Shift work: should policing illegal immigration fall to nurses and teachers?

• Author: McGray, Douglas

Just an hour from San Francisco, on the road to Fresno, a rancher has sheared a giant cross, and the words "Jesus Saves," into a grassy hillside. A little farther south, a National Rifle Association banner billows from a long truck bed, parked by the side of Route 99 until harvest time. Away from California's big cities and the cool Pacific coast lies a flat, fertile landscape that's politically more like Indiana than Marin County. Here, in California's Central Valley, U.S. citizens and illegal, undocumented immigrants have lived in a kind of awkward partnership for decades. As they do business now, the region's lucrative commercial farms (the foundation of an otherwise shaky economy) would shut down without undocumented labor. Yet the cultural impact of that huge undocumented workforce remains a sore point with conservative locals.

Pat Farmer, a police captain, drives his black-and-white squad car across South Fresno, surveying the neighborhood through dark wraparound sunglasses. He cruises past dilapidated bungalows packed with families who overflow into beat-up silver trailers; past a condemned house, behind a broken picket fence, where a Mexican methamphetamine ring used to operate; past a block of Chinatown bars where old, sunburned Mexican men in white cowboy hats linger outside. Most of these residents work hard and don't cause trouble, but many are also here illegally.

Cops like Farmer must strike a delicate balance in a neighborhood like this one, between enforcing the rules and alienating illegal residents (whom they are both legally and morally obligated to protect, and whose cooperation they need to keep the peace). For instance, undocumented workers cannot, by law, have drivers' licenses, and virtually none has insurance. So Fresno's cops spend a great deal of time busting illegal immigrants for traffic violations and impounding their cars. Every farm worker you talk to seems to have had a car impounded for driving without a license, many, more than once, and each incident brings fines and fees that can equal a month's salary--a huge blow. "They're running the gauntlet each time they're out on the road," Farmer says, not unsympathetically. But while many illegal workers feel targeted by traffic cops, it is significant what the police refuse to do: turn them in to federal immigration authorities.

"We don't enforce immigration laws," Farmer tells me firmly. "We care about behavior. It's not where you're from, it's what you're doing" And that is official: local ordinances bar Fresno cops from so much as making small talk about immigration status, a policy police veterans like Farmer strongly support. The department--which faces a growing gang problem, and the state's biggest meth trade, not to mention the usual stream of thefts and assaults every city police department can expect--simply lacks the resources, says Farmer, to deputize its cops as immigration officials. But resources, he explains, are only part of the problem. "Sometimes folks are here illegally, and they're the victim of a crime. We want them to call us," he says. "If someone is a witness, we want them to trust us" Farmer needed that trust just a month earlier, after a shooting outside a nearby convenience store. "There were numerous witnesses," he says, "a lot of folks who were probably illegal. It was critical that they talk to our detectives."

But procedures that make sense to cops on the beat may seem ridiculous to many citizens. Why shouldn't police--or teachers, or emergency workers, for that matter--lend overwhelmed immigration officials a hand? Federal agents arrested more than a million people trying to cross in 2004; still, the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States has grown by 23 percent during the first half of this decade, according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center study, and some half a million more take up residence each year.

Legislators in Washington have been modest about checking illegal immigration since the 1980s (a 1996 reform, which made border crossing more difficult, mostly encouraged undocumented workers to settle here with their families, instead of commuting back and forth for seasonal work). And no wonder: For every Republican agitator who talks about an "invasion" and gripes about pressing "1" for English, there is a big business lobbyist whispering that sub-minimum-wage workers are awfully good for the bottom line. For every liberal pressure group pushing reform on the grounds that illegal immigrants will forever be exploited immigrants, there is another that would prefer to just ease the stigma of "undocumented" status.

Until recently, most Americans lived in communities where few (if any) illegal immigrants settled. Conditions were ideal for a policy of willful inattention. But that's changing, as immigrants--legal and illegal--increasingly settle throughout the country. California's share of the country's estimated 10 million illegal residents is shrinking, as dozens of states from Virginia to Idaho see their undocumented populations explode. In a handful of these new immigration hubs, more than half of the foreign-born population is now undocumented.

Congress and the president have finally begun to talk about overhauling the slow, dysfunctional legal immigration system, which drives honest job seekers underground, and putting enforcement at the border that does more than just divert people into...