In his recent blog entry, Matthew Richer links to a January 1 article (Judge dismisses immigrants’ suit, by C. Eugene Emery Jr.) from the Providence Journal about the arrests of 14 illegal aliens after a Rhode Island state trooper stopped their van because of a traffic infraction.

Federal district judge Mary Lisi dismissed the Rhode Island ACLU’s suit over the arrests, saying the trooper’s suspicions were justified. Reporter Emery’s story then quotes a Rhode Island ACLU shyster to the effect that the judge’s ruling “does not explain what suspected criminal activity was involved, since [a] mere presence in the country illegally is not a crime.”

We hear or read this claim about “mere illegal presence” over and over, so it needs to be repeatedly slapped down.

In fact, Title 8, Section 1325a of the U.S. Code says:

§ 1325. Improper entry by alien

(a) Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts
Any alien who

(1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or

(2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or

(3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.

So they can go to the slammer for illegal entry. So it’s a crime!

However, there is a subtlety involved, clarified for me by University of Missouri at Kansas City law professor Kris Kobach: If you enter the country legally but overstay your visa, then your continued presence is a civil violation (simply because it hasn’t been defined as something else, Kobach told me). But if you enter illegally, as more than half of illegal aliens do, then your continuing presence in the U.S. is a continuing crime.

And it’s clearly possible to distinguish between the two cases. If you overstayed, you’d — potentially, at least — be able to produce your expired visa. If you entered illegally, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

In other words, common sense applies — the good guys don’t have to see the border sneaks actually straddling the border to infer that they’re here illegally!

So a correct statement would be that, in some cases, mere illegal presence isn’t a crime. But I’ll bet reporter Emery quoted the ACLU’s shyster accurately and that said shyster didn’t include the important qualifier, since nobody ever seems to.

And as it apparently worked out, these 14 illegally-present people were of the “entry without inspection” variety.

A Rhode Island reader has informed me that our tiniest state has once again beaten back the ACLU.

The facts: Last summer, a state trooper pulled over a van jam packed with some fifteen people. Only a few of them could produce any identification and only one of them could speak English. So the trooper took them into custody and contacted ICE – all of them turned out to be Guatemalan illegals.

Sound reasonable? The ACLU disagreed and sued the Rhode Island State Police alleging that the trooper engaged in racial profiling. But last week, U.S. District Judge Mary Lisi ruled that the trooper had acted appropriately. [Judge dismisses immigrants’ suit< /em>, By C. Eugene Emery Jr., Providence Journal, January 1, 2009]
This is the second time the Ocean State has defeated the ACLU in five months. Last fall, a federal judge denied the ACLU’s attempt to overturn Gov. Don Carcieri’s Executive Order requiring all state agencies and contractors to use E-Verify.

My question: Does anyone think the MSM would have ignored this story had the ACLU won? And how could a state that continues to re-elect Patrick Kennedy otherwise practice so much common sense on immigration?

Hat tip: The Kvetcher for news that a long overdue event is happening…sort of.

For a long-time in the mainstream Jewish community, it seemed only Stephen Steinlight was brave enough to publicly declare it wasn’t in the Jewish community’s interest to support mass immigration from Islamic countries. (In fact, Steinlight went further, questioning the wisdom of accepting mass immigration from Mexico, because he is a fearless and principled man, who treasures his country and his community more than being popular).

Well…it’s over seven years later, and finally the hawkish Left is coming round.

Jewish Unease Towards Mass Immigration From Islamic Countries Spreads Left By DK 2009/01/05

The Kvetcher is reporting signs of deviationism from immigration enthusiasm by a Grandee of the Jewish Establishment

Marty Peretz writes on TNR

“This morning I watched a frightening episode in the public life of America. It was a demonstration by, say, 200 Muslim immigrants in Fort Lauderdale against the Israeli air strikes over Gaza. Now, the first amendment protects such demos, and I would not for a moment want to curb them. But I ask each of you to pay attention to the details of what was being shouted. Especially by the young women screaming, “Jews to the ovens.” No jihad in America, huh? Do we want such immigrants in our country? “

(VDARE.com emphasis.)

The Kvetcher piece has imported TNR’s YouTube item on the demonstration. DK goes on to lament the imperviousness of elements in his community to

little inconveniences like terrorism, harassment, and a loss of power from say, an additional ten million religious Muslims immigrating to the U.S.

and expresses the hope that “getting a nod from a TNR macher” will help persuade centrist Jewish organizations that

the Muslim immigrant masses themselves, well…they’ll always have Paris.
We really don’t need more of this sh**.

(VDARE.com censorship – PB orders.)

It is heartening to see someone appreciate our old friend Steve Steinlight. As I said after the Seattle shooting in 2006:

Given the facts of the Middle East situation, and given the nature of the American involvement, is it wise or prudent to have significant Muslim immigration?

Poor Steve Steinlight tried to raise this question five years ago (triangulating against VDARE.COM in the process). His reward has been obscurity. But it remains a salient and valid question

Unfortunately the Comment threads on both The Kvetcher and the TNR pieces do not show the message is spreading fast.

A point I want to make more clearly is that one major reason that accurately predicting events that people are particularly interested in is so hard is because many of those events are the result of some kind of tournament.

We are fascinated by tournaments. (Just look at all the complaints that tonight’s college football championship game only represents a quasi-tournament rather than an explicit tournament like the NCAA basketball championships).

So many of the things we most want experts to predict for us are explicit tournaments (e.g., the Super Bowl playoffs) that have been carefully designed to create maximum uncertainty in the later, more climactic rounds by matching the best contestants against each other.

For example, in about 90 or 100 tries, a #16 seeded team in the men’s NCAA basketball team has never upset a #1 seeded team in the opening round, so basketball games are actually quite predictable when there is a fair-sized difference in quality between teams as determined by their seasonal performance. But subsequent round games become less predictable as the quality gap narrows, so public interest builds.

Or, the things we are interested in can be semi-explicit tournaments (e.g., the Presidential primary/general election process).

Or, unplanned events take on some of the nature of tournaments.

For example, people in the 19th Century were utterly fascinated by the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815), which determined the basic political arrangements of Europe up through 1914. It was often remarked that the next century of European dominance was determined by the events of a few minutes in the crisis of the battle in which Napoleon’s hitherto-undefeated Imperial Guard nearly broke through the British lines, but were stopped just short. Then, they faltered, broke, and ran.

Waterloo — which Wellington called “a damn nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw” – was seen as evidence against large-scale deterministic theories of history, since so much depended upon something so close.

Contributing to Waterloo’s fame was its numerous tournament-like aspects. For example, Bonaparte was the old champion making a stunning comeback. Wellington was the challenger who had never faced Napoleon before, but had worked his way up to the top by defeating his best marshals.

Finally, much that interests us are forged by vaguely tournament-like processes. For example, stock prices are the result of, in effect, competitions between those who think the price is too low and those who think it is too high.

On the other hand, the kind of phenomena that the social sciences (and much of public policy) are concerned with — crime rates, test scores, and the like — tend not to be very tournament-like at all, and thus tend to be fairly predictable.