Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, who only until recently didn't know what a "sanctuary city" is, has a thing for illegal aliens that, well, really isn't compatible with our being a "nation of laws."

By now many of you have heard that  "Church Lady" Elvira Arellano, who has been heralded as the new Rosa Parks by none other than the wife of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, announced on the anniversary of her telling the federal government what it could do with her deportation orders that she plans in September to leave her "sanctuary" in a Methodist church in Chicago to plead her case in Washington, D.C.  Here's what Zorn had to say about the woman who symbolizes contempt for the rule of law, American sovereignty, and a federal government that lacks the guts to enforce its own laws: 

They should let her go to Washington. Then they should let her be. They had their chance. For whatever reason, they passed. Game over. She won. Move on. "Plea to Feds: Do not arrest Elvira Arellano when she leaves her `sanctuary,' " Change of Subject,"  Chicago Tribune, Aug. 15 

Move on?  MOVE ON?  Just where does Zorn (e-mail) think our society should move to after media types like him send the message that if you break the law and are able to avoid punishment, you are home free?  No problemo!  Does Zorn preach this sort of thing to his kids as they sit around the family dinner table? Memo to Eric Zorn:  It is you who should move on. Follow the fine example set by President Richard Milhous Nixon:  Clean out your desk and leave town.

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple claims that the staff of Britain’s Passport Office “consists largely of immigrants, legal and illegal.”[Delusions of Honesty | Tony Blair’s domestic legacy: corruption and the erosion of liberty. , City Journal, Summer 2007]

It sounds like something of this kind is happening in the USCIS offices, according to the Washington Times, which got its hands on an internal report about corruption and crime inside the agency. Here’s my question–if it’s true that “Two District Adjudications Officers are allegedly involved with known (redacted) Islam terrorist members,” doesn’t that suggest that said District Adjudication Officers may be Islamic immigrants themselves? Isn’t this something that the USCIS should consider before giving them these jobs? The answer is no, by the way, because it’s illegal to consider it. Sorry!

There are other kinds of corruption in the article, which names no names, because the people mentioned in the report haven’t been indicted. In an earlier USCIS corruption story, corruption cases involving people who had been charged seemed to involve a disproportionate number of people with Hispanic names.[USATODAY.com - Cash, cars, jewelry Some corruption cases involving immigration officers, September 24, 2006]

U.S. agents accused of aiding Islamist scheme — The Washington Times, America’s Newspaper

By Sara Carter
August 15, 2007

A criminal investigations report says several U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees are accused of aiding Islamic extremists with identification fraud and of exploiting the visa system for personal gain.

The confidential 2006 USCIS report said that despite the severity of the potential security breaches, most are not investigated “due to lack of resources” in the agency’s internal affairs department.

“Two District Adjudications Officers are allegedly involved with known (redacted) Islam terrorist members,” said the internal document obtained by The Washington Times.

The group “was responsible for numerous robberies and used the heist money to fund terrorist activities. The District Adjudications Officers made numerous DHS database queries to track (Alien)-File movement and check on the applicants’ status for (redacted) members and associates.”

Mickey Kaus, who was kind enough to link to my Huckabee roundup, has an extended item on the recent Bush enforcement crackdown–is the Bush administration deliberately doing clumsy enforcement, in a Leninist “the worse, the better” mode, to create sob stories, and cause kindhearted Americans to say, “Aw, go ahead and legalize them,” or is the Bush administration doing clumsy enforcement out of natural incompetence? Kaus’s headline: Bush: You Asked For It, Yahoos! Is Bush trying to “heighten the contradictions”?

Hard to say–while incompetence is always the first choice, especially with the Bush administration, we should never attribute to incompetence what is actually caused by deliberate action. Bush had a plan to make all these illegals legal–it’s called amnesty, and it failed. That’s his excuse, if any, for the miserable lack of enforcement since the year 2000.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff predicted painful economic fallout from the array of immigration enforcement measures the administration unveiled Friday in an attempt to choke off the jobs “magnet” that draws illegal immigrants.

The changes, which would stiffen work-site enforcement, add border agents and increase penalties for rogue employers, could cause havoc in immigrant-dependent industries like agriculture, hospitality and healthcare, Chertoff acknowledged. “There will be some unhappy consequences for the economy out of doing this,” he said in an interview with The Times.

Chertoff said he had little sympathy for businesses that hire illegal workers, saying they should have seen the crackdown coming after the Senate failed to pass immigration reform. “We have been crystal clear about what the consequences would be,” he said.[Immigration rules may hurt economy |Crackdown on employers could cause havoc in agriculture, healthcare and other industries, Chertoff acknowledges. By Nicole Gaouette, Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2007]

Personally, I have no sympathy for people whose business model requires illegal immigration to function, and if Chertoff is hoping that doing the enforcement he was neglecting for years, (because he thought the Congressional fix was in) will cause a backlash, I think he’s wrong. Kaus points out that Rasmussen show 79 percent support for enforcement.

Read the whole thing, there’s more, including a plan to enforce the law without causing dislocation.

My previous item on Huckabee missed this one. This is from 2005, when Mike Huckabee was still governing the unhappy people of Arkansas, who haven’t been lucky in their Governors. When the Federal Government, in a rare instance of getting its act together, managed to arrest a bunch of illegals in a raid, he said that they should have been given six days warning to arrange for childcare. (All the illegals denied having children at home when arrested–apparently some of the were lying.)

“Very little thought was given to what would happen to the children, who are by the way American citizens,” Huckabee said on his monthly radio show. “I hope the next time the feds will operate with a little more common sense.”

He also questioned the idea of immigration enforcement at all:

” We’re now paying money to feed and house them in a jail space that we’re not putting meth [amphetamine] dealers in. “Is a chicken plucker a greater threat than a meth dealer or a terrorist or an armed robber?

” I don’t think so. “Alien roundup provokes Huckabee scolding, BY SETH BLOMELEY, Arkansas-Democrat Gazette, August 4, 2005

And as everybody knows, the “armed robber” and “meth dealer” demographic comes from the chicken plucker population. That is, you have a low-wage population from a high-crime country, you’re going to have more crime.

See my story The Nebraska Bank Killers: Were They Or Weren’t They? where I interviewed the mayor of small town in Nebraska, and he said “Some come up to work, some come to sell drugs.”