be patriotic Leftists — and there still are one or two — many in the New Labour project in the Nineties and Noughties were, effectively, self-hating Britons.

They tortured themselves with post-imperial guilt, wanted the country to lose its independence and be ruled by Brussels, and sought to have what a BBC executive called the ‘hideously white’ mainstream culture diluted by ‘diversity’.

This was immensely dangerous. In a world where even Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality Commission, highlights the threat that multiculturalism poses to social cohesion, it is surprising it has taken ministers so long to become alert to this danger.

However one of them, at last, has. Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, has said that the culture of the majority will once more be given pre-eminence in society. This is utterly sensible and, indeed, indispensable if we wish for a coherent and settled society of shared values.

To promote — as opposed to tolerate — the practices of other cultures is to drive people into ghettos. It prevents integration and assimilation and causes strife in society between religious and social groups who find themselves gazing at one another suspiciously across the social divides created by multiculturalism.

Mr Pickles has specified what this assault on multiculturalism will mean. He has said that public bodies’ obsession with translating leaflets into all known languages — and spending a fortune in public money on doing so — should end. Learning English is one of the fundamentals of grasping the British way of life.

He has argued that tolerance of the beliefs of others should not extend to disowning those of the majority.

He deplored the disciplining of Christian workers who wear crucifixes, and the recent decision to ban prayers before the meetings of a town council in Devon. He has called all these issues ‘the politics of division’, and he is right.

In a society that remains more than 90 per cent indigenously British, it is ludicrous to be ashamed of national traditions, rooted in common values from a shared past. And it is entirely right to expect those who come here to accept those values and traditions, and not be made — usually by mischievous, politically-motivated white liberals — to feel hostile towards them.

When even many atheists recognise the central importance of Christianity to the culture and institutions of our country — and I am one of them — it is offensive to the intellect as well as to the spiritual to seek to downgrade or marginalise that faith.

Our society needs an end to mass immigration.

This is not just because the parts of the country where immigrants most wish to settle are overcrowded, and the public services and infrastructure are cracking under the strain, or because we have 2.7 million unemployed.

It is principally because our national identity — founded on Christian values of tolerance and decency, and on a history of which we can be exceptionally proud — has been gravely injured by Britain’s Left-wing enemy within, and needs to recover from its wounds.

The best way to guarantee a harmonious future for all our people, of whatever racial background, is to make that culture strong again, and for us all to embrace it.

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