LimitsToGrowth Archive

 

December 2006
 

Animal Sacrifices Maim 1,400 in Turkey   [12/31/06]
Eid camel wrangler Nobody said Islam was easy. The challenge of yearly sacrifice of large animals (from sheep to camels and cattle) may be more than many neophyte wranglers can handle.

    At least 1,413 people — referred to as "amateur butchers" by the Turkish media — were treated at hospitals across the country, most suffering cuts to their hands and legs, the Anatolia news agency reported.
        Four people were severely injured, crushed under the weight of large animals that fell on top of them, the agency reported. Another person was hurt when a crane used to lift an animal tumbled onto him, the agency said.
        Three other people suffered heart attacks and died while trying to restrain animals, CNN-Turk television reported.
        Muslims sacrifice cows, sheep, goats and bulls during the four-day religious holiday, a ritual commemorating the biblical account of God's provision of a ram for Abraham to sacrifice as he was about to slay his son. They share the meat with friends, family and neighbors and give part of it to the poor.
Just in time are President Bush's Eid holiday thoughts and politically correct wishes:
    For Muslims in America and around the world, Eid al-Adha is an important occasion to give thanks for their blessings and to remember Abraham's trust in a loving God. During the four days of this special observance, Muslims honor Abraham's example of sacrifice and devotion to God by celebrating with friends and family, exchanging gifts and greetings, and engaging in worship through sacrifice and charity.
        America is a more hopeful Nation because of the talents, generosity, and compassion of our Muslim citizens. This holiday reminds us of the values that so many of our citizens hold in common, including love of family, gratitude to God, the importance of community, and a commitment to respect, diversity, tolerance, and religious freedom.
        Laura and I offer our best wishes for a memorable holiday.
        GEORGE W. BUSH
Did President Roosevelt salute the German nationals living in America during WWII? No, they were interned or restricted. Surely some were fine individuals and their treatment was unjust. But you can't fight a politically correct war and win. War requires the identification of enemies based on group affiliation: it's not fair but it is necessary for national security.
    Update, Jan 2: Swedish police responded to a call about a sheep being ritually slaughtered in a pizzaria in the western town of Boras. When they arrived, the sheep was already dead and police arrested one man on immigration charges. The restaurant will be decontaminated before food is served there again.

•   •   •  

Brazilian Drug Gangs' Attacks Kill 19   [12/30/06]
Rio is looking a lot like Baghdad these days, as drug gangs use terrorist tactics to intimidate the public and undermine the state. Several buses were torched, and seven people were burned to death in one of those attacks. Rio burned buses after drug gang attack

    Precioso said gang members used handguns, machine guns and grenades in 12 attacks on police stations and outposts that began in the early morning.
        The attacks were apparently a show of force staged before a new governor is sworn in Monday, Precioso said. Police intelligence had warned that gangs were planning attacks for some time.
        "It is very difficult to prevent these types of attacks that were practically kamikaze," Precioso said at a news conference. "Police action prevented the situation from getting much worse."
        He said the attacks had apparently been ordered from inside one of the state's prisons, but did not elaborate.
        Rio's governor said gangs intended the attacks to be far bloodier.
        "The idea was to kill hundreds of police and dozens of innocent people," Rio de Janeiro State Gov. Rosinha Matheus told reporters.
As noted in Is Mexico about to Fall Apart? gang violence at the current heightened level is becoming a national security threat in some countries. The Vice President of Colombia, Francisco Santos, said as much: Will we see this sort of gang crime/insurgency in Mexico City before long? Dallas? Los Angeles?

•   •   •  

Muslims 'refuse anti-MRSA gel'   [12/30/06]
Hospital wash hands sign In Britain, Muslims now endanger public health by refusing to wash their hands when they visit sick relatives in the hospital. They object to the hand cleaner because it contains alcohol.
    Muslims are prohibited from drinking alcohol. There is no inebriation caused by touching it, but many Muslims in the west will use any excuse to complain, e.g. the Minnesota cab drivers who refuse service to anyone thought to be carrying alcohol.

    NHS care assistant Theresa Poupa, 46, became aware of the situation while visiting a sick cousin at the London Chest Hospital in Bethnal Green.
        She said: "I could not believe it — the signs are large enough and clear enough but they just took no notice and walked straight onto the ward.
        "I was there almost every day for three weeks and I saw it repeated dozens and dozens of times. When I raised the matter with the nursing staff they just shrugged and said that Muslims were refusing to use the gel because it contained alcohol.
        "They said they couldn't force visitors to use the gel and I understand that — but I was astonished that anyone who didnąt wash their hands was allowed onto a ward."
Obviously it would be a simple matter for hospital officials to prevent anti-social, germ-carrying Muslims from entering, but Britain has become a timorous PC-inflicted weakling in the face of relentless cultural attacks.
    Prime Minister Tony Blair has been veering this way and that, one minute calling for immigrant assimilation to western values and then praising the Koran for "how progressive it is." No one would accuse Blair of Churchillian leadership.

•   •   •  

Illegal alien absconds, the bill remains   [12/30/06]
Here is a rare first-person account of a sort rarely seen in the press. There are surely thousands like it every year, where an illegal alien causes property damage which ultimately costs the individual citizen or raises insurance rates for all.
    Remarkably, the victim of a vehicle sideswiping was actually able to catch the perp and connect him with law enforcement. A lot of effort was for naught though because the illegal did not show up at the court date -- no surprise there.

    He forfeited his cash bond, and an arrest warrant was issued for his failure to appear, a felony. He's gone, who knows where, and the odds of him coming to court are minuscule. He'll change his name, as illegals will do, and assimilate into another place, or perhaps he is still living here under another alias. He'll continue paying cash and go about his life.
        So, where does this leave me, a born-American veteran and hard-working, 50-year taxpayer paying $1,000 per year for car insurance? A $200 deductible out of my pocket for my car repairs, that's what. Plus a couple of weeks running around seeking information and a week without a car being repaired. My insurance will probably go up, because it cost my insurance company $1,240 to fix my car.
        Meanwhile, this illegal Hispanic has five traffic citations and two felonies, he's on the loose and probably will never be brought to justice.

•   •   •  

3 Million New Americans to Ring in New Year   [12/29/06]
Wasn't it just mid-October when we observed the 300 millionth American? (Yes.)
    The population continues to grow at an astounding rate — there are an additional 888,000 plus residents in just 10 weeks.

    When the clock strikes midnight Sunday and 2007 arrives, the United States will have nearly 2.9 million more people than a year earlier.
        The Census Bureau projects that the nation's population as of Jan. 1 will be more than 300,888,000. That's up 2,863,990 from a year ago, about 1 percent of the population.
        The agency says the U.S. is expected to register one birth every eight seconds and one death every 11 seconds. It also added one person every 27 seconds through migration from others countries.
Check out the moment-by-moment US population counter at the Census website.

•   •   •  

A Question for 2007   [12/29/06]
Islam will dominate sign The threats today against western civilization from the jihadist world are unprecedented, yet the level of denial among people who should know better is stunning. Columnist Diana West notes how our own traditions of free speech are being used against us, and the oblivious attitude of the liberal media doesn't help. She also can connect the dots between Europe's experience of Muslim immigration and our own.

    Now Rep. Virgil Goode, Virginia Republican, has become both the lone standard-bearer of free speech about Islam and the favorite whipping boy of the PC elites. In a letter to constituents about the decision of Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, Minnesota Democrat, to use a Koran at his swearing-in ceremony, Mr. Goode expressed what I take to be his recognition that the laws of Islam — which prohibit religious freedom, freedom of speech and conscience, equality before the law and women's rights — do not augment but rather contravene the founding principles of the United States.
        He also wrote: "I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America." It's difficult to argue with Mr. Goode's logic. Indeed, the test case of the age — Europe — demonstrates that Islamic immigration brings Islamic law, which is demonstrably at odds with American values and beliefs. Forgoing debate, however, Mr. Goode's critics have resorted to name-calling and platitudes about "tolerance," failing utterly to notice the gross intolerance of the Islamic tradition. Worst of all, their tactics seem designed to shut up Mr. Goode, and anyone else who might follow his bold example. Will they?
See also Don Feder's Learning About Islam With Imam Ellison.

•   •   •  

China's college graduates find getting degree is no guarantee: In spring, 5 million new job seekers will try to crack tough market   [12/29/06]
Good news for Bushie pals interested in a larger, more exploitable stock of "willing workers." There's no mention of immigration in this article, but if a Senate-type bill of hugely increased legal immigration is signed into law, we can certainly expect a large influx of workers from Red China.
    Many college-educated Chinese know English or at least can claim to have studied it.

    Figures vary, but the size of China's higher education system appears to have at least quadrupled in the last decade as the nation has pushed relentlessly toward its goal of building a modern economy. Next spring, Chinese colleges and universities expect a record 4.95 million graduates, up 820,000 from this year.
        According to estimates, more than a million of them will wind up jobless. The glut is leading students and colleges to what might be considered acts of desperation.
        In Guangzhou recently, 286 graduates and post-graduates competed for 11 positions as street cleaners, according to the official New China News Agency. The city hired one candidate with a doctorate, four with master's degrees and six with bachelor's degrees.
A million desperate college graduates, willing to work for peanuts? Don't tell anyone in American boardrooms.

•   •   •  

Immigrant Children Shielded From State Tests, but for Whose Protection?   [12/28/06]
Another area of society harmed by immigration anarchy is education, particularly in terms of standards. Friends of diversity don't want to admit that some cultures (particularly Mexicans) do not value scholarly pursuits. So standards are devalued so that nobody 's feelings will be hurt. Even though the educational fad of self-esteem has been shown to be worthless, many in the educariat still cling to the belief that positive feelings are more important than skills.

    School officials in this working-class village tucked between the wealthy towns of Rye, N.Y., and Greenwich, Conn., would rather that neither Dayana nor Israel, both of whom were born in the United States, take the English test when it is given statewide on Jan. 8. They say they do not want such children to be embarrassed by their scores. But they also do not want those scores to embarrass the village. Theirs is a district where 90 percent of fourth graders score well enough to be regarded as proficient readers. That statistic helps the district attract well-heeled transplants from New York City.
        But that statistic is also not a true reflection of the district because so many students from immigrant homes have been exempted from taking the test, even if they were born in this country. The district's policy, which state law allows, has been to spare children from immigrant families from taking the test if they have been in the school system less than five years. That excludes about 15 percent of Port Chester's elementary school students and 10 percent of middle-school students. And so those students have been taking easier substitute tests.
        Then last June, the United States Department of Education, enforcing the No Child Left Behind law, deemed New York's substitutes inadequate and required all students in school for more than a year to take regular tests. Tests in 21 other states face have similarly been challenged. [...]
        "That poor child is going to have to sit through a test that is completely developmentally inappropriate and feel a sense of anxiety and failure," said Jessica O'Donovan, Port Chester's director of programs for English language learners.

•   •   •  

Is Virgil Goode a Bigot?   [12/27/06]
Jihadwatch author Robert Spencer examines the assumptions underlying the criticism which Rep. Goode has received for suggesting that having a Muslim in Congress, taking his oath of office on the Koran, was not a great thing. (Links are in the original.)

    Criticisms of Goode shared a common assumption: that he had no reason to be concerned about Ellison, the Koran, or Muslims, and that any suspicion he did have was simply evidence of his bigotry and ignorance. In raising the specter of nativism, the Post was suggesting that America has been down this road before, and has nothing to show for it but shame. Ellison, for his part, sounded a defiant note in an address in Dearborn, Michigan. To cries of "Allahu akbar" from a Muslim crowd, he declared: "On January 4, I will go swear an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I'll place my hand on the Quran."
        Ellison spoke at a convention hosted by the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America. According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune article, the Muslim American Society was founded in 1993 as the United States arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian based terror group that has spawned both Hamas and al Qaeda. MAS members maintain that the group has no ties to the Brotherhood, but there are indications that many in the group want to see the Constitution replaced by Islamic law. "We may all feel emotionally attached to the goal of an Islamic state" in America, said a speaker at a 2002 MAS conference, but "we mustn't cross hurdles we can't jump yet." Likewise, according to terror expert Steven Emerson, the Islamic Circle of North America "is a Jamad Islamia group, which is on record as calling for jihad in the United States, to promote the notion of an Islamic world."
Spencer then asks rhetorically whether the Representative-elect shares the philosophy that sharia should be the law in America as well. Reporters have not been curious enough to inquire. But Americans need to know whether Muslim immigrants and converts (like Ellison) are loyal to our system of government, particularly since a Detroit poll found 81 percent of Muslims agree that sharia should be the law of the land.
    Another point that has rarely been made in this controversy is the experience of Europe. Apparently many Europeans fear and regret Muslim immigration, indicated by a recent poll showing that 53 percent of Britons believe Islam poses a threat to the West.
    Muslim immigration has been a total disaster for Europe, and may bring Eurabia if demographic trends continue. Here are a few symptoms:
  • Muslim attacks against Jews in France are the worst antisemitism since the Nazi era.
  • Norwegian women suffer worsening numbers of rapes from Muslims; in Oslo, two out of three charged with rape are non-western immigrants.
  • The ongoing Muslim intifada in France's banlieus daily injures 14 police officers and torches 112 cars on average.
  • Some Dutch politicians, like Geert Wilders, require 24/7 police protection because of continuing death threats from jihadists.
  • Islamist terror attacks have murdered hundreds of innocent civilians in London and Madrid.
    In short, the European experience shows that Islam is not compatible with western values of free speech, democracy, reason and individual rights. Yet when a U.S. Congressman suggests that increasing Muslim immigration is unwise, he is roundly castigated and called a bigot by the Washington Post.

•   •   •  

Bipartisan Effort to Draft Immigration Bill   [12/26/06]
Jowly Ted Kennedy Sen. Ted Kennedy and his open-borders pals are busy planning a mega-amnesty, since the immigration-anarchy party is taking over Congress. (The Dems' historical identification as being the party of the working guy and gal should make them the toughest on enforcing immigration laws, but hispandering politics has swept away the idea of supporting blue collar Americans.)
    The Senate will reanimate its amnesty bill from the 109th Congress, one of the worst, most extreme pieces of legislation ever. The New York Times reports that Dems plan to make the new legislation even more flaccid.

    Counting on the support of the new Democratic majority in Congress, Democratic lawmakers and their Republican allies are working on measures that could place millions of illegal immigrants on a more direct path to citizenship than would a bill that the Senate passed in the spring.
        The lawmakers are considering abandoning a requirement in the Senate bill that would compel several million illegal immigrants to leave the United States before becoming eligible to apply for citizenship. [...]
        "I'm very hopeful about this, both in terms of the substance and the politics of it," said Mr. Kennedy, the incoming chairman of the Senate Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship Subcommittee.
Fjordman commented last spring on how American weakness on immigration is being noticed by our jihadist enemies.
    You Americans need to understand just how much is at stake here. We are in the early stages of a world war with Islam, Muslims are working to get nuclear weapons and are openly calling for the physical destruction of the West. Your enemies are watching the way you are handling the illegal situation, and they are not impressed. Do you think the North Koreans or the Iranians are scared of a country that allows itself to be intimidated and held hostage by a bunch of Mexicans who shouldn't even be in the country in the first place? When you're a superpower, the line of separation between domestic and foreign policy hardly exists. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was impressed by the way Ronald Reagan handled the blackmail by the air trafic controllers. He simply fired them. This signalled to your enemies abroad that you were not going to give into black mail anywhere.
        What is at stake here is your credibility as a superpower. In the longer run, it could be your physical security from nuclear attacks, perhaps even your very survival as a coherent nation state.
        DO NOT give in to Mexican intimidation. Build the fence, and deport the illegals. Yes, ALL of them. No amnesty.

•   •   •  

Christmas cottage

•   •   •  

Hate acts against Muslims decline   [12/25/06]
The Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a leading front group for jihadist Muslims and has been squawking up a storm about "Islamophobia", using overblown or faked hate crimes as a victimhood strategy to shut down debate about the danger of authoritarian Islam to free people. (The truth is that Muslims are better off in America, even with the suspicion that many of us feel, than they are in their dirtbag home countries.)

    "Hate crimes" reported by Muslims have decreased significantly since the year of the September 11 terrorist attacks, according to the FBI, and harassment against Jews outnumber incidents against all other religious and ethnic groups.
        Hate crimes and harassment against Jews far outnumber those against any other religion, including Muslims, according to new hate-crime statistics reported from 2000 through 2005.
        Nearly 1,700 hate crimes against Jews were reported in 2000 and 2,118 in 2001, a significant spike that was similarly reflected in crimes reported against Muslims. Thirty-six hate crimes against Muslims were reported in 2000 and more than 500 in 2001 -- most of them after the Islamist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in which more than 3,000 Americans, including some Muslims, died.
        The numbers dropped to 977 hate crimes against Jews and 151 hate crimes against Muslims in 2005, according to the most recent FBI numbers.
If life in the Great Satan were so horrible, then why is Muslim immigration increasing?

•   •   •  

Nuevo Catholics   [12/24/06]
This article makes clear how incredibly important hispanics are to the Catholic Church in Lost Angeles. While the Church is dying in other parts of the country (and much blame must be put on the pedophile priest scandal), business is booming in southern California in direct correlation with the increase of hispanic Catholic immigrants.
    After all, as the article notes, "Today, more than 40 percent of the Hispanics residing in the United States, legally and illegally, are foreign-born," and the church knows a gravy train when it sees one.

    In many ways, this is the best of times to be a Catholic in Los Angeles. "In the 1980s, we were conscious of dioceses closing churches all over the Eastern United States," Cunnane told me. We were sitting in his office in a low-slung new building across the street from the church, where the administrative work of the parish is done. "Our problem is the reverse: were it not for the shortage of priests, we would be expanding our ministry." [...]
        Los Angeles, of course, remains a city divided, and while to his Hispanic congregants Mahony is thought of as a hero, he is criticized by many people on the rich, Anglo West Side, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, for his focus on immigrants' rights and, more significant, for his supposed connivance in transferring parish priests involved in the pedophilia cases — part of the sexual-abuse scandal that in recent years has hobbled the American Catholic Church and bankrupted several dioceses. Some of these critics go as far as to say that the cardinal's commitment to the Latinos in his diocese is actually a way of deflecting attention from the scandal, and intermittently there are loud, bitter demonstrations in front of the cathedral, much to the fury of the mostly Latino worshipers. I never heard the sex-abuse issue raised once by the Hispanic Catholics I spoke to at parish churches all over the city — testimony, perhaps, to the yawning gap between West and East Los Angeles, Anglo and Hispanic.
        As a practical matter, the church's commitment to the immigrant cause now far transcends any individual's commitment, even the cardinal's. As Msgr. John Moretta, the pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, put it: "I think the church will always side with the rights of people to live where it's best for them to live. We took that position when the Irish came and when the Italians came, and now we are doing the same with the Latinos." Moretta added that the changes in some of the atmospherics of church ritual, as well as the emphasis on certain saints on the calendar rather than others, was a form of reaching out not so very different from what the church did during the great Catholic European immigration to America in the last part of the 19th century.
There's a lot to chew on here. The plain-spoken accusation about Cardinal Mahony using the immigration issue to deflect from his own crimes is unusual in the press, and I've never read anywhere else that there are anti-Mahony demonstrations in front of his church.
    In addition, I was criticized by the Rocky Mountain News for saying in my article America's Vaticrats that the Church liked hispanic parishioners because they are less educated and therefore "more passive and unquestioning" than homegrown American Catholics. Here the New York Times is saying essentially the same thing.
    Moretta's comment that people have the right to live anywhere is a lot like other Marxist Catholic drivel. It's very similar to the statement of the La Crosse Catholic Charities honcho Richard Sage: "There's an inherent right to migrate to where we will prosper."
    Jesus, on the other hand, said, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." Big difference.
    As mentioned, the blowback from the priest pedophilia scandal continues today with dioceses going bankrupt. Recently the Los Angeles diocese settled with 45 victims for $60 million -- while there are still 500 more cases pending in LA alone.
    In June, the Santa Rosa bishop helped a pedophile priest escape to Mexico (which is apparently a haven for them), so nothing has changed.

•   •   •  

Poor suffer from illegal immigration   [12/24/06]
America's working poor are practically invisible to the MSM and politicians, so it's good to read an astute analysis of how badly they are harmed by open borders. Froma Harrop is a rare columnist who gets the bipartisan big picture, including the illegal immigration's effect on environment and America's least powerful.

    Illegal immigration is usually presented as a win-win situation: Undocumented foreigners earn far more than they could back home. Consumers get a bargain.
        Nowhere to be seen are America's working poor who get stomped on 13 different ways. They have to compete with illegal immigrants for jobs and housing. Low-skilled natives and legal immigrants also end up subsidizing the undocumented because they tend to live in the same communities, which must provide hospitals, police, schools and garbage pickup.
        Who doesn't suffer from illegal immigration? For starters, the people who write about it. I speak of the journalism profession, which has the habit of covering the issue by anecdotes. Reporters thrive on sympathetic stories about illegal immigrants who work hard and go to church.
        But, were a busload of illegals from Australia to turn up at their newspaper and offer reportage at 10 percent below the going rate, the writers would call the authorities so fast that your head would spin. And the publisher's argument that thanks to the cheap Australians, he's able to trim a few cents off the newsstand price would make no impression.

•   •   •  

Your tax dollars at work: US government meets with CAIR and other Muslim leaders to discuss "Islamophobia"   [12/23/06]
What on earth is wrong with the State Department, FBI and other security agencies who continue to cater to jihad's friends in America? Can the government officials possibly be as stupid as they appear?
    "Islamophobia" is a made-up problem from the devious minds at the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), whose aim is to remove criticism of Muslims from public discourse in this country. Remember that the Saudis have contributed $50 million to CAIR for a "public-relations campaign aimed at repairing Islam's ... image in America."
    Robert Spencer comments on the full court press from the hidden Islamic persuaders.

    Why is the State Department participating in conferences like this? Why is the State Department participating in conferences with people like Nihad Awad and Mahdi Bray? And why is the State Department spending any time at all discussing "Islamophobia" in the U.S., when, if it exists at all, its cause is clear?
        Just in case you're coming in late, Americans are an extraordinarily tolerant people. There are large numbers of immigrants in the U.S. right now, legal and illegal, and apart from some isolated incidents they are not being victimized. The age of "Dogs and Irish Not Allowed" is long gone. Muslims in America are not suffering from any large-scale discrimination or hatred, and much of CAIR's vaunted hate crimes report is trumped-up. "Islamophobia" is a political tool invented by people like the speakers at this conference, for the purposes of providing protected victim status for American Muslims. The primary cause of "Islamophobia," insofar as it exists at all, is precisely the disingenuousness of those same American Muslim leaders when confronted with acts of violence committed by their coreligionists, in the name of the religion. Americans aren't stupid. They can see through the shiftily-worded and inadequate condemnation of terrorism issued by the Fiqh Council of North America.

•   •   •  

Now Hiring   [12/22/06]
Investor's Business Daily nails what's important in the aftermath of the Swift raids -- the citizens applying in large numbers for meatpacking jobs shows the falsehood of the propaganda that immigrants are needed to do "jobs Americans won't do." It's an ugly lie, demeaning to the American character, that has been allowed to remain in public debate far too long.

    After last week's raids at meatpacking plants, applicants were lining up to fill the vacant jobs. It's reality-check time for the theory that illegals are needed to do work that Americans shun. [...]
        As United Food and Commercial Workers spokeswoman Jill Cashen told the Associated Press: "They're trying to staff up their plants, and they've been raising their wages the past few weeks."
        It's not clear at this writing if Swift saw the raids coming. What's clear is that its upgraded compensation is drawing more non-Hispanic white job-seekers, who made up most of the new hires at Grand Island. These are people who don't fit the profile of the typical meatpacking worker.
        "To me," said Cashen, "it's an example that when you make the job more attractive you get a different kind of applicant."
ANSWER rally Meanwhile, the commie hispanics from ANSWER are comparing the lawful arrest of illegal workers to Hitler: Hispanic groups call for moratorium on work raids.
    SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - U.S. Hispanic groups and activists on Thursday called for a moratorium on workplace raids to round up illegal immigrants, saying they were reminiscent of Nazi crackdowns on Jews in the 1930s.
        They accused the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement of "racial profiling," or selective enforcement against Hispanics, for arresting 1,300 workers on immigration violations in December 12 raids at meatpacking plants in six states.
        "We are demanding an end to these immigration raids, where they are targeting brown faces. That is major, major racial profiling, and that cannot be tolerated," said Rosa Rosales, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, at a news conference.
        "This unfortunately reminds me of when Hitler began rounding up the Jews for no reason and locking them up," Democratic Party activist Carla Vela said. "Now they're coming for the Latinos, who will they come for next?"
For a more reality-friendly comparison, see Hitler's Mideast helpers, who include Haj Amin al-Husseini, Yasser Arafat's uncle.

•   •   •  

Q&A: Sensenbrenner Sees New Battles Looming on Immigration   [12/22/06]
Human Events has chosen Rep James Sensenbrenner as its 2006 Man of the Year, and interviewed him on the occasion for a review of what did and did not happen in this pivotal year. Rep. James Sensenbrenner
    He will be missed as Chair of the Judiciary Committee, particularly since the Democrat taking control is the Islam-friendly John Conyers.

    I make no apologies for bringing the issue of illegal immigration on the national agenda. This is an issue that has been festering for over 50 years and getting worse by the day. I took a lot of hits from the business community, from the churches and from the political elites for the border-security-only bill that the House passed last December. They completely ignore what is needed to have an effective immigration-reform proposal.
        I go back to a commission headed by Father Theodore Hesburgh, the former president of Notre Dame University, who by his own admission is no conservative. He was named head of a blue ribbon commission by President Carter in 1979. The commission reported in 1981 to President Reagan, and Father Hesburgh stated that we must secure the border first, otherwise no immigration reform proposal will be successful. The commission came out against any form of amnesty until the border was secured because amnesty would only encourage more illegal immigrants to cross the border.
        Father Hesburgh was right, and the people who have been criticizing the secure-the-border-first approach, which I introduced and the House of Representatives passed, conveniently ignore what Father Hesburgh said 25 years ago.
        Had Father Hesburgh been listened to, we would not be discussing this issue today.
        Interestingly, Ed Meese, who was, of course, President Reagan's attorney general and one of his closest personal advisors, recently wrote in Human Events, and before that wrote in the New York Times, that the Reagan amnesty, the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, was a mistake, and that history has proven it to be a mistake. Do you share that view?
        I voted against Simpson-Mazzoli in 1986 and said at the time that this would make the situation worse. I asked Mr. Meese at a subcommittee hearing while the bill was being considered what would happen if we gave the amnesty and didn't secure the border. Meese said he didn't know what would happen because people who received amnesty would price themselves out of the market and there would be a flood of cheaper labor coming across the border to take those jobs. And that's what happened. Meese was right. It was a mistake.

•   •   •  

Va. Lawmaker's Remarks on Muslims Criticized   [12/21/06]
Rep. Virgil Goode Rep. Virgil Goode has been a stand-up guy with an excellent immigration voting record. He has recently come under fire for criticizing Congressman-elect and Muslim Keith Ellison for announcing he would take his oath of office on the Koran.

    In a recent letter to constituents, Goode, a five-term congressman from Rocky Mount, wrote that he does "not subscribe to using the Koran in any way" and added: "The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."
        The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned Goode's remarks and called on him to apologize.
        "Congressman Goode's ignorant and divisive statements are an affront to Muslims in his district and to Americans of all faiths who believe in our nation's longstanding traditions of religious tolerance and diversity," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the council.
Here is Rep. Goode's recent letter to constituents on the controversy.
    Keep in mind that Muslim immigration to American is actually increasing, even though we are supposedly at war with the jihadists. Islam is Stalinism in turbans, and we are crazy to welcome it through multicultural immigration policies.
    Did FDR invite Germans and Japanese to America during WWII? Hardly, because he understood that you keep ENEMIES out of your country.
    See also Robert Spencer's remarks (original links included):
    In my 2003 book Onward Muslim Soldiers, I observed that "September 11 was largely a problem of faulty immigration controls" and called, accordingly, for tighter immigration controls -- while noting the chief obstacle to such measures: "immigration controls on Muslim countries are supposedly racist, even though Muslims are not members of any single race or ethnic group." I also wrote that "the greatest amount of damage control...must be done with the Muslim immigrants who are already in the United States. Multiculturalism has relegated the idea of assimilation to the dustbin of history. But that is precisely what is needed. American Muslims need to become assimilated to the American ideals enumerated in the Constitution." (Pp. 297-298)
Finally, Britain is facing a likely terrorist attack over the holidays because of Islamic immigration. Why is Washington importing more trouble for America when we can see how badly Muslim immigrants have worked out for Europe?

•   •   •  

For Divided Family, Border Is Sorrowful Barrier   [12/21/06]
The New York Times has been running a sob-story extravaganza, with daily snifflers about a Mexican family in San Antonio and Monterrey.
    Today's episode focuses on sister Irma who returned to Mexico after living illegally in this country for six years, who is full of tears and regret. (Is she so miserable that she can't straighten the pictures on her walls. Or maybe the Times fauxtographer helped add the touch.) Minuteman demo at Burbank NBC

    She works as a bar waitress and made an interesting remark about Mexicans' drinking habits.

    Earlier this year, Irma got a job as a waitress at a pool hall three days a week for $90. Irma said patrons of the Monterrey bar do not tip like those in Texas, where she sometimes ended the night at her restaurant job with an extra $40. "The bad thing here is that people drink until they crawl," she said. "Over there, if they see you drunk, they don't sell to you."
Mexicans don't leave their addiction to excessive drinking at home when they come here, even though the legal and social prohibitions are quite different. According to one California expert, "Alcoholism runs rampant in the Mexican Latino community."
    The Mexican habit of drinking to excess and then driving have caused the deaths of many Americans, including Marine Cpl. Brian Mathews (who survived a tour of duty in Iraq) and Donna and Sean Wilson, a Tenessee couple stuck down by a drunk illegal with dozens of criminal prior arrests.

•   •   •  

Britain's new slogan: conform   [12/20/06]
Columnist Margaret Wente notes that Tony Blair's recent repudiation of multiculturalism (which was rather tepid, in fact) was behind the curve, that the 7/7 London bombings revealed diversity as an ideology has failed miserably.
    Still, calling for Muslims to assimilate to British values is easier said than done. After all, a Pew poll found that a stunning "81% of British Muslims said they thought of themselves as a Muslim first and a citizen of their country only second."

    Britain's 2.3 million Muslims have serious social problems, of which radicalization is only one. Muslims now make up 3 per cent of the population but 11 per cent of the prisoners. Their unemployment rate is three times the national average. Muslim children do badly in school, and a third of the employable adults have no work qualifications. Eighty per cent of the immigrants from Pakistan are from backward rural areas, and many are illiterate, even in Urdu. The same goes for Bangladeshis.
        And yet, when Muslims in one poor community were asked what mattered most to them, they didn't mention crime, jobs or poverty. Instead, they answered: Palestine, Iraq, and faith (meaning Muslim schools). British Muslims are extremely diverse, but it's fair to say most identify far more passionately with the worldwide community of Islam than with the country that has taken them in. They are upset by British policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East, even though most have no ties with those places other than religion. What good is democracy, they ask, when their country persists in waging war against Islam?
        "Social cohesion" is a nice phrase. But the government doesn't have a clue how to create it. Resolving this nation's social tensions will take far more than a few English lessons and a new slogan.
Despite Tony Blair's conversion to sanity, Britain is far gone. The latest outrage against common sense (not to mention western values) was the escape of a Muslim man who killed a British police officer by wearing a veil when he left on a plane for Somalia. Heathrow officials apparently did not check whether the person in the burqa was the woman of the passport (the killer's sister). [Police killer suspect fled Britain in a veil].
    The Times has learnt that British immigration officers rarely carry out a visual check to match a passport photograph with a departing female passenger's veiled face.

•   •   •  

Making a Life in the U.S., but Feeling Mexico's Tug   [12/19/06]
Somehow the New York Times managed to find one of the rare Mexicans who resides legally in this country. (Remember that of the Mexicans who live here, an estimated 85 percent are illegal.)
    But Racquel Rodriguez is everything patriotic Americans don't want in a legal immigrant. She doesn't speak English and would only learn it in order to get a promotion at work. She doesn't care about America and is only here for the money. She would rather be back in Monterrey, with the few members of her family she hasn't yet brought here. Her high school son who was born and raised in America considers himself a Mexican — as do 55 percent of citizens of Mexican heritage who identify with their ancestral homeland rather than their place of birth.

    Despite her tenacity, Mrs. Rodriguez's family is not as close as she wants. Dinnertime comes and her husband is working late, her son is at team practice. Her daughter, Gabriela, 22, has a family of her own. Mrs. Rodriguez sits on her blue corduroy couch, yawning with fatigue. Half of her torn heart remains in Mexico.
        As Mrs. Rodriguez tells it, she was never drawn to Texas by an American dream. She was driven to leave Mexico by the pain of the past. [...]
        Her opportunity to immigrate legally came through simple luck. Her husband's sister married an American citizen. Once that sister-in-law became a naturalized citizen, she applied for residency for Jaime, Raquel and their daughter, Gabriela. Jaime Jr. was an American citizen, having been born in Texas during an exploratory sojourn by the couple.
The sidebar to this article notes the preponderance of Mexicans in the current tsunami - Low-Wage Workers From Mexico Dominate Latest Great Wave of Immigrants
    The clearest sign of the system's dysfunction is that legal permanent residents are no longer the majority of newcomers. Among recent arrivals, legal immigrants are outnumbered by illegal ones who sneaked across a border, or came legally and overstayed their visas. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, about 56 percent of illegal immigrants come from Mexico.
        The calculation Mexican immigrants make is simple: there are jobs across the border at wages that are much higher than in Mexico. In the United States new Mexican immigrants mostly earn poverty wages by American standards, a median income of only $300 a week, the Pew Hispanic Center reported last year. But that is as much as four times what they would make for similar work at home.
The statistics cited by the Times are unduly kind. Mexicans are arguably the worst, least successful immigrants ever, largely as a result of their stunning aversion to education, the traditional immigrant ladder to success: e.g. just 9.6 percent of fourth-generation Mexican Americans have a post-high-school degree, compared with 45.1 percent of Americans as a whole.

•   •   •  

Kidnappings on rise in South Texas   [12/18/06]
There's a reason why you don't toss a rotten apple into a barrel of good ones: proximity to decay promotes more of same. So it is in South Texas, where kidnappings are becoming "a way of life."

    Crime in Mexico — gangland decapitations have become a gruesome fad this year — has grabbed most of the headlines.
        Meanwhile, the kidnapping trade has quietly flourished in the Rio Grande Valley, where Americans have about the same chance of getting abducted as they do in Mexico, officials say.
        Since early 2004, there have been 78 kidnappings in Hidalgo County alone. And neighboring Starr County registered 19 kidnap or missing person cases in 2005 and 2006.
        That compares with 98 kidnappings of Americans in all of Mexico in 2005 and 2006. [...]
        The surge in kidnappings has taken many Valley residents by surprise, the sheriff said.
        ''In Mexico, ransom kidnappings are a way of life. Over here it's an anomaly," he said.
Some of the kidnappings are drug cartel related, but by no means all. Many are traditional snatch and demand cash.

•   •   •  

Bribe culture seeps into South Texas   [12/18/06]
Mexico drug bribe laid out in Texas This depressing trend is not really surprising, given that South Texas is culturally far more Mexico than America. Texans refer to the Mexican-Dixon Line, running from El Paso to Houston, as a sort of piecemeal surrender.

    BROWNSVILLE — The bribe has long been a shortcut to wealth and power along the Texas-Mexico border. But these days, it's not just politicians lining their pockets or crooked lawmen taking bags of cash to overlook drug loads.
        The culture of bribery is quietly seeping into new realms of government, from school districts to municipal court, experts say.
        Proximity to Mexico is at least partly to blame, said Anthony Knopp, a professor who teaches border history at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
        "What we're dealing with is a Third World country on the other side of the border where there is a culture of corruption ... corruption will show up here, naturally." [...]
        The bribery culture has existed in Mexico for centuries. There, the bribe is known as la mordida — "the bite." Paying mordidas is often the most efficient — or the only — way of getting things done in Mexico.
        Federal officials in the Rio Grande Valley say they began seeing rising numbers of bribery cases several years ago, and formed a task force to target corruption and graft.
Tom Tancredo reported in his book In Mortal Danger that Mexican drug corruption took over entire town governments in southern California 10 years ago: Mexican drug cartels take over U.S. cities.

•   •   •  

Mexico anti-drug effort mostly a bust   [12/17/06]
The new Mexican president started out his term with a dramatic effort to crack down on the country's very powerful drug cartels. So far, nothing spectacular but perhaps it's unrealistic to expect a big get. It took years to track down and kill Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar, for example.

    A week after taking the oath of office, Calderon ordered more than 6,000 soldiers, sailors and federal police to swarm towns where warring drug smugglers are believed responsible for as many as 500 killings this year. Hired assassins have added beheadings to their repertoire and recently started tossing victims from planes in an apparent effort to shock and demoralize rivals.
        Despite the fanfare accompanying Calderon's anti-drug operation, which included roadblocks and air surveillance, the effort had yielded no arrests as of Friday afternoon. [...]
        One suspected cartel gunman was killed Wednesday after he fired on soldiers trying to serve a search warrant on a property in the town of Dos Aguas.
        Army personnel found several hundred rounds of ammunition, cellphones and shortwave radios, 10 weapons, a police uniform and a marijuana packaging device. They also found 1,100 marijuana plants and about 30 pounds of seed.
        Port investigators have had better luck. On Dec. 5, they turned up nearly 20 tons of pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient for Mexico's burgeoning methamphetamine labs. The drug can be legally imported, but the container was labeled as another product. No one claimed the shipment.
See also my Vdare.com article Is Mexico About To Fall Apart? Brenda Walker Says Yes that focuses on drug cartel threat to Mexico's viability.

•   •   •  

Extremist Latino rhetoric flares in the background   [12/17/06]
It's rare to see honest reporting in the MSM about the sort of hateful, racist speech one hears regularly from Mexican open-borders agitators.

    From street activists to students to professionals, Latinos are stoking ethnic anger as they pander to crowds with blatant stereotypes and use racially charged language to motivate their supporters -- and they are doing so with virtual impunity.
        At an October protest in Escondido, Calif., organizer Fernando Suarez de Solar of a group called Aztec Warriors for Peace whipped a crowd of illegal immigrants into a frenzy outside City Hall after the council passed an ordinance that requires landlords to verify the legal residency of their tenants.
        "Do not allow yourselves to be intimidated by any blue-eyed 'whitey' that comes to your house and asks you for 'papers,'" de Solar shouted in Spanish. Moments later, when he was giving me an English translation of what he had just told the crowd, he forgot to include the reference to "blue-eyed whitey," perhaps in deference to my green eyes.
        Two teenage girls standing in the crowd casually dismissed Anglos as little more than a race of lazy bigots who have stolen everything they have acquired.
        "Like, white people shouldn't be trying to do that, like trying to take all of the Mexicans [away]. That's why they have everything," said 16-year-old Norma Sanchez.
        Her friend Jeanette Rivera, 17, quickly interjected "Without us, [whites] are nothing."
Patriotic Americans like the Minutemen are constantly hit with unfounded accusations of racism just for demanding that immigration be legal, controlled and reduced. The reason is that the enemies of sovereignty have no arguments, so they stoop to name-calling lies, mostly because the liberal media is receptive.
    A typical picture of Minutemen is one below, taken in Burbank in fall 2005. Minuteman demo at Burbank NBC

•   •   •  

Loss for one is another's gain   [12/16/06]
In Greeley, Colorado, the illegal Mexicans are gone from the Swift plant, and citizens are lined up to fill those empty slots. The story doesn't mention whether wages have been raised to attract U.S. workers, but that has been the pattern in other industries. Greeley job seeker Travis Stoltz
    Shown here is 19-year-old Travis Stoltz, as he fills out a job application on a glass door.
    In addition, a dirty little secret is that some businesses don't want to hire citizens if most of the workers speak only Spanish, because the Americans are a cultural disruption. Being an English-speaking citizen is a disadvantage in many areas of work that have been taken over by foreigners, like home construction and restaurant kitchen jobs.

    GREELEY - The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday. [...]
        Greg Bonifacio heard about the job openings on television and brought his passport, his Colorado driver's license, his Social Security card and even a color photograph of himself as a young Naval officer to prove his military service.
        "I don't want to hassle with any identification problems because of my last name," said Bonifacio, a 59- year-old Thornton resident of Filipino heritage.

•   •   •  

More on Separationism   [12/16/06]
Rod Dreher is the Crunchy (as in granola) Con guy, who is politically conservative but stylistically comfortable with Berkeley food esthetics and appreciation for small-is-beautiful neighborhoods.
    He is aware of the danger of Islam, that its jihad to imprison the world in sharia law is no joke, yet won't go as far as Larry Auster, who believes that the west must separate from Muslims as much as is reasonably possible.
    Dreher is a member of the Dallas Morning News editorial board, and a recent meeting with a group of local Muslim leaders says everything you need to know.

    I asked the delegation's leader to clarify something he'd said to me and some colleagues last time we met, about his belief that homosexuals should be killed, adulterous women stoned, etc. He launched an elaborate defense of this position, saying that Judaism and Christianity are against homosexuality. Yes, I said, but they don't require that gays be killed for being gay. Do you believe that they should? An imam jumped in to explain why the sharia is right to require hand-chopping of thieves. Later, the delegation's leader said that if I'm asking him to apologize for what his religion requires, he's not going to do it.
        Trying to get at the heart of the matter, I asked if they thought sharia should be the law of the land in our secular pluralistic democracy. Another round of long-winded answers, amounting to, "It would never happen here." That's not what I'm asking, I said; should it happen here. Someone explained that Muslim community would never be big enough in this country to make that happen. Which is, of course, entirely beside the point, but we moved on. I had my answer.

•   •   •  

Bay Area: Population expected to swell by 2 million   [12/16/06]
California as a whole is losing population, so they say, but the Bay Area is projected to become enormously more crowded over the coming decades.
    More bad news: Bay Area employment declined 7 percent from 2000 to 2006.

    The Bay Area's population will rise by about 2 million people over the next 30 years, with the largest increases in San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland, the Association of Bay Area Governments projected in a report released Thursday.
        Planners and demographers said Thursday it may be time for the Bay Area to bite the bullet and plan for density, because people will continue coming here to work.
        San Jose is expected to be the first Bay Area city to surpass the 1-million-population mark, in 2010, and San Francisco should see about 161,000 new residents by 2035, according to the projections, which the organization makes every two years.
        Regional planners who wrote the report predicted 1.5 million new jobs will be created in the Bay Area between 2000 and 2035, with large increases in health and education services; professional and managerial services; and arts and recreation and restaurant services.

•   •   •  

Silicon Valley espionage case   [12/15/06]
It's amazing that foreigners are hired for security-sensitive jobs with apparently no thought that they might be more loyal to their homeland than to America. Chinese in particular should be scrutinized, since China is a likely future enemy, and threatened to nuke Los Angeles a few years back. (In all the decades of the cold war, the Soviet Union never threatened to bomb an American city.)
    A recent trend is that immigrants from China have decided they are really Chinese at heart and have returned home.

    Federal prosecutors in San Jose say a "former Chinese national" living in Cupertino stole night vision training software from a Silicon Valley defense contractor and tried to sell it to military buyers in Thailand, Malaysia and China.
        A federal indictment announced Thursday against Xiangdong Sheldon Meng is being pursued under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act, a federal law intended to give prosecutors more power to reduce industrial theft.
        U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan, whose office oversaw the investigation, issued a statement saying the technology involved made the charges particularly serious.
        "The alleged economic espionage and theft and export of trade secrets such as these -- visual simulation training software that has military application, no less -- has real consequences that could jeopardize our country's military advantages in the world," he said in the statement. [...]
        In an unrelated corporate espionage case, two other men pleaded guilty in federal court in San Jose Thursday to stealing civilian chip technology from two Silicon Valley firms. The guilty pleas by Fei Ye, a U.S. citizen, and Ming Zhong, a permanent U.S. resident, are the first convictions ever under the 10-year old Economic Espionage Act.
Another dismaying fact is that our government is reluctant to use the Economic Espionage Act because "They don't want to antagonize certain foreign governments."

•   •   •  

Tancredo profile grows in Miami   [12/14/06]
Rep. Tom Tancredo remarked a couple weeks back that Miami is a "third world country," presumably referring to the level of crime, poverty and school failure. It's also a place where knowledge of English is not required, nor is assimilation to American values. ID theft victim Audra Schmierer
    A minor brouhaha followed, with Gov. Jeb Bush calling Tancredo a "nut" insisting that diversity enriches us all. Tancredo was then invited to speak at the Rotary Club, but had to cancel because of threats and the hispanic workers at the restaurant refused to serve him.
    The storm has largely blown over, but Miamians are still full of opinions about Tancredo and their city.

    Miami - This city can't stop talking about Tom Tancredo.
        The Colorado congressman was the main topic this morning on El Sol, the top Cuban talk radio station. The Miami Herald played cancellation of Tancredo's planned speech here on its front page. [...]
        Elkin Pavajeav, 30, immigrated to Miami from Columbia 20 years ago, and agrees with Tancredo in part. Miami, he said, can look like a Third World Country.
        "There's a lot of poverty here. It's like Cuba. The rich live on one side, the poor live on the other," Pavajeav said. But Tancredo seems to imply, Pavajeav said, "that the only person who should be here is the Americans.
        "America is the open to everyone. The dream can happen to me," said Pavajeav, a U.S. Marine who said he fought in Iraq. "I'm not defending Columbia. I'm defending this nation here."
Funny how many people believe immigration to America is their right.
    Anyway, you can read Tancredo's speech online.
    Yes, I know, there has always been some corruption in every large city and in many small towns as well. The difference is this. In a Third World country, corruption is a way of life, it is accepted, it is routine way of doing business. Mexico has its "mordida" and Russia has a violent mafia and so forth. In America by contrast, it is a scandal and someone is thrown out of office. So, I ask you: Is corruption becoming a way of life in Miami?
        Undoubtedly, many of Miami's problems are derived from its high poverty rate. The 2002 Census found Miami to have the highest poverty rate in the US for cities of its size㬛%. For all of Miami-Dade it is 18%. That ranking has improved modestly, but Miami is now attracting more low-wage immigrants than high-tech workers, so what is the trend line? The illegal immigrants of today are not the doctors and lawyers and engineers of the Cuban exodus of the 1960s, and our open borders are in fact "importing poverty" as a national policy.
        Forbes magazine reports in a recent edition that since 2002, a net of 151,000 Miami residents, most of them middle-class, have left Miami for other parts of the country, and 238,000 new Miami residents have arrived from other nations, mostly Central and South America. Miami-Dade County now has a foreign-born population of 51.4%, the highest in the country for a large city.
        The Inter-American Development Bank reports on remittances sent home by immigrants working in the U.S. In 2004, 47% of Florida's adult immigrant population sent $2.45 billion to relatives and friends in Latin America. Remittances have been increasing at more than 10% annually, so by 2006 almost three billion dollars in earnings are leaving Florida and do not contribute to the Florida economy. Thus, if Miami-Dade has 20% of the state's immigrants, Miami's economy is exporting about $600 million annually through remittances.
See also a letter from a Florida truck driver about how rapidly Miami has changed.

•   •   •  

Latino community outraged at timing of ICE raid   [12/13/06]
The shrieking has begun in earnest about the recent crackdown on illegal aliens working in meatpacking plants. Mexicans are wailing that the time of arrest was "insensitive" to their values. You can't make this stuff up.

    In one of the largest federal roundups in the state since the immigration frenzy swept the country, several hundred worried residents protested outside Swift & Co. beef packing plant, angry at officials for their insensitive timing of the raid.
        "This is an insult to us as Mexicans because today is El Dia de la Vigen de Guadalupe," said Lupe Tapia of Greeley, in reference to Dec. 12, which is celebrated as a religious holiday recognizing the birth of the virgin Mary. "They are acting like (the undocumented workers) are terrorists but they are just coming here to work."
Illegals have been made to feel so Special by the ethnic huckster groups that they believe law enforcement should be politically correct according to the Mexican calendar. Of course, the date is only an excuse. The foreigners would bellow just as loudly on Groundhog Day. ID theft victim Audra Schmierer
    At least ICE has emphasized the identity theft component of the raids. Any American can be the victim of ID theft, the fastest growing form of crime and another consequence of illegal immigration anarchy. One in six Arizonans have been victims of identity theft in the past five years.
    The difficulty of repairing a ruined identity and credit rating are daunting -- some victims may never recover their good name, like Dublin, California, resident Audra Schmierer (shown above). Her Social Security number was stolen and used by more than 200 illegal aliens, leaving her with a tax liability of over $1 million.
    Illegal immigration is NOT a victimless crime. The illegal aliens who used a stolen Social Security number should be prosecuted not just for the meatpacking jobs they stole but for the ID theft misery they have caused every citizen victim.

•   •   •  

Indo-US astronaut follows Kalpana's footsteps   [12/12/06]
Indians (the dot kind) have a high opinion of their compatriots' importance in American society. Many apparently regard Silicon Valley as an Indian creation that mysteriously began south of San Francisco. There's also a popular belief that ahead lies the "Indian Century" despite the nation's massive problems, including a growing AIDS crisis, a level of superstition not congruent with a first-world economy and crushing gender discrimination. Indo-American astronaut Sunita Lyn Williams
    Indians are excited about their new astronaut-girl (shown), since the last one, Kalpana Chawla, came to a sad end in the Discovery break-up. (Indians appreciate independent women more when they live elsewhere, like the United States.) Anyway, the new astronaut-girl celeb was born and raised in America, but that detail seems to matter little.

    Sunita Lyn Williams, flight engineer for Nasa's 14th expedition, is one of seven crew members for the mission.
        Sunita's parents were there to witness the first flight of their daughter into space from Cape Canavarel in Florida.
        And countless Indians were among those who watched her first flight with excitement and hope.
        Ms Williams is a second generation Indian-American and has been with Nasa for the past eight years.
NASA has been loudly touting the diversity of its most recent astronaut crew, so you have to wonder how much a quota system is shaping up: Discovery's 7 Astronauts a Diverse Bunch...
    CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Discovery's seven astronauts are among the most culturally diverse of any space shuttle crew. There are two African-Americans, an astronaut of Indian descent, the soon-to-be first Swede in space, a British-born mission specialist, an Alaskan and a Jersey Boy.
Considering the misogynous diversity present in her ancestral home, Sunita Williams should be very grateful that her parents left girl-murdering India to come to America [Feticide means 7,000 fewer girls a day in India].
    The problem of female feticide has significantly worsened since 1991, UNICEF said at the India launch of its "State of the World's Children 2007" report.
        Out of 71,000 children born every day in India, just 31,000 are girls -- giving a sex ratio of 882 girls to 1,000 boys.
        But the global sex ratio -- which is 954 girls to 1,000 boys -- suggests that 38,000 girls should be born in India every day.
In addition, the most brutal sort of child labor remains alive and well in India, Misery goes on for India child workers.

•   •   •  

Mexican government sends 6,500 troops to state scarred by drug violence, beheadings   [12/12/06]
El Presidente Fox used the military against drug cartels and failed; now we will see whether the new guy, Calderon, can do any better with troops. Hopefully he is sending an early message that his administration will be tougher on drugs and crime than his predecessor, and this action is more than a camera op.

    Security officials said police and soldiers will arrest traffickers, mount checkpoints and burn crops of marijuana and opium poppies grown in Michoacan's rugged mountains. Navy ships will seal off the state's small Pacific coast, along which smugglers carry drugs on their way to the United States. The force will operate 19 planes, 38 helicopters, and four ships.
        Hilly, largely rural Michoacan is Calderon's home state and a major drug transshipment point north; police here have reported more than 500 killings this year, about half of which investigators say are linked to a turf war between two rival drug gangs.
Along the way, Mexican cartels have picked up some terrorist style pointers from al Qaeda...
    In apparent attempts to terrorize rivals and the public, the Michoacan gangs have carried out a wave of decapitations, placing the severed heads on public display with threatening notes including one that read, "See. Hear. Shut Up. If you want to stay alive."
        In the most gruesome case, gunmen burst into a nightclub and rolled five heads onto the dance floor. In another, a pair of heads were planted in front of a car dealership in Zitacuaro, a town best known until now as a nesting ground for monarch butterflies.

•   •   •  

Katrina Begets a Baby Boom by Immigrants   [12/12/06]
The changes in New Orleans are getting a little attention. Remember how the Mexicans could hardly wait for the winds to stop to steal citizen jobs and brag about transforming the unique culture into Nueva Orleans? Then Bush suspended Davis Bacon, making illegal hiring easier, and black residents were sold out by "leaders" like Jesse Jackson.
    Now more time has passed, and the baby meal tickets are starting to appear. Anchor baby citizens allow illegal alien parents access to a whole array of welfare benefits. Katrina jackpot baby
Poor New Orleans. The city's ravaged medical services now have to be stretched to cater to illegal Mexicans' pregnancies when there's not enough for citizens.

    The throng of babies gurgling in the handful of operational maternity wards here has come as a big surprise — and a financial strain — to this historically black and white city, which before the hurricane had only a small Latino community and virtually no experience of illegal immigration.
        "Of all the myriad things that have changed after Katrina, this wasn't high on anybody's priority list,' said Dr. Mark Peters, chief executive of East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie.
        Because many immigrant mothers cannot afford to pay for prenatal care or delivery services, New Orleans's newest citizens are adding an unexpected load to the decimated health infrastructure in a city abandoned by many of its doctors. Much of the state-financed Charity Hospital system, which before Hurricane Katrina provided the bulk of care to New Orleans's uninsured and indigent population, remains closed.
See also Steve Sailer's Diversity without Community.

•   •   •  

Iraqi exodus could test Bush policy   [12/11/06]
Remember Vietnam? You lose a war, and then are expected to take in hundreds of thousands of your loser allies as refugees.
    At least some of the 900,000 Vietnamese refugees were Christian and adaptable to western ways. We can safely predict that the majority of Iraqi refugees will be culturally problematic and some will be terrorists. Muslim refugees and immigrants have been noteworthy

    Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have fled their homeland are likely to seek refugee status in the United States, humanitarian groups said, putting intense pressure on the Bush administration to reexamine a policy that authorizes only 500 Iraqis to be resettled here next year.
        The official US policy has been that the refugee situation is temporary and that most of the estimated 1.5 million who have fled to Jordan, Syria, and elsewhere will eventually return to Iraq. But US and international officials now acknowledge that the instability in Iraq has made it too dangerous for many refugees, especially Iraqi Christians, to return any time soon.
        Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for refugees and migration, said that while the Bush administration does not think resettlement is needed for most refugees, its policy could rapidly change.
        "It is quite possible that we will in time decide that because of vulnerabilities of certain populations that resettlement is the right option," Sauerbrey said. While acknowledging that the administration originally set a quota of no more than 500 Iraqi refugees, she said the president has the legal authority to admit 20,000 additional refugees.
        Eventually, specialists said, the number of Iraqi refugees settling in the United States could be vastly higher.
Interestingly, there is no mention in this moderately detailed piece that Americans might not want thousands of Muslim refugees dumped in their communities.
    See Robert Spencer's remarks about this article, along with those of Hugh Fitzgerald , who writes for Jihadwatch also.

•   •   •  

Imams seek to settle with airline   [12/11/06]
Islamist shakedowns for large sums of money are becoming a useful strategy for weakening American self-defense: first the Muslims create a terrorizing event and then claim victimhood when they are apprehended. The Flying Imams incident is widely understood as being a probe of US airline defenses and will.
    The airline in question behaved responsibly, taking action only after several recognized terrorist behaviors had been reported by passengers and staff. Yet US AIR is being targeted to fork over a hefty sum. The company should call the bluff of terrorist enablers and go to court.

    Federal air marshals and pilots called the imams' actions a probe of airport security as well as a probe of the politically correct mentality of air passengers.
        The Washington Times reported in 2004 that flight crews and passengers were experiencing a number of terrorist probes, most notably Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles in June 2004, during which 14 Syrian men posing as musicians may have practiced a dry run.
        Also in July 2004, a passenger from Syria was taken into custody at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport while carrying anti-American materials and a note suggesting he intended to commit suicide.
        A pilot reported that he watched a man of Middle Eastern descent at the Minneapolis airport using binoculars to get airplane tail numbers and writing the numbers in a notebook to correspond with flight numbers.
See also Suspicion about imams grows as terror links pile up.

•   •   •  

Growing peril for Mexican journalists who dig too deep   [12/10/06]
Another measure of Mexico's descent into anarchy is the growing power of narco-cartels to assassinate reporters whenever they please.

    Garcia is one of eight journalists murdered since January -- a toll that gives Mexico the dubious distinction of being the deadliest country in Latin America for journalists. Three others have disappeared this year and are presumed dead. Since 2004, 13 journalists have been killed, presumably as revenge for critical stories on drug traffickers, corrupt officials and criminal gangs.
        "We are not able to establish that all of these crimes are related to journalists' work," said Carlos Lauria, the Americas program director for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. "But we can't deny a common theme that these attacks were committed against reporters working on stories about corruption and especially drug trafficking."
        The most recent victim, Adolfo Sanchez Guzman, a correspondent for the TV station Televisa Veracruz, was found shot to death Nov. 30 along with a friend he had given a ride. Police say the friend was the main target of the attack.
        Other victims include Jose Manuel Nava, 53, a former editor of the Mexico City-based newspaper Excelsior, who was found stabbed to death on Nov. 16, shortly after the release of his book "El Asalto Final," or "The Final Round." It said his newspaper's recent change in ownership involved financial irregularities and government corruption.

•   •   •  

Altoona, With No Immigrant Problem, Decides to Solve It   [12/09/06]
Altoona PA
According to the New York Times, the elected representatives of Altoona, Pennsylvania, are legislating against a non-existent crisis because they are taking action before the town is overrun with foreigners. In some circles, planning to prevent a problem is considered good government.

    If Hazleton, where the immigrant population grew sharply in just a few years, started the current trend for dealing with a surge in illegal immigrants, Altoona may be the beginning of the next wave: trying to prevent a situation from developing in the first place.
        "We don't have a problem here with immigrants," said Joe Rieker, 40, one of five members of the Altoona City Council who voted in favor of the new ordinance. "But we want to stay ahead of the curve." One member voted against.
In addition, the murder of three local men outside a bar last year by illegal Miguel Padilla remains a strong memory for many Altoonans.
    Mayor Wayne Hippo and other members of the Council have said the Padilla case had nothing to do with the city's ordinance.
        But for local residents who support the ordinance, the murders were the biggest reason Altoona needed the ordinance.
        "We just had three murders here," Sandy Serbello, 64, a lifelong resident said in explaining her support of the measure. "We look at everybody differently now."
Living in a small town in Pennsylvania means knowing who your neighbors are and feeling safe. When that community sense is threatened by three murders at a pop at the hand of an illegal foreigner, you might as well live in Los Angeles.

•   •   •  

Immigrant legislation strategy is plotted   [12/09/06]
The enemies of the American nation are openly plotting its demise through an illegal alien amnesty for 20-30 million lawbreakers.

    Two of the most liberal members of Congress met with two of their most conservative colleagues this week to revive immigration legislation that passed the Senate but was throttled by House Republican leaders who resisted its attempt to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants.
        "The plan is to bring the bill up in late winter," said Rep. Jeff Flake R-Ariz., a conservative stalwart who attended the meeting in the office of Sen. Edward Kennedy,, D-Mass. The other participants were Sen. John McCain R-Ariz., and Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill. [...]
        At a time of anxiety about the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs, the McCain-Kennedy bill's efforts to import low-wage labor has drawn the anger of critics across the political spectrum. That is why Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates immigration restrictions, predicts Pelosi will be reluctant to get behind a proposal that could endanger the new Democratic majority.
        ''Nancy Pelosi knows the Democrats are on probation for the next two years,'' Krikorian said.
See also a recent clip from Lou Dobbs about the North American Union.

•   •   •  

While Sweden Slept   [12/08/06]
Bruce Bawer (the American living in Norway who wrote "While Europe Slept") paints an ugly portrait of the socialist paradise, where self-imposed cultural censorship prevents any discussion of the ruination which Muslim immigration is wreaking on their country.

    Dissent is powerfully discouraged. In Sweden, whose murder rate is currently twice that of America and where Muslims now constitute over 10% of the population and are disproportionately unemployed and prone to violence, the Swedish press routinely depicts America as crime-ridden. Polls show that the majority of Swedes are deeply disturbed by their country's dramatic social changes and highly critical of the policies that brought them about. Yet the crime and violence generally go unreported, so only rarely does any of the criticism seep into the press. Though two-thirds of Swedes question whether Islam is compatible with Western society, this issue is simply not open for public discussion.
        To quote Jonathan Friedman, a New Yorker who teaches social anthropology at the University of Lund, "no debate about immigration policies is possible" because Sweden's "political class," which controls public debate, simply avoids the topic. Recently, the city of Stockholm carried out a survey of ninth-grade boys in the predominantly Muslim suburb of Rinkeby. The survey showed that in the last year, 17% of the boys had forced someone to have sex, 31% had hurt someone so badly that the victim required medical care, and 24% had committed burglary or broken into a car. Sensational statistics — but in all of Sweden, they appear to have been published only in a daily newssheet that is distributed free on the subways.

•   •   •  

The West's Groveling Capitulation To Militant Islam   [12/08/06]
Classicist Bruce Thornton brings his historical background to bear on the refusal of the West to smack down invading Islam.

    In the Pope's visit and the media response to it, we once again witnessed the one-way street of "religious tolerance" and "respect." In other words, the West is supposed to respect and tolerate Muslims and Islam, all the while that no such respect is afforded to Christians and Jews. The West is supposed to feel guilty and obsess over its putative crimes against Islam, all the while that the longer chronicle of Islamic assault against the West is forgotten. Hence the ridiculous ignorance of those who think the Crusades were "holy wars" akin to jihadic aggression. Somehow it's forgotten that the Holy Land was Greco-Roman and Hebraic and Christian for centuries before the armies of Allah destroyed that cultural continuity and imposed a new culture and religion at the point of a sword.
        This double standard was particularly obvious given the backdrop of the Pope's visit—the city of Istanbul. Once known as Constantinople, this was one of the great cities of Classical and Christian culture, home to one of Christendom's most magnificent churches, Hagia Sophia, the church of the Holy Wisdom. On May 29, 1453, Constantinople ceased to exist, falling to the armies of the Sultan Mehmet II: "By noon," John Julius Norwich writes, "the streets were running red with blood. Houses were ransacked, women and children raped or impaled, churches razed, icons wrenched from their golden frames, books ripped from their silver bindings." [...]
        No, the enemy knows that what we pretend to be "tolerance" and "respect" are merely the camouflage of spiritual exhaustion and fear. We have fewer and fewer men like those who created the West in the teeth of Islamic aggression, men like the Byzantine Greek Lucas Notaras. After the sack of Constantinople, the Sultan demanded Notaras's beautiful 14-year-old son for the royal harem: "When Notaras still defied the Sultan," Steven Runciman writes, "orders were given for him and the two boys [his son and son-in-law] to be decapitated on the spot. Notaras merely asked that they should be slain before him, lest the sight of his death should make them waver. When they had both perished he bared his neck to the executioner." As Nestor says in the Iliad, "Men like those I have not seen again, nor ever will."
For more about the monster we are permitting to invade our communities through immigration, see the interview with documentary producer Gregory Davis:
    The West is guilty of the ages-old error of projection, of imposing its own ideas, beliefs, and aspirations onto the other guy. When Westerners approach Islam, they imagine that it is a religion like others that they are familiar with - like, say, Christianity. They see Islam as basically another item on the religious menu available in an integrated world. What they fail to understand, however, is that Islam is decidedly outside the Western tradition and therefore Western assumptions are inapt when assessing it. [...]
        In Islam: What the West Needs to Know, we talk with Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Bat Ye'or, Serge Trifkovic, and Abdullah Al-Araby, who all affirm that the most important aspect of Islam not understood in the West is that Islam is less a personal faith than a social and political plan for organizing humanity - really, a system of government.
Yes, and Islam is a totalitarian system that makes the Stalinist USSR seem like a day at the beach.
    See also Tony Blair's less-than-convincing call for "tolerance" in "multicultural Britain" — a place that becomes more dhimmified daily. Compare that with Australian PM John Howard's straightforward talk about Islam, that Muslims in his country better get with the program or scram.

•   •   •  

The Gym Jihad   [12/08/06]
An important detail is now emerging about the incident in a Dearborn outpost of Fitness USA (Exercise of Religion in Dearbornistan). Remember that a Muslim woman got her burqa in a bunch because her prayers at the gym were disrespected, so she said, by an infidel patron. (And, as Wardeh Sultan remarked "I've had my membership for seven or eight years, and I've never had a problem with praying there.")

    A Muslim woman in Dearborn, Mich., lodged a complaint Tuesday against Fitness USA for an alleged civil rights violation involving a fellow gym patron. According to Jodi Berry, executive director of Fitness USA, Wardeh Sultan was praying in front of another member's locker when the member wanted access to her belongings inside the locker. The inconvenienced patron tried to interrupt Ms. Sultan, but she remained prostrate in front of the locker and an altercation ensued. A manager was called into the locker room to intervene.
What other religion demands that praying should be done in a way that inconveniences others?

•   •   •  

Holidays bring rise in child smuggling   [12/07/06]
It's nearly Christmas so Mexicans have increased the numbers of kiddies being shipped across the border, though with varying degrees of success. Innocent children may be subjected to horrific abuse at the hands of smugglers and American taxpayers are stuck with the bill for shelters and foster care.

    As for entrusting children to professional smugglers, "if they're young girls they could be raped. Little boys can be sold to other families," said Nina Pruneda of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "They could be kidnapped, held for more money. Some actually make it, end up with their families, everything's happy. Others don't."
Sadly, for some children, a shelter full of strangers is better than their home. But the expansion of expensive services to foreign children is only one aspect of the plan of utopian do-gooders to provide welfare to the world, despite America's overspent credit card, now approaching $9 trillion in the hole.

•   •   •  

How the West Was Lost   [12/06/06]
Fjordman addresses the severe stress that political correctness has forced upon the most basic police protections, in which immigrants and other members of the victim class are always innocent and citizens are deemed troublemakers. In hard-hit areas like Britain, diligent officers are given no support from the top brass to do their job. In Australia, cops were told to Avoid Middle Eastern men on their way to beat up Aussies, leading to the accusation that police are "soft on ethnic crime." In France, the police were blamed for teenage thugs running into a power substation where they were accidentally killed, deaths that resulted in weeks of Muslim rioting.

    When Arne Hjemaas from Fauske in Norway discovered who was behind a series of burglaries in August and September, he gave the information to the police. "We knew where the burglar was and where the stolen goods were. He had stolen so much from us and from other firms that he had hired a garage to store everything," Hjemaas said, but the police did nothing.
        Finally, Hjemaas and his brother decided to pick up the goods and hand the burglar over to the police. "Unfortunately, it ended in a fight. The man was armed and aggressive. This is not stated in the police documents. The police have documented the burglar's bruises, but not mine. Our actions led to recovering stolen goods for us and others." Later, Hjemaas was told that the man was supposed to be apprehended the day before, but the officer who had been assigned the mission had to attend a funeral. Now, Hjemaas is about to be prosecuted for violence and risks four months in jail.
Fjordman later quotes author Theodore Dalrymple saying "For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain... has been to render the British population virtually defenseless against criminals and criminality." Britons are responding by fleeing their capitol city and nation in record numbers.
    Part and parcel of PC policing is not merely hamstringing officers but blaming the victim, as happened to the Norwegian mentioned above. Protecting oneself is no longer considered normal, as cultural marxism seeks to undermine even the most basic urge of human nature.
    This tendency has not been seen as much in America as in Europe, but the recent conviction of Roger Barnett for protecting his own land against trespassers shows that Marxicans are advancing here as well.

•   •   •  

Muslim woman cites gym after interrupted prayer   [12/05/06]
Dearbornistan update. Everyone you know breaks into prayer at the gym, right? Wrong. It's the Religion of Intimidation at work again.

    DEARBORN -- Fitness USA, a gym chain, is investigating an alleged civil rights violation involving a local Muslim woman who says her afternoon prayer was interrupted by a fellow patron, and that her complaint to management about the situation was rejected.
        "The manager told me, 'You have to respect her (the patron), but she does not have to respect your God,' " said Wardeh Sultan of Dearborn. "I've had my membership for seven or eight years, and I've never had a problem with praying there.
        "I told that manager, 'I can't believe you said that' " Sultan said. "Honestly, I feel humiliated and I feel ashamed, right now, to go back to Fitness USA."
What, is there a shortage of mosques in Dearborn such that Muslim women are forced to pray to Allah at Fitness USA? Not really.
    Apparently this is part of the latest strategy of radical Islam, exemplified by the Flying Imams caper, to make every public place a mosque in all of America, catering deferentially to Islam. Exhibit A below: imams conducting a pray-in at the Minneapolis airport, where they are demanding a special prayer room. Imams pray at airport

•   •   •  

Immigration Services Bureau's Ineptitude Endangers Americans   [12/05/06]
Michael Cutler is a former INS inspector who now comments at the Counterterrorism blog. He is alarmed at how the USCIS agency is failing to search adequately for terrorists as it processes legal immigration papers.
    As Sen Grassley noted on Lou Dobbs yesterday, "30,000 people in this country became citizen citizens without their file even being reviewed." The system of legal immigration is a bureaucratic disaster, in which 100,000 files are missing. USCIS rewards employees for moving cases through at a rapid rate to reduce caseload, rather than emphasizing accuracy and catching the bad guys.
    And now the Congress intends to dump the processing of a 20-million-person amnesty on this braindead agency? What a horror.

    Clearly Senator Grassley's statement makes it clear that he understands the grave risks posed by the ineptitude of the USCIS. In fact, on September 1 of this year, he testified at a field hearing conducted by the House Judiciary Committee in Dubuque, Iowa on the amnesty bill that was passed by the Senate (S. 2611). He spoke eloquently at that hearing. In fact, I testified at that very same hearing and so I heard Senator Grassley deliver his prepared testimony and provide other testimony about the failings of S.2611. His statement is worth reviewing, and you can read the hearing transcript here. The point is that USCIS is running an obviously fatally flawed program to naturalize aliens, where the emphasis is on the elimination of the backlog and not on making an effort to perform a cursory review of the relevant immigration files of as many as 30,000 cases this year alone!

See also Smuggling, theft, bribery at agency.

•   •   •  

Immigrants favor English as official language   [12/05/06]
We do immigrants no kindness by pandering to linguistic laziness. A Chinese immigrant should not have to learn Spanish, for example, in order to get along in Los Angeles. It shouldn't be a surprise that 65 percent of immigrants favor making English the official language.

    "Hola" may not be the greeting of choice among Hispanics living in the United States. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic adults -- 65 percent -- favor making English the nation's official language, according to a survey released yesterday..
        "More than three-in-four immigrants to the U.S. favored the legislation, as did nearly 60 percent of first-generation and 79 percent of second-generation Americans," the survey from Zogby International found.
        Another 67 percent of respondents not born here favored the idea compared with 64 percent of those born in the U.S. Favorable numbers were highest among Hispanics with less than a high school education (73 percent), young adults age 18 to 29 years (70 percent), Republicans (69 percent) and those from Mexico (69 percent).
        "Making English our official language celebrates the unifying factor in our diverse nation," said Mauro Mujica, chairman of District-based, 1.8 million-member U.S. English, an activist group seeking to preserve English usage in the government and elsewhere.
That's the good news. The bad news is that "The proportion of people who don't speak English well is also increasing." It's now so easy to live in certain areas, e.g. Los Angeles and Miami, without speaking English that foreigners simply don't bother to learn.

•   •   •  

Congress open to passing bill on immigration   [12/04/06]
The Democrats about to take charge of Congress can't wait to reward 20-30 million lawbreaking aliens with American citizenship.

    Congress will approve an immigration bill that will grant citizenship rights to most of the 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the U.S. after Democrats take control next month, predict both sides on Capitol Hill.
        While Republicans have been largely splintered on the issue of immigration reform, Democrats have been fairly unified behind the principle that the illegals currently in the country should get citizenship rights without having to first leave the country.
        "Years of dawdling have worsened our border security and made it harder to fix this broken system," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who will lead the Judiciary Committee next year. "We should not let partisan politics and intolerance continue to delay and derail effective reform."
        Democrats in both chambers say they will start with some form of legislation first drafted by Sens. John McCain, Arizona Republican, and Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, which was the basis for the bill that was approved earlier this year by the Senate.

•   •   •  

Manager Arrested for Garbage in Lard   [12/04/06]
Global economy alert! Better watch out for those "Made in China" products — standards are still not up to western snuff and Chinese food items could be dangerous to your health.

    BEIJING - A factory manager in east China has been arrested for using grease from swill, sewage, pesticides and recycled industrial oil to make lard for human consumption, state media said Monday in the country's latest food scare.
        Ying Fuming, a manager at the Fanchang Grease Factory in Taizhou, a city in Zhejiang province, sold the lard at half the price of other wholesalers while promising that his product met safety standards, the Shanghai Daily said. [...]
        It is the latest incident involving substandard or fake food products in China, where there is rampant counterfeiting of food and medicines.
        China's food safety watchdog announced last month that seven companies that produced salted, red-yolk duck eggs used potentially cancer-causing red dyes.
        In 2004, at least 12 infants died from malnutrition after drinking phony formula in a city in the eastern province of Anhui. More than 200 babies suffered wasted limbs and swollen heads - common symptoms of malnutrition.

•   •   •  

Immigration enforcement stuns Cleveland families   [12/03/06]
Is it just me, or is there more sniffly reporting about deportation these days? This one from Cleveland is standard issue sob story, with "innocent" illegal aliens swept up by the unfeeling State. Somehow they are all exemplary persons, according to the press, except for breaking into the country. How does it happen that the media celebrate our being a "nation of laws" except for immigration?

    The acclaimed geologist had earned his good-neighbor credentials after arriving from Albania in 1992. He found factory work, befriended seemingly half of Lakewood, and emerged as the leader of a growing Albanian immigrant community.
        Still, he lacked a more crucial credential: a current visa. On the night of Nov. 7, federal immigration agents seized Bakia and his wife, Mirjana, as they left their car outside a relative's apartment in Lakewood.
        As the couple sit in jail awaiting deportation, astonished family and friends despair at the harshness of the action.
        "We were not aware of how grave the situation was," said Alban Bakia, the couple's 35-year-old son, a naturalized U.S. citizen.
        He had applied to sponsor his parents' citizenship, but federal authorities judged that the clock had run out. Even as new visas were being considered, immigration agents acted on a 6-year-old deportation order.
A major escalation in deportation stories has to be following the deportees to their true countries, a big investment in time and money for a paper. The Poynter Institute, a journalism school, praised the approach as "Journalism with a Difference." Reporters followed home a Guatemalan mother with kids who traveled to the US illegally against the wishes of her husband, and the initial experience of getting resettled was not altogether pleasant.
    Interestingly the San Francisco Chronicle reported on a deported family arriving in the Philippines in 2004. As it turned out, the Cuevas family reconnected with their culture, bought a house and renewed bonds with their extended family — living in the Philippines wasn't horrible at all. It's only our American chauvinism making us believe that there's nothing worse than repatriation.
    Another example of a recent deportation sob story is After lifetime in U.S., deported man a stranger in his homeland, in which a repeated lawbreaker, Humberto Fernandez, (shown here) is treated sympathetically. Mexican citizen Humberto Fernendez
    He lived in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado. He was deported once for driving illegal immigrants from Arizona to Idaho for a smuggler in the 1970s, again for failing to mention his previous deportation when applying for residency in Wyoming, and finally after he drove with a broken taillight and had no papers to show police.
Additionally, the ACLU has its briefs in a bunch about a Somali criminal with a "long rap sheet" being sent home: Man's Deportation to Somalia Sets Off a Wave of Concern Over Safety. But around 9 million Somalis manage to reside there without needing rescue by the ACLU.
    And who can forget the image of "trailer parks ...abandoned" in Stillmore GA in the AP story, Messy aftermath of immigration raids outrages small Ga. town?
    Speaking of the AP, many illegal alien sob stories are published by the Associated Press — a fact-challenged institution to put it kindly — so they are reprinted in dozens of newspapers across the nation. The AP has shown no corresponding interest in the crimes committed by foreigners against Americans. Those stories are normally reported in local media only. Minutemen in Palmdale CA recently rallied to remind Americans about the human cost of open borders, namely the deaths of citizens like Tyler Lundin and David Marsh.
    And don't expect improvement from the press any time soon. Some Columbia University journalism students were recently caught cheating — on an ethics test.

•   •   •  

Did Bush Sacrifice GOP For Illegal Immigrants?   [12/03/06]
You don't see headlines as straightforward as this very often. Long-time Bush watchers are disturbed to report that the current president apparently prefers Mexicans to his own people and is happy to undermine the nation's sovereignty to benefits business pals. The truth is that open-borders Democrats are more to Bush's liking than his own party in which a greater number still support the American nation-state.

    However, where Bush may have sabotaged the Republican majority the most was in his handling of comprehensive immigration reform. Bush sided with open border advocates, often taking a stand against his own Party regarding illegal immigration. The President's demand for a guest worker program and "amnesty" — for what some studies indicate could have been as many as 100 million illegal immigrants — bucked the will of the American people and the elected officials who represented them.
        Bush had powerful allies on his side that made all the difference. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an organization not adverse to cheap labor, backed the President at every turn. Usually conservative newspapers like the Wall Street Journal joined liberal publications in the demand for so-called earned legalization for illegals. Therefore, Bush seemed willing to put it all on the line for the sake of the all-mighty dollar — no matter if it gave the Congressional majority to the Democrats or not.
        Many political pundits believe if the President would have shown a strong front with his legislative brethren, the choice for American voters would have been simple regarding the illegal immigration issue. Instead, Bush was willing to divide the Party by taking the position he did and the Democrats' conquest of the GOP wasn't far behind.
        There are even more sources who are far more cynical regarding Bush's possible sell out. Some believe Bush wants to create a North American conglomerate of nations that would encourage free trade across open borders. Critics see this as an attack on American sovereignty and they may be right. If the President was willing to sacrifice his own Party for the sake of the precious dollar, some believe he has put his nation up for sale at the same time.

•   •   •  

Build economic bridges, not border fences   [12/02/06]
Robert Pastor is a major architect of the destruction of the United States. He openly supports the dismantling of American sovereignty, having authored a book Toward a North American Community and was a major force behind the Council on Foreign Relations paper Building a North American Community.
    In this opinion piece, he recommends that the United States invest in Mexico, despite the fact that Mexico could easily finance its own development.

    Bush and Calderon should work with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to create a North American Investment Fund to invest $20 billion a year for a decade in infrastructure — roads, ports, railroads, communications — to connect the southern part of Mexico with the lucrative North American market. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has introduced a little-noticed bill for such a fund. The three leaders should support it.
        The United States is unlikely to give any aid to Mexico unless Washington is convinced that the funds will be well spent. That is why we should take note of Calderon's comments to Bush at their meeting Nov. 9 and hold him to them: "I did not come to the U.S. looking for the Americans to solve Mexico's problems. We have to solve them on our own." If Mexico undertakes needed reforms on energy, electricity, education, labor and taxes, and puts up half of the money for the North American Investment Fund, the U.S. and Canada should pledge the other half. [...]
        The U.S., Canada and Mexico should stop debating NAFTA and blaming each other for migration and begin collaborating to make the continent more competitive, as they work to integrate a developing country into a First World economy.
As it happens, the Congress already sends foreign aid to Mexico, despite the fact that it is Latin America's wealthiest nation. But the money sent only amounts to tens of millions of dollars, which is insignificant to people like Pastor, a globalist who believes American taxpayers should foot the massive bill for Third World development.
    Anyway, wasn't NAFTA supposed to uplift Mexico into a "First World economy"? The trade agreement was an opportunity wasted, because Mexico Is Marxico: the culture is unclear on the concept of entrepreneurial activity, particularly the part where an owner puts some of his profits back into the business rather than spending them on luxury goods.
    Finally, Robert Corsi reminds us that Pastor was behind the disastrous loss of the Panama Canal in Meet Robert Pastor, particularly as Red China has increased its influence there.

•   •   •  

About Those Imams   [12/02/06]
Remember the praying imams kerfuffle, where misbehaving clerics were deplaned with much shreiking about Islamophobia? They had a "pray-in" with lots of media on Friday to demand a special prayer room for themselves in the Minneapolis airport.
    A passenger has come forward to provide more details of the original incident, strengthening the view that the incident was a set-up to weaken American resolve. (Full letter from Pauline Klimmer at Debble Schussel's blog.)

    One more odd thing went unnoticed at the time: The men prayed both at the gate and on the plane. Yet observant Muslims pray only once at sundown, not twice.
        "It was almost as if they were intentionally trying to get kicked off the flight," Pauline said.
        While the imams were soon released, Pauline is fuming: "We are the victims of these people. They need to be more sensitive to us. They were totally insensitive to us and then accused us of being insensitive to them."
        The flight was delayed for some 3 1/2 hours. Bomb-sniffing dogs swept the plane, and every passenger got re-screened.
        "I think it was either a foiled attempt to take over the plane or it was a publicity stunt to accuse us of being insensitive," Pauline told me. "It had to be to intimidate U.S. Airways to ease up on security."
See also A new movement against radical Islam?

•   •   •  

No Safe Refuge   [12/01/06]
Wildlife refuge pronghorn antelope
The environmental destruction wreaked by millions of illegal aliens tromping across the southern desert has been disastrous for threatened species there. Plants are trampled, trash is left everywhere and park rangers must spend their time acting as Border Patrol agents rather than performing conservation work.

    Illegal immigrants, drug trafficking and theft rings are making U.S. protected lands along the border with Mexico hazardous for both wildlife and people. [...]
        At least 500 tons of trash accumulates each year at lay-up sites on Buenos Aires alone, says Mitch Ellis, the refuge manager, not only damaging wildlife habitat but also siphoning off about 4,000 hours of volunteer time that must be devoted to cleanup instead of to other refuge work.
In Maricopa County Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has taken action: Jail inmates to clean up desert mess
    Dubbed "Operation I.C.U.," because the desert requires "intensive care," Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said the desert trash pickup is a new phase in his fight against illegal immigration and an effort to improve the environment at the same time. The "Illegal Alien Campsite Clean Up" will occur monthly.
        "These people are coming here illegally. They're breaking the law, and they're destroying our desert," Arpaio said. "It's disgusting."

•   •   •  

Return of the Native   [12/01/06]
Democrats are about to take over the driver's seat in Congress, and the split in liberalism that has been building for decades is becoming more evident. Dems have tried to keep their blue-collar affiliation with workers, but have gone to extremes in promoting multiculturalism and other silly diversity ideology. One symptom is The Nation complaining about the "new nativism" and then being taken aback by the response from its readers.

    "All who oppose illegal immigration are not right-wing racist extremists," a North Carolinian chastised the editors. "I myself am black. And those of us in the lower depths are definitely negatively affected—not only by the downward pressure on wages but by the fact that a requirement for many jobs now is the ability to speak Spanish!" Another reader responded, "Your characterization of people who are anti-illegal immigration as racists is unfair and untrue. Like myself, most are just working stiffs. I'm a plumber, trying to hold on to my job and a way of life I grew up with." Another went further: "By labeling concerns of American workers 'nativism,' you dismiss those concerns as reactionary or invalid. Characterizing those concerns as racist or xenophobic allows you to ignore the economic impact on the working class while gallantly mounting your high horse in defense of the oppressed minority you prefer to focus on."
        That's the flashpoint of the conflict, and Democrats' answer will define their political fortunes. The party long perceived as fighting for the little guy has taken on new charges whose demands increasingly clash with the interests of its historic base. Their discontent—dismissed as prejudice—is a legitimate reaction to being forsaken as the Left attempts to force broad populism, its most reliable electoral asset, into a narrow multiculturalist mold.
Talking heads have been chattering for some time about the split in Republicans between sovereignty conservatives versus globalists. Now we can watch the liberals decide whether they care more about the American worker or illegal aliens from around the world.

•   •   •  

 

© 2006 Brenda Walker All rights reserved.