The word criminal has a much deeper meaning than merely its denotation. To call someone “a criminal,” rather than simply saying someone has broken the law, is to make a character judgment. For example, I think you would be hard pressed to find a person who would label as “criminals” the GW students who habitually break the law through underaged drinking (or, for that matter, American tourists who overstay their visas and end up being in a country illegally for some time).

The point I was trying to make is that it’s ridiculous and harmful to think of a whole group of 11 million people as criminals. For the most part they lead peaceful, law-abiding lives, and they deserve to live in communities where people aren’t afraid of the police and thus aren’t terrorized by real criminals: drug lords, rapists, murders, pimps, thieves, what have you.

Whether or not undocumented workers pay into social service programs is tricky. A lot of them are employed with fake or stolen social security numbers (yes, fraud and/or identity theft, much like those underage GW students who commit fraud and identity theft with their fake or borrowed or stolen IDs). In these cases they DO pay in, then are unable to collect. But there are two more important points on this:

1) It is a myth that only people who pay in to these programs are eligible for them. For example, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a program that brings social security to the especially poor elderly, the long-term disabled, and the blind, any of whom may or may not have ever paid in. It also often covers these people’s dependents under the age of 18 who may have never worked or paid in. Regular disability SSDI covers individuals who have never worked so long as they became disabled before the age of 22. Social security survivors’ benefits are frequently paid out to individuals who have never worked. Medicare is also available in many cases to those who’ve never worked.

2) Undocumented workers are essential to our economy and to our daily lives. To deny that is unfair or fanciful or both. If you want to do something about illegal immigration, then stop eating fruits and vegetables and meat, stop eating at restaurants, stop staying in hotels, stop hiring construction and landscaping services, stop going to friends’ houses where they have a maid or butler. These people do work that needs to be done, and we all benefit from it (and from lower prices allowed by their lower wages). So, when someone who’s out there picking our oranges falls off a ladder and breaks both his legs (like what happened to my undocumented friend Adam a few years ago), it’s wrong for us to deny that he deserves some sort of social support, because we’ve been benefiting from his labor all along.

Which is why we should provide an easy path to citizenship, or at least legal status, for these workers who we depend on so heavily and why we should focus on finding the pimps, drug traffickers, etc. in a way that makes sense, NOT by randomly asking dark-skinned individuals for their immigration papers.