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30 April, 2008

Northern Virginia: Prince William County policies working

And may drive others in the same direction

Hundreds of foreign-born families have pulled their children from Prince William County public schools and enrolled them in nearby Fairfax County, Arlington County and Alexandria since the start of the school year, imposing a new financial burden on those inner suburbs in a time of lean budgets. The school-to-school migration within Northern Virginia started just as Prince William began implementing rules to deny some services to illegal immigrants and require police to check the immigration status of crime suspects thought to be in the country illegally.

Opponents of the rules say they have had a chilling effect on Prince William's once-thriving Latino community, prompting even legal immigrants to flee a hostile environment. Supporters say the rules have done what they were supposed to by primarily pushing illegal immigrants out. "The resolution is clearly working," said Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large), chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors. "It is driving down the non-English-speaking portion of the schools and saving us millions of dollars. They're going to other jurisdictions and costing them money." Stewart called those jurisdictions "sanctuary" cities and counties, saying illegal immigrants are welcome there. He added: "There is going to be pressure to enact similar resolutions in those neighboring cities and counties." Officials from those jurisdictions reject that assertion.

Until now, the evidence of a migration has been largely anecdotal, making it difficult to measure or trace its causes. Data from school systems, however, provide the most concrete evidence to date that a significant exodus of immigrants is underway -- and that most of those leaving are settling in neighboring communities.

According to the Prince William school system, enrollment in the English for speakers of other languages, or ESOL, program dropped by 759 between September and March 31. It was the first known instance of a decline in ESOL students, said Irene Cromer, a schools spokeswoman. During that period, 623 ESOL students from Prince William enrolled in Fairfax schools, compared with 241 in the same period the previous year. Eighty-three enrolled in Arlington, and 75 signed up in Alexandria, the latter up from 10. Twenty-three ESOL students from Prince William enrolled in Loudoun County, officials there said.

School officials in Fairfax and Arlington said the new students are scattered across a number of schools, minimizing their effect on programs and budgets. In Fairfax, for example, a net increase of about 400 students isn't so dramatic when measured against the county's overall ESOL population of more than 21,000 students. "We get about 6,000 new language-minority students a year," said Teddi Predaris, director of Fairfax's Office of ESOL Services. "An increase of 400 is noticeable, but what adjective you put in front of it depends on your perspective."

Still, Stewart noted that Prince William's schools expect to save $6 million in education costs as a result of the exodus -- a cost that will be borne by the other communities. Some officials in Fairfax and elsewhere say they expect the numbers to climb in the next academic year.

More here



The Italian situation

The overall figures below don't give the full story. Not all immigrants are equally desirable or undesirable. Some groups are much more crime-prone than others -- as just about all Italians are now acutely aware. Romanian Gypsies and Africans have, for instance, been particularly troublesome in Italy. By the same token, the very high percentage of foreigners in Switzerland is less troublesome because relatively few of the foreigners there are from troublesome groups. Most foreigners in Switzerland are of Western European origin.

Note the high concentration of foreigners in Italy's prosperous North. That is of course the foundation of the furiously anti-immigration attitudes of the influential Northern League political party -- shortly to be included in Italy's government.

Note also that the figures below say nothing about ILLEGAL immigration

The number of foreign residents in Italy with valid residence permits has been put at just over two million, four hundred thousand (129,000 more than there were last year). Over 88 pct of them live in the Centre-North of the country, with a good quarter in Lombardy.

These are among the figures (up-dated as of first January 2007) in the initial Report on Immigration issued by Italy's Interior Ministry and presented at the President's palace by Minister Giuliano Amato and Under-Secretary Marcella Lucidi. The dossier contains a fair few "surprises" starting with the number of foreigners as a percentage of the whole population: at 5 pct Italy takes twelfth place in an imaginary European league table headed by Switzerland (20.2 pct), Austria (9.4 pct), Germany and Belgium (8.8 pct), Greece (8.1 pct), France (5.7 pct), Ireland (5.6 pct), Sweden and Denmark (5.4 pct), the United Kingdom (5.2 pct), Norway (5.1 pct).

There is a clear territorial division between the South (where foreign residents make up just 1.6 pct of the population) and the Centre-North (where the ratio peaks at 6.8 pct). The regions with the highest densities of immigrants are, following Lombardy, Veneto, Lazio and Emilia Romagna, but the situation within individual provinces is highly chequered, with peaks of over 10 pct, for example in Prato and Brescia.

Source





29 April, 2008

Britain: Immigration undermines education

And it is the leader of Britain's wishy washy party that says so!

Rising immigration is putting pressure on schools and undermining education standards, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, warns today. Mr Clegg says an influx of children who do not speak English is hampering the work of teachers and proves that ministers failed to plan for current levels of migration. We must acknowledge that rising migration is putting pressure on schools at all levels," he will say.

Mr Clegg's comments mark his party's strongest criticism of Labour's open-door immigration policy, and may spark speculation that he is moving to the Right. In a speech to the 4Children conference in London today, Mr Clegg will reveal figures showing that nearly 800,000 pupils - 12 per cent of the total - are registered as having a first language other than English. That marks a 60 per cent rise since Labour came to power in 1997. The Daily Telegraph revealed in December that children with English as their first language were now in the minority in more than 1,300 schools.

"The latest wave of migration has brought large numbers - of Eastern Europeans in particular - to parts of the country that have little experience of dealing with speakers of other languages in schools," Mr Clegg will say. "Even a few children in a class can be a real challenge for a teacher used to strong English language skills, especially if children are arriving in the middle of a school year - and in unpredictable numbers. "It's a challenge for native English speakers, as well - because their learning suffers too when a class can't move forward together, learn together and share experiences fully."

Mr Clegg's aides say he has chosen to raise the issue of immigration and education after receiving complaints from head teachers who say their biggest challenge is coping with the number of languages spoken at their school. He will insist that his party will never support calls to end mass immigration, saying: "The problems stem from our failure to plan for population changes, not from the existence of migrants."

However, his speech could still raise suspicions among Lib Dem activists that Mr Clegg is trying to shift to the Right to counter a resurgent Conservative Party. Some analysts say the third party will be badly squeezed in Thursday's local government elections, perhaps losing as many as 200 seats as the Tories advance. Although the Lib Dems' poll ratings are steady at about 17 per cent, the party has reaped no clear benefit from Gordon Brown's recent troubles.

Mr Clegg has been testing the waters for a shift to the Right, even hinting that the Lib Dems could fight the next general election on a promise of cutting the tax burden

Source



Are H-1Bs the Best and Brightest?

New Report Shows That Most Are Not

A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies demonstrates that most H-1Bs are ordinary people doing ordinary work, not the geniuses claimed by industry lobbyists.

Those arguing for an increase in the number of H-1B visas (ostensibly temporary visas for 'specialty occupations,' many of them in the computer industry) claim that continued U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics hinges on our ability to import the world's best engineers and scientists. But this new data analysis shows that the vast majority of H-1B workers - including those at most major tech firms - are not the innovators industry portrays them to be.

The new report, entitled 'H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest,' is authored by Dr. Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, and is online here

The analysis is based on the simple fact that in a market economy, if workers are indeed outstanding talents, they will be paid accordingly. This can be determined by computing the ratio of the foreign worker's salary to the prevailing wage figure stated by the employer (this report calls that ratio the 'Talent Measure' or TM). A TM value of 1.0 means that the worker is merely average, not of outstanding talent. The findings:

# The median TM value over all foreign workers studied was just a hair over 1.0.

# The median TM value was also essentially 1.0 in each of the tech professions studied.

# Median TM was near 1.0 for almost all prominent tech firms that were analyzed.

# Contrary to the constant hyperbole in the press that 'Johnnie can't do math' in comparison with kids in Asia, TM values for workers from Western European countries tend to be much higher than those of their Asian counterparts.

# Most foreign workers work at or near entry level, described by the Department of Labor in terms akin to apprenticeship. This counters the industry's claim that they hire the workers as key innovators.

CIS press release above





28 April, 2008

Texas lawmakers determined to halt illegal immigration

Watching as states around the country take immigration into their own hands, Texas lawmakers who failed last year to crack down on illegal border crossers have vowed to catch up in 2009. Last year, state lawmakers nationwide submitted more than 1,500 immigration-related bills, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. More than 200 of those proposals became new laws in 46 states. Texas neighbor Oklahoma and fellow border state Arizona have adopted some of the toughest anti-immigration measures, and at a hearing last week, some Lone Star lawmakers said they hoped to follow suit. "I think God would have us work on it and vote," said state Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball.

Some legislators say laws in those states are helping the economy and reducing pressure on public services. But lawyers and some business groups in Arizona and Oklahoma said immigration restrictions there have hurt businesses and have created an exodus of not only undocumented immigrants but also of Hispanic citizens. "The perception from the Hispanic community is they have been solely targeted by a bunch of racist rednecks," said Campbell Cooke, an immigration attorney in Tulsa. The city, he said, has lost about half its Hispanic population since Oklahoma legislators adopted anti-immigration legislation and Tulsa police began enforcing federal immigration laws.

Among other things, the Oklahoma law requires public employers to use a federal system to verify an employee's citizenship. Later this year, all contractors and subcontractors for public agencies will also have to use the system. Employers would also be subject to a discrimination lawsuit in Oklahoma if they fired an employee who is a citizen while keeping a worker who is undocumented. Under the law, transporting or "harboring" an undocumented immigrant is a felony. It also requires anyone older than 14 to provide proof of citizenship before receiving public benefits, except for some emergency services. "This has a huge impact throughout the community, both social and from an economic and work-force perspective," Cooke said.

Arizona adopted even more-stringent employer penalties, requiring all companies to conduct citizenship checks for their workers or risk losing their operating licenses. Ann Seiden, spokeswoman for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said it's difficult to gauge whether economic slowdowns in the state have been caused by the new laws or by the overall financial troubles nationally. But she said businesses have been confused about their new responsibilities and what liabilities they might face. "It's created an atmosphere of uncertainty, and that was our greatest fear," Seiden said.

Arizona state Rep. Russell Pearce wrote much of the anti-immigration legislation. He said claims of economic woes and Hispanic exodus were lies. "It's a huge economic boon," he said. With undocumented immigrants leaving the state, he said, taxpayers would save on costs for education, health care and public safety. And, he said, wages would go up because employers would not have a readily available supply of cheap labor. He also said those in the United States legally have no reason to flee the state. "The goal is to not to incentivize people to break our laws," Pearce said.

Texas lawmakers last year filed dozens of bills meant to force undocumented immigrants to leave the state. None of the major restrictions made it far in the process, though, after the lawmaker overseeing the bills asked the Texas attorney general to review them. State Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas, said he wanted to ensure that Texas didn't wind up in losing lawsuits over unconstitutional measures. Instead, he concentrated on a law that put $110 million into border security. The measures also faced stiff opposition from civil-rights and business groups.

Disappointed that Texas has fallen behind other states, state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, said he would file legislation to follow their leads. He said the Oklahoma economy is improving as thousands of immigrants leave the state. Any positive impact undocumented immigrants have on the Texas economy, he said, is outweighed by their cost to the state in public services. At the very least, Berman said, Texas should implement laws that punish employers who hire undocumented workers, should make English the state's official language, should require photo identification for voting and should restrict noncitizens' access to public benefits.

By not stopping illegal immigration, he said, elected leaders are allowing "multiculturalism to prevail and flourish." "We are a nation of laws, and if we continue on this path, we will lose the great republic that our forefathers gave to us," Berman said.

State Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Van, said anti-immigration measures were not targeted at Hispanics, but were meant to ensure national security. "We're not just talking about Mexico. We have a concern about all the folks coming over our southern border."

Kathleen Campbell Walker, lawyer with Brown McCarroll in El Paso and president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said Texas lawmakers should expect a surge of lawsuits and a departure of businesses if they adopt measures like Oklahoma and Arizona did. "You're going to have racial profiling; you're going to have proliferation of discrimination," she said. "Do we really want to go back to an era like the civil-rights era?" Companies, she said, are already beginning to have trouble deciphering the patchwork of immigration laws that states are adopting in addition to existing federal regulations. "It will drive you looney-tunes," she said. "I don't know if a Ouija board is enough to help you figure it out."

Bill Lenderman, who lives in East El Paso, said controlling immigration was not about race but about maintaining American sovereignty. "They'll destroy the culture of the country," he said of undocumented immigrants. Lenderman said Texas lawmakers should follow Oklahoma's example. "Tell them 'you're not welcome here,' " he said. "Go away -- no benefits and no jobs."

Source



'Painting' the target in border clashes

Some U.S. Border Patrol agents along the Mexican border are packing paintball rifles, but they're not being used for games. Agents in the patrol's Tucson, San Diego and Yuma sectors have been armed with guns that launch pepper spray and paintball projectiles and are trained to fire paintballs when they come under attack along border fences.

Splattering paint on rock throwers at high velocities is intended to dissuade them and to combat what has become a sharp increase in the number of rockings and other assaults on agents along the Mexican border. "It has become a very effective tool," said Border Patrol spokesman Ramon Rivera. "It has helped agents dramatically."

The Border Patrol has about 1,000 of the paintball guns, which have been in the hands of agents since October. The gun, known as the FN303, is produced by a Belgian company and it replaced a less effective paintball gun that was used for three or four years in Nogales, Ariz., Rivera said. At a range of about 225 to 250 feet, someone hit with a paintball could end up with stinging, welts, bruises or contusions, "and you're not going to just be able to wipe it (the paint) off your clothes," Border Patrol spokesman Lloyd Easterling said. "It certainly lets you know that you've been hit with one of these things; it's designed for you to take note and to stop what you're doing." ....

I think that is called a "memorable experience" in using non lethal force. For a while I had a low voltage wire around some of my flower beds to keep the critters out. Having accidentally touched it on occasion, I can attest that it too was a memorable experience that got my attention. Most of the rock throwing is cross border. That is the reason there are no arrests.

Source





27 April, 2008

Unemployment in Oklahoma plummets after crackdown on illegals

Should reduce house prices too

Unemployment rates are rising across the United States, except Oklahoma. That state is experiencing the most dramatic reduction in unemployment since 2007, an improvement many in Oklahoma attribute to the passage last year by the state legislature of a strong employment-focused immigration reform law. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday reported unemployment in Oklahoma had fallen to 3.1 percent in March, down from 4 percent in March last year, while unemployment nationwide was 5.1 percent, up from 4.4 percent in March last year.

"Oklahoma is no longer 'OK' for illegal aliens," said State Rep. Randy Terrill, who sponsored House Bill 1804 which passed by overwhelming majorities last year in both the House (84-14) and Senate (41-6) of the Oklahoma Legislature. "The bottom line is illegal aliens will not come here if there are no jobs waiting for them," Terrill said. "They will not stay here if there is no government subsidy, and they certainly won't stay here if they know that if they ever encounter our state and local law enforcement officers, they will be physically detained until they are deported."

House Bill 1804, the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act of 2007, has been characterized by USA Today as "arguably the nation's toughest state law targeting illegal immigration." The Oklahoma law imposes strict penalties on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, makes it a felony to transport or shelter illegal immigrants, forbids the state to issue drivers licenses or pay social welfare benefits to illegal aliens or their families, and empowers state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws.

Last month, the Oklahoma Bankers Association threatened Oklahoma would lose about $1.8 billion annually in productivity and wages, largely because House Bill 1804, which went into effect in November last year, will force an estimated 50,000 illegal immigrants to leave the state. The group based the conclusions on a study done by economists Russell Evans and Kyle Dean of the Oklahoma-based Economic Impact Group that estimated as many as 70,000 illegal immigrants were living in Oklahoma when the legislation was passed.

Proponents of the law would counter that forcing illegal aliens to leave Oklahoma was precisely the intended effect of the bill. "The next question to ask would be whether citizens have taken jobs that illegals used to do," observed blogger Tom Blumer. "Though the lower unemployment rate doesn't in and of itself prove that, it does point strongly in that direction." "Will anyone in Old Media dig more deeply into the Sooner State's situation?" Blumer wondered. "Or will they try to pretend that Oklahoma's improvement doesn't exist, because finding out why might expose some inconvenient truths, and hurt the cause of illegal-immigrant 'amnesty.'"

Source



Legal obstructionism

Left-leaning judges can make any decision they like -- and they will. They can even find a right to abortion in the constitution -- even though the word "abortion" is not mentioned there

As Bush administration officials prepared Friday to finalize rules cracking down on employers of illegal immigrants, business and civil rights advocates continued to hammer the plan, calling it an expensive and ill-conceived attack on legitimate workers and their employers. The Department of Homeland Security closed a 30-day window Friday for public comments on a new version of its "no match" rule. Agency officials hope the new language will persuade a San Francisco federal judge to lift an injunction imposed in October and allow the regulations to go into effect. The no match rule would give employers 90 days to resolve discrepancies in their workers' Social Security numbers, plus an additional three days for an employee to submit a new, valid Social Security number, before firing employees who can't comply.

Hiring undocumented workers has been illegal for two decades, but until now, employers were not held liable for fraudulent documents. Under the no match rule, employers who fail to comply could face fines or criminal penalties. "This is an important tool for employers to be sure they're acting in good faith and an important tool of immigration enforcement," said Veronica Nur Valdes, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and other immigrant advocacy groups pointed Friday to an analysis released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce suggesting that if the no match requirements take effect, they would cost American businesses more than $1 billion a year and could force up to 65,000 legally authorized workers out of their jobs. "It's the equivalent of a massive tax on small business and an attack on U.S. workers in an especially perilous time for the economy," said Lucas Guttentag, director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project.

Critics of the no match rule say they fear legal workers could get caught in a maze of bureaucracy trying to correct Social Security errors and end up being fired by employers before they can prove they are authorized to work.

But advocates of stricter immigration enforcement aren't buying those arguments. "This is not an unmanageable burden. ... It would be an extraordinarily useful tool in deterring illegal immigration," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. If undocumented immigrants can't hold onto jobs, they are more likely to leave the United States, he said.

Critics of the no match rule disagreed. The Chamber of Commerce analysis, conducted by public policy analyst Richard B. Belzer, predicted that more unauthorized workers would enter the underground economy. He also predicted the rule would increase identity theft as illegal immigrants became more desperate for legitimate Social Security numbers.

Once the Department of Homeland Security finalizes its revised regulations, the agency plans to ask U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer to lift the injunction on the rule, said Nur Valdes. If that doesn't happen, the agency will go forward with an appeal pending before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Source





26 April, 2008

An Example of AP's Bias in Favor of Illegal Immigration

The issue of illegal immigration has seemed to drift from the front pages of the news, of late, but the AP is not finished trying to advocate for law breakers everywhere, it seems. On April 25, the Associated Press posted a story that serves as a perfect example of how the wire service aims their reporting to support illegal immigration in the United States. In "Arizona sheriff stirs furor with crackdown on illegals," all the negative framing of the issue is used against Sheriff Joe Arpaio's efforts to curb illegal immigration and those who stand against him are constantly given the benefit of the doubt with neutral or positive language describing their actions. Additionally, whenever illegals are mentioned they are presented as victims, one "afraid" immigrant even being quoted as calling our immigration officials "the devil."

The subject of the story is Sheriff Arpaio's recent "crackdown" on illegal immigrants in his jurisdiction of Maricopa County, Arizona. After Federal training was given to his officers, the sheriff began a series of sweeps across the county to detain illegal immigrants. His actions are completely legal and not a single case of abuse by the sheriff's officers has been reported -- a fact that the AP story doesn't bother to mention until the 20th paragraph of the 22 paragraph story.

As the AP piece starts we get a shot at Arpiao right away with a snarky description of the man as being the "self-proclaimed 'toughest sheriff in America.'" Then the AP starts right in with several paragraphs of Hispanic pandering, public officials in small towns inside Arpaio's jurisdiction attacking the sheriff's actions. In fact, as paragraph after paragraph of the his detractors appear in the AP piece railing against the man's work, the man himself gets only a few lines in the story to defend himself.

But, even as the sheriff's actions are proven legal and professional, he is accused of "grandstanding," "racial profiling," and ignoring the elected officials of the towns in which his sweeps have occurred. The AP also reminds us that the sheriff's "raids" are occurring "on heavily Hispanic sections." This "heavily Hispanic" line is thrown into the story as if looking for illegals in "heavily Hispanic" areas is somehow a racist action. Of course, logic would make one ask where else would one look for illegals if not in the areas in which they congregate?

Then we get the AP's catalogue of Hispanic pandering, public officials attacking the sheriff.

"I was upset. We did not request them here," said Guadalupe Mayor Rebecca Jimenez, who charged that the patrols were meant to raise Arpaio's profile for his re-election campaign this year.

So, this mayor is allowed to charge Arpaio of grandstanding merely for campaign purposes, yet the question is never asked of her why so many illegals were found in her town in the first place? Why is she looking the other way as her town fills with illegal aliens?

Then we get the whining from Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon.

As for Phoenix, Mayor Phil Gordon said Arpaio should be concentrating on more pressing duties such as finding people with warrants against them, and he has asked for a federal civil rights investigation, complaining the sheriff is singling out people who are "driving with a broken taillight or have brown skin." The U.S. Justice Department refused to comment.

This panderer is given space to say that Arpaio is illicitly employing racial profiling even as no proof was offered that Arpaio has pulled people over merely for having "brown skin." While it's quite a charge, the AP offers no real proof to substantiate the bald politically charged claim made by Mayor Gordon.

Then, even as the sheriff is accused in the AP piece of sparking "protests" with his actions, the AP gives the police chief of Mesa a chance to seem as if he merely wants notification of future sweeps so that he might work to protect people from "unrest."

And in Mesa, Arizona's third-largest city, the police chief has requested two days' notice of any sweeps Arpaio might conduct there, so that his officers can be prepared for any unrest.

It does not occur to the AP, though, that if Sheriff Arpaio were to alert the police chief of Mesa ahead of time, this would not help stop protests, but will instead give the sheriff's opponents time to organize before he has a chance to institute the sweep. In other words, should the sheriff warn Mesa ahead of time, not only will illegals get the word to go into hiding, but opponents of the sheriff will be there to meet him and protests will certainly end up occurring. The Mesa police chief most likely isn't interested in protecting against "unrest" he's interested in fostering it.

Now, it cannot be ignored that the sheriff is observing the law. Yet, the AP negatively describes Arpaio's efforts as "pushing the boundaries on immigration." Are the illegals themselves not pushing the boundaries of the law? Apparently the AP doesn't see it that way. As far as the AP is concerned only the sheriff is being provocative by enforcing the law but those actually breaking the law are not doing anything wrong. Naturally, the AP wants to portray the sheriff's actions as creating civil unrest, maybe even handing the reader a thinly veiled warning of riots.

The crackdowns have led to demonstrations by protesters on both sides of the immigration debate.

So, once again, imagine how things might get out of hand if Arpaio was stupid enough to have announced his targets ahead of time like the police chief of Mesa wants! Then the AP portrays the illegals as innocents, folks who are victims of Arpaio's mean-spirited "raids."

Civil rights advocates said Arpaio is spreading fear among Hispanics, illegal or not. "You have cooks, landscapers, nannies afraid to drive," said Hector Yturralde, president of the group Somos America.

And...

Weeks after the crackdown, 20 Spanish-speaking day laborers gathered at a dusty intersection to wait for people to offer them work. Ramon Arajon Contreras, a laborer from Mexico who has lived in Guadalupe for eight years, said the sweep frightened him so much that he hid out in his house until it was over. He said he is still afraid. "If I see immigration officers," he said, "it's like I see the devil."

Isn't it a good thing that a man who has been breaking our laws for over 8 years is finally finding some fear that he is a criminal? Not according to the AP, sadly.

All in all, this AP story was little else but a sustained attack on Arpaio as he tries to enforce our nation's laws with enemies to our laws given all the space they want to call the sheriff names and cast doubts on his integrity and motives. Meanwhile, the man himself is given little space to explain himself and his supporters afforded but sparse room to show their appreciation for his actions. The net effect is to show that the AP is plainly on the side of law breakers and stands firmly against our immigration laws.

Source



Surge of illegals into Scotland

Police have caught more than 1,000 people later identified as illegal immigrants at ports in south west Scotland over the past four years. Numbers of foreign nationals detained at Stranraer and Cairnryan have more than doubled between 2004 and 2007. Crimes including people trafficking for the sex trade have also been detected.

A spokesman for Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary said the figures should deter people from trying to use the ports without the proper documents. Police say the ports are the fourth busiest points of entry to Scotland after airports in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. About 1.9m passengers and 900,000 vehicles pass through the facilities each year. People from 67 different countries have been stopped by police and subsequently identified as illegal immigrants. There were 117 such cases in 2004 but that rose to 259 last year. The total number detected over the four-year period is 1,007.

Among the nationalities without proper documents were people from Pakistan, Sudan, Iraq, Romania, Nigeria and Afghanistan. Det Ch Insp Steven Carr, who works at the ports unit, said it was always looking out for any immigration offences. "Our primary function is protection of UK security," he said. "But during the course of our work we come across other offences." These include drugs and motoring crime as well as immigration issues. "The staff here are multi-skilled because there is a multitude of offences," said DCI Carr.

The police effort is backed up by three officers seconded to the UK Border Agency (UKBA). "They have the power of immigration officers up to the point of sending somebody back to their own country," he explained. Police believe that thanks to that facility and a good working relationship with ferry operators in Dumfries and Galloway they have been able to foil organised crime. "We have reported a number of people to the fiscal for the facilitating of people into the UK," said DCI Carr. "It is a well-documented process that organised crime groups make a lot of money out of charging people extortionate amounts to come into the UK. "Organised crime groups are very proficient at it - in many ways it is safer than drugs or other forms of contraband."

The force has also been part of a number of national operations. "We were also involved in Operation Pentameter on the trafficking of people for use in the sex trade," said DCI Carr. At least a couple of young women who police believe were destined for prostitution were discovered by the Stranraer ports unit. Dumfries and Galloway Police believe it demonstrates that the region's ferry terminals are not a "soft touch" for illegal immigration. "The smallest force in the UK still gets to deal with the biggest issues," said DCI Carr. "If you come through the ports of Stranraer and Cairnryan you are taking a risk - we monitor the ports 24 hours a day. "You will be found out, detected and reported or handed over to the UKBA."

Source





25 April, 2008

Britain, Spain To Combat Illegal Immigration

Sounds like a lot of bull but maybe there is something to it

The British and Spanish governments agreed to enhance cooperation to combat illegal immigration from Africa into the European Union (EU). "Spain and the United Kingdom can work together to help the EU deal effectively with the human tragedy of illegal immigration, and we can stimulate the EU into becoming a model power and promoter of human and economic development across the globe," Britain's minister for Europe Jim Murphy said during his speech at a lunch at Spain's New Economic Forum.

According to Murphy, Britain and the other EU members can learn a lot from Spain's experience on the issue particularly in North Africa. Spain has signed deals with seven West African countries in a bid to control the flow of migrants.

Based on estimates of national statistics institute INE, the number of immigrants living in Spain soared from around half a million in 1996 to 4.5 million by the end of 2006 out of a total population of 45.12 million people.

Source



Human smuggling case thrown out in Canada

Because U.S. immigration officials were too tired to bother about blacks sneaking in via Canada. In a Canadian court they might have been required to make an effort -- which is not on. They go only for the low-hanging fruit.

Three Charlotte County men who last year allegedly attempted to smuggle two people from Guyana into the United States were set free last week after a New Brunswick Provincial Court judge ruled that U.S. law enforcement officials apparently didn't have their act together, according to a Canadian newspaper. Charged in connection with the smuggling incident were John Wayne Richardson, 48, his son John Jason Richardson, 22, and Byron Lawson Murray, 57, all of St. Stephen. They could have faced up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

According to the St. Croix Courier Weekend newspaper of St. Stephen, the three defendants were charged in January 2007 with conspiring to break American law by allegedly attempting to smuggle two Guyanese nationals into the U.S. A problem developed in the case when Canadian legal officials attempted to get a U.S. attorney to appear in court in St. Stephen to testify about the law in question. The requests for the U.S. attorney to testify were made under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between Canada and the U.S., which seeks "to improve the effectiveness of judicial assistance and to regularize and facilitate" procedures between the two countries, according to the U.S. State Department's Web site.

According to the newspaper, the attorney who had originally agreed to testify backed out. The newspaper did not identify the attorney or the U.S. agency he worked for. The U.S. Attorney's Office did not return a telephone call Monday. The crown prosecutor, David Schermbrucker of Canada's Public Prosecution Service in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said the expert agreed to testify but later backed down after his superiors denied him permission to do so.

According to the newspaper, Schermbrucker said that in order to prove to the court that the accused had violated U.S. laws, the information had to come from an expert in American law. Schermbrucker said he had found another U.S. legal expert who would testify and asked the judge for a new trial date, but the defense attorney for the Richardsons balked.

Attorney Joel Hansen of St. Stephen told the judge that the men had not necessarily broken Canadian law, the newspaper said. "They were charged with conspiracy to break American law. Quite frankly, to this day, I don't really know what that law is," the newspaper quoted him as saying. "I believe this case was to show the Americans that we're serious about border security. "We're prepared to cooperate with you, but they wouldn't cooperate with us," he said. "Go figure."

The decision by Provincial Court Judge David C. Walker to toss out the case surprised everyone in the courtroom, the newspaper said. In tossing the case out, the judge said the crown prosecutor's office did not have its "U.S. ducks in a row" and said the "charge against the accused was not murder, but a complex analysis of U.S. law" to see if they were in conflict with Canadian law, the Courier said. The judge said he was not going to keep "Canadians in a holding pattern to protect an American law that the [prosecutor] claimed was the essence of its charges against the men when the U.S. did not appear to be either available or able to provide information to the court."

Although the charges were tossed out of provincial court, the case has reached Washington, D.C., where U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is looking into it. "Senator Collins first learned of this case on Saturday during her visit to Calais," a spokesman for Collins said Monday. "Based on what she was told, Senator Collins is alarmed that charges were apparently dropped due to a lack of coordination between Canadian and American officials. She has asked her staff on the Senate Homeland Security Committee to look further into this matter."

Source





24 April, 2008

The latest from CIS

1. “Jimmy Hoffa” in a Dress: Union Boss’s Stranglehold on Mexican Education Creates Immigration Fallout

EXCERPT: Most newcomers from south of the Rio Grande have had access to an extremely low level of education, assuming they have even received instruction in basic subjects. Poverty constitutes an important factor in their condition, as well as the failure of lower-class families to emphasize education in contrast to, say, similarly situated Asian families. These elements aside, Mexico’s public schools are an abomination — to the point that the overwhelming majority of middle-class parents make whatever sacrifices are necessary to enroll their youngsters in private schools where the tuition may equal $11,000 to $12,000 annually.

The primary explanation for Mexico’s poor schools lies in the colonization of the public-education system by the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE, according to its initials in Spanish), a hugely corrupt 1.4 million-member organization headed by political powerhouse Elba Esther Gordillo Morales. Rather than lecture American lawmakers on what bills to pass, Calderón would do well to devote himself to eliminating this Herculean barrier to the advancement of his own people within their own country.

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2. The Debate Over Non-Citizen Voting: A Primer

EXCERPT: There is no more iconic feature of American democracy and citizenship than the right to vote. Men and women have marched for it, fought for it, and died for it. Historically, those without property, women, and African-Americans have all legitimately counted their progress toward full citizenship by their ability to vote. And they have correctly judged America’s progress toward living up to its ideals by the extension of the vote to all of the country’s citizens. Given these facts, it is understandable that the average American might well ask: What debate?

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3. No Coyote Needed: U.S. Visas Still an Easy Ticket in Developing Countries

EXCERPT: Mention the words “illegal immigrant” and most Americans conjure up images of desperate migrants sneaking across the Mexican border. There is another side to America’s immigration problem, however, that most know very little about — those who come with valid, temporary visas and do not return home. According to a 2006 Pew Hispanic Center study, nearly half of the 12 million-plus illegal aliens in America arrived legally with temporary, non-immigrant visas. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates that a “substantial” percentage of America’s illegal population is made up of visa overstays — their estimates range from 27 to 57 percent. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted in a 2004 report2 on visa overstays that DHS may be significantly underestimating the magnitude of the visa overstay problem — noting that the DHS study only quantified the number of visa overstays in the illegal population — whereas many who overstay visas are later able to legalize their status.

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4. The H-2B Visa Program and a “Shortage” of American Workers

EXCERPT: There is no evidence of a labor shortage, especially at the bottom end of the labor market. If there was, wages, benefits, and employment should all be increasing fast, the opposite of what has been happening..... Data show stagnation or a decline in wages.

Hourly wages for men with less than a high school education grew just 1.9 percent between 2000 and 2007. Hourly wages for men with only a high school degree actually declined by 0.2 percent between 2000 and 2007.

The share of employers providing health insurance has also declined.

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5. Immigration and Black Americans: Assessing the Impact

EXCERPT: The overall deterioration in employment rates, wages, and benefits is a strong indication that less-educated labor is not in short supply. If such workers were in short supply, wages and benefits and employment rates would all be rising, as employers try desperately to attract and retain the relatively few workers available. But this seems to be exactly the opposite of what has been happening. The deterioration in the labor market for less-educated black men is particularly problematic because they already tended to make the lowest wages and have the lowest labor force participation rates.

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6. Illegal Immigration: The Impact on Wages and Employment of Black Workers EXCERPT: As for wage suppression, all studies show that the large infusion of immigrants has depressed the wages of low skilled workers. It is the illegal immigrant component of the immigration flow that has most certainly caused the most damage but there is no way to isolate their singular harm. But even these studies most likely underestimate the true adverse impact because there is a floor on legal wages set by minimum wage laws that do not allow the market to set the actual wage level. What is known is that wages in the low wage labor market have tended to stagnate for some time. It is not just that the availability of massive numbers of illegal immigrants depress wages, it is the fact that their shear numbers keep wages from rising over time and that is the real harm experienced by citizen workers in the low skilled labor market.

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7. Weaknesses in the Visa Waiver Program: Are the Needed Safeguards in Place to Protect America?

EXCERPT: Chairman Feinstein, Ranking Member Kyl, and other subcommittee members, thank you for the opportunity to be here today to discuss weaknesses in the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), which are important to consider as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) moves to expand the program rapidly. This expansion is proceeding before the needed tools are in place to manage the program effectively, and apparently without regard to legitimate security and law enforcement concerns about visitors from many of the countries in question. As a result, Americans will be more vulnerable to terrorist attack, more exposed to organized criminal enterprises, and will experience even more illegal immigration, all of which comes at enormous fiscal and social cost to the nation.

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8. Survey: Voters Unaware of Candidates’ Immigration Positions

EXCERPTS:

* Only 34 percent of McCain voters, 42 percent of Clinton voters, and 52 percent of Obama voters correctly identified their candidate as favoring eventual citizenship for illegal immigrants who meet certain requirements.

* Of McCain voters, 35 percent mistakenly thought he favored enforcement that would cause illegals to return home, another 10 percent thought he wanted mass deportations, and 21 percent didn’t know his position.

* Voters often held different positions from the candidate they supported. Only 31 percent of McCain voters had the same immigration position as he does. For Clinton voters, 45 percent shared her position; 61 percent of Obama voters shared his position.’



Illegal immigrants sent on way by British police

Illegal immigrants are being released by police and given directions to the nearest immigration office, despite a government pledge that they would be detained, the Conservatives say today. Ten out of 27 police forces said that if the immigration service was unavailable, illegal immigrants who claimed asylum were released.

The figures were obtained by the Conservatives under freedom of information laws. The police forces who send illegal immigrants on their way are Dorset, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, South Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Thames Valley, Suffolk and Bedfordshire.

Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said last month that illegal immigrants would be detained. But Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said: “He says the system has changed, but in many parts of the country there is the same old inability to enforce the law.”

Source





23 April, 2008

Murderous African gangs come to Australia

Thanks to Australia's lax "refugee" policy

Eddie Spowart was stabbed to death because he didn't smoke and couldn't give a cigarette to a gang of youths who approached him at a train station yesterday. Horrified friends told The Daily Telegraph that the 54-year-old had been on the phone when the group of African males approached him at Granville Train Station about 12.45am. They asked him for a cigarette but when the Fijian qualified fitter, who moved to Australian in 1989, told them to go away because he didn't smoke things turned nasty, his long-time friend Tony Chand said. He was stabbed several times in his thigh, stomach and underneath his shoulder.

"He was waiting for a train in Granville - he was approached by a group of African boys. They asked him for a cigarette but Eddie didn't smoke - he told them that - one led to another and the next thing he just just collapsed," said Mr Chand who has known Mr Spowart since they were children in Fiji. "No one knew at first that he's been stabbed. "We're all upset, depressed and angry - no one can believe it. "Eddie would make friends with anybody, he wasn't a violent person. He just append to be in the wrong place at the wrong time - he was asked for a cigarette and was stabbed because he didn't have one."

Mr Spowart had been drinking with mates at a friends place and then a local pub in Granville before the stabbing. He had walked with a group of friends had walked to the Granville train station to catch a train home to the Westmead home he shared with his sister Elizabeth Spowart. Ms Spowart said she and her eight surviving brothers and sisters were shocked by the manner of Mr Spowart's death. "He was always joking, he was a very happy person, he never carried any weapons or anything of that sort," she said. "We're not coping with this well at all - the family are all coming from overseas and interstate. "No one can believe what has happened because he wasn't the type to go and fight and all that."

Mr Spowart was taken to Westmead Hospital but died several hours after the attack in Memorial Ave. Rosehill Local Area Command police, assisted by the State Crime Command Homicide Squad are investigating Mr Spowarts death. Police are appealing for anyone who may have witnessed the incident or noticed a group of black African males in the vicinity of Granville Railway Station, Memorial Avenue or near the bus interchange on Mary Street around 12.45am yesterday, to contact Rosehill Police or Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

Source



Italy aflame over immigration flood: Lessons for Britain?

A warm spring evening, and in the northern Italian town of Cittadella a gaggle of tourists pause outside its perfectly preserved medieval battlements, craning their necks skywards. They're admiring the Torre di Malta, a tower whose 6ft-thick walls soar up, up and away. It was built in 1251 to house the torture chamber of the region's then ruler, one Ezzelino da Romano III, a man so evil he came to be known as The Son of Satan.

It's Wednesday and, although the sightseers don't know it, just a stone's throw away one Massimo Bitonci, is holding court. The venue is a restaurant and the 42-year-old mayor, an urbane sort of chap, is struggling to grab a mouthful of his pizza, such is the stream of locals waiting to pay homage to him. He's a great man, say his accolytes, a man who will "go down in history". Maybe, maybe. But, his fan club aside, there's no guarantee he won't be remembered with the same sort of distaste as his predecessor.

For Mr Bitonci is a member of the Lega Nord, or Northern League, the far-Right political party originally set up to campaign for the secession of northern Italy from the rest of the country. But more pertinently today, the party is also deeply and vociferously opposed to the wave of immigration sweeping through Italy. And it's on this ticket that Mr Bitonci has made something of a name for himself.

Shortly before Christmas he announced that in the future no foreigners could settle in Cittadella without first meeting certain criteria. These were that they had no criminal record, had guaranteed regular work with an income per family member of at least 4,000 pounds per year, and a home that provided each inhabitant with at least 14 square metres of space. While at first glance these demands might not sound Draconian, consider the poverty-stricken state in which most immigrants arrive in their chosen country. Few would be able to meet such criteria. So Mr Bitonci's aim, quite simply, appears to be to prevent any immigrants from settling there.

Unsurprisingly his diktat created a stir across Italy with Left-leaning politicians accusing him of racism and of violating human rights. But for all the furore, there's no doubt that he got off far more lightly than his political equivalent in Britain - a council leader, say - would have if they had dared suggest anything even remotely similar. Indeed, if anything, the row bolstered Mr Bitonci's popularity and that of his party. Indeed, earlier this week, he was elected to the national Parliament, one of 60 Northern League MPs. The party's success was unprecedented, their share of the vote doubling as support for popular Left-wing parties such as the communists and socialists collapsed.

Indeed the League's controversial leader Umberto Bossi (he once called on the Italian Navy to turn its guns on boats bringing in illegal immigrants across the Mediterranean) now finds himself at the helm of the third largest Parliamentary party and a key prop to the incoming government of Silvio Berlusconi. The result is that the Northern League is able to exert influence on Italian politics. Indeed, as a thank you for its support, Prime Minister Berlusconi has already promised tough measures against crime, blamed by many Italians on illegal immigrants.

"One of the first things to do is to close the frontiers and set up more camps to identify foreign citizens who don't have jobs and are forced into a life of crime," the 71-year-old conservative leader announced. "Secondly we need more local police constituting an "army of good" in the piazzas and streets to come between Italian people and the army of evil." Inflammatory language indeed.

Another Northern League politician went even further: "We are already at work on a new immigration law and it will be ready soon. "Our borders have more holes in them than a gruyere cheese and through them illegal immigrants are passing - all at the expense and the patience of Italians. "We no longer wish to be division two citizens in our own country at the expense of gypsies and non-European Union citizens."

What makes the situation in Italy of such interest - and, indeed, such concern - are the parallels to be found within British society. One of the key motives that persuaded Italian voters to turn out for the Northern League was a fear of crime caused by immigrants. In recent years there has been an influx of arrivals from Bulgaria and from Romania. Conservative estimates put the number of Romanians living in Italy at 550,000 (out of a population of 60 million), but statistics suggest they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime. It has been stated that Romanians comprise 15 per cent of the Italian prison population and are responsible for 5.6 per cent of all murders.

In urban areas like Rome, the situation is even worse. Police statistics last year showed that they were responsible for more than 75 per cent of all crime in the capital, including 76 murders, 300 rapes and 2,000 robberies. And of all the crimes attributed to these economic migrants, one in particular sent shockwaves through Italy. One evening last November, 47-yearold Giovanna Reggiani was walking home in the suburbs of Rome, passing a shanty town of shelters erected by some 200 Romanian immigrants, when she was confronted by one of their number, Nicolae Romulus Mailat. Having first repeatedly smashed a rock into her face, he slung the devout Roman Catholic over his shoulder and carried her to some wasteland where she was sexually assaulted and robbed of the 13 popunds she had in her purse.

After the alarm was raised by an older woman immigrant, Italian paramedics were horrified when they discovered Giovanna's body in a ditch. Her face was a bloody pulp and they could only tell it was a woman of "indeterminate age" from her clothes. Days later, she died of her injuries.

As news of the attack spread, vigilante groups wreaked their revenge. Four Romanians begging in the centre of Rome were beaten and stabbed, while immigrant shacks were torched the length and breadth of Italy. Attempting to get on top of the situation the former Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, forced through a decree to allow the expulsion of foreigners for reasons of "public security". All foreigners including those from the EU were covered - no trial was required, only a decision by the local prefect that the people in question were a threat. While that quelled disturbances the sense of unease did not recede. And so it came as little surprise that the Northern League was able to tap into such fears and to manufacture an electoral triumph.

Professor James Walston, a lecturer on Italian politics at the John Cabot University in Rome, explains: "To the ordinary Italian there is a real threat to security from immigration and they feel that the Northern League is best suited to deal with the situation. "A lot of the fear is misplaced and irrational, but that has gone over the heads of the majority of Italians who have seen violent crimes blazed all over the Press and TV. "The Northern League grabbed the working-class vote and even white collar workers, a swathe traditionally more likely to back Left-wing parties. "Put simply, Italians are concerned about immigrants; bluntly speaking, they just don't like them and they see them as a problem."

In Britain, similar tensions are bubbling away beneath the surface as communities across the country attempt to adapt to unprecedented levels of immigration. Analysts fear the far-Right British National Party may win a London Assembly vote in next month's elections because of this increasing concern. Again, crime and the perception of crime is a key concern and this week a debate has been raging as to what impact immigrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe, are having. Police say that while they are no more likely to be arrested than a British citizen, processing them takes more time and costs more because they speak little English. Further, a new report by the Association Of Chief Police Officers warns that the scale and speed of immigration has led to problems. It states: "EU migration has led to a surge in the exploitation of migrants and crime, including extortion, pickpocketing, human trafficking and a growing sex trade."

Smaller police forces in rural areas, where hundreds of thousands of Eastern European migrants congregate to work on farms, are facing "the biggest challenges". The study adds: "While this country has accommodated this influx with little rise in community tensions, in some areas sheer numbers have created resentment."

So far in Britain politicians from the far-Right - the British National Party - have had only limited success in tapping into this discontentment. But there is a concern that an incident similar to the murder of Giovanna Reggiani may change that. To prevent that happening, the established political parties are being urged to confront the concerns of the British public. In Italy, Romano Prodi, the ousted Prime Minister, was seen to have failed in this respect, so leaving the door open for the Northern League....

In Padua, the local authorities erected a wall around an immigrant community which it said was responsible for a prostitution and drug-dealing. At Ardo, the mayor posted a bounty of 400 pounds for anyone turning in an illegal immigrant. And in Treviso, a League councillor told a session of the council: "With immigrants, we should use the same system the SS used, punishing 10 of them for every slight against one of our citizens." Another mayor called for a ban on illegal immigrants marrying, another to ban them from being eligible for school scholarships, another to limit Italian citizenship to foreigners with a perfect knowledge of Italian.

What the future holds for the Northern League is hard to know. It may be that as the Berlusconi government adopts some of its less extreme policies, its attractiveness will wane. In France, for example, Nicolas Sarkozy stole votes from Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front by talking tough on immigration and law and order. Among the most controversial measures was a proposal, now adopted by the French parliament, to require DNA testing for foreign dependents wanting to join their families in France. Even in Britain the Labour Government, after a decade of appalling mismanagement, is finally making faltering steps to regain control of the UK's borders.

More here





22 April, 2008

Canadian doubts

Globalization has increased acceptance of a multi-racial world and provided endless supplies of skilled and other labour, so what's not to love about mass immigration? While Canada's opposition parties quibbled over modest measures expediting the arrival of skilled immigrant workers, one answer to that question appeared in a report from the British House of Lords. Stunningly, it concludes that record levels of immigration bring no economic benefits.

The Economic Impact of Immigration argues that immigration addresses neither labour shortages nor problems associated with an aging society. Rather, low-paid and young workers are being placed at a disadvantage because of competition from immigrants; worse, strains on public services and Britons being priced out of the housing market risk stoking social tensions. According to the Telegraph, the British government welcomed this contribution to its "huge immigration shakeup."

Here in Canada, few noticed the British report or even Britain's "immigration shakeup," though for similar reasons cracks have been appearing in Canada's immigration portfolio too, and a small but growing number of academics, former civil servants and diplomats knowledgeable about Canada's complex and inefficient immigration system are speaking out.

Martin Collacott and James Bissett have reached conclusions similar to the new thinking on immigration now gripping most Western democracies, as did the late Bernard Ostry, while economists and professors emeritus such as Alan Green (Queen's University) and Herbert Grubel (Simon Fraser) are backing them up with far-reaching data and analysis.

Citizen groups, too, like Canada Immigration Watch are organizing to counter the vast stakeholder industry of immigration lawyers, consultants and advocacy groups that has so far monopolized Canada's immigration file. Out west, the Alberta Federation of Labour is squaring the debate with today's labour market realities. A paper by Herbert Grubel, for instance, blames Canada's poor selection criteria and high rates of immigration for the failure of recent immigrants to achieve incomes comparable to resident Canadians, even though previous immigrants did so within 10 years of arrival. Accordingly, Immigration and the Welfare State in Canada, published by the Fraser Institute, estimates a cost to Canadian taxpayers of more than $18 billion for immigrants who arrived between 1990 and 2002.

To understand Canada's selection criteria, it's helpful to see how the numbers align under Canada's two largest classes of immigrants to Canada: economic and family. In 2002, 23.3 per cent of all Canadian immigrants were principal applicants, that is skilled workers who acquired sufficient points for language, skills, etc., under Canada's selection criteria to gain admission to Canada while their spouses and dependents, who are allowed automatic entry, comprised a further 30.5 per cent. Together, at 53.5 per cent of total immigrants, they made up the bulk of Canada's Economic Immigrants.

Family-class immigrants, at 28.5 per cent of the total in 2002, are the other dominant set. Consisting of parents and grandparents (9.8 per cent) and "immediate" family members (18.7 per cent), these immigrants must be sponsored. Like parents and grandparents, the myriad cousins, uncles, in-laws, sisters and fianc‚s are then able to sponsor other "immediate" family members, leading to a phenomenon known as "chain" migration. In other words, family-class immigrants meet no selection criteria. This means they often arrive with no language or job skills and a commensurately diminished capacity for paying taxes and social integration.

The economic success of immigrants is also affected by the rate at which they arrive. Having levelled out at 0.5 per cent of the population or less after the Second World War, it skyrocketed in the 1990s to today's one per cent - the highest in the world. These high rates, combined with slow economic growth in the 1990s, says Grubel, affected the income of new immigrants and those arriving in the previous decade who now had new competition for jobs. It was in this period, too, that the number of ethnic enclaves - defined as "census" regions where at least 30 per cent of the population is of a particular ethnic background - rose to 254 by 2001, from six in 1981.

Despite similar economic conditions during the same period, Australian immigrants fared better than Canada's. Migrants there must meet more stringent requirements for skills, credentials and language. Australia also denies entrants social benefits for two years and admits a higher proportion of work-age immigrants. Parents of principal applicants, for instance, may enter only if the majority of their independently qualified children already reside in Australia.

If economic realities matter, the new thinking on immigration may find its ultimate home among the stewards of today's labour market. After appearing before a Commons standing committee where he opposed employer exploitation of temporary workers, the president of the Alberta Federation of Labour told me how, even in booming Alberta, there is no blanket shortage of labour. "Overall, the market is tight but absolute shortages exist only in certain sectors. In others, like natural gas, forestry and agriculture, workers are being laid off," Gil McGowan said

So why aren't we employing the people who are here, aboriginals for instance? Provincial training programs are what need fixing, he suggests. "Politicians have a cartoon understanding of what is happening in the labour market."

Source



Immigration among top social evils in UK

Immigration and responses to the phenomenon are among the 10 social evils afflicting British society, a survey released on Sunday by a major think-tank said. According to a survey by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the British people feel a deep sense of unease about some of the changes shaping British society. The 10 social evils pointed out by the respondents were: individualism, greed, decline of community, decline of values, drugs and alcohol, poverty and inequality, decline of the family, immigration and responses to immigration, crime and violence and young people as victims or perpetrators.

On the social evil of immigration and responses to immigration, some participants felt that local residents lost out to immigrants in competition for scarce resources. Others criticised negative attitudes to, and lack of support for immigrants and thought society should be more tolerant and inclusive. Besides, it was felt that the British society had become more greedy and selfish, at a cost to its sense of community.

Respondents to the consultation carried out by the foundation said that Britons no longer shared a set of common values and that they had lost their 'moral compass'. The four social evils which emerged as the cause for most worry among the respondents were individualism, greed, decline of community and decline of values.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is one of the largest social policy research and development charities in the UK. It supports a research and development programme that seeks to understand the causes of social difficulties and explore ways of overcoming them.

Source





21 April, 2008

Powell has won: A view from India

As people from India were a major source of Enoch Powell's unease, one might expect him to be hated there. The following article from The Times of India actually defends him in some ways

The late Enoch Powell, controversial British politician, poet, linguist and once-aspiring Viceroy of India, would surely have laughed to see the kadhai and rice bowl protests in London on Sunday. Exactly 40 years ago, to the day, Powell made his infamous 'rivers of blood' speech in newly-multicultural Birmingham. Using his oratorical powers and vast knowledge of the classics, Powell predicted uncontrolled immigration would raise racial tensions in UK the same way the Roman poet Virgil described "the river Tiber foaming with much blood".

Four decades later, the streets of the capital of politically-correct Britain were foaming with an estimated 45,000 South Asian, Chinese and Turkish catering workers protesting against strict new immigration controls. The new measures for non-European workers effectively keep the curry, chow mein and kebab chef out of Britain unless he speaks good English and has educational qualifications of the sort you don't normally find in halwai or czar of the tandoor.

If anything, the caterers' public ferment shows that Powell's controversial, if divisive, views about British multi culturalism and open-door immigration policy had finally been dignified by officialdom. The immigration controls Powell wanted have finally come to pass.

Powell quoted the registrar-general's statistics to estimate Britain would have five to seven million 'coloureds', or one-tenth of the total population, by the year 2000. By any reckoning, that was magic maths. Britain's office of national statistics says that in 2001-2002, 7.6% of the UK's population consisted of non-white ethnic minorities, which is only a bit more than Powell's predicted one-tenth.

But it was not his number-crunching that made, in his own words, his speech "go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up". Powell gave voice to the deepest fears of the Mr and Mrs White Average when he declared, "We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre".

The speech had severe political consequences for Powell. He was sacked from the shadow cabinet by a Conservative Party, which privately agreed with parts of his politically incorrect demagoguery even as it felt publicly unable to endorse it. And yet, just three days after the speech, 1,000 dockers went on strike to protest against Powell's dismissal. Their placards said 'Back Britain, not Black Britain'. By early May, Powell had received 43,000 letters and 700 telegrams supporting him. A Gallup poll found 74% of UK agreed with Powell's premise and 69% felt he should not have been dismissed.

Forty years on, the luxury of hindsight allows Britain to ruminate on the rights and wrongs of the strange saga of Enoch Powell's predicted rivers of blood. First and foremost, those rivers do not run and may be, never will.

Second, Powell was not an insular racialist. He loved India and worked hard to achieve fluency in two Indian languages. But he firmly believed it wrong to impose a mammoth immigrant community on a small island, with all the attendant perils for social cohesion.

The new immigration controls show that Britain agrees with Powell. It just doesn't have Powell's guts to say so, straight off.

Source



Putting critters and plants ahead of national security

The debate over the fence the United States is building along its southern border has focused largely on the project's costs, feasibility and how well it will curb illegal immigration. But one of its most lasting impacts may well be on the animals and vegetation that make this politically fraught landscape their home.

Some wildlife researchers have grown so concerned about the consequences of bisecting hundreds of miles of rugged habitat that they have talked of engaging in civil disobedience to block the fence's construction. "This wall is so asinine, and so wrong, I am one of a dozen scientists ready to lay our bodies down in front of tractors," Healy Hamilton, who directs the Center for Biodiversity Research and Information at the California Academy of Sciences, told colleagues at a recent scientific retreat here. "This is one thing we might be able to stop." "Make it 13!" said Allison Jones, a conservation biologist at the Wild Utah Project, an advocacy group.

Hamilton and Jones have yet to throw themselves before bulldozers, but their call to arms reflects the researchers' growing fears that the wall will imperil species that, in Hamilton's words, "walk, fly or crawl across that border." ...

Are these guys actually trying to say the fence is going to keep birds from flying over it? To even suggest that threatens what credibility they have on the issue. Having grown up on the border, I am confident that the Mesquite trees will survive any fence too. We should not be putting critters ahead of our ability to control our border. This is just another excuse to fail.

It starts with the false premise that the environment is fragile. In Texas, nothing could be further from the truth. The environment down here can overtake anything man can build, if it is not restrained by pruning and clipping.

Source





20 April, 2008

Upside to a down economy: fewer illegals

Post below lifted from Mangan. See the original for links



The L.A Times has a story (sent to me by Malcolm Pollack), Arizona slams door on illegal immigrants which, though it contains lots of liberal whining about Arizona's unwillingness to invite the world, shows that success is possible. Money quote:

"What I love about what Arizona is doing is we don't have to rely on the federal government," said state Rep. Russell Pearce, a Mesa Republican who has authored most of the toughest measures. "It has truly woken up the rest of America that states can fix that problem." The campaign has had an effect: Illegal immigrants complain it's impossible to find good work and are leaving the state.

Not coincidentally, the front page of today's Wall Street Journal features an article, Visa Violators Swept Up In Widening Dragnet, which says that "OTMs", or "Other then Mexicans", have come under increasing scrutiny by ICE. Sob stories ensue. And finally, yesterday's WSJ featured Crossings By Migrants Slow as Job Picture Dims. Si, se puede!



'Cold war' fear of Britain's race watchdog chief

Uncontrolled immigration has led to a "cold war" between ethnic communities, according to the head of Britain's race watchdog. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), believes the policy failures risk engendering racism among millions of educated professionals.

Mr Phillips will set out his concerns in an address to mark the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell's notorious "rivers of blood" speech - in which the Tory frontbencher warned of disastrous social consequences if immigration levels were not reduced. While Mr Phillips is expected to stress that the dire predictions have not come true and immigration has not been too high, he will say the influx has had worrying effects. "Powell predicted 'hot' conflict and violence. However, we have seen the emergence of a kind of cold war in some parts of the country, where very separate communities exist side by side... with poor communication across racial or religious lines," Mr Phillips will say. "In essence, Powell so discredited any talk of planning or control that it gave rise to a migration policy in which government knew too little about what was going on. Ironically, Powellism and the weakening of control it engendered may have led Britain to admitting more immigrants rather than fewer."

Mr Phillips is expected to warn ministers that they are boosting anti-immigration parties such as the BNP by failing to respond to reasonable concerns from large sections of the "settled" population. He will say: "For every professional woman who is able to go out to work because she has a Polish nanny, there is a young mother who watches her child struggle in a classroom where a harassed teacher faces too many children with too many languages between them."

Shadow home secretary David Davis said: "Mr Phillips raises a brave and timely warning and points out the consequences of a disastrous loss of immigration controls. "It has had adverse consequences for public services, housing and community relations. Whilst managed immigration is for the benefit of the country, uncontrolled immigration can lead to serious problems for the whole nation."

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19 April, 2008

Capital Area Groups Unite to Fight Illegal Immigration

Ten groups from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., announced Thursday they're joining forces to fight illegal immigration in the region surrounding the nation's capital. The newly-formed Capital Area Alliance Against Illegal Immigration hopes to pool the resources and knowledge of member organizations to end what it calls "political and legislative support for illegal immigration" in the region. "Crime, unfortunately, doesn't know political boundaries too well," said Greg Letiecq, executive director of Save the Old Dominion and leader of the Virginia branch of the Alliance.

Chuck Floyd, head of the organization's Maryland arm, agreed. "We're going after them with this particular group and trying to coordinate policies in the region, because we find that Virginia, Maryland and D.C. are not on the same sheet of music when it comes to enforcing policies," he said.

Floyd, Letiecq and Washington branch leader Bill Buchanan praised some of the Virginia General Assembly's recent political moves, including passing bills that revoke the license of a business found hiring illegal immigrants and to deny bail to illegal immigrants. Maryland and Washington could benefit from adopting policies like Virginia's, Letiecq said. "As the impacts of different policies between jurisdictions become more obvious, it's going to be important to help citizens of Maryland understand what the solutions are that are working in Virginia," Letiecq said.

Maryland Delegate Victor Ramirez, D, saw the organization as an attempt for the groups to increase their numbers to gain more leverage. However, the multi-state hierarchy of the Alliance might end up causing the group trouble, Ramirez said. "I think their plan may backfire on them," he said. "In Maryland, it's a more progressive state than Virginia, and if we see people from Virginia meddling in Maryland's policies, I think it's going to galvanize support against people who advocate these Draconian policies that create hate."

The Alliance's founding member organizations are the American Border Patrol, Defend D.C., Help Save Loudoun, Help Save Manassas, Help Save Maryland, Judicial Watch, the Maryland Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, Save the Old Dominion, Vienna Citizens' Coalition and the Virginia Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

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Pope controversy

Amusing to see a far-Leftist like Dean defending the Pope. It really is true that these guys will say anything and believe in nothing -- except getting power for themselves, of course. I myself think that the Pope seems to have forgotten some words by the founder of his faith: "My kingdom is not of this world"

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) today slammed Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, for criticizing Pope Benedict XVI on the issue of immigration and urged Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain to distance himself from the congressman, one of McCain's backers.

Yesterday Tancredo denounced comments Pope Benedict made during an address to Catholic bishops urging them to accept and welcome immigrants. "I want to encourage you and your communities to continue to welcome the immigrants who join your ranks today, to share their joys and hopes, to support them in their sorrows and trials, and to help them flourish in their new home," Pope Benedict told the bishops gathered at the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.

Tancredo, who recently finished a failed presidential bid based on a platform of fighting illegal immigration, accused Benedict of making "amnesty a key issue in his papacy." "I am not taking issue with the pope's moral authority and respect his views on the threats of Islamic immigration," Tancredo said in a statement. "However, it is not in his job description to engage in American politics."

This morning DNC Chairman Howard Dean called on McCain to distance himself from Tancredo. "If John McCain is serious in his pledge to run a respectful campaign, he should immediately denounce Tom Tancredo's insulting remarks about Pope Benedict XVI," Dean said in a release. "After years of failing to address immigration reform, the Republican party has instead used the issue to scapegoat people to win elections."

When contacted by The Washington Times, the McCain campaign had no comment and referred questions to the Republican National Committee. "At this point, Howard Dean will do and say absolutely anything to distract from his party's bitter infighting," said RNC spokesman Alex Conant. "Voters will see this for what it is - desperation."

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17 April, 2008

Democrat doubts chances for immigration reform

It is hard to disagree with that. There just IS no middle way any more. Past U.S. experience has shown that "reform" just means opening the floodgates

The chairman of a House committee that is usually the first stop for immigration bills says he doubts Congress will ever pass sweeping immigration reform. Democratic Rep. John Conyers said Wednesday that lawmakers should work on pieces of the immigration issue such as providing enough workers for businesses. He says he'll be a dedicated student of whoever accomplishes comprehensive immigration reform. His statement came at a hearing filled with business people wanting more H2B visas for seasonal workers such as seafood processors.

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Immigrant crime: A good old British "fudge" again

What no policeman or other official can say in Britain is that the big problem is not with Poles but with blacks. And the "British" population now includes large numbers of blacks. So comparing immgrants overall with the "British" population overall is uninformative. On both sides of the ledger you will have a mixed population of blacks and whites. Comparing crime among immigrant blacks with white British crime, however, would reveal a REALLY alarming situation -- which is why no such comparison will be made available

The influx of migrant workers into England and Wales from eastern Europe has not led to the crime wave that some have suggested, a police report says. Since 2004, about 800,000 people have registered for work in Britain from many eastern European countries.

The report by two chief constables has been sent to the home secretary ahead of a meeting with senior officers. It says the influx of migrants has created problems in some areas but overall crime levels have not risen. With the recent expansion of the EU, migrants have entered the UK from such countries as Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, and more recently Romania and Bulgaria.

Last year, Cambridgeshire's chief constable, Julie Spence, sparked controversy by claiming the sudden influx in east European workers had led to community tensions and increases in certain types of crime. Several other forces said they were having similar problems.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) canvassed the views of detectives and community officers across the UK. It found no evidence that crime was more prevalent among East Europeans than other groups. It said the sheer number of migrants in some areas had caused tensions and policing pressures - but the problems were minimal. "Our report is very clear: it has led to an increase in some tensions. "Particularly, say, those areas which have had higher concentrations - you get misunderstandings, you get rumours, you've got big pressure on things like housing. You get rumours that wages are being held down," Mr Fahy said.

"What is different about this wave of immigration is that it's so sudden. "Which has created a different dynamic which has created tensions and people like Julie Spence have pointed out that we have had huge increases in the interpreters budget, but that's not really just about eastern Europeans being offenders, it's also about them being victims and witnesses of crime." He said the nationality of offenders should be recorded to make it easier to monitor crime trends, and called on eastern European states to share criminal intelligence more widely.

Mrs Spence stood by her comments, saying that immigrants were not responsible for a "crime wave" but recent population growth had given police "significant challenges", particularly with non-English speakers, as the force deals with people from 93 cultures, speaking 100 languages. "Looking after victims and witnesses and managing community tensions is substantially more complex now than three years ago," she said. "We have seen an increase in specific offences such as motoring offences, sex trafficking, and worker exploitation - a form of modern-day slavery. Our workload and its complexity is increasing. "Some parts of the country are no doubt unaffected by this. However, Cambridgeshire certainly is."

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16 April, 2008

McCain Plea to Hispanics Dismays Anti-Immigration Republicans

Walking both sides of the street is normally a Democrat specialty but maybe McCain can do it

Arizona Senator John McCain cites his standing with his state's Hispanics as proof that he is a different kind of Republican, distinct from the illegal- immigration foes who dominate the party. He vows to campaign in the barrios, gunning for the 70 percent Latino support he won in his last senatorial election. That's precisely what worries anti-immigration Republicans, who say the party's base will stay at home if it detects the kind of mariachi politics that President George W. Bush practiced to win more than 40 percent of Latino voters in 2004. If McCain ``panders for the Hispanic vote, politically, he'll kill himself and he'll kill us,'' said Arizona state Representative Russell Pearce, a Republican who is leading a effort to revoke business licenses of employers who knowingly employ illegal immigrants. ``There are more votes in my approach than his.''

McCain, 71, plans to test that theory. He may be the one Republican in a position to do so. After a divisive immigration debate in 2006, Republican candidates in that year's mid-term elections only received 30 percent of the Hispanic vote, down more than 10 points from 2004, according to exit polls.

If the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, had garnered the kind of Hispanic support his party had in 2006, he might have taken three western states that Bush narrowly captured -- Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico -- and won the presidency. Democrats look at those numbers, as well as the 50 percent increase in Hispanic voter turnout and sense an opportunity.

McCain is ``starting from an enormous deficit,'' said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a Democratic advocacy group in Washington. While acknowledging that McCain has a better brand than other Republicans, Democrats said he wounded himself when he conceded in a Jan. 30 Republican debate that he would no longer vote for the immigration bill he sponsored in 2006 with Senator Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat. ``John McCain was once a champion of immigrants,'' said Rosenberg, ``but he walked away from his own bill.''

In Arizona, many Hispanics, including Democrats, disagree that McCain has abandoned them. They are ready to vouch for him, recalling a senator who would paint houses in the barrios of South Phoenix on weekends. ``This is not like all of a sudden he wants to be close to Hispanics,'' said Tommy Espinoza, a Democrat and the president of La Raza Development Fund, who worked with McCain in the late 1980s to help fix-up derelict bungalows in South Phoenix. ``Painting is not the senator's forte, but he was out there.''

McCain will need those kinds of testimonials to replicate Bush's success in drawing Hispanic voters. The presumptive Republican nominee acknowledges his challenge, telling reporters on his campaign plane on April 6 that he has ``a lot of work to do'' to persuade Hispanics to return to his party. Still, he said ``the Hispanic vote is up for grabs'' and his campaign will announce a plan to attract those voters later this month.

McCain's partnership with Kennedy, which almost doomed his candidacy, ``gives him an open door'' to reach out to Latinos, said Charlie Black, a senior adviser. Hispanics saw that ``he had the courage to sacrifice politically to do the right thing.'' That opening will allow McCain to make his case to Hispanics on education, trade and cultural values, Black said. ``For a lot of Republicans, the door is not open any more,'' he said....

McCain's advisers said he has a stronger bond with Hispanics than many Democrats recognize. They point to his Jan. 29 victory in Florida, where he captured more than 50 percent of the Hispanics who voted in the Republican primary, as proof he can make his case nationally.

While they recognize McCain's past strength, some Arizona Latino Democrats said he may have lost ground during his quest for his party's nomination. ``That track record of support is there in the community,'' said U.S. Representative Raul Grijalva, 60, an Arizona Democrat. ``But the about-face is going to very difficult for him to deal with.''

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Canadian Tories grasp the nettle on immigration

The holy trinity of issues to be avoided if you are a politician and want to stay in office are privatized health care, religion and immigration. So it is with laudable courage that the Harper government has sought to reform the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. There is a backlog just shy of a million people seeking visas to enter Canada. The average wait period to get a visa is somewhere in the neighbourhood of six years and the situation is getting worse rather than better. The Conservatives want to make the system more efficient. They want to ensure that those entering Canada have the appropriate job skills to contribute to the economy and address labour market shortages. Why then is this so problematic?

The Liberals are attempting to vilify the Conservatives by suggesting there is a "hidden agenda" at play. They are invoking the fossilized stereotype of the Conservative party as a white Anglo-Saxon elite. It has even been reported that some Liberal MPs have told their constituents Prime Minster Stephen Harper doesn't like Muslims. It has become a messy, ugly business obscuring a reality that the current system is not working.

Immigration based on family unification has been a cornerstone of Liberal hegemony in federal politics since the days of Lester Pearson. Pierre Trudeau exploited it throughout his political career to the point Liberals now believe they are the only party qualified to opine on such matters. Yet the same Liberal party recognized under the mandate of both Jean Chretien and Paul Martin that change was overdue and immigration had to be more responsive to a growing skilled labour deficit. Indeed, reform was underway under the tutelage of former immigration minister Judy Sgro until she ran afoul of a pizza delivery man and a Romanian stripper. Something the Liberals should remember when they suggest the current minister, Diane Finley, will be allowed to personally "cherry pick" the applicants who enter Canada.

Although Sgro was ultimately vindicated in what became known as "Strippergate," she personally approved 792 temporary resident permits during her brief tenure, so the Liberals' assertion that the Tories are setting a new standard for ministerial intervention is unfounded. No, what really troubles the Liberals about the proposed changes is that they so clearly demonstrate their impotence against a Prime Minister they loathe and who continually outflanks them in a minority parliament.

There has been much hue and cry over the fact this legislation is buried in the budget bill. The Liberals and the NDP would prefer it was a stand-alone piece of legislation that they could collectively defeat. How surprising then that Harper would make this an issue of confidence by wedding it to the budget bill. It's called smart politics. Harper put the Liberals in a box. They vote against the immigration bill, they trigger an election they don't have the resources or the popular support - particularly in Quebec - to win. They abstain and lose face yet again, adding to a growing list of capitulations on Afghanistan, the crime bill and the budget itself. Their brand withers as the Conservative election coffers swell.

Last week the Liberals once again demonstrated the elasticity of their principles and sided with the government as the Commons voted 201-68 on an NDP motion to reject the budget-implementation bill that contains the immigration changes. Politics is a blood sport and the Liberals are hemorrhaging badly. If this were a boxing match the referee would stop the fight.

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15 April, 2008

Why not use the immigration tools Congress has already passed?

For over 200 years, immigrants coming to our nation have found hope at their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. The words written at its base, "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," capture the American identity. That is why the debate over immigration is so important to the American people. It strikes at the heart of what our nation stands for - freedom, equality and opportunity for all. But in order to preserve these ideals, we must put an end to illegal immigration.

Texans may understand this better than anyone else. As a border state, we experience the immediate impact of illegal immigration in our schools, our hospitals and our communities. We also understand what many elected officials still don't - rewarding lawbreakers with amnesty only encourages a new flood of illegal immigrants. Nearly half a million people come illegally to the U.S. each year. Add that to the 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants who are currently living here and you have a city twice the size of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Clearly this is a growing problem that Congress must address.

And in fact, we did address it - more than 10 years ago. In 1996, Congress passed comprehensive immigration reform to put an end to the growing problem. Unfortunately, both Republican and Democratic administrations refused to enforce the law. So Congress spent the past decade passing more laws to try to quell the flood of illegal immigration. These too remain largely unenforced. For example, in 2006 Congress called on the administration to secure one-third of the border with a fence. The Secure Fence Act authorized the Department of Homeland Security to build more than 700 miles of fencing along the southwest border. To date, only 167 miles of fencing have been constructed.

Congress also gave the administration the authority to put an end to the job magnet that draws illegal immigrants. And although that law was enacted in 1986, 7 million illegal immigrants are working in the U.S. In 1996, Congress prohibited public colleges from giving preferential treatment to illegal immigrants. The law required colleges and universities that offer in-state tuition to illegal immigrants to also offer in-state rates to all U.S. students. But to date, the Department of Justice has not filed a single suit to stop the 10 states that violate this law. American taxpayers foot the bill for public education. If anyone receives the benefit of in-state tuition, it should be those who pay for it.

These are just a few of the many tools Congress has given the administration to enforce immigration laws. But at the end of the day it doesn't matter how many laws Congress passes if the administration simply disregards them. And it doesn't matter how many tools we give, if Homeland Security refuses to use them.

America has the most generous immigration policy in the world, admitting one million legal immigrants every year. These individuals follow our laws and wait in line as they anticipate their chance to live the American dream. But in order to sustain such a high level of legal immigration, we must first curb the flood of illegal immigration. No new tools are required. No new laws are needed. We simply need the administration to enforce the immigration laws that Congress has already passed.

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Foreigners carry out one in every five killings in Britain, police figures reveal

One in every five murders or manslaughters in England and Wales is committed by a foreigner, police figures revealed. In one area of London, the figure is one in three. This is despite the fact that foreigners represent only around one in 16 of the general population. The statistics are so alarming that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will hold a migrant crime summit on Thursday amid worries that police are struggling to cope.

According to figures revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, the 96 foreign nationals convicted of homicide last year were from 28 different countries. They were involved in 21 per cent of the total of 461 murder and manslaughter cases. Critics blame the Government's failure to deport foreign criminals. Recent cases have involved foreigners who had already been convicted of robbery and assault but were allowed to remain after serving their sentences.

Conservative MP David Davies, a member of the Commons home affairs committee, said: "These extraordinary figures demonstrate the failure of the Government's immigration policy, which has seen all sorts of undesirable characters being able to get into this country and use the Human Rights Act to escape deportation."

The figures show a wide variation between areas. In London, as many as 76 out of 231 identified killers were foreign nationals. In Manchester, it was eight out of 42, and in Bedfordshire, three out of seven. But in West Yorkshire, it was none out of 47.

In many cases, the figures reflect the influence of immigrant crime gangs. Scotland Yard said half of the organised crime gangs in London are "ethnic", or bound by a common language or homeland-The most common nationalities for foreign killers were Pakistani, Indian and Jamaican. Foreigners were also more likely to be victims. According to the figures, 15 per cent of those who died were from overseas. In many cases, both victim and killer were from the same immigrant community, reflecting internal feuding.

Not all police forces responded to requests for information but the figures available cover more than half of the 755 homicides in 2006-2007. Among the most high-profile cases was that of Roberto Malasi, an 18-year-old Angolan asylum seeker who shot dead a 33-year-old woman as she cradled her baby niece at a christening in south London. Malasi went on the run and two weeks later stabbed to death an 18-year-old pastor's daughter who he felt had "disrespected" him.

Other cases include Yusuf Jama, a Somali asylum seeker, who was in the gang that shot dead PC Sharon Beshenivsky in Bradford in 2005. The revelations are likely to feature on the agenda for Thursday's summit, which was called by the Home Office earlier this year. It is the first of its kind, and follows letters of concern from Chief Constables. Cambridgeshire's Julie Spence warned as long ago as 2005 there was "community tension" involving migrants which had the "potential for large-scale public disorder". She was forced to write again last year, saying the problem had "clearly magnified". Kent's Michael Fuller has also warned that the size of his force has not kept pace with an explosion in migrant numbers.

A Home Office spokesman said: "Last year, we deported a record number of foreign national criminals. Anyone convicted of a serious crime, such as murder, will be automatically deported."

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14 April, 2008

The wrongheaded ADL again

The ADL was set up to defend Jews against discrimination and prejudice. About the only antisemitism in America these days, however, comes from Muslims and the Left and the ADL is usually too Leftist to do anything about that. So it has morphed into an anti-Christian organization. Evidently even that is not enough to keep them busy so they have now decided that defending illegals is their job too. Since the illegals concerned are almost all Catholics, that must be confusing for them. Fancy DEFENDING the hated Christians for a change! Maybe they have taken up the obsolete Protestant view that Catholics are not really Christians.

I wonder if we will ever see the ADL prosecuting any of the many Muslim hate-merchants who infest the universities? Don't hold your breath! ADL stands for "Anti-Defamation League" but Muslims can defame Jews and Israel all they like, apparently

The heat is once again on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose illegal immigration crackdowns have earned him another critic. The Anti-Defamation League is not calling on Washington, D.C., to intervene, asking the Department of Justice to investigate the self-proclaimed "America's Toughest Sheriff." The Anti-Defamation League calls Arpaio's recent controversial sweeps nothing more than racial profiling.

Arpaio has set up shop all over the county in the past few months. He said his deputies and posse have arrested nearly 75 illegal immigrants in the last few operations alone. As the number of arrests grows, so does the controversy surrounding the sweep. "The last I heard, it's illegal to be in this country," Arpaio said. "They're criminals. Let's get that straight. We have been trained and we are enforcing the law. We haven't had any problems."

Once a location has been chosen, the sheriff moved in. Deputies scour the neighborhood, looking for traffic violations. When they find one, ICE-trained deputies use alleged probable cause to check the legal status of the occupants.

The Anti-Defamation League is questioning the sheriff's motives. "Numbers of people have been detained during the 'sweeps,' but not all of them have been found to be undocumented," said A.D.L. Board Chairman David Bodney and A.D.L. Regional Director Bill Strauss. "This raises serious questions about the process and its effect upon the community." "No. No, that was just one case -- possibly," Arpaio said. "We don't' do that. We have the expertise to place holds on them. If that is wrong, let them prove it."

Several city officials where the sheriff has set up patrols have criticized the operations. Recently, the Mesa police chief asked for fair warning if and when the sheriff comes to town. While he has taken heat about wanting to go into Mesa, Arpaio said he's still going to move in. "You don't really don't think I'm going to stop, do you? Never happen," he said. "In fact, I am going to increase my vigilance in going after the crime and also the illegal immigration problem." Arpaio said several state legislators have asked for him to come in and clean up Mesa. He said he will be there. The question is when

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Chertoff Defends Immigration Enforcement

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says he feels the pain of employers pinched by intensified efforts to control illegal immigration, but adds that until Congress enacts broad immigration reforms they shouldn't expect any changes in enforcement. In an interview with The Associated Press, Chertoff said this week that the rising complaints from businesses offer some evidence the Bush administration's approach is working. "This is harsh but accurate proof positive that, for the first time in decades, we've succeeded in changing the dynamic and (are) actually beginning to reduce illegal immigration," Chertoff said. "Unfortunately, unless you counterbalance that with a robust system to allow people to come in temporarily and legally, you're going to wind up with an economic problem."

Chertoff defended the actions of his agency, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "We're enforcing the law as it is, but Congress has not yet given us the authority to really expand the temporary worker program," he said in the Tuesday interview. "If we could do that, then most of these businesses could find legal solutions."

Chertoff sharply criticized businesses that complain the crackdowns on their hiring of illegal immigrants will cost them money. In a federal court case last year, groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued that the department had failed to account for the economic impact of new regulations on businesses. The argument "basically suggests we can't enforce the law because it will prevent people from making money illegally," Chertoff said. "The business community loves it (hiring illegal immigrants) because you have illegals, you pay them less, they have no place to go to complain."

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wrote Chertoff a letter last month asking federal officials to rethink their policy on workplace immigration crackdowns, saying they could have "severe and lasting effects on our local economy." Villaraigosa accused federal officials of targeting "established, responsible employers" and said ICE should spend its limited resources targeting employers who exploit wage and hour laws.

Asked about the mayor's plea, Chertoff gave no indication that Villaraigosa would get the review and revision of ICE's enforcement priorities he is seeking. "I would be delighted to see Congress give us a way to bring workers in legally," Chertoff said. "Those workers would then be able to address the economic needs of the city and they would do it in a legal way. But as long as the law is as it is, I will enforce the law as it is."

Villaraigosa spokesman Matt Szabo said the mayor hopes to discuss the matter with Chertoff in person soon when he visits Washington. Szabo emphasized that Villaraigosa "is not suggesting the secretary should not enforce the law; he's saying that the laws that we have are broken." "In the meantime, we need to enforce the laws on the books in a much smarter way that targets those who are the greatest threat to the residents of this country," Szabo said.

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13 April, 2008

The world's most perverse immigration policy?

The USA lets in milions of low IQ people but goes to great lengths to keep out the brightest people



One of the most unjustly neglected films of the past few years is Mike Judge's "Idiocracy". Mr Judge is the genius behind Beavis and Butt-Head, two of the most disgusting creatures on television, and Hank Hill, one of the wisest. In "Idiocracy" he turns his talents to futurology-and to the troubling question of the long-term impact of dysgenic breeding, junk food and grunge culture on America's collective IQ.

The premise is simple. Two typical citizens-the army's "most average" soldier and a street prostitute-find themselves transported 500 years into the future. They soon discover that they are towering geniuses compared with the knuckle-draggers who inhabit the America of 2505. The country's best university is run by Costco. People are named after brands such as Frito and Mountain Dew. Starbucks has become a chain of brothels. The president is a former porn star and wrestling champion.

One might imagine that America's politicians would do all that they could to prevent Mr Judge's dystopia from materialising. But when it comes to immigration they are doing exactly the opposite-trying their best to keep the world's best and brightest from darkening America's doors.

Consider the annual April Fool's joke played on applicants for H1B visas, which allow companies to sponsor highly-educated foreigners to work in America for three years or so. The powers-that-be have set the number of visas so low-at 85,000-that the annual allotment is taken up as soon as applications open on April 1st. America then deals with the mismatch between supply and demand in the worst possible way, allocating the visas by lottery. The result is that hundreds of thousands of highly qualified people-entrepreneurs who want to start companies, doctors who want to save lives, scientists who want to explore the frontiers of knowledge-are kept waiting on the spin of a roulette wheel and then, more often than not, denied the chance to work in the United States.

This is a policy of national self-sabotage. America has always thrived by attracting talent from the world. Some 70 or so of the 300 Americans who have won Nobel prizes since 1901 were immigrants. Great American companies such as Sun Microsystems, Intel and Google had immigrants among their founders. Immigrants continue to make an outsized contribution to the American economy. About a quarter of information technology (IT) firms in Silicon Valley were founded by Chinese and Indians. Some 40% of American PhDs in science and engineering go to immigrants. A similar proportion of all the patents filed in America are filed by foreigners.

These bright foreigners bring benefits to the whole of society. The foreigner-friendly IT sector has accounted for more than half of America's overall productivity growth since 1995. Foreigner-friendly universities and hospitals have been responsible for saving countless American cities from collapse. Bill Gates calculates, and respectable economists agree, that every foreigner who is given an H1B visa creates jobs for five regular Americans.

There was a time when ambitious foreigners had little choice but to put up with America's restrictive ways. Europe was sclerotic and India and China were poor and highly restrictive. But these days the rest of the world is opening up at precisely the time when America seems to be closing down. The booming economies of the developing world are sucking back talent that was once America's for the asking. About a third of immigrants who hold high-tech jobs in America are considering returning home. America's rivals are also rejigging their immigration systems to attract global talent.

Canada and Australia operate a widely emulated system that gives immigrants "points" for their educational qualifications. New Zealand allows some companies to hand out work visas along with job offers. Britain gives graduates of the world's top 50 business schools an automatic right to work in the country for a year. The European Union is contemplating introducing a system of "blue cards" that will give talented people a fast track to EU citizenship.

The United States is already paying a price for its failure to adjust to the new world. Talent-challenged technology companies are already being forced to export jobs abroad. Microsoft opened a software development centre in Canada in part because Canada's more liberal laws make it easier to recruit qualified people from around the world. This problem is only going to get worse if America's immigration restrictions are not lifted. The Labour Department projects that by 2014 there will be more than 2m job openings in science, technology and engineering, while the number of Americans graduating with degrees in those subjects is plummeting.

The United States is fortunate that it can solve its talent problem with the wave of a magic wand, by simply expanding the supply of visas to meet the demand. Raise the cap on H1B visas-or better still abolish it-and increase the supply of green cards, and the world's brightest will come flooding in. A country that is blessed with a dynamic economy and a world-beating higher-education system does not even have to go around wooing people, as other countries do.

Yet America suffers from one big problem: its political system is especially dysfunctional when it comes to immigration. A few brave souls are trying to lift the H1B visa cap. But most politicians are more interested in bellowing about building walls to keep illegal immigrants out than thinking seriously about the problem. And a few are even actively campaigning to reduce the number of H1B visas in order to keep American jobs for Americans. As Mr Judge might well wonder: how do you win the global talent wars when Congress is already in the hands of the idiocracy?

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Immigration is a hot election topic in Northern Italy

Wearing an Italian soccer cap and sipping an espresso, Moroccan Abbes Mohamed is certain that a centre-left victory in Italy's election on Sunday and Monday would improve life for immigrants. "The left is much more for integrating foreigners than the right. They just make it difficult," said the 35-year-old in a cafe in Verona, northern Italy. "I really hope the left wins." Mohamed has lived in Italy for over five years, but he says he is fearful for new immigrants if poll favourite Silvio Berlusconi and his anti-immigrant Northern League allies win.

The League's stance plays well in the rich north, where resentment of foreigners has spread as the number of immigrants, particularly from north Africa and eastern Europe, has grown. One League campaign poster shows a Native American in feathered head-dress with the text: "They were also subjected to immigration and now they live on reserves! Think about it."

In contrast to previous campaigns, the main sides contesting this vote -- called after Romano Prodi's centre-left government fell in January -- have not put immigration in the spotlight, though both have promised to get tough on crime by immigrants. The spread of Roma or gypsy camps on city outskirts has raised concern among Italians about crime and other problems blamed on illegal immigration. Forced removals are common.

Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) party promises to expel all illegal immigrants and crack down on gypsy camps and "centres linked to the preaching of Muslim fundamentalism". Walter Veltroni's centre-left Democratic Party (PD) puts the focus on integration, looking to increase the duration of legitimate immigrants' residency permits but to guarantee that expulsion orders for illegal immigrants are really carried out.

NORTHERN LEAGUE INFLUENCE

When Berlusconi, who is seeking a third term as prime minister, hinted at giving immigrants a vote, the League's response was so furious that the idea was quickly dropped. The 66-year-old League leader, Umberto Bossi, was minister for reforms under Berlusconi until suffering a stroke in 2004, and once advocated the use of gunships to ward off immigrants. The League spearheaded the so-called Bossi-Fini law under the last Berlusconi government that imposed tougher penalties for illegal immigration; its performance in the election could determine the character of the new government. Another Berlusconi ally, prospective finance minister Giulio Tremonti, quipped that the PD "prefers couscous" to local food.

In the northeast, where the PDL is confident of a strong lead, a recent poll in three provinces indicated that 40 percent of residents see immigrants as a threat to law and order. Legally registered immigrants make up nearly 5 percent of Italy's 58 million people but the number of illegals is unknown. "Immigration is an important issue here," said Verona pensioner Armando Ferrone.

To curb what they see as delinquent behaviour by illegal immigrants, some mayors have taken matters into their own hands. "Illegal immigrants represent one-third of Italy's prison population. In the north, it is over two-thirds," said Verona mayor Flavio Tosi, from the Northern League. In Verona, where foreigners make up 12 percent of the population, immigrants seeking publicly funded housing must meet certain income and health conditions, though Tosi said this was justified by European Union housing directives. The mayor of the town of Citadella, in the Veneto region, issued rules stating that foreigners can apply for residency only if they have adequate incomes and housing provisions and are not deemed "socially dangerous". This was branded discrimination by the national government, but has been adopted by 40 other Veneto town halls.

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12 April, 2008

300,000 Mexican babies born in US hospitals!

Over the last couple of years, we've seen some improvements on the illegal immigration front. Enforcement works! It's getting a lot more difficult to cross the border or find work. You won't believe this:

"It was 5 a.m. and CBS News national correspondent Byron Pitts is with a woman who is nine months pregnant. She's rushed to a south Texas hospital to undergo a C-section - a $4,700 medical procedure that won't cost her a dime. She qualifies for emergency Medicaid. She gave birth to a healthy, 8 1/2 pound baby boy - born in America. His Mexican mother gave him an American name: Eliot.

Eliot is one of an estimated 300,000 children of illegal immigrants born in the United States every year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. They're given instant citizenship because they are born on U.S. soil, which makes it easier for their parents to become U.S. citizens."

I'm sorry. It has to stop. We can't have 300,000 women crossing the border every year to have their babies over here. This is wrong for two reasons:

1) They don't have health insurance so the taxpayers have to pick up the tab. It's one thing to provide free health care for poor Americans. It's quite another thing to provide it for illegal aliens.

2) This is making a mockery of the 14th amendment to the US Constitution.

We must stop this by deporting these women who are coming over to have a baby. I'm OK with emergency treatment. I'm totally against people walking over and having their babies on our dime. Do you understand now why the public is so angry with illegal immigration?

Source



The inconvenient truth about immigration in Britain

A black British citizen says below that the tensions predicted by Enoch Powell have come to pass but that grumbling is about all that the British will do about it. He is probably right about that. He very much understates the Muslim problem, however and completely ignores the huge problem of black crime

On the afternoon of April 20, 1968, when Conservative MP Enoch Powell was making the most provocative and notorious speech in the history of race relations in Britain, I was a nine-month-old baby living in Mogadishu, Somalia. Speaking at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham, Powell predicted that the cost of the burgeoning immigration to Britain would be rivers of blood - communities torn apart by the tensions of conflicting cultures learning to live together. His words have reverberated ever since. Now, more than ever, Britain is experiencing unfettered immigration, the like of which Powell could never have imagined. Each year, around 190,000 immigrants are arriving in this country.

Last week, a report by the House of Lords economic affairs committee concluded that high net immigration has had little effect on income per head in the resident population - in fact, benefitting the population by just 58p a week. The report also said that ministers should limit the number of workers entering from outside the EU.

My family moved to Britain in 1973, four years after President Shermarke was assassinated in a military coup. In my family's case, the streets of Britain were paved with gold. We came from a former British colony and my parents wanted us to have a British education and upbringing. We were not political refugees: this was 18 years before the country's civil war. Britain became my home. I was educated at Cheltenham College and New College, Oxford - both privileged institutions - which gave me a sense of confidence that I could integrate and feel British. I was very fortunate.

But my parents also stressed my Somali heritage and identity. We spoke Somali at home, ate Somali food and went there in the holidays. This gave me a pride in my roots and a confidence to get on with people from all backgrounds.

It was people like me whom the London dockers were objecting to in the Seventies when they marched from the East End to the Palace of Westminster carrying placards saying 'Back Britain, not Black Britain'. It was my family that the factory workers and Smithfield meat porters were striking against when they supported Powell.

So now, 40 years after his incendiary speech, I have travelled around Britain for a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary - Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth - to find out the real legacy of his words, and the state of race relations today. What I discovered was a complex, sometimes confused, but nonetheless compelling glimpse of a society under the most extraordinary strain it has ever faced outside wartime. And my investigation led me to the most troubling question of all: Was Enoch Powell right?

In his speech, Powell warned that Britain's native population would become 'strangers in their own country', and 'the black man will have the whip hand over the white man'. He said: 'They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated.' Warning that the nation was 'busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre', he added: 'As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'

A survey by YouGov for Dispatches now suggests that he was right. Eighty-three per cent of Britons polled said they feel that there is an immigration crisis, and 84 per cent believe that the Government should stop or reduce immigration altogether. Sixty-six per cent feel their jobs are being undercut by migrant workers, and 69 per cent feel they are losing out because new immigrants are given special treatment.

Certainly, since I returned to Britain, after working abroad as a foreign correspondent, I have noticed that immigration is at the forefront of people's minds and is being discussed across the country. Many people fear that the uncontrolled number of immigrants has put an intolerable strain on housing, health and education.

My children Loula, seven, Sami, five, and Zachary, two, are at school here, and my wife Nina and I are part of the local community. People talk about immigration at home, at the school gates, in the workplace. They worry about the bread-and-butter issues: whether there will be enough places for their kids in our schools, how they will get on in a school where English is the second language, whether they can get a job.

Yet things have moved on enormously over the 40 years since Powell's speech. Back then, immigration was about cultural issues; about prejudice against skin colour and creed. Now, the grievances are focused on economics and the change in the labour market, on the effect on the NHS and on education.

What I found most shocking was that even second and third generation immigrants are resentful of new immigrants. You would think that because immigration and race have become entwined as an issue, this would not be the case. If anything, though, these people's feelings of grievance towards the wave of Poles now arriving in Britain is intensified. I interviewed Harbhajan Dardi, a Punjabi Sikh who arrived in Britain in 1968 and now lives in Smethwick, Birmingham. Although he remembered the days when Asians and dogs were banned from his local pub, he still felt animosity towards the new wave of Eastern European immigrants coming into Britain. 'They don't actually contribute to the country, to the economy,' he told me. 'They are not here to settle. They are here to have the benefits.'

Even Jamaican immigrants, who were the prime target of Powell's speech - he provocatively described their children as ' piccaninnies' - felt aggrieved towards Polish immigrants. Going back to Brixton, where I first started work as a trainee journalist on the black newspaper The Voice, I met Ricky, a carpet cleaner, whose grandparents came over from Jamaica during the Fifties. He told me he felt his job was under threat because the Poles are undercutting his rates.....

However, I don't think we will see the same levels of violence in Britain now as in the riot-torn Eighties because there are a completely different set of social dynamics. English people are generally more tolerant, and institutions like the police are more enlightened. The idea of the BNP marching through New Cross in South-East London and policemen giving them the thumbsup is unthinkable today. Our willingness to confront the problems and talk about them openly will prevent them becoming a real battleground in the way that Enoch Powell predicted.

Powell argued that one of the problems with immigration was that the majority of immigrants did not want to integrate and had a vested interest in fostering racial and religious differences. You may not have communities which are as starkly segregated as in Powell's day, but what you do have - and which modern technology has made available - is segregation of the mind. People can belong to utterly separate communities, which reject the mainstream and don't want, or need, to integrate. Instead of multi-culturalism, we are getting tribalisation.

The Muslims are particularly susceptible to this tribalisation because of a minority of extremists in their midst. Their young could be sitting in a bedroom in Bradford, connected via the internet to a radical Islamic preacher. In Southall, there are third generation British Asians who have their own community, their own music, their own language. They don't see themselves as British Asian: they see themselves as Punjabi. We thought that the generation after my parents' one would be totally integrated - but things have gone full circle. That has got to be the result of a multi- culturalism which encourages loyalty to one's own culture over-and-above all loyalty to the host Britain's....

There is no point sitting around saying Enoch Powell was a small-minded racist bigot. If there are people who still evoke his name and ideas, we have to tackle the problem and ask why.

More here





11 April, 2008

The reality of U.S. immigration policy: No policy

To grasp American immigration policy, to the extent that it can be grasped, one need only remember that the United States forbids smoking while subsidizing tobacco growers. We say to impoverished Mexicans, "See this river? Don't cross it. If you do, we'll give you good jobs, a drivers license, citizenship for your kids born here and eventually for you, school for said kids, public assistance, governmental documents in Spanish for your convenience, and a much better future. There is no penalty for getting caught. Now, don't cross this river, hear?"

How smart is that? We're baiting them. It's like putting out a salt lick and then complaining when deer come. As parents, the immigrants would be irresponsible not to cross. The problem of immigration, note, is entirely self-inflicted. The US chose to let them in. It didn't have to. They came to work. If Americans hadn't hired them, they would have gone back.

We have immigration because we want immigration. Liberals favor immigration because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy and international and all, and from a genuine streak of decency. Conservative Republican businessman favor immigration, frequently sotto voce, because they want cheap labor that actually shows up and works. It's a story I've heard many times-from a landscaper, a construction firm, a junkyard owner, a group of plant nurserymen, and so on. "We need Mexicans." You could yell "Migra!" in a lot of restaurants in Washington, and the entire staff would disappear out the back door. Do we expect businessmen to vote themselves out of business? That's why we don't take the obvious steps to control immigration (a thousand-dollar-a-day fine for hiring illegals, half to go anonymously to whoever informed on the employer).

In Jalisco, Mexico, where I live, crossing illegally is regarded as casually as pirating music or smoking a joint, and the coyotes who smuggle people across as a public utility, like light rail. The smuggling is frequently done by bribing the American border guards, who are notoriously corrupt. Why corrupt? Money. In the book De Los Maras a Los Zetas, by a Mexican journalist, I find an account of a transborder tunnel he knew of that could put 150 illegals a day across the border. (I can't confirm this.) The price is about $2000 a person. That's $300,000 a day, tax-free. What does a border guard make? (And where can I find a shovel?) The author estimated that perhaps forty tunnels were active at any give time. Certainly some are. A woman I know says she came up in a restaurant and just walked out the door. Let's hear it for Homeland Security: All together now..

The amusing thing is the extent to which American policy is not to have a policy. The open floodgates to the south are changing-have changed, will continue to change-the nature of the country forever. You may think this a good thing or a bad thing. It is certainly an important thing-the most important for us in at least a century. Surely (one might think) it deserves careful thought, national debate, prudence, things like that.

But no. In the clownishness that we regard as presidential campaigning, none of the contenders has much to say on the matter. In a dance of evasion that has become customary, the candidates carefully ignore those matters of most import for the nation, since considering hard questions might be divisive. War, peace, race, immigration, affirmative action, the militarization of the economy, the desirability of empire-these play no part in the electoral discussion. We seem to regard large issues as we might the weather: interesting, but beyond control. It's linger, loiter, dawdle and fumble and see what happens.

And so, while various conservative groups (not including businessmen) rush out to guard the borders, nice liberal professors in the Northeast hurried learn Spanish to help local illegals settle in. Many people, alienated from the United States by policies and trends they find odious, no longer care. There is no national consensus. The country fractures into a congeries of warring agglomerations and the resulting paralysis manifests itself in drift.

The problem with muddling through is that one may not like what lies on the other side of the muddle. Some day we may look back on the question of immigration and see that it all worked out well in the end and wonder what the fuss was about. Or we may not. No one will be able to charge us with having thought things through.

There is much billingsgate about whether to grant amnesty. The question strikes me as cosmetic. We are not going to round up millions of people and physically throw them across the border. Whether we should doesn't matter. It's fantasy. Too many people want them here, or don't care that they are here, or don't want to uproot families who have established new lives here. Ethnic cleansing is ugly. Further, the legal Latino population votes. It's just starting to vote. A bumper crop of Mexican-American kids, possessed of citizenship, are growing headlong toward voting age. These are not throwable-out, even in principle.

People complain that Mexico doesn't seal the borders. Huh? Mexico is a country, not a prison. It has no obligation to enforce American laws that America declines to enforce. Then there was the uproar when some fast-food restaurant in the US began accepting pesos. Why? Mexican border towns accept dollars. Next came outrage against Mexico because its consulates were issuing ID cards to illegals, which they then used to get drivers licenses. Why outrage? A country has every right to issue ID to its citizens. America doesn't have to accept them. If it does, whose problem is that?

If you want to see a reasonable immigration policy, look to Mexico. You automatically get a ninety-day tourist visa when you land. No border Nazis. To get residency papers, you need two things (apart from photographs, passport, etc.) First, a valid tourist visa to show that you entered the country legally. Mexico doesn't do illegal aliens. Second, a demonstrable income of $1000 a month. You are welcome to live in Mexico, but you are going to pay your own way. Sounds reasonable to me.

You want a Mexican passport? Mexico allows dual citizenship. You (usually) have to be a resident for five years before applying. You also have to speak Spanish. It's the national language. What sense does it make to have citizens who can't talk to anybody? It looks to me as though America thoughtlessly adopted an unwise policy, continued it until reversal became approximately impossible, and now doesn't like the results. It must be Mexico's fault.

Source



Britain: London Mayoral candidates call for illegal immigration amnesty

Today, all four major candidates in London's mayoral election join religious and business leaders in proposing a radical solution for illegal immigrants. A formidable coalition of businessmen, politicians, religious leaders and community workers will pledge their support tonight for an amnesty for illegal immigrants who have been resident in the UK for several years and can pass strict tests to prove their contribution to British society.

All four of London's main mayoral candidates - including, against the official policy of his party, the Tory candidate Boris Johnson - will back the campaign to offer undocumented workers the chance to be integrated into mainstream society and obtain papers allowing them to work and pay taxes legally. In an unprecedented move that will exert even more pressure on the Government to heed calls for an amnesty, they will be joined by an array of influential figures from outside the political world, including Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain and Stephen O'Brien, one of the City's leading businessmen.

"Enormous untapped potential and appalling waste is taking place right in front us," Mr O'Brien, chairman of the lobby group London First and former chief executive of Business in the Community, said yesterday. "Business leaders recognise that the case for an amnesty is both principled and pragmatic. The economic and moral case for liberating this army of workers from the underground economy is irrefutable."

The Government's tough new immigration controls have just suffered an embarrassing setback when the High Court ruled them illegal and unfair. Home Office changes to the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme (HSMP), which could lead to thousands of deportations, amounted to "conspicuous unfairness and an abuse of power", judges concluded.

Pressure to make the offer of a one-off amnesty has intensified in the wake of a campaign by London Citizens, the capital's largest community organisation. At a public assembly in Westminster tonight, more than 2,000 representatives of the city's community groups will demand the next mayor back their campaign. All four candidates, the Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone, the Liberal Democrats' Brian Paddick, the Green Party's Sian Berry and Mr Johnson, will agree.

Bishop Pat Lynch, a senior representative of Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, said the Catholic Church backed the changes to reward immigrants who have proved their worth to British society. "We support an agreed pathway into citizenship for irregular migrants," he said. "Families like them have contributed in a number of ways to society through work, commitment to family and schools. They are settled and trying to integrate into British life." The Muslim leader Dr Bari added: "We have to find a way of helping these people become legal citizens. We are happy to accept their labour, but not grant them rights. The present situation is not just or right and we need to come to their aid."

Estimates of the number of illegal workers range from 500,000 to 700,000, half of which may be failed asylum-seekers. An estimated two-thirds of illegal migrants work in London and the South-east, in cleaning, catering, hospitality and construction. Because they do not have legal rights, their pay and conditions are subject to abrupt changes.

The Government has steadfastly refused to agree to a blanket amnesty, claiming it would lead to a vast increase in the number of immigrants arriving. Liam Byrne, the Immigration minister, reaffirmed the Government's commitment to clampdown on businesses employing workers without full legal rights. But critics say granting deserving candidates an amnesty would be ethically and financially sound. A report by the Institute for Public Policy Research concludes that allowing illegal immigrants to work legally and pay taxes could yield a windfall of between 1 billion pounds and 3.3bn.

Last month Mr Livingstone called for a "fresh start", with a one-off amnesty for migrants without "regular status", in spite of his party's stance. "Migrants contribute hugely to the economic, civic and cultural life of London and the UK," he said. "To have a substantial number of them living here without regular status because of deep-rooted failings in the immigration system, some dating back over a decade, is deeply damaging to London as well as to them."

London Citizens' proposals demand undocumented workers meet strict criteria before obtaining full legal privileges. These include proof of their residence in the UK for at least four years, no significant criminal record, and a willingness to learn English. If individuals met these criteria, they would be placed on a two-year path to citizenship, after which they would have to have a favourable reference from an employer or a community leader. The Liberal Democrats are the only party committed to the idea of an "earned path to citizenship". The Tory leader, David Cameron, distanced himself from an amnesty, saying: "Boris is his own man. He is standing on his own platform and he dictates his own policies."

In the High Court, Sir George Newman said there was no reason why migrants who had come to Britain in 2002 under the HSMP should be deported for failing to accrue the requisite number of points. But Mr Byrne said he would appeal against the ruling.

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10 April, 2008

Thousands of migrants win right to stay in Britain

I agree with the judge here. The British Labour party is just thrashing uselessly about and mostly hitting the wrong people in the process

Thousands of highly skilled migrants who were faced with deportation can now stay in Britain, a court ruled yesterday. The ruling is a blow to the Government and its attempt to demonstrate to the public that it is taking a tough stance to meet concern over the extent of immigration. Sir George Newman, a High Court judge, branded the new rules unfair and migrant groups claim that they could mean up to 44,000 people having to leave the country. The numbers are disputed by the Home Office, which says that only 1,370 applicants are affected.

Under the old rules migrants had to say they intended to make their main home in Britain and were allowed to stay for a year initially. They could then apply for a two-year extension and a further three years before seeking permanent settlement. The system was based on qualifications, experience and earning ability, but in November 2006 the Government suspended the scheme for a month after it was found that some migrants had entered on forged papers, others were working in unskilled jobs and some were not working at all. A new criterion was introduced where migrants would have to score points based on their education, salary and age.

The changes were attacked by the HSMP Forum, which represents those on the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme. It said that the rules were unlawful and a breach of migrants’ legitimate expectations. The High Court granted the forum a judicial review of the Government’s decision and ruled that the original system should be honoured for people already in Britain. Sir George said that the changes were unfair to those already admitted to Britain under the programme and that there was “no good reason why those already on the scheme shall not enjoy the benefits of it as orginally offered to them”. He added: “Good administration and straightforward dealing with the public require it. Not to restrain the impact of the changes would, in my judgment, give rise to conspicuous unfairness and an abuse of power.”

The court had been told by John Fordham, QC, that the goalposts had been moved for those previously admitted under the scheme. He said it was “a grossly unfair, massive change to the nature of the programme” visited on highly skilled individuals who had left their homes, relatives, friends and jobs and committed themselves to living in Britain.

The ruling comes after a call last year from the Joint Human Rights Committee of MPs and peers for the changes to be scrapped, arguing that it was a breach of the right to respect for home and family life contained in Article 8 of European Convention of Human Rights. Amit Kapadia, executive director of the HSMP Forum, said: “People left their careers, uprooted their families to come to the UK and settle down. After some time you come up with new rules and say, ‘Forget all those promises, now you have to go back to your country’.”

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, was ordered to pay the legal costs of the forum and was refused permission to appeal. The Home Office insisted that the number involved was much lower than the 44,000 figure put forward by the forum. A spokeswoman said that about 16,000 people who arrived under the old rules needed their leave considered under the new rules. She said that 7,000 had had their cases considered and that only 650 had failed. Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said: “Did we give migrants a big enough warning that the rules could get tougher while they were here? We said yes, others said no. That’s why it was right for a judge to take a look at this case.”

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: “The ruling makes it clear that the Government’s decision to change the rules for highly skilled immigrants already working in this country was not only deeply unfair but also completely illegal. The Government must now recognise that you cannot invite people to come here to build lives and careers under one scheme and then simply move the goalposts.”

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “It is unfair that skilled workers who have made a commitment to this country should have the rules of the game changed after they have been welcomed.”

Source



Canadian government wins a round

The Harper government has easily survived yet another confidence vote - this time linked to its controversial immigration reform legislation. The House of Commons voted 201-68 today against an NDP motion which called for rejection of the government's budget implementation bill. The New Democrats want the budget bill stopped because it includes the immigration legislation. Conservative and Liberal MPs opposed the motion, while NDP and Bloc Quebecois members supported it.

Liberals have denounced the proposed immigration changes as regressive and anti-immigrant, but they're not prepared to bring down the government over them - at least not yet. They note that there will be several more confidence votes on the budget bill and they could bring down the minority Conservative government at a later date. The immigration measures give the government discretion to pick and choose which applicants to fast track or block.

Source





9 April, 2008

Anti-Illegal Immigration Group Calls for 'Absolut' Vodka Boycott



While the ad is undoubtedly offensive to Americans it is also true that denigrating the USA seems to be a reflex of tiny minds worldwide. So I am inclined to think that hitting back at some of the denigrators is rather overdue

An anti-illegal immigration group issued a call to arms Tuesday against a prominent Swedish vodka brand.

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC President William Gheen is in a tizzy over an Absolut vodka advertisement that ran recently in Mexico. While it is no longer running, he says it shows the alcohol manufacturer is peddling products to a group of people actively seeking to claim U.S. territory in the name of Mexico. The ad showed an 1830s map of Mexico and the United States where most of the modern western United States was still part of Mexico. The ad headline was "In an Absolut World." Absolut officials say they had no intent to make any immigration-related message with the ad, and have since issued an apology.

Gheen's group is calling for a boycott of the product until Absolut fires the ad agency. "On the one hand, we are boycotting Absolut. On the other hand, we want to thank them for getting caught" placing such an outrageous ad, Gheen said. "We have a growing uprising here in America," Gheen said, warning that Mexicans and other illegal immigrants are trying to take over the southern U.S. — an area Gheen said is not too different from the map used in the Absolut ad.

Absolut Spirits Co. spokesman Jeffrey Moran said the company does not plan to fire any advertising agencies or employees in the matter. "Where we stand now is we are firm in our apology. The situation is not one that is positive for us as a company who has been so active in our marking over the years. And we issued a sincere apology," Moran said, speaking to FOXNews.com by phone from France. He added: "We are truly sorry. ... There was no ulterior motive behind that ad."

Moran said the global ad campaign has generally played on comedic juxtaposition between something real and something obviously not possible. One ad that ran in New York City showed roller-coaster handle bars inside a taxi cab; another featured a pregnant man. An ad that ran in France showed a city street clogged with bicyclists, except for a single car lane. "Most of these have a little 'a-ha' moment," Moran said. But Absolut found itself trying to explain the joke to American audiences with the ad that ran in Mexico.

On the company's Web site, commentary on the ad has so far reached 230 pages and counting. "This is the first time we've experienced this reaction at all. So I don't really even have a gauge" to compare it with, Moran said. In the apology issued Sunday, Absolut said: "We acknowledge the reactions and debate and want to apologize for the concerns this ad caused. We are truly sorry and understand that the ad has offended several persons. This was not our intention. "In no way was the ad meant to offend or disparage, or advocate an altering of borders, lend support to any anti-American sentiment or to reflect immigration issues." Moran said that the company also has made internal changes to make sure ads developed in one market don't offend consumers in another market.

Vin & Sprit, Absolut's Sweden-based parent company, will be acquired by French spirit maker Pernod Ricard SA under a deal reached last week, according to The Associated Press. Moran said he was not aware that any problems over the ad had affected the sale to Pernod Ricard.

Gheen said about 100 organizations are part of his boycott organization, the National Illegal Immigration Boycott Coalition, and some of those groups boast thousands of members. While success "is hard to measure," Gheen cites a recent boycott of Bank of America over business practices targeting illegal immigrants. He said somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 people have signed onto a petition in the ongoing boycott, which he claims denied the bank new customer accounts and other bank business. "Is this enough to ruin their stock and bring the bank down? No," Gheen said, "but it is enough to cost them."

Source



Australia rejects up to 400 immigrants a day

HUNDREDS of people are being refused entry to Australia each day because they are deemed not good enough. But the Rudd Government yesterday hinted it had no plans to relax its immigration policy as new data revealed almost 650,000 visa applications had been rejected by the Immigration Department since 2004. The statistics, which equate to about 400 rejections a day, were drawn from a question on notice which took more than a year to table in Federal Parliament. Immigration Minister Chris Evans said 160,956 applicants were denied entry in 2004, 177,684 were knocked back in 2005, 156,479 were refused in 2006 and 153,827 were rejected last year. His response showed it was departmental staff and not the then-minister rejecting hopeful migrants and visitors.

Despite Senator Evans earlier this year pledging to culturally reform his department, he dismissed the need for a review into why hundreds of thousands of people were being denied entry here. "The Rudd Government is committed to strong border security measures and the orderly processing of migration to our country," Senator Evans said. "It is crucial that we maintain the integrity of our immigration system and ensure that people meet the criteria for the visas they apply for."

Senator Natasha Stott Despoja last year asked former immigration minister Kevin Andrews how many visas his department had knocked back after US rapper Snoop Dog was denied entry based on bad character grounds.

A department spokesman said yesterday Australia had a non-discriminatory immigration policy and visa applicants had to meet a range of criteria. He said a person could be knocked back for having poor health, not enough money, bad character grounds or on suspicious they would outstay their visa or work illegally. Answering the question on notice, Senator Evans said it would be too time-consuming to reveal the number of visa applications which had been refused because of a criminal conviction.

But he said the people who failed character tests were associated with people or groups suspected of being involved in criminal conduct; were not of good character because of their past or if there was a significant risk they would "harass, molest, intimidate or stalk another person in Australia". The department can waive the character test under section 501 of the Migration Act if a person's conviction or past behaviour is not considered serious. About 4.3million people were granted temporary and permanent visas to Australia in 2006-2007.

Source





8 April, 2008

Cost of immigration enforcement bill could deter Blue Dog support

A Democratic-sponsored immigration enforcement bill supported by Republicans could add $40 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Monday, a figure that could scare off fiscally conservative Democrats being pressed to support it.

Republicans have initiated a discharge petition to move Rep. Heath Shuler’s (D-N.C.) bill, which is opposed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Their targets are mostly Blue Dog Democrats who hail from conservative districts more likely to support tough measures against immigration.

But Blue Dogs are also opposed to adding to the federal deficit, so the cost of the bill could make them think twice before getting on board. Democratic leaders believe the high cost will deter more Blue Dogs from signing on.

So far, 185 members have signed on as co-sponsors. The most recent Democrat was Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) on March 31. “You need more Democrats and Republicans to get to 218. This report doesn’t help you get there,” said a Democratic leadership aide.

But Republicans say the money is not the point. They point out that the Democrats they’re targeting have already signed on to the bill. “Democratic leaders are trying to avoid the fact that there’s a bipartisan consensus in support of a real border security bill without amnesty,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). “Somewhere in a $3 trillion budget we can find the money to secure our border.”

The Democratic aide stressed that the centrist Democrats who signed on to the bill originally did so before the CBO figures came out. “How do they expect to get these other ones on?” the aide said.

Shuler spokesman Andrew Whalen said the CBO report does not take into account the cost of illegal immigration borne by local governments. He said North Carolina’s costs for healthcare, education and incarceration related to illegal immigrants is around $1 billion annually. He also said it was alarming to see that the country is depending on tax revenues from illegal workers. Whalen said Shuler’s staff is hoping to meet with CBO officials later this week to go over questions and concerns they have with the report.

His bill includes provisions to authorize the hiring of 8,000 additional border security agents over five years, add new technology along the border and mandate that employers check out all workers’ Social Security numbers against government databases.

The CBO figures were contained in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.). The CBO found that the bill would decrease federal revenues by $17 billion because illegal workers would be forced underground, working off the books and not paying taxes. The new federal judges authorized by the bill would cost the Treasury $30 billion, the letter said. And the federal government would have to spend another $23 billion on the border guards, more detention cells and help for local governments on the border.

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US Immigration Services makes rapid strides

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) which looks after immigration issues in the United States announced recently that it would complete more than one million naturalization cases during fiscal year 2008 – far exceeding the number of cases it has completed in 2007

This important update comes following a thorough analysis of the work completed during the last six months. According to USCIS Director Emilio Gonzalez , "By the end of the year, I expect USCIS will have finished 36 percent more naturalization cases than last year without compromising national security or the integrity of the naturalization process." Mr. Gonzalez is credited with steering positive results and countering U.S. immigration backlog with additional staff, extended working hours, and staff increases.

Recently, USCIS has been working on internal efficiency reforms and management innovation including detailing employees to work in the most heavily affected offices, quadrupling the funding for overtime and using Asylum Office facilities and staff to conduct naturalization interviews. Recently, USCIS updated the anticipated time it will take to complete naturalization cases, projecting processing times around 13-15 months, a three month improvement from the 16-18 month projection six months ago.

According to Mr. Gonzales, "Our workforce will continue to do everything possible to assist immigrants on the path to legal residency or citizenship, facilitate the smooth transit of others who wish to work here temporarily, and safeguard the security of the United States through the integrity of our immigration system. Modernization efforts to build a fully-electronic immigration platform continue to move forward. More than 34 USCIS facilities will be renovated or replaced nationwide, and more than 3,000 new employees will join our ranks by the end of this year. Our professional training programs are varied and robust."

According to USCIS, in the summer of 2007, the agency received an unprecedented number of applications and petitions for immigration benefits. The months of June, July and August 2007 alone showed USCIS receiving nearly three million filings, compared to 1.8 million filings during the same period a year earlier. The sudden surge included 1.4 million naturalization applications last year, of which, 460,000 were in July alone. USCIS states, while historically filing increases have occurred in advance of fee increases, Presidential elections, immigration debates and new legislation, none of the past increases are close to the magnitude of the last summer´s surge.

There were some recent U.S. media comments hovering around processing time. However, the truth is, all applicants have been promptly receiving a formal receipt mailed immediately after USCIS inputs their case processing on-line. The agency in fact, notes, as of March 11, 2008, processing times for naturalization applications filed after June 1, 2007 have been lowered to 14 to 16 months from 16-18 months to process. In all cases, the USCIS has also tried to provide parallel case processing so that administrative redundancies are eliminated when one single applicant files several different forms in a singular application batch.

Among other positive developments, the USCIS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have also jointly committed themselves to work to eliminate the backlog of name checks pending with the FBI. According to related U.S. government web sources, both agencies have established a series of milestones prioritizing work based on the age of the pending name check. Earlier, the FBI had already eliminated all name check cases pending more than four years. According to USCIS´s Gonzalez, "This plan of action is the product of a strong partnership between USCIS and the FBI to eliminate the backlogs and to strengthen national security."

Here again by increasing staff, expanding logistical resources, and applying new business processes, the current goal is to complete 98 percent of all name checks within 30 days. USCIS and the FBI intend to resolve the remaining two percent, which represent the most difficult name checks and require additional time to complete, within 90 days or less. In another positive development, USCIS reports that it is going to accept H-1 Petitions sent to California or Vermont Centers and it that it will not reject an H-1B petition that is subject to the fiscal year 2009 cap solely on the grounds that it was received at the wrong service center (e.g., the petition may have been inadvertently mailed to the California Service Center instead of the Vermont Service Center or vice versa), the only exceptions being petitions earlier sent to the Texas or Nebraska Service Centers.

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7 April, 2008

Companies ARRANGING illegal immigration?

Zack Taylor was a border patrol agent and a supervisory border patrol agent for 26 years. Though he retired in 2003, he still lives in the same house in Arizona where he has only to look to the south to see the Mexican border. With states and communities, including Kansas, considering tougher immigration laws, Taylor said he thinks they should look to his state for ideas. Some of the things Arizona has done include penalizing employers who hire illegal immigrants, cutting illegal immigrants off from social services and tracking other ways illegal immigrants receive public benefits.

When asked about the effect Arizona's laws have had, Taylor responded that they have noticed many illegal immigrants leaving the state. "In 2007, Arizona had one of the highest increases in food stamps. I think we were 10 percent over the previous year. We expect that to drop dramatically in 2008," he said. Oklahoma passed similar laws, and the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (www.nafbpo.org), a group he is a part of, was involved with the legislation there.

Taylor also discussed some of the effects of illegal immigration on the country. "The source of some of the most violent gangs in the United States are foreign countries. One of the major crossing points is the Tucson sector," he said, adding that is the section he lives near. "We see the surge in violence, murder, rape, arson, before everyone else does." Though he said the state seems to have fewer immigration problems now, a major problem is still drug smuggling and the smuggling of illegal immigrants across the border.

Though he couldn't give names, he said that several large companies aid and abet the smuggling. Businesses will send people to Mexico to recruit workers. The people will be sent to a village where the locals specialize in a specific kind of work and also where the wages are low and people need jobs. "They'll go to a place that does meat packing in Mexico and say, `Ok, if you'll come work for us, we will pay the smuggler to bring you into the United States, any identification you need to live and reside in the United States, and we'll give you a job for X number of years.' Usually two years," Taylor said. The company then arranges for workers to be at a certain time and place to meet with a smuggler who will then gather them and take them across the border. "That happens a lot, especially in the food processing business," he added. "I don't want to name them, but I know who they are, and I have worked these smuggling cases."

One effect illegal immigrants have, he said, is they depress wages because they will work for less money. "I know that from talking to legal immigrants that are here and Mexican Americans that are now citizens, because an illegal will come in and take a job for $8 an hour that a legal resident had for $15," Taylor explained. "So, actually, the illegal is not hurting the skilled worker. He's hurting the semiskilled and unskilled laborer." If immigration laws were passed to keep companies from hiring illegal immigrants, Taylor said companies would then have to hire American workers. And despite what some may say, he went on to add that when there were raids in Iowa and Colorado, there were American citizens lined up outside the businesses waiting for the doors to be opened so they could be interviewed.

One of the worries Taylor currently has about immigration are two bills, HR 3287 and HR 2593. The first would designate part of the United States/Mexico border in Arizona as wilderness. The second would designate all of the United States border with both Canada and Mexico as wilderness. "A wilderness designation in the United States is very restrictive as to what you can do when you're on the wilderness area," he explained. "You cannot take any kind of mechanized equipment on there - not even a bicycle."

A couple of weeks ago, a hiker discovered an illegal immigrant who had been shot three times by bandits, called bajardoras. "Groups of three to six with automatic weapons go into these wilderness areas and they rob the illegal aliens that are going through, and if they give them any resistance, they just shoot them," Taylor said. "This is what a lot of people don't understand, that the victim is the person coming here." Since the man was found in an area designated as a wilderness, he had to be rescued by foot - a group walked to him with a stretcher and carried him back out. From the time he was found until he was taken to the hospital took 12 hours, Taylor said.

The bills are currently pending, he added, but if passed, they would hinder the duties of the border patrol, because it would keep the border patrolmen away from the border unless they were on foot or horseback. "The congressmen that are supporting it know that this is going to make this area more dangerous. It's going to encourage the smugglers to use it more, and they're trying to cloak it as wilderness to get it passed," he said. "These wildernesses should never be considered on or near the international borders." He also added that they don't really qualify as wilderness since the areas are not pristine.

But mainly, he said, the bills would keep border patrols from being able to do their job. Part of what they do is to enforce immigration laws. The purpose of those laws, he said, is to protect the American economy and American jobs and to protect the public safety and national security. "The way the immigration system works is if a person in a foreign country has a legitimate reason to come here, they can get a visa," Taylor explained. "It's only $100. The minimum charge for a smuggler is $3,000. So if the person has to come here illegally, it's because he cannot come here legally."

The only reasons an immigrant is kept from crossing legally, he added, are because of a criminal record, a contagious disease, or because it is likely that person might become a public charge and end up on public welfare. "The problem is, to actually immigrate here to work takes three years, and they don't want to wait the three years," Taylor added. However, he also explained that the immigration laws aren't strict in comparison to some countries. Mexico, for example, takes seven years.

Though he did not know the number of illegal immigrants that cross the border, he said when they did keep track of the numbers, some days it would exceed 30,000 people a day, just in the section where he lives. "I've caught as many as 3,000 in an eight-hour shift," Taylor added. "And this 12 million number they're throwing around? Nah. There's probably that many in the four border states. I would say it's probably closer to 10 percent of the total population."

Already, he said, border patrols have caught terrorists coming across the border where he is because they know there is such a high number of people crossing and that it is difficult to separate them out from the others. "What people have to understand and accept is that a significant percentage of the illegal aliens that are crossing the border illegally are criminals, and they come here to engage in gang related criminal activity," Taylor said. "The people that are framing the argument about what's going on on the border are doing it to divert the American people's attention away from what's really going on. They know what I'm telling you, and they're trying to keep it from getting out."

Source



Immigration clampdown may close 16,000 British eateries

The article below is from a red-top so one does not exactly expect econometrics from it but there are many voices saying the same. They are all prophecies, however. So how about some reality instead? The new British regulations are modelled on Australian ones and there have long been and still are Indian and Chinese restaurants all over the place in Australia. So Brits can rest easy: Their curry and their fried rice are not at risk

Up to 16,000 Chinese and Indian restaurants could be forced to close because of a crackdown on immigration. Bosses fear they will be unable to find chefs because foreigners wishing to settle here will soon have to prove they can speak English. And they claim immigration officers already disrupt business by raiding diners and takeaways at peak times. Maria Fernandes, who chairs the Ethnic Minority Citizens Forum, warned: "Restaurants in high streets will simply disappear. They rely on chefs coming from abroad. "The new rules will spell the end of the UK as the recognised capital for high quality, multicultural cuisine."

From October a new points system for the granting of work permits will include the need to speak English. But Ms Fernandes thinks the level of ability demanded is too high. She said: "Of course it is important that people are able to communicate. "We are not arguing they should not speak English. But a chef does not need to speak English to university level. "If you only want people like that, you won't get real chefs but people who have studied the hospitality industry. They will be highly qualified but may not have the right skills to cook excellent meals."

Britain has about 32,000 Indian restaurants and takeaways and 30,000 Chinese. Small takeaways run by families for generations will survive. But restaurants in high-rent areas are under most threat because they need to find skilled kitchen staff.

The owners are also furious about the chaos caused when they are raided in searches for illegal immigrants. Labour MP Derek Wyatt said: "The immigration service are now visiting between 7pm and 8pm on Fridays and Saturdays, the busiest period of the week. "They are closing restaurants, clearing out customers and leaving without paying anything. This is not acceptable."

Cabinet minister Harriet Harman has agreed to meet a delegation of restaurant owners. But she added: "The enforcement of immigration rules has to be an operational matter for the Border and Immigration Agency."

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6 April, 2008

Feds defend Arpaio on crime sweeps

Immigration officials say sheriff is following law

Top federal immigration officials on Friday defended Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's recent crime sweeps, rejecting critics' arguments that the sheriff is violating an agreement that allows deputies to enforce immigration laws. The officials made their remarks as 38 new officers at five Arizona law-enforcement agencies were sworn in to enforce federal immigration laws. The federally trained officers are members of the Phoenix Police Department, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, and the Pima, Pinal and Yavapai county sheriff's offices. Now, with more than 200 trained officers and jail officials, Arizona has the most of any state in nation.

Asked about the intensifying controversy over sweeps in Phoenix and Guadalupe, Matthew Allen, newly appointed special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona, rebuffed accusations that Arpaio is conducting immigration raids masked as crime sweeps. Jim Pendergraph, who coordinates an ICE program that trains local police in immigration enforcement, agreed. They said Arpaio is enforcing state laws and, in the process, arresting illegal immigrants, which is permitted under an agreement between ICE and the Sheriff's Office. "He has stayed within the bounds of the agreement," Allen said. Pendergraph said he even drove to Guadalupe on Thursday to see Arpaio's operation for himself and "I saw nothing that gave me heartburn."

The crime sweeps, held recently in largely immigrant and Hispanic neighborhoods in Guadalupe and Phoenix, have sparked large-scale protests accusing Arpaio of conducting immigration raids based on racial-profiling. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and Guadalupe Mayor Rebecca Jimenez have blasted the crime sweeps. Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris also asked ICE officials to look into whether Arpaio's crime sweeps were appropriate under the agreement.

Arpaio has maintained that he is not targeting suspects based on race and that the sweeps were in response to complaints of crime from business people and community leaders. On Friday, he continued with a second day of sweeps in Guadalupe, despite the objections of the mayor and hundreds of protesters. He said he was considering doing more sweeps in Mesa after eight state legislators signed a letter asking him to focus his crime-suppression activities on the southeast Valley. "We are going to arrest any illegal immigrants we come across," Arpaio said.

Arpaio's deputies are allowed to double as immigration agents under a federal program known as 287 (g). The program also allows jail personnel to identify foreign-born criminals in jails and prisons and process them for deportation. Most of the seven Arizona agencies participating in the program have 10 or fewer officers and jail officials trained in immigration enforcement. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has 160. Congressional auditors are conducting a probe of the program to see how well it is working in Arizona and other parts of the country. Their report is expected in the fall.

The additional Arizona officers sworn in Friday raised questions about whether more immigration sweeps will take place in other parts of the state. Alessandra Soler Meetze, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said she fears more local police will question drivers about their immigration status during traffic stops. That could lead to civil-rights violations and racial-profiling involving immigrants and U.S. citizens, she said. But law-enforcement officials insisted Friday that they do not plan to use ICE-trained officers to do crime sweeps similar to Arpaio's. Instead, the officers will be used for targeted operations aimed at arresting and deporting foreign-born criminals tied to immigrant and drug-smuggling and other criminal rings, they said.

One sergeant and four detectives from the Phoenix violent-crimes bureau completed the four-week ICE training, the first in the department to do so. The department in recent months has taken heat from both sides of the immigration debate. Border-control advocates want the agency to get more involved in arresting illegal immigrants, and immigrant advocates say immigration enforcement should be left to the federal government. Joe Klima, commander of the Phoenix violent-crimes bureau, said the five officers will go after violent criminals associated with human-smuggling organizations. "We will not use this for routine immigration enforcement," Klima said.

Pinal County Sheriff Chris Vasquez did not rule out the possibility that his five newly trained deputies will be used to arrest illegal immigrants following traffic stops, but that will not be the main focus. The deputies will instead focus on combating smuggling groups that transport illegal immigrants through Pinal County. The county is a major corridor for transporting illegal immigrants and drugs from the border into the United States, Vasquez said. "We will go after the biggest threat, and right now, the biggest threat is not undocumented immigrants who are coming here to work as landscapers or restaurant workers," Vasquez said.

Source



At least Britain is honest about immigration now

Last week a Lords committee said immigration had brought little economic benefit to Britons. A black "Times" correspondent tours Britain and finds similar sentiment on the ground. And expression of that sentiment can no longer be suppressed

Enoch Powell's explosive "rivers of blood" speech in 1968 effectively closed down public debate about immigration for several decades. His inflammatory language made the topic radioactive, while at a stroke destroying his political career. Forty years on, immigration is being discussed up and down the country and occupies centre-stage in parliament. It's a topic that presses emotional buttons in everyone - white, black or Asian - as I found during a journey across Britain to discover whether Powell's apocalyptic visions have any basis in today's reality.

It has been a fascinating experience for me - a Briton born in Somalia barely a year before Powell's speech - to listen to these concerns. As an overseas reporter I have been more used to hearing villagers' grievances against another tribe of a different ethnicity. Yet in a sense these were familiar scenarios - whether I was talking to a white family who felt under siege in picture-postcard Lichfield or a second-generation black worker in Brixton who was complaining about Polish workers undercutting his business.

It was striking how ill-informed we are about immigration. There are so many half-truths bandied around that none of us feels we have been given the full picture. What became clear to me is that the issue is less about colour and cultural differences - in the way Powell portrayed - and more about the sense that people's jobs and livelihoods are being threatened.

My point of departure was the room in the Midland hotel in Birmingham where Powell made his fateful speech. First I talked to people who had been there at the time. A friend of Powell, a policeman from Wolverhampton, told me that he thought the speech was one of Powell's worst: the MP, he said, had looked self-conscious and worried as he delivered it. Even today it still has the power to shock with its bleak vision and Powell's warning - in messianic, racist tones - that Britain was about to change for ever. However, stripped of its poisonous rhetoric, it is impossible to deny that some of his predictions have been borne out by events. In effect, Powell was articulating a critique of multiculturalism - before multiculturalism became official policy. At the time he called it communalism, a "canker" that would isolate communities and which the majority, native British population would struggle to understand.

Most people now believe that multiculturalism - the celebration of ethnic diversity without the need to integrate - is imploding. Powell's spectre of "the River Tiber foaming with much blood" was in fact a reference to the racial ferment in America, which many people at the time - including Richard Nixon - thought might be on the verge of civil war. In Britain people pointed to the race riots of 1981 as a fulfilment of Powell's prophecy.

In some ways we are still stuck with the parameters of his speech, with its emphasis on people coming to live here permanently. By combining the issues of race and cultural identity, it continues to divide people and evoke anger. However, I think we have moved far beyond the kind of world that Powell predicted. To me the real revelation is the way in which second and third-generation immigrants feel embedded in Britain - and now talk about east Europeans with the same sense of fear, foreboding and anger that white people expressed about Asians 30 or 40 years ago. According to a YouGov survey commissioned by Channel 4, 58% of settled British migrants feel there is an immigration "crisis". Among the total population this view is echoed by 83% - with 84% in favour of halting immigration altogether. The poll also found that 66% feel that their jobs are being undercut by migrant workers and 69% believe the latter are given special treatment.

One of the most striking interviews I conducted was with Ricky Scott, a carpet cleaner from south London whose grandparents had emigrated to Britain from Jamaica in the 1950s. Concerned that east Europeans were undercutting his charges with rates of 30 pounds a day, he also complained about the number of newcomers on the streets who were speaking foreign languages. In an uncanny echo of Powell - who spoke of the majority British becoming "strangers in their own country" - the carpet cleaner said: "I can't be understood in my own country."

It is not just second and third-generation immigrants who are directing their ire at east Europeans. In Lichfield a white working-class family told me that it was only a matter of time before "rivers of blood" became a reality. Dave James, who had experienced difficulty in finding work, recalled going to a job-seeking agency and finding himself at the end of a queue of east Europeans who were receiving priority treatment. He walked out. "It makes me feel like a second-class citizen," he said. I met many others from the so-called white working class who feel they can no longer compete for the jobs that are now taken by Polish electricians and other skilled workers. They feel utterly marginalised and ignored by everybody - which makes their stories compelling and sad.

Because Poles are white and Christian, attracting little racist sentiment, they are to some extent seen as fair game. They represent the lightning rod of immigration: the focus for people's fears about their livelihoods being threatened by the sheer numbers arriving from abroad.

This is very like the scenario that Powell described - people unable to find jobs, changed neighbourhoods and different languages spoken at schools. But immigration these days is a matter of constant churning change. I interviewed many Polish people who said they would definitely be going back home. They do not see themselves as immigrants but as part of the global workforce. Our economy - Europe's most open, wealthy and diverse - beckons them to a place where they can use their skills and then move on.

This is perhaps the crucial distinction from Powell's frame of reference. The new transient immigration is all about the needs of our economy. Meanwhile, a huge number of indigenous British people have been failed by the education system and are not prepared for such a dynamic globalised workplace.

Last week a House of Lords committee declared that immigration had brought "little or no" economic benefit to the majority population. But after speaking to a range of employers - from City bankers to people who employ immigrants on building sites - I am convinced that they are wrong. Our economy has outshone that of every other European country: immigration certainly has not held it back. In rejecting the committee's conclusion, Gordon Brown ruled out an annual limit on immigration, favouring a new points-based system that will allow only highly skilled workers into the UK. Immigration, it seems, is now part of our economic policy and therefore extremely difficult to control.

This will be of no comfort to indigenous Britons such as Richard, a middle-class writer who told me that his area of Wibsey is the last bastion of British civilisation in Bradford. Feeling outnumbered by Pakistanis in areas of the town where he says "whitey is not welcome", he dreams of going down to Whitehall and seeing it "lined with politicians and civil servants hanging from the lampposts" - a fitting punishment, he feels, for having destabilised this country.

Pakistanis, of course, have worries of their own. Indeed, I spoke to many Asians in the Midlands who felt they were suffering from discrimination. One said: "I'm British and if I want to bring my wife and uncle from Pakistan, why do I have a harder time than a Polish guy who can just walk in?"

For me the most positive aspect of the immigration issue is that it is no longer a no-go area. Today it is being discussed openly by people of all colours, from many points of view. And it is surely better to debate the pros and cons of immigration than to close the argument down - as Enoch Powell did all those years ago.

Source





5 April, 2008

An Immigration Question that Creates Strange Bedfellows

The federal government's civil rights commission is attempting to produce a definitive answer to one of the touchiest questions in the immigration debate: whether new immigrants, especially illegal ones, hurt African-Americans in the workplace.

The hearing Friday is likely to be a lively discussion among the country's top experts on the issue, as the commission seeks to come to a final conclusion in a debate that has churned out what seem like unexpected and incongruent opinions from both sides of the political divide.

Illegal immigration foes will try to convince the commission that the federal government should protect black workers from competition. On the other side of the debate, left-leaning immigration and labor experts will likely downplay the difficulties facing African-Americans as they argue that competition from illegal immigrants is largely insignificant. "The purpose is to help inform the debate, to provide recommendations to the White House," one of the commissioners, Peter Kirsanow, said.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which has issued a series of policy briefs embracing views that could be characterized as conservative, including critiques of affirmative action, might find itself in an odd spot as it prepares to issue a report on the issue. Protecting citizens from having to compete for jobs is not typically a conservative stance.

Source



Britain CANNOT cut (legal) immigration very much

Economists are generally pro-immigation because they are aware that immigrants improve labour market flexibility and labour market inflexibility is a major barrier to improved national productivity. So the article below from "The Economist" rightly points out that there are major limits on what the British government can do. One can deceive by omission, however and what the article completely glides over is the weak-kneed attitude of the British government towards illegal immigration. They are nearly as bad as the U.S. government over it. Energetic pursuit and deportation of illegals would greatly reduce the social problems of immigration -- as illegals tend to be undesirable immigrants in many ways.

Another category unmentioned is family reunions, which are in fact a large part of current immigration. Restricting such reunions to dependant children and spouses from non-arranged marriages would be an obvious step.

SIX billion pounds is, as Britain's immigration minister Liam Byrne put it, "a big number". This figure is the amount that the government reckons was added to the economy by immigrants in 2006, and a number that it has repeatedly used to justify the record numbers of migrants that Britain has absorbed in recent years.

But there is another big number: 190,000. That is the amount of net immigration that Britain can expect to receive each year unless the government tightens things up, according to a report published on April 1st by the House of Lords economic-affairs committee. Their lordships put these two big numbers together and calculated that they pretty much cancelled each other out. Gross domestic product (GDP) may have grown handsomely thanks to migrants, they said, but GDP per head-each person's share-has hardly budged. Using bald GDP growth to justify immigration was "preposterous and irrelevant", the committee's chairman said.

Strong words, and manna for migration sceptics ("Immigration: the great lies", trumpeted one newspaper, thrilled). The report was actually more balanced than that. It found evidence that immigration had pushed down the wages of the lowest-paid by a fraction but higher-paid people had experienced a small fillip. As far as competition for jobs was concerned, it pointed out that the number of vacancies is about the same now as it was seven years ago, since migrants create jobs as well as taking them. Immigration is pushing up house prices, it observed, which may be good news for some of those who are most vocal about the downside of open borders. And it heard evidence that migrants may push down the "natural" rate of unemployment, since they are more flexible than sluggish Britons about which jobs they take. ("This effect may, however, decrease...as migrants become more like the native population," noted Stephen Nickell, an economist who gave evidence to the committee.)

This was not, all in all, a bad-news report. But the problem for the government is that it has relentlessly made the case that the economic benefits of migration are vast, in order to buy off those who don't like its social effects. The suggestion that the pay-off is merely neutral is therefore quite a blow. The government's own calculations value the benefits of immigration to Britons at about 30 pounds ($59.4) per person per year. That is not much of a bribe for people who reflexively dislike it-and there may be more of them about. Immigration has raced up voters' worry lists over the past two years and now vies with crime for the top position, according to Ipsos-MORI, a pollster. Some 68% believe that Britain has too many migrants.

But it is hard to cut back. The Lords recommended an annual cap on migrant numbers, a policy that the Conservatives have been plugging as part of a commitment to "substantially lower" immigration. The Liberal Democrats would cut down too but, like the government, they want to tighten the criteria for work permits rather than define a ceiling.

In truth, most immigration to Britain is out of any government's hands. EU citizens, who make up nearly 30% of net immigration, may come and go as they please. (Numbers will increase when Romanians and Bulgarians are given the right to work in Britain, which must be granted before 2014.) Asylum-seekers are entitled by UN conventions to a fair hearing, and the government cannot stop its citizens from marrying foreigners and having children with them.

Such folk account for half of Britain's annual immigration. Of the remainder, the majority are students, prized because they pay hefty tuition fees. The only category left to play with is skilled workers from outside the EU, who make up just one-fifth of all immigrants; and some of them (from American bankers to Brazilian footballers) are among the most useful. Cuts in immigration look on the cards, but it is unlikely they will be substantial.

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4 April, 2008

U.S. poll: Voters Unaware of Candidates' Immigration Positions. McCain Supporters Farthest Off the Mark

Press release from CIS below

A new poll using neutral language finds that primary and caucus voters have little knowledge of candidates' immigration positions. The results also show that voters often do not share their candidate's position. For results and tables, go here. Among the findings:

# Only 34 percent of McCain voters, 42 percent of Clinton voters, and 52 percent of Obama voters correctly identified their candidate as favoring eventual citizenship for illegal immigrants who meet certain requirements.

# Of McCain voters, 35 percent mistakenly thought he favored enforcement that would cause illegals to return home, another 10 percent thought he wanted mass deportations, and 21 percent didn't know his position.

# Voters often held different positions from the candidate they supported. Only 31 percent of McCain voters had the same immigration position as he does. For Clinton voters, 45 percent shared her position; 61 percent of Obama voters shared his position.

# This lack of knowledge, coupled with disagreements with their candidates' positions, makes it very difficult to draw any conclusions about the fact that all three remaining candidates favor legalization for illegal immigrants.

# Whoever wins the presidency will face significant opposition to giving eventual citizenship to illegal immigrants. Just 25 percent of Republican and 50 percent of Democratic primary/caucus voters said they would support such an effort.

# Pro-enforcement voters have a greater intensity of views than supporters of legalization. Among Republicans, almost nine out ten who favored causing illegals to return home said they strongly supported that view; on the other hand, fewer than half of Republicans who backed legalization strongly supported that view.

# This greater intensity also exists among Democrats. Of Democrats who favored causing illegals to return home, more than seven out of ten strongly supported that view; on the other hand, fewer than six out of ten who favored legalization strongly supported that view.

Methodology: The survey of 1,276 persons who voted in a primary or caucus was conducted March 12-13. The survey was conducted by Pulse Opinion Research.



Britain's immigration debate

Below are two letters to "The Times", which "The Times" has published as an article under the heading "Immigration is of negligible benefit to the UK. When measuring the contribution that immigration makes to this country we must take into account its impact on our infrastructure". The points the letters make are basic. It is amazing that such points have to be made. That they do shows the great dishonesty on the pro-immigration side, the British government in particular

Sir, Your editorial on the inquiry I chaired into the economic impact of immigration claimed that we made "highly charged claims" that Britain lost out from immigration "while essentially guessing the numbers" (April 2). This is nonsense. One of our main conclusions is indeed on the need to improve the present inadequate statistics. However, the available evidence shows that the benefits are small and close to zero - not negative.

This is based on the effect on GDP per head, which measures people's living standards. Total GDP, which the Government continues to cite as evidence of huge economic benefits, is meaningless because immigration obviously increases not only GDP but also the population. China has a bigger GDP than Britain but that tells us nothing about its relative living standards. GDP per head is an average and we point out that there are winners and losers from immigration but overall the costs and benefits are small. The lowest paid, many of whom are former immigrants or the children of immigrants, suffer a slightly negative effect on wages from immigration.

We are concerned that high immigration could discourage employers from investing in adequate training for those who leave school at 16 and don't get jobs - a danger acknowledged by the Government. We are also concerned about the pressures in some areas on housing, schools and other services. Of course, employers support high immigration. They naturally want access to low cost labour. But it is the responsibility of Government to balance that demand with all the other factors set out in our report.

You suggest that we argued for a "cap" on immigrant numbers. In fact, we recommend something different and more flexible: a target range for net immigration. It is important to recognise that, under any conceivable scenario, large numbers of immigrants will continue to come to Britain. We explicitly acknowledge in our report the contribution immigrants make - and will certainly continue to make. That will still be the case even if the level of gross immigration - which has averaged just under 500,000 a year since 1997 - is brought nearer to balance with emigration (which has averaged just over 300,000).

Lord Wakeham
House of Lords

Sir, Originally, the Home Office calculations gave the fiscal benefit of immigration as 2.5 billion pounds per year. Subsequent analysis of the Home Office's calculations showed that an error once removed reduced the benefit to virtually zero. Earlier calculations in Canada, the US and the Netherlands had come to the same conclusion. The Government used its original figure of 2.5 billion relentlessly in its support of unrestrained immigration, although it has now dropped this claim.

All the four estimates from the four countries mentioned omitted any cost calculations associated with infrastructure. This cost includes housing, transport, congestion, health, police, education and not least the disruption of communities.

The argument that immigration keeps down costs is short term at best and may well be wrong as we can probably import the same goods more cheaply. In addition immigrants repatriate money to their native countries. Four years ago the net repatriation of money (mainly to South Asia) was about 1 billion. Since then new countries have joined the EU and this figure will probably have increased significantly. The Poles were last year repatriating, for instance, at the rate of just less than 1 billion per year if one allows for unregistered transfers.

Michael Salt
Chesterfield, Derbyshire

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3 April, 2008

Bush pulls rank to finish fence

Bypasses environmental laws, red tape in effort to complete 670-mile barrier

The Bush administration plans to cut through the bureaucratic red tape and bypass environmental laws hindering the building of 670 miles of fence along the border with Mexico and finish the section authorized by Congress by the end of this year. Federal officials said the administration will invoke two legal waivers sanctioned by Congress to overcome obstacles holding up construction in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, the Associated Press reported.

Officials have said the "virtual fence" along a 28-mile section of the border in Arizona has been delayed by technical problems, and opposition from landowners along the border has delayed plans for the 670 miles of fencing. The department previously used its waiver authority to build smaller portions, two in Arizona and one in San Diego. Federal officials say that 309 miles of fencing has been completed, as of March 17, with another 309 miles to go.

Amid more than 100 meetings between federal officials and environmental groups and residents, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had insisted using the waivers would be a last resort, the AP noted. DHS says it will conduct environmental assessments when necessary, but the waivers allow the department to go ahead with building before the assessments are completed.

Landowners have refused to give the government access, and environmentalists complain the fencing puts endangered species into even worse situations. DHS argues the barrier will solve the problem of widespread trash and human waste left by illegal aliens.

As WND reported in January, the author of the fencing provisions of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif, introduced legislation in the House of Representatives to require the construction of double-layered barrier within six months. However, an amendment submitted by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, into the Department of Homeland Security funding bill specifically exempted DHS from having to build any fence at all.

Hunter said in January that when the Secure Fence Act "was enacted more than one year ago, the American people were pleased to see the necessary steps were finally being taken to secure the dangerous and problematic smuggling corridors that exist along our border with Mexico." "Instead of adhering to the law and building the prescribed fencing, the Department of Homeland Security began to immediately retreat from the mandates of the bill, indicating its intention to build 370 miles of fence and not the required 700 miles," he said.

At the time, Hunter pointed out, DHS had built about 75 miles of new fence along the border, of which only five miles was double-layered. "The reality is that single-layered fencing and vehicle barriers do little, if anything, to stop illegal immigration, and the 'virtual fence' alternative being aggressively pursued by DHS remains ineffective and unusable," he the congressman said. "The legislation I am introducing reinstates the most important elements of the Secure Fence, which were wrongly amended under the omnibus spending bill," Hunter said. "If we truly hope to bring some sense of security to our southern land border, then we must begin building the appropriate infrastructure in the timeliest manner possible."

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Nearly 50 illegal immigrants working as security guards arrested in Texas

A task force led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 50 illegal immigrants in weekend raids of mostly Latino night clubs in Dallas, officials said Sunday. Authorities raided 26 businesses, including night clubs, restaurants and pool halls. They were targeting employees working as security guards for two security companies, which officials declined to identify. Law enforcement teams of local, state and federal officials simultaneously hit the 26 businesses around 11 p.m. Saturday and arrested 49 people. They recovered four pistols.

Those arrested will faces charges of being in the United States illegally. Federal law also prohibits illegal immigrants from possessing weapons. Four people arrested were from El Salvador and the rest were from Mexico, officials said. One of the Salvadorans arrested was a legal immigrant, and it is unclear whether he will face any charges. "Hopefully, this operation will help us send a message that we will not tolerate the falsification of documents for undocumented aliens under the guise of providing security," Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins said.

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"N.Z. First" Targets Immigration in New Zealand Election Year

New Zealand's "relaxed" Maori people don't like hard-working Asians

New Zealand First, the political party led by the nation's Foreign Minister Winston Peters [a Maori], is targeting Asian immigration to boost support before this year's general election, the Dominion Post reported. A flood of Asian immigration risked forming mini-societies that may heighten division, said the party's deputy leader Peter Brown, according to the newspaper.

The party, which supports Helen Clark's government, is polling below the 5 percent threshold it needs to get any seats under New Zealand's system of proportional representation, the Dominion said. New Zealand's Asian population may almost double to 790,000 by 2026, the government statistician said yesterday.

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2 April, 2008

British Prime Minister rejects cap on immigration

The comments by the PM below are something of a curate's egg: Both good and bad. To attribute all the economic growth of the last 10 years to immigration is such a towering absurdity that it is really beneath comment. Most of that growth is simply inflation, for a start. The PM must have been desperate to makes such an assertion. On the other hand, it would seem to be true that the new points system will probably achieve more than a numerical cap would. It could however probably be tightened to ensure that only highly qualified immigrants are accepted.

The real issue is the number of "parasite" immigrants being accepted, particularly refugees from Africa. African refugees are highly welfare-dependant and, such are the troubles of Africa, you could under present rules have half of Africa in Britain eventually. If anything is unsustainable that is. A very strict numerical cap there would make sense.

No-one is game to mention Africans, of course, but the Lords do at least mention the other largely parasitical category: Family reunions. These are often elderly or unskilled relatives from the Indian sub-continent and many do not contribute much to the economy but do draw on government services. Clearly, most people in this category should have to pass the points system on approximately the same basis as other immigrants. Immigrants who wish to support relatives should generally be able to do so by way of remittances to the home country, something that is already widespread. Brown completely fails to address that issue

Gordon Brown says immigration is good for the UK and has rejected suggestions that an annual limit is needed. The PM was responding to a report by a House of Lords committee saying record immigration had had "little or no" impact on people's economic well-being. Mr Brown said the concerns raised were being tackled by a new points-based system that will allow only highly skilled workers into the UK. He said migration had added 6 billion pounds to the economy and was a "substantial income". Most British businesses who have faced labour shortages had benefited from being able to recruit more widely for skilled labour, he said.

Speaking at his monthly news conference, he said the Australian-style points-based system would effectively "restrict the numbers of people who come into this country from outside Europe". It would bar unskilled immigrants from outside the European Union, he said. There would be a new citizenship fund, with people coming into the country being expected to contribute to the public services they use. And there was more financial help for local authorities to enable them to deal with the influx.

Mr Brown conceded that it was important to get the balance right given "pressures on the economy". But he said that gross domestic product per head had risen since 1997 from 13,900 to 22,840 pounds in the last year.

"Most people in the City of London know they have benefited very substantially," he told reporters. "Not just from the inward investment that's coming from international companies, but the number of key workers who are coming to join them and are making a huge contribution to the British economy. "But we want to get the balance right between that and of course being sensible about the pressures on our economy."

Mr Brown said a cap on immigrants coming to the UK could only be applied to those outside the EU. "Most people who are proposing a cap are proposing a cap of only 20% of possible migrants into this country," he said. "And of course many of these people are the highly skilled workers who are important to the economy."

Mr Brown's comments follow a report by the Lords Economic Affairs Committee which says competition from immigrants had had a negative impact on the low paid, on training for young UK workers, and had contributed to high house prices. The peers called for a cap on immigration levels, saying the government "should have an explicit target range" and set rules to keep within that limit. They raised the prospect of cutting the rights of people to follow relatives who have settled in the UK.

And they rejected claims by ministers that a high level of immigration was needed to prevent labour shortages as "fundamentally flawed". They also warned that the points-based system carried a "clear danger of inconsistencies and overlap".

The committee, whose members include two ex-chancellors and other Cabinet members, took eight months to consider government immigration policies. Inquiry chairman Lord Wakeham said: "Looking to the future, if you have got that increase in numbers and you haven't got any economic benefit from it, you have got to ask yourself, is that a wise thing to do? "That is why we want the government to look at it."

Committee chairman Lord Vallance of Tummel, a former CBI president, said the government's analysis of the economic impact from immigration was "very shaky". The report claims that if net immigration of 190,000 people per year continued over the next 20 years, it would contribute to a 10% increase in house prices.

Shadow home secretary David Davis said the peers had shown "unequivocally that the benefits of the current immigration policy to ordinary UK citizens are largely non-existent".

Chris Huhne, the Lib Dems home affairs spokesman, said the report made clear that "the government has completely lost track of the number of people who live in this country".

UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage said: "The fact still remains that all three parties voted for an enlarged EU and open borders with half a billion people living in the EU."

Sir Andrew Green of pressure group Migration Watch, said the report had "torn to shreds the government's economic case for the massive levels of immigration which they have actively encouraged

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Australia: Immigration blamed for housing crisis

Hard to argue with given extensive State and local government restrictions on housing developers and land usage. Such restrictions are not going to go away any time soon

A massive, uncontrolled increase in immigration in the past three years has fuelled the housing affordability crisis, home builders say. Housing Industry Association (HIA) managing director Ron Silberberg blamed the shortage of private rental accommodation on net immigration he estimated at 250,000 people a year.

"There has been an uncontrolled expansion of the immigration program," Dr Silberberg told a Senate committee in Canberra. "The pace in which it's increased has been massive over the last three years. "Do we need an explanation as to why there's pressure on private rental housing?" He described the immigration program as a federal government lever which could be used to address the housing crisis.

Asked if he blamed the squeeze entirely on immigration, Dr Silberberg said its effect was substantial. "It's a very significant influence on the demand for housing and accommodation." Dr Silberberg was speaking at the Senate select committee on housing affordability's first day of public hearings. More than one million Australians are considered to be in housing stress by paying at least 30 per cent of their income on accommodation.

The HIA chief also said the industry suffered from a skills shortage because only a tiny fraction of immigrants had training in residential construction. Only about 800 of the net figure of 250,000 arrivals had the necessary skills, he said. "I don't think the department of immigration has a proper understanding of labour market forecasting because that's done by another agency. "Demand for skilled people and professionals is so tight it's not even worth advertising."

The Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) told the committee that the construction sector's ability to meet demand is just as important as releasing more land. "Addressing undersupply is a critical issue if we are to ensure that we are able to adequately and affordably house our communities as Australia continues to develop," PIA national president Neil Savery said. "We're not saying that addressing supply is the panacea to the problem and certainly that the equation in relation to supply isn't simply: `Let's release as much land as we can possibly can on the urban fringe of the city'," he said.

Institute chief executive Diane Jay said releasing more land sounded simpler than it was. "There's some evidence that even if there were more land immediately available we really don't have the capacity within the construction and development sector to go a lot further in terms of meeting supply," she said. The group welcomed the federal government's planned National Housing Supply Council but said it must produce nationally comparable data on land release as well as new housing statistics.

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1 April, 2008

Britain introduces new visa system for highly skilled workers

Professionals and highly-skilled persons willing to migrate to Britain will have to apply for visa under the new points-based system which comes into force in India from Tuesday. The point-based system-Tier 1 (PBS-TO), which covers highly skilled migrants, entrepreneurs, investors, and graduate students, replaces the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, the Entrepreneur and Investor schemes and the International Graduates. The initial visa will be granted for three years as against two years under the previous systems.

India, Britain's most important market for highly skilled migrants, will be the first country where the new visa regime is being introduced from tomorrow. "The roll-out for rest of the world will take place in summer," a British High Commission statement said.

The new system is expected to make the visa process easier for legitimate travellers and tough for those intending to cheat the system of immigration and ensure that unwanted outsiders do not enter Britain and settle there. Anybody trying to cheat the system will be banned from applying for a visa for 10 years.

Under the PBS-TO, visa applicants will need sufficient points to qualify. Points are awarded for objective criteria such as qualifications, previous earnings, age and UK experience, the statement said. "The new system allows those wanting to work in Britain to calculate, before they make their application, whether their points add up to entry as highly-skilled worker," British High Commissioner to India Richard Stagg said.

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Immigration doesn't benefit Britain

By Philip Johnston

For those of us who have felt unsettled, or even alarmed, by the exceptional scale of recent immigration to the United Kingdom, there has been one argument that has been difficult to rebut. It was, indeed, the very justification for the Government's immigration policy, if it deserves to be so described: without the foreign workers who have poured in over the past 10 years, both legally and illegally, economic growth would have stalled and we would be a less prosperous nation.

The highest levels of immigration by far in our history may well have had other deleterious impacts, including that on the country's cultural cohesion and, self-evidently, on the public services and infrastructure, strained by the rising population, and even the reintroduction of some serious diseases, such as TB, which had all but been eradicated. But we were assured by ministers and proponents of large-scale immigration, including business leaders and union bosses, that these were more than outweighed by the economic benefits that have accrued to the nation

The problem with this argument is that it is not true, but it was difficult to prove its falsity because no authoritative study able to command widespread acceptance had been undertaken to test its veracity. Well, now one has. The economic affairs committee of the House of Lords will report tomorrow after a three-month inquiry. This committee includes Lords Lawson and Lamont, former Chancellors of the Exchequer; Lords MacGregor and Wakeham, former cabinet ministers; Lords Layard and Skidelsky, eminent economists; Lords Turner and Paul from the world of commerce and industry; and other former Labour ministers and senior politicians. They took voluminous quantities of evidence from a wide variety of parties, ranging from the Government to academics, demographers and pressure-group campaigners. Anyone who attended the hearings can testify to the rigorous nature of their investigation.

We already know the general tenor of their report, and it would be a surprise, given the evidence, if they were to conclude anything other than that the economic benefits of immigration to the country as a whole have been marginal, even non-existent. This is not to say that nobody benefits. Clearly an immigrant who earns far more than at home gains, and his remittances will help his family and his country's economy.

So, too, do householders who pay a plasterer/nanny/plumber half the amount they would to a domestic worker. So, also, does the employer whose costs are cut by using cheaper labour. I have never understood the enthusiasm of the trade unions for large-scale immigration since it depresses wages, but they may judge that more low-paid workers mean more members. Furthermore, there is obviously a need for foreign companies based in Britain to bring in their own skilled workers and managers to run their operations, which also adds to immigration, though these incomers rarely settle, but move back home or to another country.

While all these factors can be said to point to the advantages of immigration in specific spheres, it is not the same as saying that immigration benefits the country as a whole because some, usually the poor, lose out to the competition; and, as output rises, it is consumed by the larger population. Taking all this into account, the Lords committee is expected to conclude that "the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run".

This key conclusion demolishes the Government's case for large-scale immigration. If it has not been to the economic benefit of the resident population, what has been its purpose? The truth is that the Government simply lost control and then sought to make a virtue out of doing so by concocting a spurious economic case in its defence. Last autumn, in evidence to the committee, a joint study by the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics said immigration boosted GDP by œ6 billion in 2006, which sounds impressive but is irrelevant since it also added to the population. On a per capita basis, the increase in economic output could be measured in pence.

The Government report also said that migrants are more diligent and more reliable than British-born workers. This may be true and a lot of employers will concur. Yet with more than one million young people on benefits and out of work, should ways not have been found to get them into jobs first, by reforming welfare so that it does not pay to stay at home while a job is taken by a migrant worker? Most of the jobs created in recent years have gone to foreign workers, many of whom, since 2004, have been from the new EU countries in eastern Europe to which Britain opened its labour markets, unlike other major economies.

The only other justification for large-scale immigration is that it is good to have lots of different - and often very enterprising - people in the country from all over the world because they enrich our society. I would go along with that, though it is not difficult to do so living in London, which has always been one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities.

On a small and crowded island, boosting the population from 60 million to 70 million by 2030, almost entirely as a result of immigration, as official figures forecast, is a serious matter (especially when, as we report today, decision-making is hamstrung because we can't be sure it hasn't already happened). Did the Government take a decision in 1997 that the British population was not growing rapidly enough and that, for the long-term economic betterment of the country, it had to be boosted by roughly one sixth in just over 30 years? If so, it passed everyone by.

It was never debated by Parliament or put to the people in a general election. When there was an attempt to raise the issue in the 2001 election campaign, the Government cynically played the race card to close the debate down. Yet it could be argued that the changes to Britain engineered by mass immigration will be Labour's most enduring legacy.

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