Wingnuts, Judges Struggle to Understand Epidemiology, Due Process

Writing about the Malkin/Savage/Boortz idiocy of accusing undocumented immigrants of spreading swine flu, Josh Holland traces the lineage of the pseudo-scientific health scare back to anti-Semites who blamed the spread of the black plague on European Jews.

Nezua at the Sanctuary points out the resemblance to the fake health fears that fueled anti-Chinese policies in the 19^th Century.  Keith Olbermann and Crooks and Liars also took note.  If this is the depth of policy analysis on offer from the right, Arlen Specter and his 200,000 moderate Pennsylvanians won't be the only ones switching parties.

Contrarian conservative jurist Richard Posner might be one of those ready to jump ship.  He is no fan of the immigration legal system. 

Arbitrariness of outcomes is one reason he routinely slams immigration judges and the BIA in his decisions.  Or rather, it's not that the outcomes are arbitrary, it's that they are as likely to be determined by the gender and location of the judge as by the merits of the case.

A male judge sitting in a Southern court is about twice as likely to reject your asylum plea, according to research from two Georgetown University professors.

"The fact that women are more sympathetic to asylum seekers -- that is certainly a factor, and maybe Southerners don't like foreigners as much," Federal Appellate Judge Richard Posner said with a chuckle. "Maybe people in big cities are more used to having large [less] indigenous populations. Maybe it's different in more homogenous areas of the United States."

. . .

At the immigration judge stage, [the researchers] found judges in Atlanta granted only 12 percent of asylum requests, while judges in New York granted 52 percent and judges in San Francisco granted 54 percent. Even within those jurisdictions, the rulings were all over the map, they said. One New York judge granted asylum in six percent of the cases; another New York judge granted asylum in 91 percent of cases.

Given those stats, it shouldn't come as a surprise that it was a judge in Atlanta who ordered U.S. citizen Mark Daniel Lyttle deported based on little more than ICE's bare assertion that he was a Mexican named Jose Thomas and the fact that his skin was brown.

[Lyttle] was turned over to Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) on October 16, 2008. He claims that a woman who worked for the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told him that he was a Mexican citizen by the name of Jose Thomas (possibly Jose Tomas).

His mother Jeannie Lyttle described the exchange, "She said are you Jose Thomas? And he said, ‘No! That's not my name.' And she said, ‘Yes it is and you're from Mexico.' She insisted that they had the same birthdate and that Mark was lying and he was from Mexico. Everything that happened to Mark was based on the report that she gave that said he was someone else. That's not even his real dad's [last] name... Mark had never spent a day outside the United States in his life."

Jacqueline Stevens has more about the Lyttle family and Mark's travails in Central America.