Sarkar: Criminals Due to Poverty

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America, Criminal Empire of Global Proportions

By Roar Bjonnes (PNA)
Drive-by-shootings, crime ridden neighborhoods, drug overdoses, and rape. These are the gritty ingredients of Hollywood films such as Pulp Fiction and Training Day. Now such staple celluloid crime scenes are being exported for real. How? In the form of criminal aliens. Not in sci-fi episodes of Star Trek and X-Files, but rather from the concrete hoods of Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York City.

Many of these criminal aliens arrived in America as children. They were smuggled here in the arms of parents, uncles and aunts. They fled the rat-infested stench and hopeless poverty of shantytowns in Mexico, Jamaica, or Honduras.

Others escaped wars and political persecution in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. All they wanted was to become part of the American dream. But many of these kids ended up in gangs or started to abuse drugs. Eventually they ended up in prison.

Since 1996, more than 500,000 of these criminals have been rounded up and deported. According to Associated Press writer Randall Richard, “this year they are being banished at a rate of one every seven minutes to more than 160 countries around the world.”

A six month investigation by Richard revealed some shocking realities: Ten-thousand strong, these criminals have made Kingston, Jamaica, into a literal killing field. According to Jamaican police, they have been involved in hundreds of murders.

In Guyana, drive-by-shootings, kidnappings and bank robberies were once only the myth of Hollywood films. Not any more. Today, 600 hard-core deportees plague this country of only 700,000 with violence and crime.

According to Interpol records, murders in Honduras increased from 1,615 in 1995, to 9,241 in 1998. This increase was mainly caused by the first influx of about 7,000 lawless deportees and the guns, drugs, and gang lifestyles they imported from the United States.

However Mexico has absorbed the largest number of deportees, 340,000 according to the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

While the criminal deportees receive free air fare to their home country, the free lunch generally stops at the runway. With no money in their pockets--not even enough for a bus fare—they arrive in their own country, penniless and alien. Often no longer able to speak their native tongue, crime becomes a matter of survival.

Even though most of the aliens have no history of gang activity or violence in the US—indeed, the majority are drug offenders--when they arrive “home,” they inevitably bring violence and other criminal troubles with them.

While this unsettling export commodity is increasing by the thousands each year, the US State Department is reluctant to discuss the foreign policy implications of the deportations.

US Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas and a primary author of this 1996 law, told the Associated Press “that when they commit a serious crime, they have, under our laws, forfeited the right to live among us.” But he admitted there is one problem with the law: too many ultimately sneak back through America’s porous borders.

There are no simple solutions to this serious problem. However, many political and social observers argue that a large percentage of today’s prisoners--including more than 50 percent of the deportees--are drug abusers, and drug abuse is not a serious crime. Therefore, drug abuse should be treated for what it really is: an addiction.

There is further logic to this argument: The US prison environment is an ideal place to learn criminal and violent behavior. Therefore, decriminalize drugs, and there will be fewer prisoners and thus fewer criminals, including criminal deportees, who, literally, are wreaking havoc on a global scale. [END]

Copyright The author 2003