Illegals Today

In September 2004 there was a horrible tragic fire on Columbus' west side in which seven adults, all illegal immigrants and three children, all U.S. citizens died. At least, that's my recollection from the way the story was covered then. At the time we were told that the fire got out of control because the residents were fearful of being discovered, couldn't speak enough English to let 911 know what was wrong, were living several families in one small apartment, and were probably victims of an arsonist, perhaps a rival or disgruntled fellow-immigrant (don't remember if the theory was sex, drugs or bad debts).

Today's report says nothing about that, only that "Columbus lawyers working with colleagues in Texas and Mexico agreed to the terms of a $6.5 million lawsuit" against the property owners and a security firm.

"Most of the 10 people who died had traveled to the United States to work as landscapers. All were killed by burns and carbon-monoxide poisoning as the fire, set in a mattress in a hallway on the lower level, quickly spread and blocked their escape. Apartment owners were aware of an arson fire in the same building 90 days before the fatal fire but failed to increase security, lawyers said."

So who is at fault here? Not the people who smuggled them into the country; not the people who hired them; not the people who supplied false documents; not the other illegals who invited them to live 10 people to an apartment; not the liberals, Hispanic advocacy groups or church groups who do everything to keep them here; not the immigrant men who didn't allow their women outside to learn English; not the Congress who didn't supply the funding to protect the borders; and certainly not the Mexican government who refuses to clean up their mess at home, preferring to drain all it can from our economy. In 2004, our own emergency call service was blamed because they didn't speak enough Spanish and they all had to take crash courses.

No, through the shenanigans of lawyers who get their 1/3 of the settlement and the Mexican government (don't know how much they get, except perhaps they get to tax that portion that goes to Mexican citizens), the security company and the landlord are at fault for not providing enough security.

Several years ago my son lived in a lovely almost new apartment complex on the east side--off street parking, some garages, a pool, party house, gym, great access to major highways and shopping, etc. Young Hispanic men (if there were women we didn't see them) were jammed into some of these apartments, having fights, looking not at all anxious to be noticed outside the building, with a variety of junky cars littering the parking lots. As soon as his one year lease was up, he moved. It was a scary place.

How long will there be landlords willing to invest in Columbus and keep up property if they have to increase security to handle illegals, or be sued for not doing so? How long will we know the problems in these immigrant communities if our newspapers push the details under the rug? How many more children and parents will need to die at the hands of our homegrown enablers?

Cross posted at Collecting My Thoughts.

Labels: illegals, law suits

Banks have been offering home mortgages to undocumented workers using a taxpayer ID instead of a Social Secuity number, and it's not illegal to do so. You don't have to be an American citizen to own property here. Think about all the rich European rock stars and middle eastern oil magnates who buy multi-million dollar homes that eat up our coastlines and forests so they can drop by a few weeks of the year. They are actually cheap tax shelters because their own property taxes are confiscatory.

Now a new bill has been introduced (H.R. 480) by John T. Doolittle R-CA to amend the Truth in Lending Act to make such mortgages to illegals difficult (I was going to say "illegal" but we know that there is an army of lawyers out there working for advocacy groups that will find the loophole, so I downshifted to "difficult").

When there is a practice or law so clearly working against the average, tax paying, law abiding citizen, I always say the trite and true: FOLLOW THE MONEY. Who benefits when undocumented workers buy homes? MurrayT has a home in Florida and the recent tornado wiped out some of those homes. He says FEMA is trying to find the home owners to give them aid--but they have fled fearing arrest for being in the country illegally and are afraid of the INS. Property owners paying taxes in that county and paying high insurance premiums and the rest of the nation (me) who donate to the very inefficient Homeland Security Department are paying.

But the banks with their fees and the real estate industry (now in sort of a slump) and all their linked industries like home inspectors, title examiners, insurance companies are not innocent. Local taxing districts probably don't care as long as the county or township gets its share. Nor are advocacy groups innocent, like La Raza, who normally would turn up their noses at a so-called American value. But they'll preach it brother, oh yes, "the American dream," how could you deny this to hard, working immigrants? Read their own material. They intend to "retake" the southwestern U.S. which Mexico lost in a 19th century war.

The sovereign Mexican government is the big bandito behind all this. And we have so many trade treaties with Mexico it would be hard to sort through. How about that latest one allowing Mexican truck drivers to deliver Mexican goods within the U.S. when we can't even inspect our own trucking industry. But our banks are doing lunch with their bancos you can be sure. Illegal immigrants sending money home, supporting (destroying?) villages and towns left with no young men, is the second highest source of income in Mexico, with oil being number one and tourism number three. The quasi-American left who will weep bitter tears over the 5% rich in this country who pay most of our taxes (but never enough, right?), have no problem turning a blind eye to the inequities in Mexico with the richest Spanish-Mexicans (they have very restrictive laws regarding citizenship) at the top of the government and industries and the poorest Indian-Mexicans at the bottom. Why should Mexico ever clean up its act and be responsible for its own poor and unemployed and create some upward mobility if we're willing to support them with the jobs and social benefits?

Cross posted at Collecting My Thoughts.

Labels: housing, Mexico, real estate, taxes

When the government paperwork blocks business owners efforts to determine if a worker is legal, the immigrants flood the area causing housing, education and health problems in counties that don't have the resources to police the problem. This report is from South Carolina.

"Reid Ringer of Saluda said his county has been overrun by illegal immigrants who came to work in agriculture and poultry processing.

"Saluda County is currently in a state of chaos," Ringer said, showing photos of the living conditions of immigrants who are stuffed into decrepit trailers reconfigured to house more than one family.

Marti Coleman-Adams, also of Saluda, said the town now looks shabby because of the dilapidated housing cobbled together for the influx of immigrants and longtime residents' taxes are rising steeply to pay for extra services. Michele Beasley of Charleston said she sees similar things happening in her area. Beasley said Medical University Hospital is supplying free health care to immigrants. With such volumes of newcomers, "we can only assume the majority of these people are illegal," she said. Lem Dillard, a peach farmer, said he tries to make sure all his workers are documented but the government paperwork is difficult to work with and people are often fined for simple mistakes."

Rep. Thad Viers, R-Myrtle Beach, sponsored several bills dealing with illegal immigration. Story here in the Sun News (Myrtle Beach, SC) 02/15/2007

Labels: business, SC, taxes

"Fewer than 10 percent of Lindbergh students were Hispanic in 1980. Today, the figure has swelled to more than 75 percent. But Jennifer Kill, a sixth-grade teacher at the school, said she has never asked if any of these students are illegal immigrants or the children of illegal immigrants. Her job is to teach children, not to guard the border. "As a teacher, you get the students that come to your door," Kill said. "You don't concern yourself with where they're from, what they look like." People who do track immigration trends estimate that 125,000 to 145,000 children of illegal immigrants attend public elementary and secondary schools in Arizona. That figure comes from the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C., which is quick to point out that about half of these students are likely U.S. citizens born in this country. The Pew estimate nearly equals the enrollment of the Scottsdale, Mesa and Chandler unified school districts combined."

Story from Tribune (Mesa, AZ),15-FEB-07

You can find this article by going to Access My Library, where some articles are free and others will require that you type in the number on your public library card and you will have access to a number of newspapers, magazines, and data sources. I used the search term, "illegal immigrants." It's a very nice service.

Labels: Arizona, education, Pew

On January 18, the government of Mexico announced an agreement to fix tortilla prices. This move, according to my sources, shows President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa is not afraid to take action. In 2006, tortilla prices rose by 14% compared to inflation of 4.05%.

Also, the Mexican government is not afraid to take its citizens to task for drinking too many sugary soft drinks. They are getting hit with a 5% tax. The purpose of this tax is 2 fold--to generate revenue from the booming consumption of soft drinks (Mexico is second only to the US in per capita consumption of carbonated drinks) and to discourage drinking of them because of health problems (I hope we all know how silly this left hand/right hand trick looks). I'm assuming the government is also subsidizing the Mexican sugar industry.

All this leads me to a suggestion. If the Mexican government would just call its people home with good jobs, infrastructure, health care and education, they could stop all that soft drink consumption by Mexicans going on north of the border, and get tortilla prices under control by keeping their citizens in Mexico where they have more access to them.

Source: Latin American Economy & Business, January 2007.

Labels: Mexico, nutrition

I'm not sure I understand all the anthropological gooble-de-gook in this article, but I'm thinking these authors (the et al were almost all Hispanic surnamed) believe something in evil capitalism is keeping Hispanic border guards from siding with the Mexican illegals. I wonder--did anyone blame capitalism when German surnamed 3rd and 4th generation young men were fighting Germans in WWII?

"U.S. Immigration Officers of Mexican Ancestry as Mexican Americans, Citizens, and Immigration Police" by Josiah McC. Heyman and others, Current Anthropology, volume 43 (2002), pages 479–507

Summary
"U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers of Mexican ancestry do not identify with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants. Instead, they understand themselves as U.S. citizens who reject both domestic racism and ethnic loyalties that cross national borders. Their self-understandings emerge from processes that include U.S. citizenship ideology and social mobility into primary-labor-market jobs with stability, benefits, and progressive careers. These processes insulate them from the experience of immigrants in casual and insecure labor markets devoid of social benefits. Thus they differ from immigrants not only in being on opposite sides of the bureaucratic encounter but also in being at opposite poles of bureaucratized social citizenship. This suggests that a cause of opposition to immigration in advanced capitalist societies is that citizenship-based job and benefit systems restrict the scope of empathy."

While my power steering fluid was dripping out yesterday (I didn't know it), I was driving along and listening to someone report that the border guard who was sentenced to a minimum security prison but sent to a medium security instead and placed in the general population where he was badly beaten by other prisoners. And now it has come out that the government may have lied at their trial. If Bush doesn't shape up on border protection for us, he's going to lose his support from conservatives for his plan to help Iraqis protect their borders.

"In the high-profile case of two U.S. Border Patrol officers imprisoned after shooting and wounding a Mexican drug smuggler, two Department of Homeland Security documents apparently contradict the version of events put forth by the U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted the case.

The internal Department of Homeland Security memoranda – which have been denied Congress despite repeated requests by two House members – show that within one month of the shooting incident involving Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, government investigators had identified the smuggler as Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila.

But this seems to contradict U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton's claim that Aldrete-Davila came forward through a Mexican lawyer who offered to identify his client in exchange for immunity." Jan. 31 report. Update here

Then reaching back a few years, I thought I'd check on the "Mexican national" as he was called then in the MSM news reports, who alledgely let his 23 sick and elderly passengers die when he abandoned his van accident during the Rita hurricane. Apparently, the transportation company has had to pay (as it should) a few million in damages and shape up their falsified log sheets for drivers (they're still in business?). Juan Robles Gutierrez was an illegal alien with no driver's license. Not sure what happened to him, but looks like both the U.S. and Mexico were looking out for his civil rights. If it's like the border patrol agent case, he probably got immunity for testifying against the van company and a green card.

It's too discouraging to even track him down on the internet. Sort of like losing the power steering fluid.

Beginning January 23, 2007, 13 deputies and jailers from Alamance County, NC "started about a month of training in Charlotte to become federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. In September, the Department of Homeland Security formally approved an agreement with Alamance County to train and deputize the officers. The agreement came about, in part, with the approval of the Alamance County commissioners, in particular through the efforts of Commissioner Tim Sutton, an outspoken immigration reform advocate.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is part of the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in March 2003 from two former federal agencies -- the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Customs Service. A 1996 federal law, known as the Immigration and Nationality Act, authorizes training and deputizing local officers to be federal agents. According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Web site, to qualify for the program, local officers must: Be U.S. citizens. Pass a background check. Have two years' experience on their current job. Have no pending disciplinary actions." Source: Times-News (Burlington, NC), 01/23/2007, available through Access My Library.

Here's another story on Sutton's efforts from last fall, which appear to have been successful.

In the United States tuberculosis was declining until 1985. Then in 1986 it increased 1.1% and by 1993 it was up by 18.4% over the 1985 figures. The population groups with TB were primarily homeless, prisoners, men with HIV, migrant farm workers and immigrants. Then the rate of infection started to go back down. Even so, in 2003 the CDC estimated that 10-15 million people in the U.S. were latently infected with TB and increasingly it is drug resistant.

I'm just thinking here--don't have the answers yet--just trying to connect the dots.

I wonder what happened in the mid-1980s and the early 90s to change the infection rate? In 1986 Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and there was a mass legalization of illegal immigrants which had the effect of bringing even more illegals into the country as they joined relatives and hoped for a similar opportunity (like many of the proposals currently being floated). Meanwhile, by 1993, many of the HIV population were surviving due to the drug cocktails and they were no longer immune compromised and so susceptible to TB, so their numbers decreased even as more illegals with the disease entered the country.

Instead of seeing rational measures to keep out people with TB who will be working in our restaurants, nursing homes, and schools, we will see more proposals by the medical community that we create a friendlier environment, so the illegals won't be afraid of medical treatment.

Here's the template, and it appeared in JAMA in 2005:

"More than half of US multidrug-resistant strains occur in foreign-born individuals who reside in the United States. Control measures require intensive case finding, appropriate treatment programs, and the willingness of foreign-born residents to comply with treatment. The latter is a difficult task because cultural and language barriers along with fears about the US legal system hamper public health efforts. As shown in the study by Granich et al, some foreign-born residents may just disappear into society without completing therapy." "Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis," JAMA. 2005;293:2788-2790.

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