Bill Clinton and Immigration

This morning a colleague and I were discussing Bill Clinton and his remarkable abilities as a politician. I told a story of someone I knew in D.C. who directed Arlington Cemetery and met him once and had a brief two minute conversation with him. The next year walking through a crowd at the annual ceremony he stopped and said hello to my friend and referenced the conversation he had with her the year before. She was dumbfounded and it is mind boggling how intelligent he was and is. It makes me sad, however because a man of such potential in my opinion ruined the democratic party. My colleague mentioned the immigration bill passed under Clinton's watch when Congress passed legislation making "deportation a mandatory penalty for a long list of crimes, including minor, non-violent offenses committed years before the laws went into effect." Ironically a report released today indicates just how bad it has gotten.

Human Rights Watch said in a report today the mandatory deportation of legal immigrants convicted of a crime, even a minor one, has separated an estimated 1.6 million children and adults, including US citizens and lawful permanent residents, from their non-citizen family members, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The Press Release says:

“The laws are not only cruel in their rigidity, they are senseless,” said Alison Parker, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch’s US Program and author of the report. “How do you explain to a child that her father has been sent thousands of miles away and can never come home simply because he forged a check?”

Prior to 1997, immigrants who committed a crime were permitted to go before an immigration judge, who could exercise his or her discretion in imposing penalties. However, the legislation Congress passed in 1996 precluded immigration judges from considering whether deportation would be excessively harsh in light of the immigrants’ family relationships, community ties, US military service records, or the possibility of persecution if returned to their country of origin. The deportation takes place after the non-citizen has completed the terms of the sentence imposed for the crime.

According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data included in the report, 64.6 percent of immigrants deported for crimes in 2005 had been convicted of non-violent offenses, including non-violent theft offenses such as shoplifting. Read the Full Report here.

This happened under Clinton, not Bush. So did the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Welfare Reform, NAFTA, etc. The list goes on. Let us not go back to the Clinton years although they were indisputably better than now. Let us move on to a place where the government supports the people no matter the color of their skin, their gender, sexual orientation and yes their country of origin. Because no human is illegal.