Mexican Diplomat’s Dishonest Claims About Illegal Alien Law-Breaking Do Not Stand Up to Scrutiny

Mexican diplomats and politicians have a long history of lecturing Americans on illegal immigration, along with attempting to meddle in U.S. politics in ways that favor illegal aliens while undermining our border security and rule of law. The most recent example is Mexico’s consul in Oklahoma City protesting about an Oklahoma state law that aims to act against mass illegal migration at a time when the Biden administration refuses to do its job.

The statute in question is HB 4156, which passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives on April 18 by an overwhelming majority of 77 to 20. The state Senate passed it on April 23. Inspired by anti-illegal-immigration state legislation in Texas, “[t]he measure aims to crack down on illegal immigration in Oklahoma by creating the crime of impermissible occupation and requiring individuals to leave the state within 72 hours of their conviction or release from custody,” as explained by a press release issued by Oklahoma State Senator Casey Murdock. First-time offenders found guilty would be punished with a misdemeanor, a fine of up to $500, a year in jail, or both.

Predictably, the common-sense law has drawn criticism and attacks from pro-illegal-alien activists and lobbyists, and from Mexico’s consul in Oklahoma City, Edurne Pineda. Repeating standard open-borders euphemisms, Mrs. Pineda claimed that “[u]ndocumented migrants” aka people “without papers” are “not criminals, and they do pay taxes. They work really hard” and “are here because they get employed, because your economy needs them.” She concluded that “criminalizing them is not going to solve anything, nor is it fair.”

The vast majority of illegal aliens may not be criminals in the egregious crime context, but some certainly are, as FAIR has conclusively documented. Oklahoma’s southern neighbor, Texas, is one of the few states to specifically maintain a database of crimes committed by illegal aliens, showing that between 2011 and 2024 “303,000 illegal aliens were charged with more than 521,000 criminal offenses,” including homicide, assault, and sex crimes. That dangerous criminals are a minority within the large and growing illegal alien population does not change the fact that such crimes could have been prevented if we had secure borders and our immigration laws were actually enforced.

Illegal aliens are, by definition, law-breakers. They violated our laws by either entering the U.S. unlawfully or overstaying a visa. First-time illegal entry is a misdemeanor and illegal re-entry a federal felony. In addition, many illegal aliens – after illegally sneaking into the U.S. – continue to break the law by working in the underground economy and/or using fraudulent Social Security Numbers [SSNs] and identity papers. In fact, in the recent past, the Social Security Administration estimated that 75 percent of illegal aliens use either forged or stolen SSNs. While the federal government usually looks the other way, when it does pursue the matter the extent of various kinds of fraud committed by illegal aliens becomes apparent. One example was the largest ICE worksite enforcement raid in U.S. history, which occurred at a series of chicken processing plants in Mississippi in 2019. In its wake, 119 illegal aliens were prosecuted, including for not only stealing the SSNs of American citizens but even falsely claiming to be U.S. citizens themselves.

Numerous instances of illegal aliens committing identity fraud exist. Children and Hispanics, or both, are particularly impacted. The mother of a three-year-old boy whose identity was stolen by an illegal alien woman who used it to acquire work and unpaid medical debts expressed “how frightening it is to know that my son’s medical history has been blatantly corrupted, which could have serious, life-threatening impacts on my son’s life and medical care.” In another case, a nine-year-old boy was denied Medicaid because his SSN showed wages being reported. One man was also fired from multiple jobs, got in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service for allegedly unreported income, and was saddled with a criminal record because an illegal alien criminal stole his identity.

The real-life victimization caused by illegal alien identity fraud – as well as other crimes committed by illegal aliens – may not be a “big deal” for Mexican diplomats or the open-borders lobby, but none of us would want it to happen to us or our families and friends. The solutions are clear, but one thing we should definitely not do is heed the self-serving special pleadings of Mexico’s corrupt political elites who – rather than trying to improve their people’s lives – use mass illegal migration to the U.S. as a socio-economic safety valve and source of remittance money.