I can count upon receiving a handful of e-mails every time an illegal immigrant is involved in a high-profile crime. What do you have to say now, the authors ask. Why don’t you condemn these “illegals?” A few dedicated correspondents write any time an illegal immigrant anywhere in the U.S. is involved in a crime.
We can exchange anecdotes all day long, I told one. To what end? What one sees always depends upon where one looks. I’ll take your drug dealer and raise him five DREAM Act kids. My married, taxpaying janitor to your carousing, tax-evading busboy.
So, police arrest illegal immigrants in connection with the fatal hit-and-run of Jose Medina, a young nightclub valet, and, right on schedule, the messages arrive.
“Why don’t you write about the poor plight of the illegals who KILLED Medina, the LEGAL citizen making an honest living for himself?” says “The Colorado Watchdog.”
My suspicion is that The Colorado Watchdog would not have paid more than a few seconds’ attention to the killing of Medina had not illegal immigrants been involved. And those few seconds would have been spent wondering whether Medina was here illegally because, you know, Hispanic surname, valet.
But I’ll take the bait. If Norma Paola Vera-Nolasco, the alleged driver of the pickup that struck Medina, and Eliu Montes-Garcia, charged as an accessory after the fact, are guilty — and boarding a flight to Mexico doesn’t exactly broadcast innocence — they should serve their time and then be kicked out of this country. If the charges hold, Vera-Nolasco took a life, shattered a family and then tried to run. A killer and a coward.
Any group of people will have among it the criminal, the irresponsible, the plain old dirtbags. It seems obvious to say that they don’t speak for, don’t define, the larger group. But the insidiousness of the illegal immigration debate, as I’ve said before, is the way in which an entire group is held culpable for the actions of a minority. I don’t just mean illegal immigrants as a whole, but Latinos. It’s no surprise that among the correspondents demanding I speak out against illegal immigrants in the Medina killing are Latinos eager to put as much space as possible between us and them. One signed her name: “Formerly Garcia, but hard to be proud of that fact.”
I can’t imagine a situation in which the crimes of a white male would result in a similarly worded display of self-loathing from another, unrelated white male. No. I take that back. You of German, Irish and Italian ancestry might ask your elders about that.
People do the reprehensible every day. A just society judges them by what they have done, not by who they are. “This is not an illegal immigrant issue,” Gabriel Schwartz, the Medina family attorney, told me Wednesday. “This is Nolasco, who happened to be an illegal immigrant. This is Montes-Garcia, who had been deported twice before. But the question the family is asking is, ‘Why did the government fail us?’ ”
That’s a fair question, and it underlies the current tension in immigration law enforcement, one articulated this week in a nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute study.
Do we target only the most dangerous illegal immigrants for deportation or do we cast out whomever we catch, the study asked. Some states have chosen the targeted path. Some the universal. Colorado partners with federal immigration agents to focus on human smugglers. Which approach is the better use of limited resources? Which poses the greater legal, moral, human cost to society? What are the drawbacks to an enforcement- only solution? How do we treat the millions of illegal immigrants living among us? How can we make sure the Montes-Garcias of the world get out and stay out?
It’s easy to condemn the alleged actions of Montes-Garcia and Vera-Nolasco. It is, frankly, as easy to laud the accomplishments of the DREAM Act kids, who are Americans in all but name.
To do both may be a necessary — if futile — provocation to expand one’s view. But it’s also necessary to recognize the loud voices at the extremes for what they are, a distraction, and distractions serve only the status quo.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
