Held to answer

Three men admit they killed three 8-year-old boys and walk free, cheered on by celebrities and well-wishers. President Barack Obama’s administration announces that it will allow illegal immigrants facing deportation the chance to stay here and apply for a work permit.

Two separate events in the same week that carry a similar message: Laws don’t matter, and neither does guilt. It’s enough to give a vigilante ideas.

Instead of celebrating these two events, as some people have, we should consider where we are going.

Two juries convicted Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley in the murder of the three boys found naked and hogtied in a ditch in West Memphis, Ark. Maybe both juries were wrong, but they heard more evidence than Natalie Maines or Eddie Vedder. And the jurors weighed in before the celebrity faction took over, and two films were made about the case.

At their jubilant press conference, the trio looked healthier than they did when they were arrested. Echols complained that his life on Death Row was “hell, actually.”  Yet while imprisoned he managed to write a book and get it published, he married an attractive woman, and he became the ringleader for the West Memphis Three fan club.

Misskelley, who was repeatedly referred to as “retarded” by sympathizers while his case was on appeal, did not look mentally diminished at the press conference. (A prosecutor I know has pointed out that the only time it is politically correct to use the term “retarded” is when you’re trying to drum up sympathy for someone accused of a crime.)

If Echols, Misskelley or Baldwin are truly innocent, then they were falsely convicted; that’s nothing to celebrate. If they are truly guilty, they don’t deserve to be made heroes and lavished with adulation; that’s nothing to celebrate. It might even embolden them to think they can do what they want.

Likewise, illegal immigrants now have reason to believe that U.S. immigration laws will be bent in their favor.

For decades, Republicans and Democrats have ignored illegal immigration for their own self-serving reasons. Republicans know that businesses like the cheap labor that illegal immigrants provide. Democrats hope that if illegal immigrants can become citizens, they will vote Democratic, the party of special-needs groups.

Politicians and media have been unwilling to calculate the true cost of illegal immigration, not just in welfare and education costs but the price that has been paid by America’s working class squeezed out of jobs.

The media perpetuate the myth of Americans who won’t take just any job – without asking if that is true and without considering if a glut of illegal immigrants have devalued former working-class jobs.

American citizens clearly aren’t as choosy as the stereotype would suggest. In Portland, the New Seasons market chain receives 700 applications a week; the clerk who rang me up at the Seven Corners store earlier this summer has a law degree.

The 18-year-old guy who mows lawns in my neighborhood graduated in June with a 3.9 GPA from Grant High School. He has been eagerly looking for any kind of job. He also has a fair complexion, speaks unaccented English and his last name does not suggest a trendy ethnicity. He has no plans, and no money, for college in the fall.

When I was growing up in Southern Oregon, my mother and aunts worked in the seasonal, fruit-packing houses. Ten years ago, I wandered onto the empty main floor of Southern Oregon Sales in Medford, Ore., where maintenance guys were readying the machinery for the start of “packing season.” I walked upstairs and looked around the cafeteria. There were signs in English and Spanish. When my mother worked there, they didn’t need signs in Spanish. Were there not enough women like my mother and aunts to work the packing house?

The day before the Obama administration announced the change in immigration enforcement I met a young man in Portland’s Old Town working as a security guard. He graduated in June with a degree in journalism. We commiserated for a while about the state of American journalism, with all of the layoffs and the shortage of jobs. He loves journalism, but he has set aside that dream and applied to the Portland Police Bureau.

While he’s tackling reality, another journalist – Jose Antonio Vargas – is demanding the right to keep his “American dream” even though he has been in this country illegally since 1993. Vargas is the former Washington Post reporter who earlier this summer detailed his years of deception in a New York Times story. (He prefers to be called “undocumented,” even though by his own admission he deliberately acquired numerous documents under false pretenses, including an Oregon driver’s license, although he never lived here.)

Over the years he obtained a college scholarship that could have gone to an American citizen or a legal immigrant. Trading on his ethnicity in the age of diversity, he obtained internships at The Philadelphia Daily News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post – all could have gone to someone here legally. At one point, Vargas worries “What good was college if I couldn’t pursue the career I wanted?”

I can think of a bigger worry: What kind of a country will America become if laws become meaningless? If being guilty is no worse than being innocent?

– Pamela Fitzsimmons