What do you call a friend who always wants everyone else to "have his back" but never returns the favor — even when it's patently obvious that it's in his best interest to do so? No friend at all, of course.
That's what I thought when I recently read Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca's remarks defending the Secure Communities program against the most recent attack, without the federal government -- which runs the program -- having his back. This attack once again has taken the form of an "analytical" report prepared by an anti-immigration-enforcement special interest group that purports to assess the costs to county taxpayers of participating in the program. (See our three-part critique of a similar analysis, "Secure Communities by the Numbers".)
Secure Communities, a criminal alien biometric identification initiative of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been touted by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Napolitano and ICE Director John Morton as a kind of crown jewel in DHS's efforts to focus its immigration law enforcement efforts away from your run-of-the-mill illegal alien, and toward serious alien criminal offenders.
But where were Napolitano and Morton, or their press flacks, when nuggets from this latest report were released to the media, forcing Baca to respond? Nowhere to be found. If they aren't willing to speak up for their own program, how long can they expect their friends and allies to do so? How long can they expect to maintain these friends and allies?
the Fiscal Cost of Secure Communities:
This isn't the only time they have left their friends in the lurch. They did the same thing with the Williamson County, Tenn., Sheriff's Office in a pending lawsuit.
DHS and ICE leaders need to add some fiber to their diet, but the kind I'm talking about can't be found in the grocery store: it's moral fiber.
What a shame — both because it's dismaying on its face that they are content to sit back and let others take the hits for their program, and because sooner or later it's going to have an adverse impact on what is, truly, an excellent system for ferretting out those aliens in our society who seem determined to flout not only the civil immigration laws, but also the criminal laws.
I would say that it makes you wonder how serious this administration is about immigration law enforcement, but I already know the answer to that, and it's not positive. I'm thinking that the agency should be re-named to Immigration and Customs Un-enforcement (ICU), because under Morton's stewardship -- and ultimately under the direction of Secretary Napolitano and President Obama -- efforts to police unlawful immigration to this country are not only wounded but in critical condition.
But I digress. Getting back to this report that obliged Sheriff Baca to react to the media: "The Cost of Responding to Immigration Detainers in California — Preliminary Findings", prepared by Judith Greene of the Justice Strategies organization of Brooklyn, N.Y. According to the report, it costs Los Angeles County (and, by extrapolation, its taxpayers) $26 million yearly because they have chosen to honor immigration detainers filed as a result of identification of alien criminals when they are booked into the county jail. Of course, the report questions the wisdom of this expenditure.
Sheriff Baca steadfastly declined to provide figures in response to the report or to media inquiries. One may or may not agree with that position, but given the chum-in-the-water frenzy that attended the report's release, one can also understand that he may have wished to choose his own, more measured moment in which to release the relevant figures, and perhaps have expected vocal support and supplementary information from DHS or ICE — a reasonable assumption in nearly any administration except this one, which sees immigration enforcement in nearly the same Manichean terms as Justice Strategies and its allies in the open-borders movement. But the decision to hold back the figures was apparently reversed by litigation to force their release; those figures were used by Justice Strategies to conduct its California jail "costs analysis-lite."
By title, the report claims to assess the cost of examining immigration detainers in the entire state of California, but the alleged costs to the state are almost an afterthought; they are simply extrapolations of the analytic manipulations used to arrive at Los Angeles County's "costs", which take up almost the entirety of the report. In fact, the California part of the analysis consists of a single paragraph entitled "Statewide Estimates" near the end of the report.
Given the ambitious scope captured in the title of their report, it is a surprise they think that they could have done it justice in a mere three-and-a-half pages; this blog, one of two about the report, is nearly as long as the report itself.
But this isn't the only curiosity. I also don't know what is meant by use of the phrase "preliminary findings" in the title. Will it be amended later? Or is the phrase intended as a shield so that, if the analysis doesn't stand up under critical examination, one can simply say, "Oh well, it wasn't final you know." If what is intended by "preliminary findings" is the former — that it will be amended and finalized later — then why announce it with fanfare to the media through press releases and a variety of open-borders and immigrant advocacy websites? And if what is intended is the latter — that it can't withstand critical examination and use of the phrase "preliminary findings" is a hedge — then isn't releasing it the height of irresponsibility?
This leads me to my second concern. Most scientific and scholarly analyses are put right out front by their authors for review by their peers and even (perhaps I should say, "most especially") by their critics. They know that intellectual honesty requires that kind of rigor, and if their findings don't stand up under the light of day, they should go back to the drawing board. Not so this report. I did find it, but it wasn't easy; it's not readily available on the Justice Strategies website, nor on the websites of some of the other open borders advocacy groups that have been hyping it. Ultimately I found it by a link embedded in an article by one of the journalists who covered the release. That kind of "hide-the-pea" approach seems a bit dodgy to me. It's certainly antithetical to modern academic notions about the importance of critical review and examination, especially after ensuring that it gets sensational treatment from a number of media outlets.
Which brings us, finally, to my third concern: the media's willingness to uncritically accept and trumpet a report that is paper-thin and patently summary, almost conclusory, in nature. This wide-eyed innocence is certainly a stark contrast to the journalists I've come into contact with over the years. One gets the sense that it's a convenient mock naiveté that's been used so that they can push a story they don't themselves have any confidence in. That sense is strengthened by the fact that what media reportage has surrounded the story has focused almost exclusively on Los Angeles County, and not on California as a whole, despite the title of the report. I suspect that, like me, the reporters found themselves asking "Where's the beef?" but were willing to suspend their disbelief in favor of sensationalism and, in at least some (if not many) instances, were willing to advance the story because the report conforms to the prism through which they view immigration law enforcement. If the public interest, and not the special interests of this or that group, is truly to be served, then surely the media bears some responsibility.
One likely reason for the urgency of releasing the "study" in a preliminary form, and for flacking it to the news media, is the animated debate in California over the TRUST Act, a dreadful bill just passed by the state legislature that is awaiting action from the governor, who has not said yet if he will sign it or veto it.
I am deeply suspicious of polemics that masquerade as independent, thoughtful scholarly analysis. We've seen that kind of thing before with the Secure Communities program. But it is particularly ironic for an organization that claims on its webpage to be "promoting humane, effective approaches to criminal justice and immigration reform through rigorous analysis, high-quality research, and practical policy solutions."
Next:The Cost of Responding to Faux Analysis, Part 2: Ignoring the Inconvenient Little Truths that Detract from Your Hypothesis