Sometime you get what you asked for ...

... and don't like it. Really don't like.

The state of Alabama has spent millions on attracting foreign auto companies to come to their state, mostly in tax incentives. It has been so successful at this that Mercedes Benz and other foreign companies hire almost 7% of the state's workforce.

So then Alabama passes one of the harshest anti-illegal immigrant law in the country.
Bingo!

An Alabama police officer snags himself a real live undocumented alien driving a rented car who is immediately hauled off to the nearest jail. He was booked for violating the new immigration law.

They had arrested a German executive of Mercedes Benz who had left his passport in his hotel room.

As the local police chief said of the arrest: "I'm not surprised at the amount of attention this has drawn. I expected it would take something like this to get attention." Keep in mind that most police forces were opposed to the new law.

But there is an upside to this story. There is now evidence that at least one Alabama state senator is not a complete fool. State Senator Slade Blackwell told the New York Times:

"The longer the bill has been out, the more unintended consequences we have found," he told the paper. "All of us realize we need to change it."


no word yet about what the Germans think of this.

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More on Rubio

Over at the Frum Forum the crowd is having a minor meltdown over a Frum post chastising some on the Right for defending Rubio's 'exaggeration.' Some are seeking to claim that Rubio's parents are real exiles because they somehow 'sensed' that things were going to go bad - at a time when Fidel was still hanging around cheap cafeteria's in Mexico City writing his latest manifestos (please see small print).

So far, my favorite comment is this from Watusie:

But what the WaPo has revealed is that he is not the son of exiles; he is an anchor baby for economic migrants.

Which as far as I can tell is literally true.

But of course there are Hispanics, and then there are Hispanics. Get to land as a Cuban and you are welcomed with open arms. Get to land as a Mexican - and you are forever an illegal who should be sent back with your children. A curious dichotomy.

NOTE: I ate at one of the cafeteria's famous as a Castro hangout. He used to pen his famous 'manifestos' there. By an odd coincidence Carmen's godmother and her husband were couriers for Castro. The godmother had the typescript of one of el maximo lider's manifestos with corrections in his own hand. Small world.

The allure of immigrant labor

I have been pointing this out to people for some time. When you hire immigrants, legal or illegal, you get hard working adults, many of whom are trying to raise a family. They work under conditions and for less pay than the same kind of folks from America will work for.

Now that Alabama is determined to fill all of its agricultural jobs with citizens and legal immigrants, some farmers are discovering this.

Potato farmer Keith Smith saw most of his immigrant workers leave after Alabama's tough immigration law took effect, so he hired Americans. It hasn't worked out: Most show up late, work slower than seasoned farm hands and are ready to call it a day after lunch or by midafternoon. Some quit after a single day.

And from Georgia, which passed similar laws?

In south Georgia, Connie Horner has heard just about every reason unemployed Americans don't want to work on her blueberry farm. It's hot, the hours are long, the pay isn't enough and it's just plain hard.

"You can't find legal workers," Horner said. "Basically they last a day or two, literally."

I heard this over the years from other small businesses. Of course, one solution would be pay higher wages. But that seems to be anathema to all concerned, including the politicians who are determined to clean up the illegal alien mess.

be careful what you wish for.

Taxes and the Illegals

One of my favorite complaints about illegal immigrants is that they don't pay taxes.

Here is a little snippet from other the latest and last New York Times column by Bob Herbert:

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

And perfectly legal too, thanks to friends in high places.

and I believe 41% of American citizens pay no income tax either.

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Illegal Immigrants in the Tar Heel State

Last spring I had an overt, died in the wool, white supremacist in my class on Migration in World History. One day he went on one of his rants about how awful illegal immigrants were because they were causing our community college system to collapse by crowding into classes where they couldn't speak English. I told him I thought that was nonsense and I was in a position to know, being a professor within the higher education field. Students who get into community colleges speak English, and there are not that many of them. How could the people accused of being willing to work for sub-American wages be able to send their children to schools charging out of state tuition rates, as North Carolina does. He didn't buy it.

Providentially when I got home that night I found in the local paper this article by Scott Mooneyham (a columnist who covers state politics) which provided me with the hard numbers to make the point I wanted to make. So the next class I asked my class a few questions.

1. How many students go to NC community colleges?
Answer: about 300,000. Most of the students thought many times more.

2. What percentage of these are illegal residents?
Answer: community college officials say that in 2008 it was 112 students, which is considerably less than 1%. Actually it's about .00038. Most students thought it was as high as 20% and several thought as high as 50% (no, I don't know what planet they live on either).

3. How many times the instate tuition rate do out-of-state students pay?
Answer: It varies a bit, but Mooneyham gives the figure for out-of-state tuition as $7,700 per year. That seems to be about 5 times as much. Students were all over the map on this one, though one or two out-of-state students got it right.

What I didn't ask them, but should have, was how much this costs the state of North Carolina to educate this horde of illegals in community colleges.

Answer: it doesn't - in 2008 the state made about $185,000 off of them. Also, since the state requires that they have graduated from an American high school, it is difficult to believe very many of those 112 were unable to speak English. Most of the ones I know personally speak English exactly like the locals, sadly. As to how overcrowded this makes our community colleges? Not at all. They go to the back of the line and are only admitted if space is then available.

just my luck, the day I did all this the class white supremacist was absent. Oh well.

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They still need us! They really really need us!

Teachers that is. Especially ones that demand that you read.

David Frum notices that as manufacturers start to rehire, there is a serious problem with the population they are expecting to hire from.

As manufacturing work gets more taxing, manufacturers are looking at a work force that is actually becoming less literate and less skilled.

In 2007, ETS — the people who run the country’s standardized tests — compiled a battery of scores of basic literacy conducted over the previous 15 years and arrived at a startling warning: On present trends, the country’s average score on basic literacy tests will drop by 5 percent by 2030 as compared to 1992.

That’s a disturbing headline. Behind the headline is even worse news.

His explanation is not convincing (the vast majority of potential hires are natives and the products of American schools), but at least it's a start for a discussion of just what we are doing about education. In this state, that would be cutting budgets massively at both the state and local level and stagnating teachers' salaries along with a few unpaid leave days.

But we must do everything we can not to raise taxes back to the level of, say, the 90s.

About immigration

Another out of touch elitist progressive wants to lay out the welcome mat for foreigners ...

... uh, wait. That's JEB BUSH!

Never mind.

(Actually, I am surprised this wasn't published in the Wall Street Journal).

we elected the wrong Bush

But it's not about race

After that bracing little refresher course on post-racial politics from South Carolina we can turn to the great state of Arizona, where events have unjustly earned the state a reputation as being filled with anti-Mexican racists.

Hard to see why anyone would think that, but there is this from a town in Arizona called Prescott where the local elementary school decided to have a mural painted. Some of the children in the mural are based on actual students at the school. Here's a sample of some reactions, a told by the artist in charge of the project to the Prescott Daily Courier:

As the Miller Valley mural took shape, Wall said, he and the other artists working at the site heard regular racial slurs from the passengers of cars driving by.

Wall reports hearing comments such as "You're desecrating our school," "Get the ni----- off the wall," and "Get the sp-- off the wall."

"The pressure stayed up consistently," Wall said. "We had two months of cars shouting at us."

The hostility seems to have been sparked at least in part by local city councilman Steve Blair, but since he tells us " 'I'm not a racist by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever people start talking about diversity, it's a word I can't stand.' " ... and " 'The focus doesn't need to be on what's different; the focus doesn't need to be on the minority all the time' " it could not be about race.

My imagination may be more flexible than Councilman Blair assumes.

the kid in question btw is an Hispanic (legal) but don't worry - the school told the artists to lighten his face.

Japan and illegal immigrants

I am putting this article up because I want to share it with my students in my 'Migration and World History' class. It is from the WaPo. Japan's problem with illegals, immigration in general, and a shrinking population are different from ours in major ways. Still, watching the way the government is enforcing the laws on immigration might be instructive.

Here is the gist of it in two paragraphs:

As a result, the number of illegal immigrants has been slashed, often by deportation, from 300,000 in 1995 to just 130,000, a minuscule number in comparison to other rich countries. The United States, whose population is 2 1/2 times that of Japan's, has about 90 times as many illegal immigrants (11.6 million). ...

...That policy, in a country running low on working-age people, is helping to push Japan off a demographic cliff. It already has fewer children and more elderly as a percentage of its population than any country in recorded history. If trends continue, the population of 127 million will shrink by a third in 50 years and by two-thirds in a century. By 2060, Japan will have two retirees for every three workers -- a ratio that will weaken and perhaps wreck pension and health-care systems.

Well, someone is going to have to pay our Social Security tax so I can retire in relative comfort.

beside, I am well on my way to learning Spanish (after a mere 45 years of trying).

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Dollars and sense on Immigration

Every public policy no matter how small has a price tag, one way and another. The Cato Institute has figured out what it would mean to legalize illegal immigrants.

A new study from the libertarian CATO Institute concludes that legalizing the more than eight million undocumented workers in the United States would have significant economic benefits for the country, while simply enhancing border enforcement and applying restrictive immigration laws would actually hurt the U.S. economically.

How much benefit? $180 billion.

and even Victor Davis Hanson has admitted that we are NOT going to have the stomach for deporting all of them.

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Problems with immigration and citizenship

Just in case you thought my complaints about the way CIS and the State Department handled young Mickey's case was merely a private snark, it seems that Hilzoy at Obsidian wings* and Michael Ledeen at National Review Online are both hopping mad at the same type of studied indifference and bad faith, this time in cases that could literally cost a person their life.

These clowns have to go.



*home of the ever popular Sniper Kitty.

The Primaries and Immigration

Several Republican candidates made a strict anti-illegal immigration policy the hallmark of their bid for the nomination. They are all gone now. Instead John McCain, who has been bitterly criticized by self-appointed spokesmen for the party for being too moderate on immigration, is now the presumed winner of the nomination.

The Wall Street Journal, which has always supported immigration reform that allows for a clear-cut path to permanent residency and citizenship points out this fact. Read the whole column, but their summation is:

The GOP primaries have been about as clear a market test as one could imagine for the restrictionist position. Mr. Romney adopted it in full-throated fashion, as Fred Thompson did earlier, and as Mike Huckabee does now. If hostility to illegal immigration were as decisive a voting issue as the TV and radio talkers claim, Senator McCain would not be the presumptive Republican nominee. And this is all without taking account of Democrats and Independents, who tend to be even less restrictionist.

The primaries suggest that even GOP voters appreciate that immigration is more complicated than conservative media elites pretend. Mr. McCain has adapted his immigration position over the last year and now talks about securing the border before other reforms go ahead. But he also talks about a guest-worker program to deal with economic realities, as well as the folly of deportation.

This must be right, even wise, since it agrees with Clemens' position. Once again the voters, even in primaries which usually bring out the committed and doctrinaire, seem to have more sense than most of the politicos.

Immigration and Americanism

I was browsing through manybooks.net looking for free books I could load into the Kindle reader I am thinking about getting when I came across a description of As a Chinaman Saw Us, a book written in 1904. It offers a satirical view of America in the guise of a fictitious report from the 'Chinaman.' Here is what he supposedly said about Chicago:

About one-half only of the total population speak or understand English. There are 500,000 Germans, 125,000 Poles, 100,000 Swedes, 90,000 Bohemians, 50,000 Yiddish, 25,000 Dutch, 25,000 Italians, 15,000 French, 10,000 Irish, 10,000 Servians, 10,000 Lutherans, 7,000 Russians, and 5,000 Hungarians in Chicago. You will be surprised to learn that numbers do not count. The 500,000 Germans are not the dominating power, nor are the 100,000 Swedes. The 10,000 Irish are said absolutely to control the political situation. You will ask if I believe that this monster foreign element can be reduced to a homogeneous unit. I reply, yes. Fifty years from to-day they will all be Americans, and a majority will, doubtless, show you their family tree, tracing their ancestry back to the Mayflower.

Many of those Germans, btw, would be persecuted and condemned as enemy aliens who had not assimilated properly when we went to war with their presumed Fatherland in 1917. There were whole sections of Chicago where you heard nothing but German, with German newspapers and German language schools. Thank god we got rid of all that.

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USCIS: the most hated entity in the Federal Gov't

At least at the Clemens' household. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services. They are the clowns preventing our adopted 'grandson' from coming into America. Making our homeland safe from incoming 6 month old infants. It's explained here and here. [We aren't too fond of our Senator, Elizabeth Dole, either. Her office refuses to even respond to requests for help]

But, lest you think that Clemens and Carmen et al are simply malcontents focusing only on their own peculiar experience, here is a helpful editorial from today's Washington Post explaining just how inept and out of control these clowns are. You will notice that they are self funded, btw. That means they are NOT controlled in any way by congress. They can, and do, tell Senators to buzz off if they have the temerity to question CIS judgement. Perhaps that explains why Senator Dole's office refuses to get involved.

Anyway, here is a key quote from the editorial:

IN JULY, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services increased naturalization and visa fees across the board by an average of 66 percent. One fee more than septupled: the application to change from temporary to permanent residency, which went from $180 to $1,370. Immigration advocacy groups and other critics (including us) decried the ghastly expenses immigrants faced. Still, USCIS pledged that the increases would benefit applicants by allowing the agency to reduce processing times: from six months to four months for permanent residency visas, and from seven months to five months for naturalization applications.

Fast-forward to today. As USCIS Director Emilio T. Gonzalez testified at a House hearing last week, permanent residency applications now take about a year to process, and naturalization applications take a whopping 18 months. USCIS attributes this to the surge in applications it received in June and July -- 3 million applications and petitions in the summer of 2007, up from 1.8 million in the summer of 2006 -- and says it had no way of anticipating the increase. But USCIS should have known that raising fees so precipitously would have this effect.

This is typical of how things operate at CIS: price gauge so they can increase their budget without Congressional oversight, blithely make pledges they can't possibly meet, and then stonewall. Twits.


[not that it is the main thrust of my post, but this 'unavoidable' delay in processing citizenship will almost certainly benefit the Republican Party in November]

Amnesty for Illegals?

Just when I have given up on him Victor Davis Hanson returns to some plain spoken common sense. He sees the trap of Repubs taking their anti-amnesty into the realm of mass deportation which is, after all, the logical end point to such talk.

... while it is easy to say, "I oppose amnesty in all its forms," note apparently how difficult it is for the candidates to make the next intellectually honest and logical corollary, "Thus I am for the mass deportation of all illegal aliens."

It is fine and good to talk of "attrition" by slowly and incrementally rounding up illegal aliens as they come in contact with government agencies and need various licenses, papers, statements, etc., but you are still talking about deporting millions, who are currently working and crime-free, rather promptly.

His conclusion:

Bottom line: Republicans have to be careful that they don't turn a windfall issue (the Democrats are mostly open-borders and captive to the identity-politics wing of the party) into a mass deportation albatross.

Personally I am not so sure they can do this. I am pretty sure, however, that the Demos are capable of mishandling the issue, one way or another.


One of these days I am going to have to get around to reading Hanson's book Mexifornia.

Immigration: As Arizona goes, so goes ....?

Well, let's hope not the rest of the country. Arizona has just passed some draconian, not to say stupidly harsh, laws against illegal immigration. It is designed to hit businesses that hire illegals as well as the illegals themselves. Since illegals in Arizona represent about 14% of the workforce this could have dramatic repercussions on Arizona's economy, law enforcement, and society in general.

The Washington Post is pessimistic. Me too. Except for this: we can all watch what happens in Arizona - if it is the disaster that the WaPo thinks it will be, we will be forewarned. If not, we can take that lesson to heart also.

Though I for one would be dumbfounded.

Adios, Muchachos!

I am curious about Republican strategy for the future. Apparently I am not the only one. The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today titled 'Hispanics and the GOP.' It hits on a topic I've mentioned several times: if the Repubs are seen as anti-illegal immigrant, plus anti-legal immigarnt, how can it avoid being seen as anit-Hispanic? And since Hispanics make up about 8% of the electorate and will be 20% by 2020? And how will this bode well for the Repubs when they have seen their edge among Hispanic voters rise to more than 40% in 2004 only to drop down to less than 30% in 2006? Right now it seems that 51% of Hispanic citizens favor the Demos to 21% for the Repubs.

To understand this remarkable erosion of Latino support for Republicans, look no further than the most recent Presidential debates. While GOP candidates debated the urgency of erecting a fence from California to Texas along the Mexican border, Democrats debated in Spanish on Univision.

And:

... getting people to vote for you is easier when you're not likening them to Islamic terrorists, or implying that Latino men are hard-wired for gang-banging. Unlike blacks, who have hewed to Democrats in large majorities for decades, Latinos are proven swing voters, and Republican energies would be better employed trying to win them over instead of trying to capitalize on ethnic polarization to win GOP primaries.

There's precedent here. In the mid-1990s after California Governor Pete Wilson embraced Proposition 187, which denied education and health-care benefits to the children of illegal aliens, Latino support for Republicans fell to 25% from 53%, and GOP support among Asians and women declined as well.

BTW, as an example of the delusional thinking and denial that goes into this, I have seen some Republican commentators simply deny that Proposition 187 had anything to do with the implosion of Republican votes in California.

But wait! We are only talking about illegal immigrants here, the law breakers who deserve this negative rhetoric!

Well, no.

... but when the target of scorn is the mother or brother or cousin of someone here lawfully, that becomes a difference without much of a distinction politically. Moreover, Tom Tancredo, the pied piper of restrictionists in Congress, wants a "time out" on all legal immigration, and Hispanic voters are wise to the fact that it's not because he thinks there are too many Italians in the U.S.

And then there are the Irish! Once regarded as even worse than the Hispanics! Really.

Es la verdad.


Just curious, but would that time out on legal immigraion include Canadians? Cubans (who overwhelmingly vote Repub)?

Anti-immigration rules and employment

Actually, I am not sure if this is because of stupidly restrictive rules, incompetence in ICE, or simple nastiness. But the anti-immigration mood IS having an impact.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the opening of a software development centre in Vancouver after losing a fight to ease restrictions on the admission of foreign workers to the United States.

Well, there goes the computer industry.

Way to go, Canada.*


*The views of this song do not necessarily reflect the views of this blog nor its administrator.

Fallout from the Immigraton Bill fiasco

Here is an interesting take on the failure of the Immigration Bill - it seems that a great many Hispanic legal immigrants who had no intention to become citizens are now signing up to do so. They are very specific in saying that they want to be able to express their opinions about the opponents of the bill by voting. What a great idea.

The comments from readers are interesting too. Here's part of one:

I’ve had three close relatives become naturalized citizens. My wife, my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law(who came over here as a nurse). None are fans of illegal immigrants but also think Immigration, ICE, CIS, whatever you want to call it is both mismanaged and shouldn't have hiked the fees like they did.

As far as I know, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, who has ever dealt with any aspect of ICE, CIS, or the diplomatic personnel taking applications for visas have ever had anything good to say about the process, either the way they were treated or the accuracy of the information. This includes the writer of this blog and at least two of its readers (Maira and Cantanima) .

The government can be quite efficient, considerably more efficient than business or even NGOs - when it is politically expedient to be so. Social Security is a good example. Why are our immigration services so dysfunctional?

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Immigration bill autopsy

At least according to John Derbyshire over on NRO. I don't think anyone at 'National Review' was happy with the immigration bill. Feel free to read it and give me your comments.

The Derby is most interesting as fights his way through the pro-immigrant argument that Bush makes that there are some jobs that Americans won't do. He is skeptical but finally admits that there are, indeed, some jobs that could not be filled at the going hourly wage. His response is bracing:

I would still say: Well, then, let those jobs go hang. If you can’t, for love or money, find any citizens or legal residents to pick your apples, at wage levels not so high that consumers refuse to buy the apples, well, let the apples rot. That’s hard on you, I understand. You’ll have to find some other way to make a living. That happens to people, though — it’s happened to me a couple of times. And the U.S.A. won’t fold for want of apples.

As for me, I am not sure it is a question of Americans being willing to do the jobs, but whether or not there are enough Americans to fill all the jobs. Historically we are at relatively low levels of unemployment, so where do we find the workers?

Teenagers? Well, if you are willing to work with an entire crew of teenagers, get to it. Just be sure you adjust your hours so that they can still make it to school - which, if it is doing its job is busy ensuring that they will not have to do such work as adults. When you think about it, that is in fact the purpose of our education system.

Of course there are always retirees who can at least work part time. Somehow, though, I can't quite see too many of them being capable of putting in even 20 hrs a week at, say, the local chicken factory here in beautiful (and aromatic) downtown Wilkesboro. I am also not sure that most employers want to deal exclusively with part timers, although there are some advantages to that (fewer benefits to pay for, for one).

Anyway, there is always the Derbyshire solution: find another line of work. As he says, the USA won't fold if you drop dead, as it were.