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   From: criminally-complicit@sfchronicle.com   
      
   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).   
      
   On the other hand, Tibbetts’s killer is reported to have lived   
   in the United States for seven years, from age 17, and worked at   
   an Iowa dairy farm for four of those years. He worked on the   
   books, having used a stolen identity to get past the Social   
   Security–number check (not E-Verify) used by his employer. His   
   lawyer said that the killer “diligently filed tax returns   
   legally with the IRS.” He had a car registered in someone else’s   
   name and managed to drive for years without a license. He had a   
   child with a high-school classmate of Tibbetts’s, meaning he was   
   presumably listed as the father on the birth certificate.   
      
   That’s a lot of interaction with our institutions. That an   
   illegal alien can do all that — for years — without raising a   
   red flag represents a profound failure of policy. For instance:   
   He used someone else’s identity to get the dairy-farm job — was   
   the rightful owner of that identity notified when his Social   
   Security number was used to check employment eligibility? If I   
   make a change online to my bank account, I receive an email   
   notifying me of the change so that if it was done improperly I   
   can alert the bank. There is no such notification for the use of   
   our most important personal identifiers, and the Social Security   
   Administration resists the very suggestion of coordination with   
   the immigration authorities to identify illegal aliens in the   
   work force.   
      
   The killer filed tax returns, presumably using the stolen   
   identity. Was the victim of this identity theft notified that   
   another tax return was being filed in his name? Again, no — the   
   IRS refuses cooperation with the Department of Homeland   
   Security, even when it knows the filer is an illegal alien (as   
   when a filer provides an Individual Taxpayer Identification   
   Number on the tax return but has a different, stolen number on   
   the W-2 form).   
      
   Given that he had a steady, on-the-books job, the killer   
   probably had a bank account. Banks have to comply with a variety   
   of federal “know your customer” regulations, but verifying the   
   authenticity of the killer’s documents (reportedly including an   
   out-of-state non-driver ID) apparently was not one of them.   
      
   None of these gaps that allowed Mollie Tibbetts’s killer to live   
   here illegally for years is the fault of a lazy bureaucrat or an   
   inattentive police officer. They are the result of policy   
   choices that weaken our immigration security and enable someone   
   like the killer to remain here with impunity.   
      
   Some fixes:   
      
   • I’m not a wall enthusiast, but it remains too easy to   
   surreptitiously cross the border with Mexico. Just this week a   
   caravan of 128 Mexicans and Central Americans, including young   
   children, crossed en masse in Arizona because the border was   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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