- NEW YORK (AP) -- The US government
calls them criminal aliens.
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- Many came to the United States as children, often in
the arms of men and women fleeing poverty and war.
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- They went to school here, but usually not for long. They
came of age on city streets from Los Angeles to New York.
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- Eventually, they broke the law.
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- In 1996, US Congress passed a law to banish them from
America for life and directed immigration agents to hunt them down.
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- The biggest dragnet in US history is now well under way.
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- Already, more than 500,000 criminal aliens have been
rounded up and deported, according to government figures. This year, they
are being banished at a rate of one every seven minutes to over 160 countries.
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- Under the 1996 law, every non-citizen sentenced to a
year or more in jail is subject to deportation, even if the sentence is
suspended.
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- As many as 250,000 aliens now serving time in US prisons,
or who are on probation or parole, have been marked for deportation, says
the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.
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- The total number of deportable criminal aliens among
the estimated 11.8 million non-citizens living in the US is unknown.
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- Eighty per cent of the deportees are being sent to seven
Caribbean and Latin American countries - Jamaica, Honduras, El Salvador,
Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic - where jobs are
scarce and police resources are limited.
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- Mexico has absorbed 340,000, says the US Bureau of Immigration
and Customs Enforcement.
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- The culture of drugs and guns which many deportees carry
back to their native lands is wreaking havoc in nations that receive them
in substantial numbers.
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- Deported after serving sentences for their crimes in
America, they are simply set loose upon arrival, usually with little or
no money and with no job prospects.
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- To survive in what for most of them are unfamiliar surroundings,
many turn to crime.
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- 'We're sending back sophisticated criminals to unsophisticated,
unindustrialised societies,' said Mr Al Valdez, an assistant district attorney
and gang expert in Orange County, California.
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- 'They overwhelm the local authorities.'
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- For example, he said, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, one
detective is working on 139 gang homicides.
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- Officials in many of the receiving nations say the criminal
aliens were children when they first came to America and have no real connections
to the countries of their birth.
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- Guyana's Foreign Minister Rudy Insanally said many Guyanese
who immigrate to the US with their children were well educated, yet their
children returned as criminals.
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- 'You are sending us the dregs of your society,' he said,
'and at the same time you are poaching our teachers and nurses.'
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- US Representative Lamar Smith, a primary author of the
1996 law, said until they obtain citizenship, immigrants are guests in
America.
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- 'When they commit a serious crime, they have...forfeited
the right to live among us,' he said.
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- The only problem with the law, he said, is that too many
eventually make their way back through the US' porous borders.
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- In Mexico, criminal deportees tend to remain in border
towns where US immigration agents drop them off by bus.
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- There, they await their chance to slip back into the
US.
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- Copyright @ 2003 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights
reserved.
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- http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/world/story/0,4386,215700,00.html?
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