May 16, 2008
The New York Times story "Arizona County Uses New Law to Look for Illegal Immigrants" (link) about Sheriff Joe Arpaio's attempts to enforce immigration laws in Maricopa County, Arizona contains the following:
Peter Schey, a lawyer from Los Angeles hired by the Mexican consulate here to represent some of the detainees, said, "This sheriff is not the director of homeland security, but that is how he is acting."
This is at least the fourth link that Schey has to the Mexican government; MSM hacks frequently fail to point out his series of links when offering quotes from him.
Posted to Immigration2008a
at 12:55 PM
The John McCain campaign is requiring all their staff members, volunteers, and vendors to disclose lobbying links and the like:
No person working for the Campaign may be a registered lobbyist or foreign agent, or receive compensation for any such activity.
I'm going to guess that "foreign agent" is meant in the legalistic sense, i.e., someone would have to be registered with the Department of Justice as a Registered Foreign Agent under FARA to qualify: usdoj.gov/criminal/fara. The three top campaigns already include registered foreign agents.
The new McCain edict brings us to Juan Hernandez, a McCain staff member who's his Hispanic outreach director. He's also a former cabinet-level official with the Mexican government who worked directly with Vicente Fox and he's appeared on several cable TV shows promoting a "free flow" of people between Mexico and the U.S.
McCain was asked about him a few months back but Hernandez was still doing outreach for McCain last I heard. He's also been a Senior Fellow at the McCain-linked think tank the Reform Institute for a couple years.
However, a search of the FARA database (which is flawed) shows no matches for his name, so I'm going to guess he's going to continue to be associated with the campaign. Until such time, of course, as people start asking McCain why someone who presumably took an oath to the Mexican government is now doing outreach for him to U.S. voters.
Posted to Politics
at 12:05 PM
May 15, 2008
Via this we find this:
Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) obtained passage today of an amendment to the Iraq supplemental appropriations bill to provide partial amnesty for illegal immigrants working in agriculture. The amendment would provide legal status for 1.35 million agricultural workers and lessen current protections for Americans and new foreign workers taking agricultural jobs. The amendment was adopted 17-15 in the Appropriations Committee and will be part of the bill put to the full Senate for a vote. In a parallel move, apparently Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is attempting to use a similar amendment to reopen temporary visas for unskilled workers outside the annual ceiling.
Feinstein dropped the push in November, then tried a mini version in April. Those amnesty backers who realize they won't be able to push full "comprehensive immigration reform" will continue to try piecemeal approaches like this. Please contact your senators and let them know what you think.
UPDATE: There's more here; this says that Senator David Vitter will try to get AgJobs out of the bill when it hits the floor.
Posted to Immigration2008a
at 01:55 PM
Over thousands of posts, this site has had to make very few corrections, probably at most the same number as the NYT makes in a day. However, in the past some unnamed members of the team whose content appears here advanced the belief that "The Anchoress" (theanchoressonline.com, "TA") is actually former RNC hack Ken Mehlmann. It has recently come to our attention that that is false, and TA is actually one Elizabeth Scalia (theanchoressonline.com/about-the-anchoress-online). She is presumably not the UK professional biker by the same name and she presumably previously desired anonymity in order to shield herself from abhorrent reactions relating to rampant BushBotism. This site apologizes for any confusion.
Posted to Bloggage
at 01:41 PM
May 13, 2008
From
this:
Much of the money for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's immigration-enforcement efforts lately has poured out of a special pool of state money.
But New Times has learned that Governor Janet Napolitano's turning off the spigot.
In what appears to be a prelude to a major fight between Napolitano and Arpaio, the governor issued an executive order last week to develop a new task force--headed up by the state Department of Public Safety--to find and arrest tens of thousands of felons with outstanding warrants.
And, according to a letter from DPS Director Roger Vanderpool to Arpaio outlining the new effort, the task force will be funded with the money that Arpaio isn't getting anymore...
UPDATE: There are details
here, and from
this:
Arpaio said the governor, along with officials in Phoenix and Maricopa County, "conspired to take away ... money that the state Legislature and the (county) Board of Supervisors approved specifically to enforce human smuggling laws, money my office needs to fight illegal immigration."
He said Napolitano's decision to create the felony warrant task force is "a cover-up for taking away grant money to fight illegal immigration," calling the move "despicable.''
From
this:
Napolitano spokeswoman Jeanine L'Ecuyer denied that the Democratic governor was trying to cut into efforts to stop illegal immigration.
"It couldn't be further from the truth," L'Ecuyer said.
In fact, I am shocked - shocked! - that anyone would accuse Napolitano of trying to block immigration enforcement.
Posted to Immigration2008a
at 05:34 PM
N.C. Aizenman of the Washington Post offers "Study Says Foreigners In U.S. Adapt Quickly", an article about a new Manhattan Institute report called "Measuring Immigrant Assimilation", authored by economist Jacob Vigdor of Duke University. He constructed an "assimilation index" based on economic, cultural, and civic assimilation. One of the issues with the index is that it probably doesn't include a question on whether those immigrants subscribe to our laws or whether they think they don't apply to them, and it probably doesn't cover irredentism-related issues. It's also a mixed bag; while the headline of the WaPo article spins it in the way we've come to expect from the WaPo, even N.C. Aizenman offers the following as the third sentence of his article:
The gap between today's foreign-born and native populations remains far wider than it was in the early 1900s and is particularly large in the case of Mexican immigrants, the report said.
And, Howard Husock, vice president for Policy Research at the Manhattan Institute,
says:
It turns out there is plenty of assimilation going on. Cubans and Vietnamese, for instance, are economically indistinguishable from natives. Germans are indistinguishable both culturally and economically. Some cities are doing better than others at assimilating newcomers. Houston, where Mexican and Central Americans predominate, has an assimilation index of just 19. New York, where no one group predominates, has a score of 31.
But the most striking finding is much less positive. The current overall assimilation level for all immigrant groups combined, measured on a scale of zero to 100, is, at 28, lower now than it was during the great immigration wave of the early 20th century, when it never went below 32. What’s more, the immigrant group that is by far the largest is also the least assimilated. On the zero-to-100 scale, Mexicans — 11 million emigrated to America between 1980 and 2006 — score only 13.
Although Mexican assimilation does occur, it’s extremely slow. Mexicans who arrived in 1995 started out with Index scores around five — and increased only to around 10 by 2005. In other words, our largest immigrant group arrived with little education and even less knowledge of English, and they have stayed that way for an extended period.
On the same theme, Eunice Moscoso offers "Immigrants less integrated than before, study finds" (
link).
Oddly enough, those hacks who support massive and/or illegal immigration only seem to have read the headline of the WaPo piece.
They include
David Weigel of Reason Magazine (
"The Washington Post reports on a new study revealing the quicker and quicker adaptation of immigrants to American norms."; reason.com/blog/show/126477.html). He's taken to task
here.
Someone else weighing in is
Duncan Black (aka Atrios) under the title "Paging Lou Dobbs" (eschatonblog.com/2008_05_11_archive.html#7247266138416718020):
Haven't looked at the study myself, so put this in the category of "confirms what I already thought," but as someone who lives in a city which still has plenty of white ethnic enclaves I've long been puzzled by the widespread belief that today's immigrants are somehow "different," aside from the skin color of some of them.
That's not only sleazy race-baiting, but it contains two logical fallacies: he's drawing a false conclusion based on a small sample size (i.e., his limited experiences) and based on past behavior despite the underlying conditions having changed.
Next up is Matt Yglesias, who links approvingly to both the WaPo and Atrios in "Assimilation Then and Now" (matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/assimilation_then_and_now.php).
Last and least at least as far as traffic is concerned, Daniel Drezner takes a content-free swipe at both Lou Dobbs and Mickey Kaus (http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003815.html)
UPDATE: Looking at the study (manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_53.htm), here's what "cultural assimilation" means to the author the study:
* Ability to speak English
* Intermarriage (whether an individual’s spouse is native-born)
* Number of children
* Marital status
One will note a few things missing, such as whether they buy in to our laws (or think they don't apply to them) and whether they support our borders (or think they have a Blut und Boden-style right to move anywhere within the Americas).
An intellectually honest index would take those into account. The civic index has similar issues as well, one of which the author acknowledges (military service being a fast-track to citizenship).
Posted to Immigration2008a
at 12:30 PM
May 12, 2008
Somewhere from a few hundred to 700 or more persons were arrested in Postville, Iowa earlier today as part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid of the Agriprocessors meat packing plant in the town. That plant produces kosher meat and is owned by the Rubashkin family, Hasidic Jews from New York; this page has more details on the culture clash after the bought the plant and seem to have gained a great deal of power in the town. Details on the raid itself here. "Immigration rights activists" tried to use scare tactics in expectation of the raid here.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union - a representative of which was recently convicted in a similar case - also didn't want the raid due to an attempt to unionize the workers. Per them, raiding the plant could interfere with "ultimately uncover[ing] unscrupulous employer acts". On the one hand ICE could actually be raiding the plant to interfere with others' investigations, but on the other if they uncover employer malfeasance and it's successfully prosecuted then the UFCW should be happy. Of course, they're being fundamentally dishonest: they want labor laws but not immigration laws to be enforced. The last link lists the contents of a rather interesting subpoena, but it's unclear exactly what was involved. There's no word on whether the plant's owners are involved or cooperated with the investigation, but if the former one would think the UFCW would want a raid. If the latter it would probably have been mentioned. There's a video report on the raid here.
UPDATE: This later report says only about 300 were arrested. And, there was a protest outside the facility where the arrestees were held. Now, turning to a summary of the search warrant, we find that, in a highly encouraging move, ICE paid someone to pose as an illegal alien and recorded his dealings with those at the plant. And, there are allegations of worker abuse, weapons being carried in the plant, and even a meth lab being operated inside the plant. Those protesting the raid would allow activities like that to continue.
UPDATE 2: A report on a 5/13 press conference held by "Matt Dummermuth, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, and Claude Arnold, special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement" is here. They didn't say whether the company was being investigated for criminal activity, and:
[They] also refused to comment on if there would be more arrests in relation to the more than 300 outstanding criminal complaints... A total of 390 first-shift workers were arrested as a result of the immigration raid. The event, which boasted 697 criminal complaints and arrest warrants for plant employees, is the largest single-location immigration raid in the nation. Nearly 60 people, most of them women, were released under ICE supervision to care for children or due to medical reasons. Those released are wearing electronic monitoring devices. Of those arrested, 290 are Guatemalan, 93 are Mexican, four are Ukrainian and three are Israeli.
UPDATE 3: Some on the left continue their support for illegal activity and worker abuse, with Frank Sharry offering the press release "The Republican Approach to Immigration Policy: Treat Immigrants Like Cattle" [1]. He says:
The GOP plan of terrorizing Latino immigrants in hopes they will self-deport amounts to a non-violent strategy of ethnic cleansing. Forcing them further into the shadows does nothing to regain control of our chaotic immigration system. And making workers afraid while coddling employers who take advantage of them ends up hurting immigrant and American workers alike.
If the first sentence is true, then we can't enforce our immigration laws, even after they were changed to Sharry's liking: he's simply opposed to immigration enforcement. And, it's certainly true that the Bush administration is in the pocket of cheap labor employers, but the way to end the worker abuse Sharry decries is to reduce illegal immigration, not to encourage it as Sharry would do.
[1] http://www.americasvoiceonline.org/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=27:
advisory-republican-policies-treat-immigrants-like-cattle&catid=1:
under-main-menu&Itemid=30
Posted to Immigration2008a
at 03:53 PM
