New Haven wrecks immigration law by program giving IDs to illegals


New Haven’s mayor, John DeStefano Jr., dissembled about it during his unsuccessful campaign for governor last year, but the other day his city’s Board of Aldermen approved a program to issue municipal photo identification cards to illegal aliens so that they might have an easier time in the city.

The rationale for the program is that without forms of official identification, illegal aliens can’t open bank accounts and are forced to carry large amounts of cash, making themselves vulnerable to predators. It is also argued that without official identification the illegals can’t easily avail themselves of public services for which some accountability is required and that illegals will fear to cooperate with police and other officials, even though New Haven’s police long have been ordered to disregard the immigration status of people not suspected of other crimes.

But the city’s ID card program inevitably will create false identifications along with the genuine. For the city will not be requiring birth certificates or other reliable documentation from people who claim to have none. The program’s purpose is to create


anyidentity.

 


u u u


So from now on in New Haven people will be able to be whoever they want to be without having to graduate from Yale or even Southern Connecticut State University. This new service may prove valuable not only to illegal aliens but also to regular citizens throughout the country who are in trouble with the law in their own ways and thus in need of replacement identities.

And of course being an illegal alien is not


supposedto be easy any more than robbing banks is supposed to be easy. Otherwise there would be no immigration laws and no laws against robbing banks. The point of New Haven’s ID card program is precisely to facilitate breaking the law, on the grounds that this is more humane than enforcing it.

 

Most of all the program is politically correct. For anyone who criticizes it is denounced as a bigot, foreclosing argument.

Mayor DeStefano and other advocates of the ID card program argue that it is just a stopgap measure, to help the city deal with its large illegal population until the federal government takes control of immigration. But controlling immigration is the last thing the mayor and other advocates of the program want.

For when, just two days after the city approved the program, federal agents descended on New Haven and arrested 29 people said to be in the country illegally, the mayor and the program’s advocates were outraged. They complained that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was retaliating against the city and that the feds had not given city government notice of the raid.

But the raid was retaliation only insofar as what New Haven had done was provocation, a proclamation that immigration law is to be disregarded. Besides, if the people arrested were indeed in the country illegally, the motive for the raid would make no difference. After all, it is acknowledged that more than a tenth of New Haven’s 125,000 residents are illegals, and its encouragement of them has caused the city to be ridiculed as "New Havana." So to object to such raids is only to object to

anyenforcement of immigration law.

 

As for the feds’ failure to give notice, since New Haven city government’s policy is now to facilitate illegal immigration, notice would have been a breach of security.


u u u


Mayor DeStefano and other advocates of the ID card program note that people coming to the United States illegally are responding to economic incentives. But illegal immigration involves a


rangeof incentives; it is much more than jobs themselves. The unlikelihood of enforcement of immigration law and rude deportation is another incentive. The welcome given by municipal government, like New Haven’s ID cards, is another. So is the qualification of illegals for resident citizen discounts at public colleges, which the General Assembly has just voted for. So is the General Assembly’s defeat of a bill to prohibit municipalities from giving identification cards to illegals.

 

Needless cruelty — like separating parents from children during immigration raids — is one thing. Encouraging illegal immigration as New Haven is doing is something else. It is to advocate

unlimited, uncontrolledimmigration, which means the very dissolution of the nation, its common culture, and law itself. This madness is what political correctness has come to in New Haven, and given the refusal of the Legislature to stop it, it soon may afflict the whole state.

 

 

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less