Mollie Tibbetts, R.I.P.

The role of immigration policy failures

How responsible is immigration policy for Mollie Tibbetts’s murder?

The chief culprit, obviously, is the murderer himself, Mexican illegal alien Cristhian Rivera (if that’s even his real name). But immigration control is one of the elemental responsibilities of the national government, and it failed in this case. As Senator Tom Cotton put it: “Mollie would be alive if our government had taken immigration enforcement seriously years ago.”

But there are different levels of culpability. The government bears the greatest share of blame when the authorities have an illegal alien in custody, they know he’s deportable, they release him anyway, and he goes on to commit more crimes. For example, it’s not too much to say that the elected and appointed officials of San Francisco were accomplices in the deaths of Kate Steinle and the Bologna family because of that city’s sanctuary policies.

The least share of responsibility would accrue to our immigration policies if an alien managed to infiltrate the country undetected and then had no interactions with government or any other institutions of our society before committing his crime. Given how unserious we are about immigration enforcement, our policies would still warrant a share of the blame, but the responsibility would be more diffuse and indirect.

The Tibbetts murder falls somewhere in between. Unlike the killers of Steinle, the Bolognas, Menachem Stark, Jamiel Shaw II, Drew Rosenberg, Grant Ronnebeck, Reginald Destin, and others, Tibbetts’s killer was not shielded by a sanctuary jurisdiction and is not believed to have been previously arrested and released (though we may learn more in the coming days).

Read the rest from Mark Krikorian HERE.