The Tennessee Conservative, an outfit that bills itself as a “news alternative,” really, really hates illegal immigrants and doesn’t think this state does nearly enough to stop them from settling here.
“Illegal aliens,” TTC calls them, “alien” being a term that conjures images of space creatures rather than of fellow human beings. Believe me, this is not by chance.
“It’s time state-level Tennessee Republican leadership stepped up & turned off the MAGNETS drawing illegal aliens to TN: education, employment, welfare & mass transportation,” The Tennessee Conservative tweeted recently. “Will they???”
TTC suspects the answer is no, because to it the party leadership, including Gov. Bill Lee, consists of RINOs: Republicans In Name Only. But I’ve come across something that I suspect The Tennessee Conservative might like a lot.
Legislators in Mississippi, my home state, also are currently in session. And one of them introduced a bill that would create the Mississippi Illegal Alien Bounty Hunter Program.
I’m old enough to remember a TV show from the late 1950s called “Wanted: Dead or Alive” that featured a bounty hunter in the lead role. His name was Josh Randall, and he operated in the 1870s Wild West.
He was played by a pre-megastar Steve McQueen and carried what 6-year-old me considered the coolest sidearm ever devised: a .44-40 caliber Winchester Model 1892 carbine with sawed-off barrel and stock, known as a Mare’s Leg.
The same, but full-length rifle was packed by Lucas McCain in another old western, “The Rifleman.” That show was set in the 1880s so, strictly speaking, neither Josh nor Lucas could have wielded one. And those bullets in Josh’s gun belt? They were actually .45-70 caliber rounds, too big to have fit in his gun, but they looked cooler, so…
Where was I going with that?
Oh yeah, the bounty: Josh typically received $500 for one of his captures; the Mississippi bill sets the figure at $1,000. Not much of an increase, considering 150 years in between. Josh could have bought a steak dinner for 25 cents.
The bill would also create the crime of “illegal trespass by an illegal alien,” consisting of that person being in Mississippi. Illegally. And it established the penalty for that trespass: “life imprisonment without eligibility for probation, parole, conditional release, or release except by act of the Governor or the natural death of such person.”
That’s a tougher penalty than a lot of murder convictions carry in Mississippi or anywhere else in this country. But hey: We need to turn those magnets off, right, TTC? And the bill anticipates another option aside from prison: deportation within 24 hours.
The fellow who introduced the Mississippi bill is Rep. Justin Keen, a freshman Republican (surprise!) whose previous jobs included sheriff’s deputy and SWAT team sniper. Given that second occupation, I guess it’s lucky that he didn’t make dead-or-alive part of the deal.
The bill was apparently pretty much copied from a piece of Missouri legislation this year. It was my intent to read the Mississippi bill carefully and then explain to you what is wrong with it. The problem I ran into was, what is wrong with it is everything. Just for starters, how is a bounty hunter supposed to determine who is or isn’t an “illegal alien?”
So I watched a TV news report of the sponsor, Keen, defending it.
“I think the initial, knee-jerk reaction for a lot of people is they see this and it says ‘illegal alien bounty hunter program’ and they just assume that people are going to run rampant and just start scooping up individuals and start hauling them off,” Keen said.
Instead, he explained, “We want licensed legal people that go through a vetted process and then specifically target those that should not be here that are a detriment to our national safety, our neighborhoods and our schools.”
All this, of course, in service of King Donald’s war on illegal immigrants whose skin tones fall in the darker epidermis registers. Trust me: Irish visitors who overstay their visas are not the target for this kind of legislation.
Keen was optimistic about his bill’s chances. “We’ve had very little opposition, if at all,” he said in the TV interview. “It’s been overwhelmingly supported here at home.”
Not by immigrant advocates.
“It just doesn’t pass muster,” Patricia Ice, an official with the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, told the Mississippi Free Press in an interview. “There are so many things wrong with it.”
And not by the people who would be enforcing it. Mike Morrison, president of the Mississippi Bail Agents Association, told the Mississippi Free Press that “We were not consulted (for this bill). We have not endorsed this. We, like you, saw this in the news and said, ‘Oh God.’”
Oh God, indeed. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed in Mississippi, and the bill died in committee. I hope it never comes up in Tennessee. I’m not sure there are any cooler heads here.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.