(Criminal) Alien Nation: Breaking more laws than one.

A couple of hours after sundown on October 30, 2000, undercover cop Edward M. Toatley sat in his black Toyota 4Runner, waiting to close a drug deal in a run-down neighborhood of Washington, D.C. He had just driven across town with a suspected drug dealer, Kofi Apea Orleans- Lindsay, handed him $3,500, and watched him disappear into a nearby building. "Here he comes," muttered Toatley a few minutes later, when Orleans-Lindsay returned. In a van about a block away, a surveillance team listened in.

The officers then heard Toatley speak his final words: "Is everything all right?" Next they heard the blast of a gunshot, followed by heavy breathing. They raced to the scene, but Orleans-Lindsay eluded them in a wooded area. Toatley, a Maryland state trooper, died two hours later; Orleans-Lindsay dodged the law for two weeks. But the police caught up with him on November 13 in Brooklyn, N.Y., after he'd been featured twice on the television program America's Most Wanted. Now he's facing federal murder charges.

He has also stirred a debate about how this could have happened in the first place: Orleans-Lindsay is a chronic criminal, with two felony convictions over the last three years. What's more, he's an immigrant, from Ghana. He should have come up for deportation proceedings long before he aimed his gun at Toatley. But Orleans-Lindsay slipped through the cracks-and his case shows that those cracks aren't just hairline fractures, but yawning holes. Current deportation laws are occasionally criticized as too harsh, and in some specific cases these criticisms are warranted; but the more important truth is that too often, the laws are not enforced vigorously enough.

Concern about the tie between crime and immigration is nothing new. From the Mafia gangs of the 1920s to the Mariel boatlift of 1980, it is a staple of American history. But it may be based on a misperception. Throughout the 20th century, federal panels and other researchers repeatedly dismissed the connection. "Immigration has not increased the volume of crime to a distinguishable extent, if at all," noted the federal Immigration Commission in 1911, during the height of the Ellis Island influx. "In fact, the figures seem to show a contrary result."

The current evidence suggests that legal immigrants are a bit less prone to criminality than native-born Americans. This conclusion may, in part, be an artifact of lousy recordkeeping, reluctance among immigrants to report crimes to the police, or law enforcement looking the other way. It isn't very easy, after all, to penetrate a crime ring that conducts all its business in Ukrainian or Vietnamese. But it may also be the truth: People willing to transplant themselves across continents and into a new culture probably aren't going to put it all on the line to go shoplifting at Wal-Mart. Some of the evidence suggests that illegal immigrants-setting aside the unlawfulness of their very presence-are slightly more prone to criminality than native- born Americans. That would make intuitive sense, because this population is disproportionately young, unmarried, and male. But, again, the data aren't wholly reliable.

Orleans-Lindsay came to the United States legally, as a child and with his family. Now he is a case study in how the Immigration and Naturalization Service routinely fails to track aliens in the criminal- justice system. Although there is fairly regular contact between federal and state prison authorities and the INS, the INS doesn't often reach down into the thousands of county and local jails across the country. When it does, the results aren't very encouraging: A 1998 report by the General Accounting Office looked at a sample of 20,000 criminal aliens and found that the INS had failed to identify 36 percent of them. "In other words, more than 7,000 serious felons were released back into our communities," says Daniel Sutherland of the Center for Equal Opportunity. "They should have received one-way tickets to their countries of origin."

Orleans-Lindsay had stayed in a Maryland county prison, but the question of his immigration status was an afterthought. He had been arrested several times, received suspended sentences, and violated repeatedly the terms of his probation. Still, the fact that he was an alien didn't come up in court, and it wasn't until last September that the county asked the INS's Baltimore office about Orleans-Lindsay's immigration status-and it wasn't until four days before the Toatley shooting that the appropriate files were actually hauled out of storage.

Preventing crimes such as Orleans-Lindsay's presents a conundrum for conservatives, because it pits crime control against federalism. The most effective way to guarantee that people like Orleans-Lindsay are deported may be to increase the monitoring of county prisons. Yet this knocks against the principle of local control. This tension is not unique to criminal deportations; it affects many other aspects of immigration as well. Some experts believe, for example, that the best way to prevent illegal immigration is to make sure illegal immigrants can't get jobs in the United States. There has been a bipartisan push in Congress to set up a national worker registry that employers would consult before hiring anybody. The idea has a kind of appeal, assuming it would work properly-until it's likened to forcing small-business owners to seek the permission of a federal bureaucrat for each of their employment decisions. How much freedom are we willing to surrender in order to combat this particular problem?

Further complicating the picture are the headline-grabbing cases in which the deportation rules have proven too harsh. The rules were tightened in 1996, and also made retroactive. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parolees recently complained about the consequences: "We have seen cases of applicants who have resided in the United States for 30+ years who many years ago committed a minor crime and are now being threatened with deportation." Last year the INS itself protested that the new rules "went too far." There are dozens of stories of people who have deportation proceedings brought against them because they wrote a few bad checks for small amounts long ago, or accepted a misdemeanor charge in a plea bargain.

Unfortunately, these anecdotes-which make for great newspaper stories full of sympathetic victims-have obscured a more significant problem: the federal government's failure to deport many real criminals. The actual number of criminal deportations has more than doubled since 1993, and yet glaring problems remain. There is even a question as to whether deportation is always the best solution: Offenders, after all, can often return through a porous border, and evade lax enforcement. Rafael Resendez-Ramirez is a case in point. An illegal alien from Mexico, he briefly terrified the country by committing at least eight murders near railways in Illinois, Kentucky, and Texas. The FBI searched for him intensively, and he eventually surrendered himself in 1999. He had been deported three times previously, and had gone back to Mexico voluntarily at least nine times after being caught by the Border Patrol.

Deportation, then, is no panacea; but there are some commonsense solutions to the problem of criminal aliens. Enforcing visa time limits and improving border security would help. It may also make sense to pay particular attention to ethnic networks. Just as Cambodians are celebrated for running most of the doughnut shops in California, Nigerians are well known for perpetrating credit-card fraud. Another promising reform would be to change the way immigrants are selected, by emphasizing education and skills over other criteria. "The very process of acquiring and building skills appeals to a person willing to forgo the short-term gratification crime provides; someone who has taken years to become educated and employable at a high level of responsibility is typically not the sort of person who will see crime as a short-cut to riches," writes Carl Horowitz in a forthcoming Center for Immigration Studies report.

The problem, in the end, may not be that we're failing to deport enough criminal aliens-but that we're importing too many in the first place.