In 1989, when Teresa Pecovic was five, she was brought to the U.S. by her parents from Montenegro, which was Yugoslavia at the time. She grew up with her family in Detroit where she attended Catholic high school. In 2007, both of Teresa’s brothers were deported back to Montenegro, but were later allowed back into the country because they were married and had children. Early this year, Pecovic was detained by immigration officials. This month, Pecovic was deported to Montenegro. The likelihood of her returning looks less likely than her brothers’. Of all the individuals to fail to report to immigration authorities, was Pecovic really such an immediate threat in need of deportation?
I understand why Pecovic was deported; she failed to report to immigration authorities. But Pecovic had a Social Security number, a driver’s license, a job, filed and paid taxes, was educated in a Catholic high school, grew up in Detroit, was fluent in English, had no criminal record aside from her aforementioned offense, and was born in a country with which the U.S. is at peace.
Instead of driving from one end of the county to the next in search of the lower gas prices, most of us -myself included - would rather just pull into whichever station happened to be cheaper than the station across the street. The hours in the day and the gas in my tank I would lose in my cross-county search would cost me more than I would save at a cheaper gas station. Generalizations are unavoidable when time and resources are scarce.
Generalizations may strike us as unfair, even discriminatory. When police scrutinize black males out after dark more than they do white females out in broad daylight, some will see this as unfair towards black males. It may well be. When politicians set the voting age at 18 instead of 16, some will say this is unfair to 16 and 17 year-olds. It may well be. But as Canadian psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker wrote in his 2002 work “The Blank Slate,” “[d]enying driving […] rights to young teenagers […] is unfair to responsible teens. Be we are not willing to pay […] the costs of classification errors, such as teens wrapping their cars around trees.”
Classification errors, as Pinker calls them, are what one seeks to avoid by using generalizations, be the classification error running out of gas in search of lower price, a carjacker going uncaught, an unqualified politician being elected thanks to enough uninformed teens. In Pecovic's case, the classification error (if there in fact was one) was the deportation of a license-possessing, Catholic-educated, English-speaking, job-holding, tax-paying Detroit-reared daughter of Yugoslav refugees.
According to a report by the Department of State, Europe was the least likely region to see anti-American political violence, seeing only three acts of political violence (two of which occurred in Turkey). According to the report, in 2012, Europe (including Turkey) saw three acts of political violence, Brazil saw five, Afghanistan saw six, and Indonesia saw nine. Montenegro saw none. Could the time and resources which were invested in, detaining and deporting Pecovic have been better spent elsewhere? I think so.