Anti-BVBL

Photo: Saurabh Das / Associated Press

The New York Times reports that Henry Cejudo the son of illegal immigrants from Mexico wins the Gold Medal for the United States in wrestling. Congratulations Henry!

The American flag landed on the scorer’s table, launched by a family member with exceptional aim. Henry Cejudo grabbed it from his coach and draped it around his body. He stood there for the longest time, fighting back tears, the son of illegal immigrants wrapped in stars and stripes.

Greg L said on 19 Aug 2008 at 12:37 am:
Monticup, I understand your frustration and outrage, but try to refrain from characterizing all illegal aliens as nascent criminals. Some are, but it would appear that they’re a pretty small minority. With somewhere around 12 million illegal aliens in the US by conservative estimates, if they were all predisposed to criminal behavior we’d be far worse off than we are. There are about 300,000 illegal aliens in Virginia, and we certainly don’t have a crime explosion that such numbers would create.

A big problem however is that of those 300,000 we have no idea who they are. Among them are certainly some of the worst folks you could imagine from both a crime and a national security perspective. In order to ensure these bad actors aren’t present, the lawful deportation of as many illegal aliens as possible is a way to ensure we remove those who pose the most significant threat as well as (perhaps more significantly) discourage other bad actors from unlawfully entering the country.

If we cannot control our borders, we are no longer a sovereign nation, and our democracy is in grave peril. As we seek to do so, we have to be certain that what we ask for is reasoned and responsible. We can’t do that very well by saying all illegal aliens are invariably rapists and murderers without undermining our arguments. There’s enough provable and unambiguous data out there to support our arguments without stretching so much, and in ways that can become counterproductive.

We have to maintain a higher standard than anyone else, and while it might not be fair, that’s just how it is. Let’s do our best to be better than those arguing the other side.

Acutally, it’s almost refreshing to see Mr. Leteicq make this kind of statement. It’s in sharp contrast to his infamous ‘Dog for Sale’ thread. Apparently he is coming to the realization that in order to be considered a rational voice in the immigration debate he can no longer permit the previously employed rhetoric and mischaracterizations of all ‘illegals’ as being rapists, murderers etc… To what extent this transformation is a result of our efforts might never be known but I feel confident that we have contributed to forming the terms of this discussion. Congratulations to everyone for their continued participation.

I have been doing some research into the history of immigration originating from “south of the border”. The more I read, the more clarity I have in this unhealthy dance between the U.S. and Mexico. This article by the Harvard Magazine, succinctly points out, the historical migratory relationship throughout the last century, and the story does not seem to alter, no matter what decade. It goes something like this, America needs labor, cheap labor, we enlist help from our “south”, we get irritated with the “help” and send them home. Some time later, not a long period of time mind you, we realize that we need more cheap labor. We send out the “bat” signal, calling all cheap labor, and next thing you know, we have immigrant workers, legal and illegal.   Clearly, many of the immigrant workers, legal and illegal who are hispanic are not all from Mexico, but I believe the premise of the article, this country needing an expanded unskilled work force, holds true for many of our southern neighboring countries.   

This cycle has continued to this day. Isn’t it about time we figure out how to create some real workable and fair solutions to this ongoing dilema?

The first significant wave of Mexican workers coming into the United States began in the early years of the twentieth century, following the curtailment of Japanese immigration in 1907 and the consequent drying up of cheap Asian labor. The need for Mexican labor increased sharply when the Unites States entered World War I. The Mexican government agreed to export Mexican workers as contract laborers to enable American workers to fight overseas. After the war, an intensifying nativist climate led to restrictive quotas on immigration from Europe and to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol, aimed at cutting back the flow of Mexicans. But economic demand for unskilled migrant workers continued throughout the Roaring Twenties, encouraging Mexican immigrants to cross the border—legally or not.

The Depression brought a temporary halt to the flow of Mexican labor. During the early 1930s, Mexican workers—including many legal residents—were rounded up and deported en masse by federal authorities in cooperation with state and local officials. Mexicans became the convenient scapegoats for widespread joblessness and budget shortages; as Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone point out in Beyond Smoke and Mirrors (2002), Mexicans were accused, paradoxically, of both “taking away jobs from Americans” and “living off public relief.”

Although intended as a wartime arrangement, the Bracero program continued under pressure from U.S. growers, who feared a continued labor shortage in the booming postwar economy. Still, the numbers of legal braceros fell short of demand, and growers began regularly recruiting undocumented workers to tend their fields. By the end of the Korean War, illegal immigration had become a fixture of the U.S. agricultural economy—and public sentiment had again turned restrictionist. In 1954, the U.S. government responded with “Operation Wetback,” apprehending close to one million illegal workers. Meanwhile, to appease the growers, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) reprocessed many of these undocumented Mexicans and returned them to the fields as legal braceros.

The passage of the IRCA set the stage, many observers believe, for the enormous and entrenched problem of undocumented immigrants that exists today. While granting amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans residing illegally in the United States, the law began a process of border fortification and militarization that has had the opposite of its intended effect. The idea of building a wall—which began under the Clinton administration—turned a pattern of circular migration into one of permanent settlement. “Now ‘Once I make it, I’m not going back,’” Domínguez explains. As Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey pointed out to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005: “From 1965 to 1985, 85 percent of undocumented entries from Mexico were offset by departures and the net increase in the undocumented population was small. The build-up of enforcement resources at the border has not decreased the entry of migrants so much as discouraged their return home.”

After a 4 month hiatus, a Summer edition of the Help Save Manassas - Frontline newsletter is now available, entitled - Prince William: An Oasis in the Desert. Obviously, the HSM camp suffers from hallucinations where the mantra about the ‘Rule of Law’ Resolution aka the Immigration Resolution abound and where the resolution is both working well but yet not working at all.

Interestingly, some of the regular names including Steve Thomas no longer appear and there’s no mention of his whereabouts. We do learn that both Greg Letiecq and Dan Arnold of the nightmarish - Cultural Chaos fiasco of the March edition have both been ‘re-elected’.

We also learn that after exhausting local businesses, the ‘Do the Right Thing’ pledge has now ‘expanded’ their reach to areas such as Stafford & Spottslyvannia. One needs to ask whether or not local businesses are being deceived into pledging their allegiance to HSM?

The zeros and heroes section seems to be repeated from past editions.

And then there’s the ‘Crime Prevention’ Team which perhaps has replaced the Special Ops group? According to the newsletter the police department believes the Crime Prevention Team is a ‘valuable resource’. Surely if the police felt such a ‘team’ of local citizens was needed they would have requested volunteers. Instead, Letiecq and cohorts have most likely put the police in the undesirable position of having to mediate any incidents that could result by having this antagonist force thrust themselves into this situation.

This editorial from the Washington Post sounds sane and reasonable regarding a realistic approach to illegal immigration. In addition to understanding immigration within our own borders, we need a comprehensive approach to improve the economic opportunities for our southern neighbors within their own country. NAFTA is creating very negative consequences in some regions to our south and those adverse effects must be addressed.

CONGRESS’S FAILURE to enact a workable immigration system last year prompted the Bush administration to redouble its previously lethargic efforts at enforcing existing immigration laws. The get-tough campaign — more workplace raids and arrests along the Mexican border, plus a smattering of criminal cases against employers — has two goals. One is to show a doubting public that the feds mean business. The other is to make things so miserable for businesses that corporate lobbyists join in the fight for meaningful immigration reform.

But the basic legal and economic dynamics that created the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system remain largely unchanged. Despite the economic dip, there is still demand for unskilled labor that native-born Americans cannot supply. That demand will perk up when the economy does. The number of visas available for unskilled workers — 66,000 per year — is laughably inadequate. Many thousands of workers continue to enter the country illegally or enter legally and then overstay their visas. A practical approach would acknowledge both the demand for unskilled labor and the fact that 5 percent of the American workforce consists of undocumented workers. It would raise the quota of temporary employment visas, establish a better system for employers to verify the legal status of job applicants and offer undocumented workers a way to register themselves and eventually earn citizenship. Critics will howl about an amnesty, but realists will see it is the way to address the reality of immigration and labor in a globalized marketplace.

Unity in the Community in collaboration with George Mason University, Prince William Campus
University Life presents - Crossing the Line: An Immigration Film Series at the Verizon Auditorium at George Mason University’s Prince William Campus

Saturday, August 16 at 7:30 pm – a double feature
“Alienated: Undocumented Immigrant Youth”
This film is about undocumented immigrant youth facing the challenges of life after high school without options for legalized work or college
“Beyond the Border”
Latinos seeking a better life have migrated to Kentucky, for low-paying jobs in the tobacco, manufacturing and horse racing industries. As Latino communities swell, so does the xenophobia and discrimination they face.

Sunday, August 17 at 2:30 pm
“Under the Same Moon”
The reunion of 9-year-old Carlitos and his mother Rosario, Who works as an illegal domestic in Los Angeles.

To Elena, I’d suggest you go back to your history a bit more to discover the role many labor unions and related American-worker interests had in demanding limits to immigration in the 1920s. What labor wanted was a need to limit immigration in order to obtain bargaining leverage. How can any union successfully strike for lower wages without limits to the labor supply? Check out the ILGWU resolutions dating back as early as 1905.

Dan Stein

I think it is imperative, for all who discuss immigration, to understand its origins. I may not be an expert on unions, but I do understand the fear and anxiety that lives in all of us when we encounter people that are different from own small world experiences. The original, over-reaching 1924 Johnson-Reed act was in response to a changing face of America. What I found interesting was that “The 1924 Immigration Act also included a provision excluding from entry any alien who by virtue of race or nationality was ineligible for citizenship. Existing nationality laws dating from 1790 and 1870 excluded people of Asian lineage from naturalizing. As a result, the 1924 Act meant that even Asians not previously prevented from immigrating – the Japanese in particular – would no longer be admitted to the United States.” Now Really Mr. Stein, does this sound like unbiased labor union concerns, or just simply racism codified within the immigration legislation?

It is also extremely noteworthy that the KKK had great influence in working towards passage of the 1924 Johnson Reed Act. The eugenics movement was integral to the passage of the immigration act.

Local eugenics societies and groups sprang up around the United States after World War I, with names like the Race Betterment Foundation. The war had given many Americans a greater fear of foreigners, and immigration to the United States was still increasing. In 1923, organizers founded the American Eugenics Society, and it quickly grew to 29 chapters around the country. At fairs and exhibitions, eugenicists spread the word and hosted “fitter family” and “better baby” competitions to award blue ribbons to the finest human stock — not unlike the awards for prize bull and biggest pumpkin. Not only did eugenicists promote better breeding, they wanted to prevent poor breeding or the risk of it. That meant keeping people with undesireable traits in their heritage (including alcoholism, pauperism, or epilepsy) separate from others or, where law allowed, preventing them from reproducing.

These vocal groups advocated laws to attain their aims, and in 1924, the Immigration Act was passed by majorities in the U.S. House and Senate. It set up strict quotas limiting immigrants from countries believed by eugenicists to have “inferior” stock, particularly Southern Europe and Asia. President Coolidge, who signed the bill into law, had stated when he was vice president, “America should be kept American. . . . Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”

 

An “Un-American Bill”: A Congressman Denounces Immigration Quotas

At the turn of the 20th century, unprecedented levels of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the United States aroused public support for restrictive immigration laws. After World War I, which temporarily slowed immigration levels, anti-immigration sentiment rose again. Congress passed the Quota Act of 1921, limiting entrants from each nation to 3 percent of that nationality’s presence in the U.S. population as recorded by the 1910 census. As a result, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe dropped to less than one-quarter of pre-World War I levels. Even more restrictive was the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) that shaped American immigration policy until the 1960s. While it passed with only six dissenting votes, congressional debates over the Johnson-Reed Act revealed arguments on both sides of this question of American policy and national identity. For example, on April 8, 1924, Robert H. Clancy, a Republican congressman from Detroit with a large immigrant constituency, defended the “Americanism” of Jewish, Italian, and Polish immigrants and attacked the quota provisions of the bill as racially discriminatory and “un-American.”

——————————————————————————–

Since the foundations of the American commonwealth were laid in colonial times over 300 years ago, vigorous complaint and more or less bitter persecution have been aimed at newcomers to our shores. Also the congressional reports of about 1840 are full of abuse of English, Scotch, Welsh immigrants as paupers, criminals, and so forth.

Old citizens in Detroit of Irish and German descent have told me of the fierce tirades and propaganda directed against the great waves of Irish and Germans who came over from 1840 on for a few decades to escape civil, racial, and religious persecution in their native lands.

The “Know-Nothings,” lineal ancestors of the Ku-Klux Klan, bitterly denounced the Irish and Germans as mongrels, scum, foreigners, and a menace to our institutions, much as other great branches of the Caucasian race of glorious history and antecedents are berated to-day. All are riff-raff, unassimilables, “foreign devils,” swine not fit to associate with the great chosen people—a form of national pride and hallucination as old as the division of races and nations.

But to-day it is the Italians, Spanish, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Balkanians, and so forth, who are the racial lepers. And it is eminently fitting and proper that so many Members of this House with names as Irish as Paddy’s pig, are taking the floor these days to attack once more as their kind has attacked for seven bloody centuries the fearful fallacy of chosen peoples and inferior peoples. The fearful fallacy is that one is made to rule and the other to be abominated. . . .

It must never be forgotten also that the Johnson bill, although it claims to favor the northern and western European peoples only, does so on a basis of comparison with the southern and western European peoples. The Johnson bill cuts down materially the number of immigrants allowed to come from northern and western Europe, the so-called Nordic peoples. . . .

Then I would be true to the principles for which my forefathers fought and true to the real spirit of the magnificent United States of to-day. I can not stultify myself by voting for the present bill and overwhelm my country with racial hatreds and racial lines and antagonisms drawn even tighter than they are to-day. [Applause.]

Source: Speech by Robert H. Clancy, April 8, 1924, Congressional Record, 68th Congress, 1st Session (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1924), vol. 65, 5929–5932.

Another case of the eighth amendment of the constitution being thwarted. The New York Times brings us a tale of cruelty that one could never imagine happening to THIER loved one. How is it, in this great nation, that illegal immigration has turned into our own human rights crisis. Just because you are this country, lacking proper documentation, does not absolve you of your human rights endowed upon us by our Creator. I have posted only a small portion, I really urge everyone to read the entire story.

He was 17 when he came to New York from Hong Kong in 1992 with his parents and younger sister, eyeing the skyline like any newcomer. Fifteen years later, Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons.

But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

Mr. Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.

In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng’s lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.

“For this desperately sick, vulnerable person, this was torture,” said Theodore N. Cox, one of Mr. Ng’s lawyers, adding that they want to see a videotape of the transport made by guards.

Immigration and detention officials would not discuss the case, saying the matter was under internal investigation. But in response to a relative of Mr. Ng’s who had begged that he be checked for a spinal injury or fractures, the Wyatt detention center’s director of nursing, Ben Candelaria, replied in a July 16 e-mail message that Mr. Ng was receiving appropriate care for “chronic back pain.” He added, “We treat each and every detainee in our custody with the same high level of quality, professional care possible.”

Officials have given no explanation why they took Mr. Ng to Hartford and back on the same day. But the lawyers say the grueling July 30 trip appeared to be an effort to prove that Mr. Ng was faking illness, and possibly to thwart the habeas corpus petition they had filed in Rhode Island the day before, seeking his release for medical treatment.

The federal judge who heard that petition on July 31 did not make a ruling, but in an unusual move insisted that Mr. Ng get the care he needed. On Aug. 1, Mr. Ng was taken to a hospital, where doctors found he had terminal cancer and a fractured spine. He died five days later.

The accounts of Mr. Ng’s treatment echo other cases that have prompted legislation, now before the House Judiciary Committee, to set mandatory standards for care in immigration detention.

I have to eat my words, there WERE workers that had access to secured areas of the airport. I would agree that when there are locations that require security clearances, we should absolutely know the backgrounds of those people. Once again, this just amplifies that we need to fix our broken immigration system. We need to have a credible way of knowing who is here in our country.  I recognize, that many families, caught up in this raid, will be in heartache tonight.

I will be posting a story, very soon, about another detainee death, where the  man suffered horribly. 

DULLES, Va. — An immigration raid at Dulles International Airport resulted in 55 arrests on Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says.
The people were doing contract work at a construction site, inside a secure area, where they would potentially have access to runways and airplanes.

ICE agents made their move as the workers were being bused to the site, checking work and immigration papers.

The agency says one of the workers had an airport security badge, that grants unescorted access to the airport tarmac.

ICE says allowing unauthorized workers into sensitive sites puts the nation’s infranstructure at risk.

Most of the people arrested will be flown an ICE detention facility in El Paso, Texas to begin removal proceedings.

Officials say this operation and others like it aim to guard infrastructure. The agency says it’s important to make sure people who work at airports are in the United States legally.

Investigation into the workers’ immigration status has been going on for a while, leading up to the raid.

The arrests did not affect flights or travel to and from the airport

Ask yourself, what should Americans be more incensed about, day laborers who don’t pay income taxes, or untold millions or billions in lost income taxes due to corporations not paying?  I mean really, shouldn’t we focus on the “big fish” as opposed to the “little fish”!  There are already billions that illegal immigrants pay into social security, money they will never collect because the number they are using is bogus.  No, NOT a stolen number, simply one that doesn’t exist, except that it affords them the ability to work and pay taxes like the rest of us.

WASHINGTON - Unlike the rest of us, most U.S. corporations and foreign companies doing business in the United States pay no federal income tax, according to a new report from Congress.

The study by the Government Accountability Office released Tuesday said two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, and about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.

Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO’s estimate.

“It’s shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country,” said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

An outside tax expert, Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said increasing numbers of limited liability corporations and so-called “S” corporations pay taxes under individual tax codes.

“Half of all business income in the United States now ends up going through the individual tax code,” Edwards said.

The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren’t paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes and it did not identify any corporations by name. It said companies may escape paying such taxes due to operating losses or because of tax credits.

More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.

The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S.

Dorgan and Levin have complained about companies abusing transfer prices — amounts charged on transactions between companies in a group, such as a parent and subsidiary. In some cases, multinational companies can manipulate transfer prices to shift income from higher to lower tax jurisdictions, cutting their tax liabilities. The GAO did not suggest which companies might be doing this.

“It’s time for the big corporations to pay their fair share,” Dorgan said.