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Mollie Tibbetts, R.I.P.

Cross-posted to 5 groups.

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The role of immigration policy failures
How responsible is immigration policy for Mollie Tibbetts’s 
murder?

The chief culprit, obviously, is the murderer himself, Mexican 
illegal alien Cristhian Rivera (if that’s even his real name). 
But immigration control is one of the elemental responsibilities 
of the national government, and it failed in this case. As 
Senator Tom Cotton put it: “Mollie would be alive if our 
government had taken immigration enforcement seriously years 
ago.”

But there are different levels of culpability. The government 
bears the greatest share of blame when the authorities have an 
illegal alien in custody, they know he’s deportable, they 
release him anyway, and he goes on to commit more crimes. For 
example, it’s not too much to say that the elected and appointed 
officials of San Francisco were accomplices in the deaths of 
Kate Steinle and the Bologna family because of that city’s 
sanctuary policies.

The least share of responsibility would accrue to our 
immigration policies if an alien managed to infiltrate the 
country undetected and then had no interactions with government 
or any other institutions of our society before committing his 
crime. Given how unserious we are about immigration enforcement, 
our policies would still warrant a share of the blame, but the 
responsibility would be more diffuse and indirect.

The Tibbetts murder falls somewhere in between. Unlike the 
killers of Steinle, the Bolognas, Menachem Stark, Jamiel Shaw 
II, Drew Rosenberg, Grant Ronnebeck, Reginald Destin, and 
others, Tibbetts’s killer was not shielded by a sanctuary 
jurisdiction and is not believed to have been previously 
arrested and released (though we may learn more in the coming 
days).

On the other hand, Tibbetts’s killer is reported to have lived 
in the United States for seven years, from age 17, and worked at 
an Iowa dairy farm for four of those years. He worked on the 
books, having used a stolen identity to get past the Social 
Security–number check (not E-Verify) used by his employer. His 
lawyer said that the killer “diligently filed tax returns 
legally with the IRS.” He had a car registered in someone else’s 
name and managed to drive for years without a license. He had a 
child with a high-school classmate of Tibbetts’s, meaning he was 
presumably listed as the father on the birth certificate.

That’s a lot of interaction with our institutions. That an 
illegal alien can do all that — for years — without raising a 
red flag represents a profound failure of policy. For instance: 
He used someone else’s identity to get the dairy-farm job — was 
the rightful owner of that identity notified when his Social 
Security number was used to check employment eligibility? If I 
make a change online to my bank account, I receive an email 
notifying me of the change so that if it was done improperly I 
can alert the bank. There is no such notification for the use of 
our most important personal identifiers, and the Social Security 
Administration resists the very suggestion of coordination with 
the immigration authorities to identify illegal aliens in the 
work force.

The killer filed tax returns, presumably using the stolen 
identity. Was the victim of this identity theft notified that 
another tax return was being filed in his name? Again, no — the 
IRS refuses cooperation with the Department of Homeland 
Security, even when it knows the filer is an illegal alien (as 
when a filer provides an Individual Taxpayer Identification 
Number on the tax return but has a different, stolen number on 
the W-2 form).

Given that he had a steady, on-the-books job, the killer 
probably had a bank account. Banks have to comply with a variety 
of federal “know your customer” regulations, but verifying the 
authenticity of the killer’s documents (reportedly including an 
out-of-state non-driver ID) apparently was not one of them.

None of these gaps that allowed Mollie Tibbetts’s killer to live 
here illegally for years is the fault of a lazy bureaucrat or an 
inattentive police officer. They are the result of policy 
choices that weaken our immigration security and enable someone 
like the killer to remain here with impunity.

Some fixes:

• I’m not a wall enthusiast, but it remains too easy to 
surreptitiously cross the border with Mexico. Just this week a 
caravan of 128 Mexicans and Central Americans, including young 
children, crossed en masse in Arizona because the border was 
marked only with three-foot-high vehicle barriers designed to 
stop cars but not people.

• Require systematic, built-in, ongoing cooperation between DHS, 
SSA, and IRS. There is no excuse for one hand of the federal 
government not knowing — not being allowed to know — what the 
other is doing.

• Mandate E-Verify for all new hires. To root out identity 
theft, the E-Verify bill in the House would require that people 
be notified when their Social Security number was used for 
employment.

• Require as a condition of receiving federal highway funds that 
all state DMVs participate in E-Verify’s RIDE program, which 
authenticates driver’s licenses or non-driver state IDs 
presented for employment.

As David French noted yesterday, “While no border can be 
perfectly guarded, we can do better. We simply choose not to.” 
That choice probably cost a young girl her life. And that’s our 
fault.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/mollie-tibbetts-
immigration-reform/
                                                                 
          Ť

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Mollie Tibbetts, R.I.P. "But But Sanctuary Cities! Blue Wave! Obama Democrats Murdering Americans!" <criminally-complicit@sfchronicle.com> - 2019-07-14 04:49 +0200

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