Big-City Police Chiefs and the Arizona Law
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
By Heather Mac Donald
National Review Online
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu
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A delegation of big-city police chiefs has announced its opposition to the Arizona immigration law. They claim that SB 1070 will increase crime by intimidating illegal-alien victims and witnesses from cooperating with the police. This standard argument in favor of local sanctuary policies has never been tested empirically by comparing witness involvement in sanctuary and non-sanctuary cities. As Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, head of the Arizona Sheriff’s Association and a supporter of SB 1070, points out, cooperation from illegal aliens is already low.
But the real weakness in the position of the big-city chiefs (who are exquisitely political animals) is the tired nostrum that we need a federal, not a local, solution to illegal immigration. Unless the federal government suddenly starts showing an unprecedented commitment to the issue, you cannot have a federal solution to illegal immigration without also involving local law enforcement. There are simply not enough resources at the federal level to create a meaningful deterrent for intending illegals who have not yet entered the country or a reason for illegal aliens already in the U.S. to return to their home countries.
Only by defining the “solution” to illegal immigration as official federal amnesty is the statement that only the federal government can provide a solution true. Of course, local governments have been creating unofficial amnesties through their sanctuary laws for years. Those don’t seem to have worked out so well.
Heather Mac Donald is a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. She also is a recipient of 2005 Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement.
Heather’s work at City Journal has canvassed a range of topics including homeland security, immigration, policing and “racial” profiling, homelessness and homeless advocacy, educational policy, the New York courts, and business improvement districts. Ms. Mac Donald’s writings have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, Public Interest, and Academic Questions. Her book The Burden of Bad Ideas
—a collection of essays from the pages of City Journal—details the effects of the sixties’ counterculture’s destructive march through America’s institutions. Her second book, Are Cops Racist?
—another City Journal anthology—investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby's harmful effects on black Americans. Her newest book, The Immigration Solution:
A Better Plan Than Today’s, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, chronicles the effects of broken immigration laws and proposes a practical solution to securing the country's porous borders.
“A non-practicing lawyer, Ms. Mac Donald has clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, has been an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City. She has testified before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives; the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims; the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. In 1998, she was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's task force on the City University of New York, thanks in large part to her City Journal essays on education. The New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers Association conferred its Civilian Valor Award on her in 2004. She was awarded the 2008 Integrity in Journalism award from the New York State Shields. She was also the recipient of the 2008 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies. She is also a frequent guest on Fox News, CNN, and other television and radio programs.
Ms. Mac Donald received her B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned her M.A. in English and studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. Her J.D. is from Stanford University Law School.
Heather Mac Donald lives and works in New York City.
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