August 2007
Immigrant surge leads U.S. toward half billion people [8/31/07]
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100 Million More: Projecting the Impact of Immigration on the U.S. Population, 2007 to 2060 [8/30/07]
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Drunk driver admits guilt [8/30/07]
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Blacks, women lag behind in building jobs [8/30/07]
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Groups sue to stop NAFTA truck pilot program [8/29/07]
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Victim: Kidnappers unafraid to commit Mexican-style crime in U.S. [8/29/07]
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Defending Our Own Civilization [8/29/07]
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A Ken Burns Guilt Trip at PBS? [8/29/07]
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Iraqi families find refuge in Atlanta [8/28/07]
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Latinos Launch Economic Boycott [8/28/07]
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Drug Cartels Put Hit Squads in Laredo [8/28/07]
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Illegal immigrants choice: work underground or leave [8/27/07]
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Mexico's Plutocracy Thrives on Robber-Baron Concessions [8/27/07]
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Revisiting 'toilet to tap' [8/27/07]
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Migrants fleeing as hiring law nears [8/26/07]
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European Dream Ends with Kidnapping, Prison [8/26/07]
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Immigration-rights support lagging? [8/26/07]
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Social acid has burnt the heart of Britain [8/25/07]
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California without a Mexican [8/25/07]
Shown below is a harvesting machine specific for salad greens designed by another company:
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Hallway rape went unreported by neighbors [8/24/07]
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Scenes from Eurabia: Women Should Know Their Place [8/24/07]
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Victim Faces Down Attacker [8/24/07]
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Latino immigrants moving up, study finds [8/23/07]
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Enforce immigration laws, activist says [8/23/07]
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Family's death puts new focus on those here illegally [8/22/07]
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Eroding sovereignty [8/21/07]
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71% Favor Requiring Foreign Visitors to Carry Universal ID Card [8/21/07]
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The public's not with the pols on illegal aliens [8/21/07]
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Building a Coalition, Forgetting to Rule [8/20/07]
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Immigration activist Arellano arrested [8/19/07]
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Migrant cash is world economic giant [8/19/07]
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Border violence pushes north [8/19/07]
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Marines disarm RPG found in van [8/18/07]
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Immigration authorities conceding crackdown not as tough as expected [8/17/07]
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Relatives in Mexico can only pray for miners [8/16/07]
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Children of color being left behind [8/16/07]
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State budget pinch puts squeeze on kids, families [8/16/07]
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Concerned about survivor in Newark [8/15/07]
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NHS staff told to eat away from desks for Ramadan [8/14/07]
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Ramos pleads guilty to manslaughter charges in Beach [8/14/07]
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Jihad On Our Shores [8/13/07]
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Change of Heart on Immigration? [8/13/07]
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Newt Gingrich Calls for America to Win the War at Home [8/12/07]
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Immigration rules may hurt economy [8/11/07]
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Bush 'committed to illegal Irish' [8/10/07]
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Man Charged in Newark Deaths Pleads Not Guilty [8/10/07]
Below, the four students who were shot: Iofemi Hightower, 20, Dashon Harvey, 20; and Terrance Aeriel, 18, and 19-year-old Natasha Aeriel (bottom right) who was shot but survived.
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Fewer Mexican Immigrants Are Sending Money Back Home, Bank Says [8/9/07]
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Whites Now Minority in 1 in 10 Counties [8/9/07]
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Lou Dobbs transcript [8/8/07]
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Where black and brown collide [8/8/07]
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Terrorists teaming with drug cartels [8/8/07]
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The Downside of Diversity [8/7/07]
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4,000 People a Week Trying to Leave UK [8/6/07]
The CIS paper 100 Million More: Projecting the Impact of Immigration on the U.S. Population, 2007 to 2060 was rolled out with a press conference Thursday morning. For starters, here's a decent article about the information.
Immigrants and their children will account for more than half the country's population growth over the coming half-century, according to a study released Thursday.
Coverage has been mixed in quality, with some reporting focusing on the "100 million" number and connecting it with 2060, e.g. Immigration to add 105 million to U.S. by 2060, study says. In fact, that unpleasant milestone will be reached far earlier according to the study.
The examination of new census figures by the Center for Immigration Studies found U.S. population levels, currently around 300 million, will shoot up to 468 million by 2060. California alone could be home to more than 60 million.
Immigrants - both legal and illegal - as well as their descendants are expected to make up about 105 million, or 63 percent, of the national increase.
"It's important to understand where we're headed in population size and why. The why is largely, but not exclusively, immigration," said Steven Camarota, author of the report.
For a first-person report of the press conference, see Don Collins' account, Wattenberg Wipes Floor With KrikorianFallaciously. A video of the event was shown on C-SPAN earlier today, and it's true that Wattenberg behaved outrageously and tried to hijack the proceedings with his idiot arguments including the tired old BS about restrictionists being racist.
In a low-voiced, avuncular manner, Wattenberg started with an anecdote, saying "Plural anecdotes are data." This should have brought hoots of derision from his press corps audience. But it didnt. Then, he introduced his housekeeper, Iris, who sat directly behind me in the audience. She, Wattenberg reported, had come to America illegally years before. Her present status was unexplained. But then no one asked.
Iris is the mother of three children, presumably born here, making them American citizens (some of us think of them as "Anchor Babies" because they can bring in alien relatives). Iris' husband has left her and she is coping as a single mother. One child, a fifteen year old boy, is now a sophomore in high school and a linebacker on the football team. He is patriotic and will be well educated and will make a great contribution to Americaaccording to his mother's employer, that is.
The Center for Immigration Studies study released today is thorough scholarship about the ugly demographic future facing America because of Washington's unwise immigration policies.
However, the odd title is troublesome because it makes US population growth by 2060 appear to be only 400 million. In fact, the number then will likely be at least 468 million, as noted in the paper.
If immigration continues at current levels, the nations population will increase from 301 million today to 468 million in 2060 a 167 million (56 percent) increase. Immigrants plus their descendents will account for 105 million (63 percent) of the increase.
Keep in mind that even the Census (which always underestimates) has 2043 targeted as the year in which the American odometer will flip over another hundred million to the big 400. That's just 36 years in the future.
However, if US population growth continues at the rate of the 1990s (13.1 percent per decade), the 400 million mark will arrive just 24 years from now in 2030. The mathematics of demography is relentless.
Also, the current population of the United States according to the Census counter is over 302,740,400. It is hard to keep up.
Hector Velazquez-Nava, the drunk-driving illegal alien who killed film director Bob Clark ("A Christmas Story") and his son Ariel, pleaded no contect in court on Wednesday.
Like many other cases of death at the hands of an illegal alien, this tragedy was preventable, but law enforcement dropped the ball. Velazquez-Nava had been convicted in 2005 of a "prostitution-related charge" and was sentenced to probation, with no deportation.
Police records indicated that Velazquez-Nava was driving a GMC Yukon on April 4 along the Pacific Coast Highway with a blood-alcohol level of 0.24 three times the California legal limit when he swerved and crashed into a 1997 Infiniti Q30, driven by Clark. The father and son were pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics, and Velazquez-Nava and his passenger, 29-year-old Lidia Mora, sustained minor injuries.
Under the plea deal, Velasquez-Nava will receive just six years in prison for killing two Americans.
Police said the defendant did not have documentation of legal U.S. residency or a U.S. drivers license, A hold has been placed by immigration authorities, who said that Velazquez-Nava will likely be deported.
The fact that he is the subject of a detainer means that he is deportable, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Once the local law enforcement agencies custodial duties are finished, we will take custody and put him in a formal removal process.
See also Film Director and Son Killed by Drunk Illegal Alien.
According to a Saint Louis University study, hispanics including many illegals are taking jobs from citizen blacks and women.
Hispanics, however, are capturing a greater share of construction employment in most of the 18 metropolitan areas studied, reflecting increased immigration since the 1990s. In Los Angeles, for example, about 41% of the area's workforce is Hispanic, but 67% of construction workers are Hispanic. [...]
For a reminder of how an economy turning rapidly illegal can affect citizens, see Media Prescription for a Carefree Future.
Florence Cox, executive director of Black Contractors United, a Chicago-based professional association, says the demise of vocational schools hurt minorities' prospects in construction, but so has the growing reliance on day workers, many of them undocumented immigrants.
"Everybody loses," she says. "The municipality is not picking up the tax dollars that it should. It deprives the people who are being used and it keeps people ready and willing and able to work from having access to the kind of work they should have access to." [...]
Hispanics make up most of the employment growth in U.S. construction, says Rakesh Kochhar, associate director for research at the Pew Hispanic Center. It comes primarily from newly arrived Mexicans, most of whom are undocumented and who flock to regions such as Atlanta or Charlotte, he said.
Public Citizen, the Teamsters Union and a few other groups have sued to stop the Bush Administration from allowing Mexican trucks to haul freight throughout the United States. In pushing ahead with the pilot program, the administration is disrespecting Congress. which passed a law in May requiring several conditions be met before Mexican trucks would be set loose on US highways.
The suit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, maintains that the Bush administrations pilot program, which authorizes up to 100 carriers based in Mexico to perform long-haul operations within the U.S., violates several key congressional requirements. The groups filed an emergency motion asking the court to delay the pilot program before it goes into effect in a matter of days.
Public Citizen spokesman Robert Shull was interviewed on the John and Ken Show this afternoon, and he had a frightening list of horrors about Mexican trucks and drivers. I took notes:
• Under Mexican law, there is no limit on the number of hours that a professional trucker may drive.
An American truck driver phoned in and said that Mexican drivers are already driving all over the country and they illegally remove HazMat signs from the vehicles until they are near the destination. It's another marker of America turning into the Third World.
• There are essentially no licensing laws in Mexico for truckers.
• The United States does not require that Mexican drivers speak English or understand US traffic laws.
Around 5,000 people are killed annually in crashes involving large trucks, and that's without uninspected Mexican trucks and untrained Mexican drivers. Public safety doesn't matter one iota to Bush and his gang of globalist cronies, and if more profit can be made by endangering innocent citizens like you and me, they are happy to do it. Everyone's safety is at risk from Mexicanized highways.
As I've noted before, the Mexican way of crime, particularly kidnapping, is part of the diversity that Washington has welcomed with its open borders program.
SAN DIEGO - A Mexican businessman testified Tuesday that his Mexican captors boasted they were unafraid to kidnap people in the United States as they tortured him in a suburban home.
See also recent Mexico polling results that show the pervasive fear of crime there (Mexicans Fear Muggers More Than Terrorists).
Eduardo Gonzalez Tostado, 32, haltingly recounted his captors' threats and demands for money in the first hours after a woman lured him to a home in a quiet cul-de-sac the night of June 8 with the promise of sex. Instead, he was jumped, beaten and shot with a stun gun by at least four men who blindfolded and bound him. [...]
"He said it's not the first time, he did it before, he has the balls to do it over here in the U.S., not in Mexico, the kidnapping," Gonzalez said during the second day of preliminary hearings in San Diego Superior Court. [...]
The defendants - four Mexican citizens, one Cuban and one U.S. citizen - could face life in prison without the possibility parole if convicted.
Most people in Mexico express grave concerns about their personal safety, according to a poll by Consulta Mitofsky. 61 per cent of respondents are personally very fearful of being victims of an armed robbery.
In addition, 56 per cent of respondents greatly fear a kidnapping, while 47 per cent are very afraid of becoming victims of a terrorist attack.
Mexico City has become infamous over the past few years for its "express kidnappings"-a form of quick hostage-taking in which victims are forced to vacate their bank accounts from automated tellers at gunpoint.
Jamie Glasov interviews Jihadwatch honcho and author Robert Spencer, whose most recent book is Religion of Peace.
Spencer: For six years now, almost invariably when I would talk about the elements of Islam that jihadists use to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims, people would respond by referring to violence in the Bible and the sins of Christianity. Over time I came to see that the all-pervasive sense of guilt and self-hatred that blankets the West in this age of the dominance of multiculturalism is the single greatest obstacle keeping us from meeting the ideological challenge that the jihadists present. Insofar as Westerners are ashamed of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and so many are, they will not defend it.
This is not a matter of faith. Whether or not one is Jewish or Christian, Judeo-Christian civilization has given the world numerous ideas of human rights that the jihadists directly challenge: freedom of conscience, the equality of dignity of men and women, equality of rights before the law for all, and more. Islamic Sharia offers a radically different model of society. We in the West need to recognize this and stand up for our own civilization, culture, and heritage. If we are too paralyzed by guilt and consumed with self-hatred to defend our own civilization, we certainly won't keep it.
Several months ago, hispanics got offended and angry when they learned that Ken Burns' upcoming PBS epic about WWII did not include special treatment of latino veterans. He quickly caved to their demands (this is PBS, remember) and assembled additional material to describe the hispanic "experience" in the war.
This situation is but another skirmish in the long-term war of Mexicans to exaggerate their importantance to American history and pave the way for a bilingual, hispanicized America. (See author Jorge Ramos' brag that "Latinos are not only the largest minority right now, but eventually we will be the majority in the United States, and the process is well underway.")
Call it a guilt trip or a cultural awakening, but some Latino filmmakers feel that the controversy over Ken Burns' upcoming World War II documentary has unexpectedly opened doors for their work at PBS.
In fact, the number of Mexican Americans who served in the armed services was 300,000, not a large number when you consider that 16 million went to war. Therefore, the percentage of Mexican Americans in uniform was less than 2 (.018 to be precise).
The maker of "Brown Is the New Green: George Lopez and the American Dream," which airs Sept. 12, said he believed PBS was anxious to air his film before Burns' because "they had egg on their face." [Ed: Actually, the date falls within the Hispanic Heritage Month of programming.]
The Lopez film is one of five Latino projects that PBS is airing in the weeks before the start of Burns' "The War" on Sept. 23. Advocates were angered that the Burns epic did not feature the contributions of Latino soldiers, and their protest this spring forced PBS' best-known documentarian to add such material to the film.
Patriots honor all who served, but the hispanic presence in the American forces during WWII was not substantial by any measure.
The continuing complaining of the hispanics in this matter is very unseemly and only serves to show that they apparently feel they are a special class, separate from other veterans. There is no similar demand from other ethnic veterans groups that they receive unique recognition from Burns.
Sixty Minutes has been pounding the drums for America to accept many thousands of Iraqi refugees as part of our national responsibility for botching up their country. The possibility that terrorists could be brought in through this doorway are very real. At the top of the list for refugee status are Iraqis who have been employed by Americans: it's quite possible that sleeper agents have already been planted in those positions for later use.
In July, however, came an urgent plea from the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker to at least help Iraqis who are helping Americans. Crocker asked that immigrant visas be issued to every Iraqi employed by the U.S. government in Iraq to prevent them from fleeing as refugees. As many as 110,000 Iraqis may be targeted as American collaborators.
Apparently iraqi refugees are beginning to arrive. Here's a warm and cuddly story about a new family being welcomed to Atlanta.
The eight-member family - a couple, their five children and a grandmother - fled Baghdad for Turkey nearly two years ago, said Ellen Beattie, regional director in Atlanta for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian group assisting incoming refugees. The father, an electrician who worked with U.S. contractors in Iraq, made the decision to leave after his brother, who transported water for U.S. and coalition troops, was murdered. The Christian family also felt the sting of religious persecution in the largely Muslim country, Beattie said. [...]
Many of the initial refugees probably will be Christians, since they genuinely are endangered and likely won't be inclined toward explosives. But there are certainly many Muslims in the pipeline, and we have had no assurances from the government that adequate screening measures have been taken to protect the country.
This year, the U.S. State Department agreed to accept 7,000 Iraqis, although fewer than 200 have been admitted so far. (By contrast, 18,000 Iraqi refugees have arrived in Sweden since 2006 .)
Keep in mind that a previous war brought nearly 700,000 Vietnamese refugees, a group which has grown into well over a million.
See also Unsettling Iraqis from Investors Business Daily, which is alarmed by misplaced generosity in Washington.
Co-sponsored by Chris Shays, R-Conn., and Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., HR 2265 would grant "special immigrant status" to at least 20,000 Iraqi "refugees" in the first year alone (and a total of 60,000 through 2011). That special status covers visas, passports, permanent residency, entitlements, resettlement assistance and even housing on U.S. military bases. [...]
Sorry, that's not exactly comforting. The FBI doesn't have the resources to investigate all the Middle Easterners already in this country, let alone a flood of new immigrants from a Muslim country where polls show the majority of its citizens support attacks on U.S. troops. [...]
Nonetheless, the bill could become law. It has a companion (S. 1651) in the Senate sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. And both are being pushed hard by GOP powerbroker Grover Norquist, a close ally of Karl Rove and founder of the Islamic Institute, a Washington lobby group that has fought for looser Arab immigration.
In Prince William County, Virginia, the lawbreaking foreigner community is all miffed that the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution to deny many public services to illegal aliens.
On the first day of a one-week boycott called by immigrant groups in Prince William County, both of these county residents said they were shopping elsewhere to send a message that Latino immigrants are an important, unified economic force and can't be intimidated.
Hispanics "built this country"? Where do they get these ridiculous ideas? Americans built this country and Mexicans are merely recent brigands here to feed at the trough.
"They used us Hispanics to build this county, and now they are trying to kick us out. It's not fair," fumed Padilla, 28, a legal immigrant from El Salvador. On the window of his restaurant, La Laguna, was a large green poster that read, "We Are A Pro-Immigrant Business. Rescind the Prince William County Anti-Immigrant Resolution."
If the hispanics only "came here to work" as they claim, then losing free social services and benefits wouldn't matter. In fact, illegal foreigners depend on taxpayer-funded goodies like free healthcare to augment their low-skilled wages because the invaders are here for the money, period. We citizens are forced against our will to subsidize the "cheap" labor so desired by powerful business interests.
Mexican cartels are moving north, more every year, and are bringing their narco-violence with them. With billions of dollars to be made, little details like a national border mean nothing.
Mexican drug lords locked in a bloody fight for control of a pipeline that runs from Mexico to Dallas and up through middle America have brazenly stationed hit squads and reconnaissance teams in Laredo.
See also the video clip about worsening crime in Laredo. Referring to narco-violence, Sheriff Rick Flores says, "Mexico is going to be the next Colombia."
In the past two years, rival cartels have killed at least seven people in Laredo, including a victim stalked and killed near his job site and a man gunned down in the parking lot of a popular restaurant, U.S. authorities say. Nearly all the victims were mixed up in the drug trade themselves.
"That river does not stop these people," said Webb County Sheriff's Maj. Doyle Holdridge, who for the past 30 years has been working drug cases along the Rio Grande, which separates Laredo from its Mexican sister city, Nuevo Laredo. The cities have a combined population of half a million.
Boo hooey alert: illegal alien families will suffer if America ever gets around to enforcing is employment laws. Where have we heard that before?
Jorge S., an East Bay grocery store clerk, worries about his family's future if the Bush administration follows through with its declaration this month to crack down on employers who fail to verify the legal status of their workers.
Articles of this ilk never mention the millions of citiens who are unemployed or underemployed. If there was any sort of worker shortage, then wages would be increasing, and they are not.
"Everyone at the store is worried about it. We're all in the same boat," said Jorge, 53, who invented a Social Security number to get hired eight years ago and would not give his last name for fear of losing his job. "I'd be in a very difficult situation if I lose my job."
In other illegal employment news, Rep Lamar Smith had to send a letter to the editor to refute an AP story that crops are rotting in the fields for lack of pickers: Texas congressman disputes story.
The writer stated "fields are empty at harvest time as workplace raids become common." The opposite is true -- crops are being harvested and workplace raids are not common, though American workers would benefit if they were.
In addition, despite the dire predictions of crops rotting in the fields due of lack of farm labor, even the U.S. Department of Agriculture can't point to any confirmed reports of such crop losses.
The New York Times ran an opinion piece today with some interesting observations on Mexican wealth and inequality, a major theme in this online neighborhood.
Billionaire Carlos Slim recently surpassed Bill Gates as the richest man on earth, and Mexico's oligarchic economic system figures strongly in how Slim accumulated that wealth ($59 billion). But a simple dollar comparison leaves out the true scope of Slim's vast fortune...
To put it in perspective, Mr. Slim's treasure is equivalent to slightly less than 7 percent of Mexico's total production of goods and services - one out of every 14 dollars' worth of stuff made by all the people in the country.
Mexico scholar George Grayson criticized the corrupt economic system that allowed Slim's ascent to Numero Uno:
The income distribution in the United States may be fast approaching Mexican levels of inequality, but in relative terms, Mr. Gates isn't even in Mr. Slim's league. His $58 billion fortune is less than 0.5 percent of the nation's G.D.P.
Indeed, by this measure, Mr. Slim is richer even than the robber barons of the gilded age. John D. Rockefeller, America's richest man, was worth the equivalent of about 1.5 percent of the nation's G.D.P.
[Slimlandia is] not a reverential term. Many Mexicans hoped privatization, which began in the early 1990s, would create competition and drive prices down drastically. That hasn't happened. "Slim is one of a dozen fat cats in Mexico who impede that country's growth because they run monopolies or oligopolies," says Grayson. "The Mexican economy is highly inefficient, and it is losing its competitive standing vis-ˆ-vis other countries because of people like Slim." [...]
An economy built on oligarchy has a lot of similarities to the growing corporatism replacing representative government in this country. Is that aspect of Mexican society more appealing to Mexichurian George Bush than even the endless supply of inexpensive labor? Bush's plans for a North American Union may have more to do with importing Mexican business culture than cheap workers.
"He made his billions because of an extremely close and advantageous relationship with the Salinas government," says professor Grayson of William & Mary.
[Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world, CNN Money 8/20/07]
California has a water problem -- not enough of it for exploding population growth, fueled by excessive legal and illegal immigration. As a result, Los Angeles is facing the ultimate in recycled water, namely "Indirect potable reuse" also known as "toilet to tap." The author of this piece believes it is a fine idea and makes no mention of the overpopulation cause.
Los Angeles' water supplies are getting lower. The once-desolate Owens River Valley burst into flower this year because the Department of Water and Power brought less water to the city. Other states are increasing the amount of water they are able to tap from the Colorado River, L.A.'s primary source of water. And this has been the city's driest year on record. In response, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has called for greater water conservation to help meet future needs.
Given this scary situation, the DWP earlier this month asked a handful of private contractors how to promote "recycled water planning" and, in the words of DWP representative Carol Tucker, "to explore all options with our stakeholders for recycling water." Tucker insisted that turning sewage into tap water was not part of the plan, and other DWP officials have echoed her message.
But the water agency's request for ideas about recycling was explicit. It spoke of "indirect potable reuse," which means restocking groundwater with purified wastewater.
Can you say "attrition"? How about "self-deport"? Perhaps even "law enforcement"?
The countdown for Arizona's tougher hiring law is being felt by foreigners who belong elsewhere.
The state's strong economy has been a magnet for illegal immigrants for years. But a growing number are pulling up stakes out of fear they will be jobless come Jan. 1, when the law takes effect. The departures are drawing cheers from immigration hard-liners and alarm from business owners already seeing a drop in sales.
Much of the article is filled with wails of doom from Chamber of Commerce types. The Udall Center says that the state's economic output would fall by $29 billion if illegal workers were removed, as if no one else will come forward to fill those jobs.
It's impossible to count how many undocumented immigrants have fled because of the new law. But based on interviews with undocumented immigrants, immigrant advocates, community leaders and real-estate agents, at least several hundred have left since Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano signed the bill on July 2. There are an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona.
Some are moving to other states, where they think they will have an easier time getting jobs. Others are returning to Mexico, selling their effects and putting their houses on the market.
In fact, teenagers, minority citizens and people over 50 might have more success finding employment in such an environment of lawfulness. Imagine that.
The German magazine Der Spiegel tells a story of failed assimilation ending up in a crime that could easily have caused the death of young man, but the perps only got as far as kidnapping because the victim escaped.
The intended abductee was Sascha, a 19-year-old student whose affront was being a German dating the daughter of Turkish immigrants. The father, mother and son conspired to kidnap the young man, and they did manage to snatch him off the street into a car. There is no clear statement of their ultimate plan, although there were threats of murder.
The family's honor and reputation were at stake. People in the Turkish community had already started talking about Muharrem. Turan says that in many Turkish families things can only go well as long as German values and Turkish values don't collide. It's a common problem in the community, she says.
So the kidnapping father had immigrated to Germany in 1973, yet apparently did not grasp that family-based felonies are still considered crimes -- really? That's hard to believe.
According to Turan, her father only realized that he had done something wrong when he was sitting in the courtroom, listening to what people had to say, when the prosecutor argued that he should be sentenced to seven years in prison without the possibility of parole, and when the judge rendered his verdict.
At any rate, all of the kidnappers were sentenced to prison sentences.
For all the squawking in Los Angeles about the deportation of convicted felon Elvira Arellano, Saturday's street rally in support of her had only a few hundred participants. If the brain trust at La Raza thought that the church squatter was going to be a big draw as a sympathetic image of alien sob stories, then maybe they should go back to the drawing board.
It's more likely that the huge crowds will not be back until Mexicans and Aztlan fellow-travelers can demand goodies directly for themselves, like amnesty. Standing up for a symbol many be too much of a stretch for illiterate peasants.
A crowd estimated at only 500 to 1,000 people, carrying large photographs of Arellano and her 8-year-old son, Saul, and signs reading "I Am Elvira" and "Keep Families Together," marched from Broadway and Olympic Boulevard to a rally at the U.S. Federal Building on Saturday afternoon.
As we can see from the photo below, the commies at ANSWER were major organizers behind the march.
March organizers had anticipated a stronger response after Arellano's arrest and deportation. She chose to leave her U.S.-born son behind - putting him in the custody of a friend in Chicago where he is expected to enroll in school.
To the credit of the article cited here, the concerns of local black citizens were used to balance the far left rantings of open-borders extremists. In particular, veterans of the civil rights movement don't like the unworthy demands of illegal foreigners being equated to their struggle:
Some African-Americans in Los Angeles have also taken umbrage with the immigrant-rights groups' attempts to liken Arellano to [Rosa] Parks, a pioneer of the black civil-rights movement for refusing to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Ala. bus in 1955, sparking a historic bus boycott.
"(Arellano) was intoxicated with a false sense of power," said civil-rights activist Ted Hayes. "How dare they flaunt themselves like that in the face of the American people?"
John O'Sullivan is preparing for a regular trip back to his native Britain and uses the occasion to analyze how the place has become a "fractured, distrustful and disorderly society."
One symptom is worsening crime, particularly the murders of children by criminal gangs, noted by CBS News in Wave Of Teen Murders Hits Britain, although the story has no mention of the immigration connection. A story from the Daily Mail is not so shy about connecting the dots among multicultural immmigration, decreased personal safety and the desire to flee: Record numbers leaving Britain for new life abroad - as immigration to UK soars.
O'Sullivan lists three corrosive factors that he believes are causing the social breakdown of Great Britain:
It didn't happen overnight. Breaking down a strong culture of civic self-control takes time and several social acids.
interesting that two out of three social acids are connected to unwise immigration policy. Read the whole thing, as they say.
The first such acid was the cultural liberalism generally associated with the 1960s: the attempt to free people from irksome traditional moral customs and the laws that reflected them. [...]
Combined with a welfare state that picked up the tab, however, cultural liberalism promoted social irresponsibility - more voluntary workless, more divorces, children with fewer opportunities because they live in homes without two parents, a growing underclass, a society that is cruder, more disordered, less gentle.
Less neighbourly, too, because of the second social acid: the ethnic and religious diversity introduced by mass immigration.
You may be surprised to learn that "diversity", which is usually discussed as an undeniable social good, has any drawbacks. But Robert Puttnam, an American social scientist, has established from a major survey (and to his own distress) that ethnic diversity makes people less trustful of each other.
Worse, people feel this distrust towards those from their own ethnic group as well as towards "the Other". Diversity, it transpires, is a recipe for bad neighbourliness.
This growing distrust might have been lessened, even overcome, by an effective policy of American-style "assimilation" - that is, getting everyone to think of themselves as "British first" and to embrace a common British history and culture. That policy worked well in the US until the 1970s.
Instead government promoted the third acid: a "multiculturalism" that encourages minorities to retain their culture and identity. Thus, our rulers set out, eager and well-intentioned, to maximise the differences and therefore the tensions inherent in diversity.
Tamar Jacoby is such an obnoxious robo-cheerleader for the big business open-borders side that she does our work for us. (See Our Friends Tamar and MEChA.) Her screed in today's LA Times is another example.
The only problem: Much as we need better enforcement, on the border and in the workplace, that's only half the answer. And without the other half -- better, more realistic immigration laws -- it will wreak havoc.
Tamar neglects to mention that agriculture can avail itself of unlimited H2A visas to hire foreign pickers. But the truth is too tiresome when there's an extra nickel to be made by screwing the American public.
We've already had a preview of the likely consequences, and not just at the movies. For several years now, tougher border enforcement, plus competition from higher-paying hospitality and construction jobs, have deprived farmers in California and other states of the foreign workers they need to plant and harvest their crops.
The crisis peaks every year in August and September, and the photos start showing up in the newspapers: piles of rotting pears, strawberry plants choked by weeds, unpicked cucumbers grown to monstrous sizes and melons oozing in the fields.
She also makes the same arguments as slave owners in the 1850s, bracero employers in the 1960s and mill owners in the early 20th century dependent on child labor -- namely that their industries would collapse without exploitable workers.
If millions of Mexicans weren't volunteering to work for coolie wages, then agribusiness would automate its production, just like every other modern industry. As a result of America's dependence on foreigners to harvest our food, this country has fallen behind in agri-tech, and other countries are in terms of creating machines to do the drudge work like mowing,
To get an idea of what's possible, check out some recent harvesting technology. A company in San Diego, Vision Robotics, sees the mechanized future and is designing for it.
Remember that in 2004, a low-skilled immigrant household cost the taxpayer around $19,588 annually, according to a study by Heritage scholar Robert Rector. That cheap labor gets more expensive all the time.
See also Blueberry farms turn to mechanical harvesters.
The talking heads on Fox were yammering away on this case a little while ago and wringing their hands about the failure of people to even report a crime in progress. However, no one could bother to mention the cultural aspect of the crime, that the apartment building was populated by Somali immigrants, a group known for their disrespect of women.
The Pioneer Press report didn't mention the diversity of the characters at all. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune did better:
Though the building's resident manager wouldn't provide demographic breakdowns, the tenant list in the entryway is dominated by Somali surnames -- a segment of St. Paul's population that police say is often reluctant to report crimes.
Naturally, accused perp Rage Ibraham insists he is innocent and the incident was a "misunderstanding." Right, Somali males misunderstand the position of women in this country, specifically that gender equality is the law of the land.
That reluctance is of such concern to police officials that Chief John Harrington has been meeting monthly with Somali elders to encourage community cooperation in criminal matters, police spokesman Tom Walsh said Thursday.
Through Wednesday night, the building in the 300 block of Winthrop Street had generated 63 police incident reports this year, with 19 involving various types of disturbances and 11 being 911 hangup calls.
American women should pay attention to the erosion of rights, safety and social standing that have occurred in Europe because of Muslim immigration.
"Women are simply not accepted by the Muslim community," says Mohammed. "So women had also better not do this work." Mohammed is my colleague social worker [integration civil servant] in Antwerp's immigrant quarters. He looks at me gravely. "That is just the way it is, and that is why I prefer not to work with a woman, that simply doesn't work." He is complaining about another colleague, a Flemish woman who is his superior.
Reading further in this article, we find that the female superior was not supported by management, which was clearly intimidated.
Mohammed does not think that this mentality about women and work is wrong. In fact, whoever questions this attitude is wrong because it is his culture and belief, which is why he accepts it, he "understands" it and we, Flemings, do not. Consequently we must accept it, until we "understand" as well.
There are a lot of crime stories every day, where citizens are murdered, raped, robbed, killed in drunk-driving crashes at the hand of illegal aliens. Some get more attention than others, and that's just human nature and the media. But of course every life is precious, and we shouldn't overlook cases that get less attention but are deeply shocking and repugnant.
The brutal attack and rape of a wheelchair-bound elderly woman certainly counts as one of those. She survived to see him sentenced though.
Resolute in her desire for justice, the 73-year-old woman steered her motorized wheelchair into the Hartford courtroom Wednesday to confront the man who broke into her East Hartford apartment while she was sleeping and raped her.
The victim's daughter read a statement written by her mother:
Fidgeting with the plastic tube from her portable oxygen tank, the woman, identified only as JD, took a breath and stared at Alejandro Cuy Xum as he was brought into Superior Court in Hartford for his sentencing.
The last time JD saw Cuy Xum, now a 23-year-old, was after midnight July 17, 2005, when he broke into the Willow Arms Apartments for the elderly on Main Street.
"I've lost the ability to live in my own home. I was living in a senior apartment complex when I was attacked. I no longer have the strength to live on my own. That part of my life ended.
It wasn't enough to rob, rape and beat up an old lady unable to defend herself: the Guatemalan killed her dog as well.
"I've lost most social contacts. My lifelong best friend, Dot, and I lived at Willow Arms Senior Housing along with other friends and building neighbors. Dot and I would see one another several times a week. I seldom see them anymore. That part of my life ended. ...
"I've lost full use of my arm. ...
"I've lost the companionship of my little dog. Peaches was my constant companion."
The opposite of the immigration sob story is the cheerful immigrant success story. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Except when important factors are left out, like whether American workers were displaced to make way for cheaper exploitable foreigners who are illegally employed.
Latino immigrants have steadily moved out of jobs paying the lowest wages and into middle-income employment in the past decade, helped by the boom in the construction industry, which hires millions of foreign-born workers, according to a study released this week by the Pew Hispanic Center. [...]
For the other side, see the experience of an American contractor in losing his livelihood: Media Prescription for a Carefree Future.
The study counts legal and illegal immigrants and does not address American-born workers displaced by immigrants. There is debate among economists over how much immigrants compete with native-born workers.
"Foreign-born Latino workers are making progress, and if that appears contrary to our perception, it really has to do with the sheer growth in their numbers," Kochhar said. "Their numbers are so large that we are distracted. In relative terms, they are progressing out of the lowest-wage work and progressing toward middle-wage work."
Redwood City is located between San Francisco and San Jose on the peninsula. Average folks there are beginning to band together as Minutemen because they don't want to live in Mexifonia and be overwhelmed by crime, bilingualism and failing schools.
But [resident Art Bush] hates that his neighborhood has been sliding downhill. At least, that's the way he sees it. The crime, he says, is high; the test scores at the local schools, he says, are low; and neighborhood homes,once proud, have turned "Third World" shabby, he says, or are otherwise barely visible, hidden behind thick wrought-iron gates popular among Latino immigrants.
Bush blames the influx of people from across the border, and he says hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Redwood City agree.
That's why, last winter, Bush decided to take a stand: He began to assemble the Redwood City Coalition for Immigration Control. The group, says Bush, is an "offshoot" of the Golden Gate Minutemen, a Northern California outpost of the anti-illegal-immigration activists whose tactics include patrolling the border, vigilante-style, in search of those aiming to cross illegally.
The coalition functions as a chapter of the Golden Gate Minutemen, says Charles Birkman, spokesman for the Bay Area-wide Minutemen group.
Members of the Golden Gate Minutemen encouraged Bush to begin a Redwood City chapter as part of a regional campaign to "encircle centers of liberalism in the Bay Area" with groups that take a more conservative view on immigration reform, says Charles Birkman, a spokesman for the Minutemen. [...]
Bush estimates that 70 percent of the crime in Redwood City is committed by Latinos, although he admits that the data is "a guess." The Redwood City Police Department doesn't track the ethnicity of those it arrests, but the county jail does divide suspected criminals into ethnic groups. Last month, 41 percent of the detainees at the jail were Hispanic. The Sheriff's Office does not routinely check the immigration status of its prisoners.
Another American family destroyed by open borders...
Felinda Williams couldn't make herself go to court on a recent morning, couldn't bring herself to look at the man accused of driving drunk and killing her daughter, her son-in-law and her 2-year-old grandson.
It's yet another case of unnecessary, preventable deaths, in which innocent citizens lost their lives to a previously arrested, drunk-driving illegal alien.
She knows few details of the Aug. 11 crash in Houston that killed the newlyweds and the little boy nicknamed "Peanut Butter." She does know that her daughter didn't die on impact. The young woman, according to reports, felt the flames and begged helpless bystanders to pull her free.
The grieving woman knows two things about Juan Felix Salinas, the man charged in connection with their deaths: She knows his name, and she knows he was in the U.S. illegally, out on bail after an earlier arrest.
"He's been through the courts and the jail before, and nobody caught it," Williams said. "If they'd caught it, he would have been in jail or deported, and then he wouldn't have been out there on the streets, and my babies would still be alive."
Frank Gaffney does an excellent job of making the central arguments for what's at stake in the SPP negotiations -- everything. National sovereignty is one of those things you don't notice until it is gone, and then it will be too late.
Sovereignty is an abstraction to which few Americans give much thought. We take it for granted, like the air we breathe or the water we drink. Yet, the essence of the most successful political experiment in history - the United States of America - is the sovereign power entrusted by the people via our Constitution to our elected, accountable representatives.
Unfortunately, such sovereignty is endangered by those who believe the world of nation-states is too disorderly for efficient global commerce and the peaceable resolution of disputes. Call them the Transnational Progressives (conservative wit John O'Sullivan coined an abbreviation he insists must be spelled Tranzies). They prefer supranational arrangements like the European Union, run by wholly unaccountable bureaucrats.
The trouble for the Tranzies is that a lot of folks who value their freedoms - notably, the American people and many who represent them in Congress - generally don't fancy such arrangements. They see them for what they are: big government on steroids, unwieldy, unchecked and unresponsive to the will of the ruled.
Here's another Rasmussen poll showing Americans want immigration to be legal, controlled and reduced.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters nationwide favor cutting off federal funds for sanctuary cities that offer protection to illegal immigrants. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 29% are opposed. Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney proposed such a plan earlier this week.
By a 71% to 16% margin, voters also favor a proposal that would require all foreign visitors to carry a universal identification card as proposed by another GOP Presidential hopeful, Rudy Giuliani. Seventy-four percent (74%) also favor the creation and funding of a central database to track all foreign visitors in the United States.
By a 56% to 31% margin, voters want the government to continue building a fence along the Mexican border.
What is wrong with clueless liberal politicians who continue to pander to illegal aliens, no matter what?
Here's how Gov. Corzine, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the other Democratic leaders were trying to spin the story: Those three college kids were killed because an uncaring public didn't want to spend enough money on Newark.
The other propaganda being spun is that the problem is guns, and the mayor is hot to take action on that front. Booker Announces New Crackdown On Guns.
Here's how the public sees the story: Those three college kids were killed because uncaring politicians didn't want to enforce the law and deport illegal aliens who commit crimes.
Anything but admit the problem is criminal aliens, particularly dangerous gangs like MS-13, and the way that law enforcement is afraid to do its job when the perps are foreigners.
Many on the left object to the so-called hysteria about the fact that at least one of the accused killers is an illegal alien. Earl Ofari Hutchinson should know better since he lives in southern California, but he is on board with the far left and against the safety of citizens.
Leading immigration reform foes from Center for Immigration Studies to Bill OReilly also claimed that state and federal officials are so fear being branded racist that they have turned a blind eye to waves of illegal immigrants who supposedly have unleashed a violent crime wave across the country.
On the contrary, that strategy is precisely the one being pursued in the Los Angeles area by local gang members. A 2006 court case concluded that hispanic gangsters were indeed terrorizing blacks to run them out of the area. The LA Times headline was clear: 4 Los Angeles Latino Gang Members Convicted of Anti-Black Conspiracy.
They gleefully add that Newark is a sanctuary city where police are forbidden to ask questions about a suspects citizenship status. There are arguable exceptions;the spate of violent clashes between black and Latino inmates in California's prisons, and Los Angeles county jails last year, the headline-grabbing murders of black teen Cheryl Green last December, three other young blacks in Los Angeles. But there is no evidence that Latino gang members have embarked on a systematic campaign of ethnic
cleansing against blacks.
Newark Slayings Fan Hysteria Over an Illegal Immigrant Crime Wave
Four members of a Latino gang in Highland Park were found guilty Tuesday of unleashing a barrage of assaults and killings to push African Americans out of the predominantly Latino community in northeast Los Angeles.
The verdicts in a downtown federal courtroom marked the first time a street gang had been convicted of breaking federal hate crime laws, traditionally employed against white supremacist groups like skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan.
"I'm glad the truth is out," said Luisa Prudhomme, whose 21-year-old son, Anthony, was killed when Avenues members allegedly kicked open his door and shot him in the head as he lay on a futon.
"This wasn't just regular gang activity as usual," she said. "This was hate crime. They promoted hatred and racism and ignorance." [...]
But unlike other racial gang strife in the city, the Avenues' violence was deliberately aimed at African Americans with no gang affiliations, including women and children. The gang scrawled threats and racial epithets in graffiti on walls.
Steve Sailer mentioned this David Frum op-ed in his recent VDARE.com article assessing the Karl Rove years. The opinion piece is a fascinating look inside the mysteriously dense Bush administration, and does answer the question "Are they stupid or in the thrall of corrupt Mexico?" According to Frum, the Bushies are plain old dumb -- that is, oblivious to facts.
Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle.
In my brief service as a speechwriter inside the Bush administration, I often wondered why it was that skeptical experts on issues like immigration could never get even a hearing for their point of view. We took the self-evident brilliance of our plans so much for granted that we would not even meet, for example, with conservative academics who had the facts and figures to demonstrate the illusion of Rovian hopes for a breakthrough among Hispanic voters. We were so mesmerized by the specious analogies between 1996 and 1896 that we forgot that analogies are literary devices, not evidence.
Sweet! I can't wait for the Church Lady in cuffs pix! It's about time this convicted felon was behind bars where she belongs. What an arrogant piece of work she is, plus her part in the whole obnoxious sob story strategy of playing on the emotions of the American people.
LOS ANGELES - An immigration activist who sought refuge inside a Chicago church for a year was arrested in Los Angeles this afternoon after taking her campaign on the road.
Doing the Happy Dance here.
Elvira Arellano was arrested about 4:15 p.m. Chicago time by law-enforcement officials after leaving Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in downtown Los Angeles, said Emma Lozano, an adviser who was there during the arrest.
After talking to news media inside the church, Arellano and her supporters got into their van to head north to San Jose, where she was scheduled to speak at another church, Lozano said. Moments after they entered the van, an unmarked vehicle stopped them.
The driver of Arellano's van, Roberto Lopez, poked his head out because he wanted to see why they were being blocked. Several other unmarked vehicles surrounded their van.
Agents emerged from all the cars screaming for Arellano to get out, Lozano said. Her 8-year-old son, Saul, started to cry, and Arellano said to everyone in the car, "Calm down. Don't have any fear. They can't hurt me."
Update 8/20: Elvira has been deported to Mexico.
Remittances from both immigrants and illegal aliens continues to grow. In many (most?) cases, the easy money from expats tends to depress the urge to undertake social and economic reforms in the home countries. Look at Mexico.
Reputable economists have found "remittances are generally spent rather than invested, they do not add to an economy's stock or enhance its productivity." But it is hard to turn down free money in the mail, so they continue.
Globally, remittances — the cash that immigrants send home — totaled nearly $276 billion in 2006, the World Bank says. Remittances have more than doubled since 2000, and with globalization increasing the numbers of people on the move, there's no end in sight.
As the article mentions, "the U.S. lost $41.1 billion in 2005" — it is money strip-mined from our economy and sent to other countries. There's no surprise in that; the senders are foreigners who care nothing about America, its people or welfare.
If these guest workers incorporated as a company, their migrant multinational would rank No. 3 on the Fortune 500 list, trailing only Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil in annual revenue.
Here's the Los Angeles Times, trying again to write a news story that involves immigration. It starts out well enough, then goes off the tracks...
Violent crime along the U.S.-Mexico border, which has long plagued the scrubby, often desolate stretch, is increasingly spilling northward into the cities of the American Southwest.
Huh? The anarchy spreading north from Mexico is a result of continued open borders and the cartels working to increase their market share. The spillover from the war among the cartels is a just a part of worsening violence from foreigners in the Southwest. Mexicans at home are fighting over which gang of thugs will contol the multi-billion-dollar drug trade in certain regions, particularly the future NAFTA highway following Route 35. ("Drug traffickers kill for I-35." )
In Phoenix, deputies are working the unsolved case of 13 border crossers who were kidnapped and executed in the desert. In Dallas, nearly two dozen high school students have died in the last two years from overdoses of a $2-a-hit Mexican fad drug called "cheese heroin."
The crime surge, most acute in Texas and Arizona, is fueled by a gritty drug war in Mexico that includes hostages being held in stash houses, daylight gun battles claiming innocent lives, and teenage hit men for the Mexican cartels. Shipments of narcotics and vans carrying illegal workers on U.S. highways are being hijacked by rival cartels fighting over the lucrative smuggling routes. Fires are being set in national forests to divert police.
As I've written before, you don't have to believe Mexico is a crime-friendly culture to understand that upwardly mobile professional criminals want to operate in markets where they can maximize profits. The low-rent boonies of Mexico look pretty sad compared to the bright lights and big money of the United States: drug smugglers have an American Dream too.
But such harsh realities of diversity must be smoothed over by la Times with warm and cuddly reminders of how lucky we are to be invaded by Mexico.
Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Houston sociologist, said people on both sides of the Rio Grande viewed themselves as one community.
Remarkably, the LA Times can't miss an opportunity to celebrate diversity even while it describes worsening crime.
"People say, 'The river doesn't divide us; it unites us,' " he said. "When you're at ground zero at the border, you see yourselves as one community -- for good or bad."
Meanwhile, the growing violence in Mexico is spreading to areas that were thought immune. Calderon's surge doesn't appear to be that effective.
The violence has spread to the affluent business city of Monterrey, the beach resort of Acapulco and beyond. In remote towns like Juchitan on the Pacific coast, wealthy local families have fled a wave of kidnappings by drug gangs. [...]
Don't think the Mexican way of crime is not coming to America.
"They are professionals. Their infrastructure is more powerful than the police. The authorities don't have the resources to face up to a phenomenon like this," said a drug expert within the Veracruz state government.
"This isn't finished, I think it's only just beginning," said the expert, who asked not to be named.
[Once quiet towns engulfed by Mexico drugs war Reuters 7/18/07]
Translated from mil-speak, that's a rocket-propelled grenade.
LAGUNA NIGUEL - A military-style rocket-propelled grenade found in a customized van was disarmed and hauled off to the Orange County Sheriff's headquarters in Santa Ana.
Mexican drug smugglers escalating their firepower? Jihadis? Home-grown gang activity? Choose your poison.
The sheriff's bomb squad called the Marines' Explosive Ordnance Detail from Camp Pendleton to disarm the weapon.
As usual, the White House is not interested in even the most cursory attempt at enforcement.
A week after unveiling a major crackdown on businesses that hire illegal immigrants, the Bush administration is now conceding that its most heavily touted weapon in pursuing employers - an assault against Social Security fraud - will be nearly useless.
That's because when the Social Security Administration warns employers about bogus identification numbers, it remains barred from also alerting the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that's supposed to hand out penalties.
In addition, federal promises to hold companies responsible for hiring illegal immigrants could potentially be stymied by several other issues: Employers are still not required to check a new employee's Social Security number against a free federal database, there could be long gaps between when an employee is hired to when the warnings are issued each year, and there is no way to follow up on employees who have been fired. In many cases, illegal workers could still hop from job to job without being caught.
The ongoing Utah mine disaster gets the warm and fuzzy treatment from la Times. No mention that three of the trapped miners are likely illegal aliens from the nation of scabs (Mexico).
MOCORITO, Mexico - Labor recruiters from Utah first came to the rural hamlets that surround this town in the western state of Sinaloa two generations ago, with promises of dollars to be made digging deep into the earth.
Of course, anyone who knows the least bit about American labor history understands that US miners fought and died for those jobs, and the reason that mining isn't as dangerous as previously is because of the struggle of miners and unions.
Onesimo Payan Carrillo, a retired miner, remembers them as "really tall, really blond men" who persuaded him and many others to leave their cornfields for U.S. coal mines.
The bond between this corner of Sinaloa and Utah has remained alive ever since, with sons and grandsons following in the footsteps of those first miners, including two young men who were trapped following the Aug. 6 collapse of the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah.
These days, unions are too corrupt to protect the American worker and favor opening the border to endless workers whom the unions hope to organize. In an earlier time, union leaders like Samuel Gompers understood that flooding the country with excess workers was detrimental to his goals of improved wages and working conditions.
Last year I wrote about the mining industry's propaganda assault on citizens in American Miners Now Targeted, namely that mining was another "job Americans don't want to do."
Current mind control seems to be effective in Utah. I saw a man-on-the-street interview on cable TV and the guy piped up without being asked that those "immigrant" workers were here to "feed their families," a popular line from the open-borders crowd.
The San Francisco Chronicle can't say "culture" even though the latest school results show it profoundly effects educational performance. White Americans and Asians are routinely grouped together, because those cultures value learning and testing repeatedly reveals that basic fact.
If Asian immigrants were doing as badly in school as their hispanic counterparts, then one might reasonably wonder whether whites were getting better treatment. But immigrants from Confucian cultures are very successful academically, because Asian parents insist their kids study hard and do well in school. One example: UC Berkeley's undergraduate student body is "overwhelmingly Asian" in the words of the New York Times [Little Asia on the Hill]. Case closed.
A frustrating and persistent achievement gap between black and Latino students and their white and Asian American peers shows no sign of abating in the latest state test results for nearly 5 million students across California. [...]
See also Steve Sailer's blog on educational euphemism: Education Jargon Breakthrough: "Low Confidence Learner".
Statewide, more black and Latino students have scored at grade level in the core subjects in recent years, but they still lag far behind other ethnic groups.
[State schools chief Jack] O'Connell said the skill gap can't be explained by differences in family income.
In addition, see Parapundit's remarks about hispanic cultural aversion to education: Samuel P. Huntington Comes Out Against Immigration From Mexico. He cites Prof. Huntington's research which shows that even fourth-generation Mexican-Americans remain far behind the national average in educational attainment, i.e. less than 10 percent of that group have post-high-school degrees compared with 45 percent of all Americans. Shocking stuff and highly damaging to the nation's future success, but it's impolite to discuss in today's PC climate.
The San Francisco Chronicle attempts to engage with an ethnic sob story about The Children, but ends up highlighting how taxpayer funds go to support separatist education agendas.
Teacher Marta Cueva dipped into her wallet this week to buy fabric for costumes that her young students will wear when they perform Mexican folk dances at her Berkeley school's end-of-summer show.
Their school, the Bay Area Hispano Institute for Advancement, normally would have paid for the costumes. But, like scores of other private, publicly funded children's programs in the Bay Area and across California, it hasn't received state funds since July 1 and is struggling to meet expenses as a result of the Legislature's budget standoff, which is in its seventh week. [...]
"It is a critical community resource for families who want their children to learn Spanish and have a better sense of Latino culture," said Argentine-born Alina Salganicoff, who heads the school's parent advisory council and has two children in the program. "There's an incredible demand, a waiting list of over 100. They've tried to look at how to expand, but that's tough, especially in a situation like this when you're not sure you can even meet your payroll."
A columnist in Newark is concerned with the real questions that should be asked by law enforcement about gang involvement in the murders of the three Newark students, and hopefully are being investigated at least behind closed doors.
In a schoolyard not far from the Ivy Hill apartments where they lived, the three college students were forced to kneel facing a wall. They were shot in the back of the head. Although items were taken from the victims, the execution-style slayings suggest more gang initiation than robbery.
Rev. Jesse Peterson is even more alarmed about the attack on black Americans
Hovering in the background of this triple murder is the specter of MS-13, a mostly Central and South American gang with a growing New Jersey presence.
Jose Lachira Carranza, 28, an illegal immigrant from Peru, is in custody along with two 15-year-olds. Still on the run are Rodolfo Godinez, 24, identified as Nicaraguan, and two juveniles, one of whom may be his brother. Local gang units are probing neighbors' statements linking the suspects to MS-13.
From Newark to Los Angeles, Hispanic gang members, some of whom are illegal, are waging a violent war against blacks and the Newark killings are part of this budding epidemic. Here are some recent cases from California: Since July 2006, there have been 12 shootings targeting blacks in Canoga Park, prompting local police to issue warnings this week for black residents to be wary; In December, 14-year-old Cheryl Green was killed by a Hispanic gang; In November, three Hispanic gang members received life in prison for crimes that included the murder of two black men and conspiracy to intimidate black residents in Los Angeles; And last August, four Hispanic gang members were convicted of engaging in a six-year conspiracy to assault and murder blacks in Highland Park.
You have to wonder whether a program of anti-black ethnic cleansing is shaping up in the east among hispanic gangsters, just as it has in LA: Mexican Gangs' Ethnic Cleansing of Black Americans in Los Angeles.
In Scotland, political correctness regarding Muslims is making frightening inroads. Ramadan is the month-long Islam holiday which includes daily "fasts" from sun-up to sundown, after which Muslims can eat to their hearts delight. In fact, Muslims frequently gain weight during Ramadan. Some fast.
HOSPITAL staff in the Lothians have been told not to eat at their desks to avoid offending Muslim colleagues during Ramadan.
Meanwhile, westerners in a hotel in Islamic Dubai have no such restrictions placed upon them.
NHS Lothian has advised doctors and other health workers not to have working lunches during the 30-day fast, which begins next month.
The health service's Equality and Diversity Officer sent an e-mail to all senior managers, giving guidance on religious tolerance. [...]
Bill Aitken, Scottish Conservative justice spokesman, was reported as saying: "Frankly, this advice, well meaning as it may be, is total nonsense.
"This is the sort of thing that can stir up resentments rather than result in good relations."
Alfredo Ramos is one of the more infamous illegal alien criminals moving through the court system these days, being the killer of the two Virginia Beach teenaged girls, Alison Kunhardt, 17, and Tessa Tranchant, 16. Bill O'Reilly took the case on because it was such a terrible example of immigration anarchy — illegal alien with a prior DUI conviction who hadn't been deported, was blotto drunk and killed two high school girls who were best friends.
See a YouTube clip of O'Reilly at his best, smacking around the suits who allowed this travesty to occur.
Also, my VDARE.com blog: Virginia Beach Teens Killed at Intersection.
Wearing headphones and speaking through a translator, Alfredo Ramos admitted in court Monday to killing two teenage girls in a drunken-driving crash in March.
Another plea deal. Don't these creeps ever have to face a jury of citizens?
Ramos, a 22-year-old illegal immigrant, pleaded guilty in Circuit Court to two counts of aggravated involuntary manslaughter.
"I'm guilty, judge, of all the charges," Ramos told Judge Thomas S. Shadrick.
He faces up to 40 years in prison; then deportation. His sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 5.
At trial, witnesses described Ramos' car speeding toward the intersection at 65 mph. The girls were sitting in their car with their seatbelts on waiting for the light to change. When Ramos hit the girls' car, the force of the crash was so large that another driver thought that an explosion had occurred. Ramos was drunk at three times the allowable level and didn't even remember the collision.
Misty-eyed immigration enthusiasts believe that America does assimilation better than anywhere else, to the point we don't need to worry about annoying jihadists appearing in this country. "Our Muslims," they intone piously, "are not like those Europeans who are blowing things up all the time."
Investors Business Daily is more realistic than that, and compiles a partial list of homegrown and immigrant jihadis. Following is a snip.
• The "Lackawanna Six" from upstate New York who were caught training for terror with al-Qaida overseas.
Other listings at Refugee Rampage in Salt Lake.
• The Columbus, Ohio, trucker who helped al-Qaida case the Brooklyn Bridge for attack.
• The Los Angeles man who fatally shot two and wounded three at an Israeli airline ticket counter at LAX.
• The New Yorker found guilty of plotting to blow up a Manhattan subway station.
• The Lodi, Calif., native who trained with al-Qaida in Pakistan to blow up fellow Americans at supermarkets.
• The three black Muslim converts from Torrance, Calif., jailed for plotting to attack Army recruiting stations and synagogues.
• The Virginia jihadists busted for training to kill U.S. soldiers overseas.
• The San Francisco Muslim who took his SUV on a hit-and-run killing spree.
CIS director Mark Krikorian reads the White House tea leaves and believes that the new emphasis on enforcement at this late date in the Bush Presidency is merely another strategy to attain the ultimate goal of amnesty down the road. There was a government spokesman on Fox News Sunday and he said pretty directly, "Enforcement? We'll show you enforcement."
To the initial strategy of heart tugging scenes of family separation, the government now has pumped up threats of economic breakdown in order to frighten the citizenry: If America doesn't have millions of exploitable foreign workers, crops will rot in the field and produce counters will be empty.
These scare tactics have been used before.
Lobbyists for farmers and roofing contractors and others will soon be screaming bloody murder. But Congress and the media would do well not to take at face value the squealing of firms losing their cheap-labor subsidy. When the end of the last big guestworker program was being debated in the early 1960s, California farmers claimed that "the use of braceros [Mexican guestworkers] is absolutely essential to the survival of the tomato industry." Instead, termination of the program prompted mechanization which caused a quintupling of production for tomatoes grown for processing, an 89-percent drop in demand for harvest labor, and a fall in real prices.
And slave-owners in the antebellum South made similar dire predictions if abolition were to occur.
The same sort of thing happened half a century earlier, when the textile industry predicted disaster if child labor were ended. At a Senate hearing in 1916, one mill owner said that limiting child labor would "stop my machines"; another said "investors would never receive another dividend"; while a third said that ending child labor would "paralyze the country."
In fact, a recent Rasmussen poll showed strong support for enforcement.
Seventy-nine percent (79%) of American adults favor a proposal requiring employers to fire workers who falsify identity documents. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 9% are opposed while 12% are not sure.
That would be the war against criminal aliens who are increasingly killing citizens.
Speaking at the Ames, Iowa Straw Poll, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich urged President Bush to call a special session of Congress to pass emergency legislation requiring anyone arrested for a felony to be checked for legal status.
See a great clip of Newt speaking on the current phoney war with Islam, saying "We are in greater danger than you can imagine [from nuclear terrorism]... We don't have a peace process [in the middle east]; we have a surrender process... it's Munich all over again."
Gingrich cited the illegal immigrant in Newark, NJ who shot four college students execution style, killing three. The illegal immigrant had been arrested twice, including being indicted for raping a young girl and threatening to kill her family. Twice he was released back on the streets.
"Four young people, working hard, studying, doing the right things - three of them were killed, all four were shot in an execution style by somebody who should not have been in America in the first place," Gingrich said in his remarks to a supportive crowd.
Under a new immigration bill, Gingrich wants the Department of Homeland Security to outsource the creation of a secure, accurate system to quickly check legal status of people who commit serious crimes. He wants the bill to require that anyone arrested for a felony be checked for legal status. Lastly, he stipulates that any city, county or state that refuses to do so would lose all federal funding.
Also, Newt on Fox, calling for Congress to require that all arrested persons be checked for immigration status.
Here is the clip of Newt at Ames, Win the War at Home.
Bush's alleged "crackdown" has barely been announced and the wailing from business, particularly ag biz, has already begun in earnest.
"It's going to be awful; the harvest is going to be awful," said Laura Foote Reiff, co-chairwoman of the Business Immigration Group, predicting the effect on agriculture, where more than half of the 2.5 million workers are believed to be illegal. "People will feel it when they go grocery shopping, when they read in the newspaper that we're importing our meat from China."
Phew, where to begin? Just what is the connection between the labor supply for the seasonal harvest and meat imports from China? There isn't any.
And if there is a genuine shortage of agricultural pickers, then send immigration agents to bust some construction sites and scare those illegal workers back to the fields. Many illegal aliens use farm jobs as their employment gateway to the USA, and move on in a few years to more lucrative jobs. That's why agriculture is always squawking that they need more workers.
Furthermore, Washington already provides an unlimited supply of agricultural visas, the H-2A, but growers prefer illegal alien workers which are regarded as more convenient. Rep Tom Tancredo made that point during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on the March 4 Late Edition.
TANCREDO: In terms of visas, Wolf, do you realize -- and I don't know whether the President realizes this, but let's talk about H-2A visas which are the kind that allowed for people to come in and do agricultural work. There are no limits on those visas. You can have as many as you want.
In the 1840s, slave-owners in the South complained that they couldn't possibly give up their free labor, asking "Who will pick the cotton?" Today's agricultural interests make the same flawed argument.
People don't use them because, of course, there are restrictions in terms of pay, in terms of providing some sort of housing, in terms of providing some sort of health care. So they would rather use illegal immigrants.
Before the big Senate amnesty tanked due to unprecedented public outcry, illegal Irish were full of multicultural support for their compadres in sombreros. Now, not so much. In the previous situation, the Irish were happy to lobby for an amnesty for the tens of millions of lawbreakers in order to convenience themselves while they trashed America. That political generosity to Mexicans etc. has disappeared.
Illegal Irish believe they are SPECIAL, at least in their own minds, and now insist that they receive a separate amnesty on their own. So sorry, Mexicans! It's every border-buster for himself these days!
President Bush is committed to dealing with the issue of illegal Irish immigrants in America, the US consul for Northern Ireland has said.
Hey, does Mexico City know about Bush accepting a legally binding bowl of shamrocks from Ireland PM Bertie Ahern?
The failure of recent legislation which would have allowed illegal immigrants who had left the US to return means many are afraid to visit home.
US consul Dean Pittman said the president wanted to resolve the issue.
The horrific execution-style murders of three black college students keeps getting uglier: one of the accused is an illegal alien, Jose Carranza of Peru, who should have been in jail for previous violent crimes. How does an illegal alien child rapist get bail anyway?
The 28-year-old construction worker charged with the execution-style slayings of three students here Saturday night is an illegal immigrant from Peru who had an order of detention pending against him by federal authorities, his lawyer and judicial officials said today. [...]
There is no excuse that this monster was left to wander the streets of America and kill young citizens: his rap sheet was quite long enough to warrant attention.
Mr. Carranza, who lives in Orange, had been out on $150,000 bail pending trial on two separate indictments: sexual assault on a young girl in his care over four years when she was 5 to 9; and aggravated assault stemming from a bar fight last year. He turned himself in to Mayor Booker personally Thursday, about 12 hours after a 15-year-old, who is not being identified because he is a juvenile, was arrested on the same charges.
It doesn't help that Newark is a sanctuary city for illegal aliens.
FOX News has learned Carranza, who has a fake Social Security number, had been arrested on charges of raping a 5-year-old girl and then threatening the child and her parents. In that case he faced a 31-count indictment.
If the authorities can't jail and then deport someone like Jose Carranza, then something is seriously wrong.
In another, he was arrested on assault charges stemming from a bar fight.
Apparently remittances to Marxico are shrinking, for the first time in years, maybe ever. The possible reason is downright cheerful.
This year a smaller percentage of Mexican immigrants in the United States sent money back to their homeland than in 2006, according to a report released yesterday by the Inter-American Development Bank. The bank said the reduction had left at least two million people in Mexico without the same financial help they had once received.
Enforcement works, and even a little has an effect. Imagine what would happen if Washington engaged in a full-court press with complete intention of making the attrition strategy work.
Bank officials, pointing to a survey of Mexican immigrants in the report, said the decline reflected a rising sense of insecurity and uncertainty about whether they would stay in the United States. Anticipating a possible move back to Mexico, these immigrants appear to be saving more.
A new Census report is out and the results are in: the tsunami of foreigners, led by illegal immigration, is overwhelming the historic American population. For example, several counties in Texas have less than 5 percent white population, south of the Mexican-Dixon line.
Whites are now in the minority in nearly one in 10 U.S. counties.
Of course, it's not increased births among black citizens that is adding to "diversity" — it's all about the demographic warfare being waged via immigration against the American nation and its people by Mexicans and others.
And that increased diversity, fueled by immigration and higher birth rates among blacks and Hispanics, is straining race relations and sparking a backlash against immigrants in many communities.
"There's some culture shock," said Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based research agency. "But I think there is a momentum building, and it is going to continue."
Immigration has spread from traditional gateways of southwestern border states and New York to all over the nation at a speed that has terrified many citizen communities by the rapidity by which a town may be swamped by illegal foreigners. For example, Luzerne County Pennsylvania (home to Hazelton) has experienced a tripling of hispanics since 2000.
This being an Associated Press story, the boo hooey flows like a mighty river. Note how a US-born hispanic complains that she feels unwelcome even as she works treasonously for an anti-borders organization.
"I think across the board all of us feel like we're not welcome," said Jacinto, who was born in the U.S. and volunteers for an advocacy group called Mexicans Without Borders.
The article also recites the now-outdated statistic that "By 2050, minorities will account for half of U.S. residents." Obviously the demographic reversal will be much sooner than mid-century unless our borders are closed soon, and many of the residents will be loyal to foreign nations that are historic enemies of America, Mexico in particular.
Prince William County has seen its Hispanic population more than double since 2000, to nearly 70,000 last year. Non-Hispanic whites account for a little more than half the population, down from about two-thirds in 2000. [...]
"I don't think Latinos or any other so-called minority group are seeking to make white people a minority," Jacinto said. "It's just a reality."
Immigration -- it's the new way of war.
The unfortunate cave-in in a Utah coal mine has received a lot of media coverage, but with very little notice of one aspect, that some of those workers trapped are illegal alien workers.
Meanwhile the miners themselves, six individuals all described as family men in their ages between 20s and late 40s. Three of them Mexican nationals, Mexican consulate from Salt Lake City is up here, talking with those families.
The Rocky Mountain News indicates that they are illegal.
Some of the miners' families may be illegal immigrants. Barbara Stinson Lee, spokeswoman for the diocese of Salt Lake City, asked photographers not to take pictures of families attending a Mass Tuesday night. "It is a request from the families that there be no photographs. It's not grief. It's an immigration issue. They don't need pictures on the front page of newspapers," Lee said.
It adds to the danger of an already hazardous job to have foreign employees who cannot communicate with English-speaking American workers and supervisors.
Last year I wrote about the BS from mining companies that coal mining was another one of those jobs "Americans don't want to do," another fable from business owners: American Miners Now Targeted.
In case anyone needs a reminder that The Economist is a purveyor of clueless elite opinion, consider this recent article about brown-on-black gang violence in Lost Angeles: The subtitle is "The struggle for political dominance pits natural allies against each other."
Why would black American citizens and mostly illegal aliens from Latin America be presumed to be on the same side? In places like LA, they are in competition for the same jobs, schools and territory. Only a politician or a journalist would assume such a dumb idea.
To be fair, the Economist eventually gets around to a more balanced treatment...
"We're being overrun," says Ted Hayes of Choose Black America, which has led anti-immigration marches in south-central Los Angeles. "The companeros have taken all the housing. If you don't speak Spanish they turn you down for jobs. Our children are jumped upon in the schools. They are trying to drive us out." Not, Mr Hayes emphasises, that he has anything against illegal immigrants personally, or against Mexicans who are in America legally. Indeed, he says, in that useful old phrase, he is friendly with many of them.
In fact, racial hate crimes are rising in LA and the victims are increasingly black.
Last year Pew, a pollster, found that one-third of blacks believe immigrants take jobs from Americans—more than any other group. Yet in some ways their views were benign. Blacks are less likely than whites or even Hispanics to believe that immigrants end up on welfare or commit crimes. Latinos, on the other hand, appear to make no such concessions. One survey of Durham, in North Carolina, found that 59% of Latinos believed few or almost no blacks were hard-working, and a similar proportion reckoned few or almost none could be trusted. Fewer than one in ten whites felt the same way. [...]
One reason blacks and Latinos have failed to form an alliance is philosophical. The black civil-rights struggle, in the South at least, was mostly about asserting legal rights and demolishing barriers to voting by those who were, in theory, already enfranchised. The Latino struggle is quite different. Its goal is often the selective or non-enforcement of the law, particularly on immigration. A common demand, for example, is for local police not to co-operate with federal immigration agents. And, whereas blacks in the 1960s demanded power in proportion to their numbers as adult citizens, Hispanics want rather more.
Los Angeles tallied more than 400 racial hate crimes last year—the most, as a proportion of all hate crimes, for at least a decade (see chart). Blacks fared worst: they comprise just 9% of the population of Los Angeles County but were the victims of 59% of all race-hate crimes. Seven times out of ten, their persecutors were Latino. Hispanics, who make up almost half the population, were victimised by blacks eight-tenths of the time. These numbers greatly understate the violence.
See also Mexican Gangs' Ethnic Cleansing of Black Americans in Los Angeles and LA Proposes New Immigration Tax.
The question is how could Al Qaeda thugs NOT utilize the pre-existing smuggling infrastructure of Mexico's powerful drug cartels. The narcos control the border on the Mexican side and are clearly the go-to guys for transporting dangerous cargo and persons.
The DEA produced a report in 2005 about the terrorist-cartel connection which the Washington Times has seen.
Islamic extremists embedded in the United States — posing as Hispanic nationals — are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.[...]
"It is very likely that any future 'September 11th' type of terrorist event in the United States may be facilitated, wittingly or unwittingly, by drug traffickers operating on both sides of the United States-Mexico border," the DEA report says.
Rep. Ed Royce of California, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs terrorism and nonproliferation subcommittee, said the DEA document substantiates information that his committee has been given in the past year.
"Hearings I held in Laredo [Texas] last year and this DEA report show that our southern border is a terrorist risk," Mr. Royce said. "Law enforcement has warned that people from Arab countries have crossed the border and adopted Hispanic surnames. The drug cartels have highly sophisticated smuggling and money-laundering networks, which terrorists could access."
Liberals are shocked, shocked to learn that diversity causes distrust, according to the Bowling Alone social critic Robert Putnam. (See this page to download Prof Putnam's recent research.)
They have long taken it as an article of faith that diversity enriches our culture and makes us strong.
Horse manure. Multiculturalism has been a scam from day one, a way to guilt-trip Americans and other westerners into believing that our history of "crimes" requires the acceptance of a totally alien belief system, one that negates the basics of human psychology (tribalism, for one) and tries to recreate humanity from the inside out into a Marxist ideal.
On the contrary, Americans and the west are no worse than any other group in terms of bad behavior and better than a lot. Furthermore, the guilt-tinged ideology is psychologically flawed, since all peoples prefer the company of others from their group for safety and comfort. Genuine community is based on shared values, period.
IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.
Put me in the unshocked column. The only advantages of diversity are limited and specific, e.g. it can be useful to compare one's own beliefs, strategies etc. with that of other cultures. But to try to create some imaginary universal nation (in the words of Ben Wattenberg) is perfect idiocy and will only lead to civil war or worse.
But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
"The extent of the effect is shocking," says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.
Unwise and excessive immigration has shredded the social fabric in Britain. From rioting and worsening crime to bias against citizens, the UK is losing its hold on its own people who want to flee.
Liam Clifford, a former immigration control officer, set up globalvisas.com as a one-man band 12 years ago. He now employs 60 people and is in the process of opening new offices in both South Africa and Australia. Mr Clifford said: "It's absolutely phenomenal. People are trying to get away to wherever they can, and most are successful.
For all the multiculti propaganda, people don't really like diversity, and they certainly don't like it when their government gives preferences to immigrants over home-grown citizens.
"Ironically, one of the main reasons for leaving is the overstretch of services due to increasing immigration into the UK. People are looking for the better standard of living offered by other countries, as even the most idyllic villages in Britain are under pressure from rising populations ... Some are telling us they are fed up with living in this country. Even business people are saying they've had enough.
"They're saying 'I can't put my children into the right school, but if I move abroad I can'. Most people are very patriotic and don't want to leave. They're almost terrified about it. But they say they just have to. [...]
"And time and time again they are saying to us they don't want to be seen as racist because they are quitting because of immigration. We tell them of course they're not."
In America, there's no place to immigrate to, except parts of this large country not yet inundated, so we hear about "white flight" and "black flight" from
