Immigration
November 13th
posted: November 13, 2007 3:19 EST
His campaign down the tubes, the feeble presidential candidate finally hits YouTube with a shock-and-awe ad.
By Michael Roberts, Westword (Denver)
To paraphrase Dick Cheney, Rep. Tom Tancredo's quizzical presidential campaign is in its last throes. But it's going out with a bang -- literally -- with a commercial running in Iowa that makes Lyndon Johnson's infamous 1964 mushroom-cloud spot look subtle.
The ad (click here) begins with Tancredo offering an endorsement of the message that follows: "Hi, I'm Tom Tancredo, and I approve this message because someone needs to say it." An instant later, the screen fills with overtly scary, often overexposed images of a hooded man placing a bomb in a book bag and heading to a mall. Meanwhile, a narrator who bears a striking aural resemblance to Boris Karloff in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas declares: "There are consequences to open borders beyond the twenty million aliens who've come to take our jobs. Islamic terrorists now freely roam U.S. soil." Next, he adds, "Jihadists who froth with hate here to do as they have in London and Spain and Russia," with the locations in question punctuated by shots of a blasted bus, a destroyed train and a lifeless, bloodied young boy. Then it's back to the mall, and once the voice intones, "The price we pay for spineless politicians who refuse to defend our borders against those who come to kill," we see the figure set down the book bag just prior to a fade to black and the sound of an explosion. The final graphic reads: "Tancredo... before it's too late."
Over the top? Oh man -- but it's also very much in keeping with Tancredo's true-believer style, which is analyzed in Westword's 2003 profile. During his early days as a Colorado state representative, Tancredo was known as one of the "House crazies." Iowans who see his latest commercial may well revive the nickname.
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posted: November 13, 2007 3:09 EST
Dim pol Fife Symington blinded by the bright lights on Larry King's show.
By Tony Ortega, Village Voice
Before people get too worked up about disgraced former Arizona governor Fife Symington’s “disclosure” that he saw the 1997 “UFO” known as the Phoenix Lights—the subject of a breathless segment on the Larry King Live show last week—a few words about that phenomenon from someone who actually investigated it.
In 1997, Symington was in the middle of the bank-fraud scandal that would bounce him from office, but that’s not my way of questioning what he saw in the sky—thousands of Arizonans did, in fact, witness the famous Phoenix Lights that March. But from the start, bad reporting of the facts, hyperventilating by UFO “experts,” and constant stupidity from television reporters in particular resulted in a false impression that has hardened into seeming fact a decade later—that the “vee” of lights seen flying over the entire length of the state was explained away by the Air Force as flares dropped from military planes.
That is not the case. But it’s not hard to see why people think as much. Because the bare facts of what happened that night almost never get told by a confused press, even ten years later.
Here’s the truth: there were two, distinct events that happened the night of March 13, 1997 in the skies over Arizona, which I reported in great detail in a story that appeared a year later in the Phoenix New Times. The first event was the famous “vee,” which appeared over northern Arizona and gradually traveled south over nearly the entire length of the state, eventually passing south of Tucson. This is the “wedge-shaped” object that Symington and hundreds or even thousands of others saw—including two of my colleagues at the New Times. Timings of the “vee” sighting started at about 8:15 over the Prescott area, and it was seen south of Tucson by about 8:45. That’s 200 miles in 30 minutes, suggesting an air speed of 400 miles per hour.
News of the sighting spread fast, drawing out many other people who began looking at the sky, some with camcorders. And it was this second wave of observers who caught the second event of the night at about 10 pm, a set of nine lights falling behind the Sierra Estrella, a mountain ridge to the southwest of Phoenix. Television reporters were the first to suggest that this was a series of flares dropped over the North Tac range behind the Estrella. But naturally, people who had seen only the 8:30 “vee” were incredulous—how could “flares” dropped from planes fly over the entire state in a vee formation?
Well, they couldn’t, of course. But to this day, reporters almost never distinguish between the two events and the explanations that were soon presented for each.
The flares over the Estrella were soon cleared up. The Air Force, after some maddening early denials, eventually owned up that the Maryland Air National Guard had dropped them over the North Tac range. So much for the 10 pm sighting.
But what rarely gets reported is that the famous vee was also solved quite early. First of all, contrary to what you usually hear, there was a videotape made of the vee. I saw it after questioning the person who shot it (he also shot the 10 pm flares over the Estrella), and the video quite clearly shows the lights moving in relation to each other, rather than as lights on a solid object.
The human eye, however, seeing point sources of light in a dark Arizona sky, will tend to fill in the space between the lights in a contrast effect—convincing the eyewitness that he’s seen a solid object. Again, however, videotape of the ‘vee’ clearly showed that this was not the case.
(My personal favorite of all the accounts that night is a sighting that was convincing proof that the “vee” was not solid. A man saw it pass directly over the face of the Moon, and instead of a solid object, he saw five contrails pass over the Moon, making the Moon look blurry. Now, instead of concluding that he’d seen five planes flying in formation with their exhaust plumes plainly showing against the Moon, he instead insisted that the “captain” flying the alien triangular craft had turned it transparent just at the right moment so that he could see the Moon through it!)
Also, reports that the vee was low overhead and moving slowly have to be discounted. The human eye is notoriously unable to judge the distance to overhead point sources of light in a dark sky. Simple physics dictates that in order to fly from Prescott to Tucson in 30 minutes the vee was moving very fast, and, logic dictates, at a high altitude.
But there’s an even better reason to believe that the vee was not what Symington and others believed. As I reported in June of 1997, there was a credible report of the vee’s nature that was received immediately by UFO “experts” but not followed up—at least until I checked it out. It turned out that an amateur astronomer, Mitch Stanley, had been outside that night using a Dobsonian telescope, and had captured the vee in his field of view, giving him a view 60 times the magnification of the human eye. (I’m a builder of telescopes, and I thoroughly checked out his telescope and quizzed him about his use of it. There was no reason to question this young man’s veracity.) That March evening, his mother was standing nearby and could see that he was looking at the vee through the scope (I questioned them both) and they both say this was his response when she asked him what it was: “Planes.”
What I reported a decade ago:
What looked like individual lights to the naked eye actually split into two under the resolving power of the telescope. The lights were located on the undersides of squarish wings, Mitch says. And the planes themselves seemed small, like light private planes. Stanley watched them for about a minute, and then turned away. It was the last thing the amateur astronomer wanted to look at. "They were just planes, I didn't want to look at them," Stanley says when he's asked why he didn't stare at them longer. He is certain about what he saw: "They were planes. There's no way I could have mistaken that."
The only real mystery of the Phoenix Lights is which group of planes this was. I suggested that Stanley’s description (squarish wings) sounded like A-10s, not private planes. But the Maryland National Guard denied that they had flown over that path before dropping flares later.
Ten years later, however, the Phoenix Lights still live because it’s claimed by UFO supporters that the only explanation for the flying vee was that the Air Force called it flares. You’ll hear that explanation ridiculed again tonight on Larry King Live, and the “UFO community” will no doubt consider it a huge victory. So much for common sense.
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October 29th
posted: October 29, 2007 4:05 EST
Radio host Joyce Kaufman wins fans by flaying undocumented immigrants.
By Amy Guthrie, Broward-Palm Beach New Times
One morning in March, Joyce Kaufman called Comcast, her cable TV provider. It was the sort of mundane chore most folks must endure, but for Kaufman it became a turning point that would affect not just her but thousands of listeners in South Florida.
That day, Kaufman reached a customer-service recording in English. She was asked to press one to continue in English or two if she preferred Spanish. And that was it. She was enraged.
A tanned and tattooed 53-year-old with copper-blond hair, Kaufman hosts a radio talk show. She's been on the air in South Florida since 1991, playing music and hosting talk shows. She's had the Joyce Kaufman Show, a general talk program on WFTL-AM (850) broadcasting from Fort Lauderdale, since 2001. In the past, she's offered callers and other listeners her views on everything from the war in Iraq to the travails of O.J. Simpson, but now she is imbued with a new and more singular purpose. Thanks to Comcast, the husky-voiced Kaufman is suddenly reborn as an advocate for immigration control.
She arrived at work that day still fuming, she recalled recently. For her, a Spanish speaker with Puerto Rican roots, the cable company's language prompt implied that Hispanics couldn't learn English or that they needn't bother to.
Her coworkers at WFTL encouraged her to vent her outrage on the air. When she did, she says, the phone lines lit up.
read on . . .
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posted: October 29, 2007 4:00 EST
How can a gringa deal with her friends' racism?
Dear Mexican: Why do so many of my peers assume I must have low self-esteem just because I’m dating a Mexican guy? I finally found someone with my same values and who treats me way better than any gringo I ever dated. The same women who complain about ‘sleazy’ Mexican men go to France and giggle about ‘how flirtatious’ French men are. Fucking racists!
Dear Cute Little Gabacha: A couple of years ago, I dated a Vietnamese chica caliente whose only sins were that she studied Spanish in Guatemala and had racist parents. Remember that scene in Annie Hall where the bigoted grandmother of Woody Allen’s girlfriend imagined the nebbish as a Hasidic Jew? Substitute a sombrero for the shtreimel, and that was yo in the eyes of those damn chinitos. Despite my bachelor’s degree, full-time job, and lack of a mustache, my gal’s parents still disapproved of our relationship because I was Mexican—no other reason. The girl and I broke up after about a year, but that’s a different cuento. The point of this story is to say “Gracias” for noting how stupid non-Mexicans can become once a wab starts dating someone they know. Not to get all Abby in this column, but por favor, people: Judge a Mexican man by his accomplishments, not by how dark his skin is or his ability to grow a mustache within the hour. Too many good guys I know get burned this way (write in with your horror stories, cabrones!) and drown their sorrows in Herradura as a result. Who says Mexican men aren’t pussies?
And while we’re at it, Chulita, may God rain churros upon your days for further ridiculing the hypocrisy of your fellow gabachas. Look, chicas: Spare me your questions/rants about Mexican men ogling/whistling at/courting you. As Chulita correctly points out, isn’t it interesting how sexual harassment is interpreted as flirting when the horny man is some hot hombre and not a day laborer? I’m not excusing their actions—chivalry is muy bueno—but grabbing your nuts and catcalling chicks isn’t a Mexican trait; it’s a huevos thing. Ask Jack Nicholson if you don’t believe me.
read on . . .
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October 22nd
posted: October 22, 2007 1:49 EST
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Racial b.s. preserved in Watson's Cold Spring Harbor Lab. The lab's brilliant
Eugenics Archive shows past gaffes by other respected scientists.
Why does Dr. Watson bumble? Maybe he spends too much time — or not enough — in the incredible
archive of eugenics history at his own Long Island lab. No matter the reason, DNA pioneer
James Watson has a long history of expressing crackpot ideas like
his latest one about black people's supposedly inherent inferiority.
More on that later, but let's just say that Watson is likely to get less than a warm reception if he dares to visit the DNA learning center he has set up on the outskirts of Harlem.
He wouldn't be the first brilliant, rightly admired person to also be somewhat of a crackpot. Look at Ezra Pound, a poet even when he wasn't writing poetry, an inspiration to writers everywhere, and also a raving anti-Semite 24/7.
For further evidence of how brilliant members of our species can also be dolts, take a gander at "Never Again," my February 23, 2000 story about the Eugenics Archive at Watson's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. As I noted back then:
In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office was set up at Cold Spring Harbor, making the lab the center of what became an international movement. In the United States, the results ranged from "Fitter Families" contests, aimed at encouraging people of "good stock" to breed, to laws restricting immigration of non-WASPs and ordering sterilization of the "feebleminded."
Arguing for limiting immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Harry Laughlin, head of the ERO, told Congress in 1920, "We in this country have been so imbued with the idea of democracy or the equality of all men that we have left out of consideration the matter of blood or natural inborn hereditary mental and moral differences." Adolf Hitler, of course, took the same logic to pathological conclusions, using eugenics as a rationale for genocide.
[David] Micklos, the site's editor, doesn't mince words about the American involvement in eugenics. In one essay, he describes the ERO's journal Eugenical News as the "dominant mouthpiece for the racist and anti-immigration agenda of eugenics research."
The digital archive serves as a reminder that crackpot science isn't just the domain of Nazis and ignorant racists. Among the leaders of the American eugenics movement were Stanford president David Starr Jordan, Luther Burbank, and Alexander Graham Bell. Charles Darwin's son headed the Eugenics Society in England. The ERO itself was endowed by a grant from the widow of railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, and such population-control progressives as Margaret Sanger also believed in the cause.
If I'd been smarter, I would have interviewed Watson back then about the archive; he probably would have spouted lots of cracked stuff and I would have written a better story. But what do you want from me? I'm Jewish-Oklahoman. My father was born in Poland and grew up on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn; I was born and raised in Oklahoma. Speaking of faulty breeding, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was the melting pot of all sorts of wack theories and experiments concerning race, and many of them had nothing to do with black people but rather focused on the supposed inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans. In fact, it was the Nordic-superiority bullshit that so inspired Hitler and his crew.
Just because crackpots use your ideas doesn't make you yourself a crackpot, of course. There were plenty of influential, widely praised people who endorsed eugenics and embraced ideas of racial inferiority and its inevitable corollary: racial superiority. No doubt that current anti-Mexican cretins will use Watson's latest comments to fan the flames of the anti-immigration cause.
By the way, don't believe Watson when he now claims that what he said was aberrant.
Forget the journalistically inferior press in the U.S. Read the continuing coverage of this controversy in the Times (U.K.), which sparked this brouhaha with its October 14 piece by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe.
First, here are Watson's comments in context, from her piece:
Back in 1990, the journal Science commented: "To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script." When, in 2000, he left an audience reeling by suggesting a link between skin colour and sex drive — hypothesising that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos — some journalists suggested he had "opened a transatlantic rift". American scientists accused him of "trading on past successes to promote opinions that have little scientific basis". British academics countered that subjects should not be off limits because they are politically incorrect. Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, said that "nothing should stop you ascertaining the scientific truth; science must be free of concerns about gender and race".
He says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so".
When asked how long it might take for the key genes in affecting differences in human intelligence to be found, his "back-of-the-envelope answer" is 15 years. However, he wonders if even 10 years will pass. In his mission to make children more DNA-literate, the geneticist explains that he has opened a DNA learning centre on the borders of Harlem in New York. He is also recruiting minorities at the lab and, he tells me, has just accepted a black girl "but," he comments, "there's no one to recruit."
As the obviously racially inferior Rajeev Syal of the Times wrote on October 19 about the controversy stirred by Watson's comments:
He has courted controversy in the past, reportedly saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine that it would be homosexual.
He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos, and claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured.
David Lammy, the Skills Minister, whose family moved to Britain from the Caribbean, said yesterday that the views expressed by Dr Watson would be seized upon by far-right organisations such as the British National Party. "It is a shame that a man with a record of scientific distinction should see his work overshadowed by his own irrational prejudices," he said.
Look for those irrational prejudices to be seized upon by the anti-immigration cretins on this side of the Atlantic.
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October 18th
posted: October 18, 2007 4:40 EST
Professors caught in the feds' post-9/11 web of paranoia and incompetence.
By Lisa Rab, Cleveland Scene
Marixa Lasso and Jim Raden took their wedding vows in March. The family Lasso had adopted for herself in Cleveland, thousands of miles from her native Panama, encircled her that day. Fellow Case history professor Renée Sentilles provided the flowers and decorated the cake; a grad student's husband played DJ.
At 38, Lasso had waited long for this moment. Her youth was dedicated to building the perfect résumé — winning prestigious fellowships, gaining two coveted posts as a professor of Latin American history, writing a book.
She and Raden were planning an all-American life. Just two months after the wedding, the newlyweds steeled themselves for a brief separation. Lasso needed to spend the summer doing research in Panama. Raden flew down for a visit in June, urging her to hurry back. She planned to join him in August for a surprise birthday party for his mother. Then she'd return to Cleveland to teach her fall classes.
But when Lasso went to the U.S. consulate in Panama for a routine visa renewal, she hit a strange roadblock. After living, studying, and working in the United States for 13 years, she was suddenly barred from re-entering the country. Her visa could not be issued. She had to wait for additional "procedures."
No one could tell her why or how long it would take. The irony of her predicament was not lost on Lasso. When she first came to the U.S. in 1994, she was invited by the American government. She won a Fulbright fellowship — a program that, in addition to sending Americans abroad, funds academics wanting to do research in the United States. The program's quaint goal is to promote "mutual understanding" between America and other countries, and it worked well in Lasso's case.
She used the funding to earn a master's degree in history from Pitt, then got a doctorate at the University of Florida. A tiny woman with dark, sparkling eyes who quotes the Statue of Liberty's "huddled masses" inscription in her e-mails, she wrote about hot topics such as race and revolution in Colombia 200 years ago. Viewed as a rising star in her field, she had no trouble snagging a job at Cal State Los Angeles in 2002. It was a tenure-track position, offering the gold medal of academia — lifetime job security — if she did well.
Meanwhile, the world outside the ivory tower was changing. After 9/11, academics with names like Habib and Ramadan began to arouse suspicion. Asians, Latinos, and certain Europeans suddenly became a threat to unseen bureaucratic eyes within the U.S. government. Foreign scholars were being shut out of the country due to rarely explained visa problems.
Take Haluk Gerger, a Turkish political scientist and journalist who has criticized the presence of American nuclear weapons in Turkey. He was frequently jailed in his own country for protesting his government's treatment of Kurds. When he and his wife tried to visit America in October 2002, he experienced a strange moment of déjà vu. They landed at Newark airport and were informed that his 10-year visa had been revoked. He was fingerprinted, photographed, and forced to return to Europe.
A few months later, Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a Cuban scholar and former ambassador to the European Union, applied for a visa to speak in Dallas at the Latin American Studies Association's International Congress. He had no reason to expect trouble. He'd been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins and had recently finished a research fellowship at Harvard.
But after State Department officials in Havana discovered that he planned to lecture about the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, his visa was denied. No reason was given, but Treto was certain it wasn't a bureaucratic glitch. "Obviously they are trying to punish me for being so critical of U.S. policy toward Cuba," he told the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The same thing has happened to thousands of foreign scholars since the Twin Towers fell. While academics always had their fair share of immigration problems, Bush's war on terror provided a convenient excuse to bar critics — whether real or imagined — from entering the U.S.
Many who got stuck had nothing in their background that could even remotely be linked to terrorism. They merely studied subjects — or expressed views — considered sensitive by the Bush administration. In fact, their most common crime seemed to be harboring left-leaning sympathies for the underdog.
As the feds tightened visa checks, consular officials were warned that if they had doubts about an application, they should send it on to the bureaucratic jungle in Washington, D.C. Academics weren't told why their visas had been flagged or how long the reviews would take. People were delayed for months or forced to cancel their trips altogether. Most never received an explanation.
"After September 11 this became a very great concern," says Penny Rosser, director of the International Scholars Office at MIT. "The number of delays and denials skyrocketed for students and scholars."
read on . . .
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October 11th
posted: October 11, 2007 3:34 EST
Probably without the help of illegal immigrants.
By Carolyn Szczepanski, The Pitch (Kansas City)
In June, Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser announced that he intended to root out "community divisiveness" with a new slate of parks commissioners. But by appointing Northland resident Frances Semler, Funkhouser got more than a skilled gardener and well-regarded neighborhood president: Semler, a 73-year-old bookkeeper, is also a member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, an anti-illegal-immigration group that patrols the U.S. border, pickets construction sites and favors militaristic rhetoric to warn against an "invasion" of unlawful immigrants.
Instead of inspiring community inclusiveness, Funkhouser's appointment alienated the Hispanic community and many allied organizations that call the Minutemen a vigilante group.
read on . . .
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October 8th
posted: October 8, 2007 1:19 EST
Seattle's Casa Latina gets the public's -- and Judicial Watch's -- attention.
By Nina Shapiro, Seattle Weekly
Some people are intimidated and disturbed by the atmosphere created by these workers. But others are eager to exploit their cheap labor.
Public attention has been focused most recently on Casa Latina, a nonprofit that in 1999 established an organized, city-sanctioned day-labor center in Belltown, where workers had long gathered along Western Avenue.
Casa Latina is now looking to move to the Central District, a plan that has provoked escalating opposition from property owners there. Last week, some residents called in Judicial Watch, a conservative, Washington, D.C., group that opposes taxpayer subsidies for day-labor sites because they say many of the workers are illegal immigrants. The group, which successfully pressured a Virginia day-labor site to close, pledged to "investigate" the city of Seattle's funding of Casa Latina.
Meanwhile, the long-simmering drama outside the SoDo job market has been heating up, raising questions about whether day laborers can survive amicably anywhere.
read on . . .
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posted: October 8, 2007 1:10 EST
Lettuce have your huddled masses: Work force becomes truly globalized.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Beset by an immigration war on one front and just plain war on another front, government officials in the U.S. are frantically seeking more illegals for necessary farm work here and longer stays in Baghdad for shanghaied foreigners to build the unnecessary supermax American embassy.
As Nicole Gaouette of the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday,
With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, the Bush administration has begun quietly rewriting federal regulations to eliminate barriers that restrict how foreign laborers can legally be brought into the country.
The effort, urgently underway at the departments of Homeland Security, State and Labor, is meant to rescue farm owners caught in a vise between a complex process to hire legal guest workers and stepped-up enforcement that has reduced the number of illegal planters, pickers and middle managers crossing the border.
Meanwhile in Baghdad, workers from the Philippines and other countries who were shanghaied by U.S.-hired contractors to build the supermax U.S. embassy will probably be roped into staying longer as that project falls behind and its cost soars toward $1 billion. Check out the testimony at intrepid California congressman Henry Waxman's July hearing for details on the shanghai gestures.
Without addressing the issue of the original trickery that landed many of those foreign workers in Baghdad against their will, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported yesterday:
The embassy, which will be the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world, was budgeted at $592 million. The core project was supposed to have been completed by last month, but the timetable has slipped so much that the State Department has sought and received permission from the Iraqi government to allow about 2,000 non-Iraqi construction employees to stay in the country until March.
As I wrote on August 8:
Shanghaied to build to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Working on the construction site without safety equipment — or even shoes. The story of the alleged kidnapping of Filipino workers who thought they were going to Dubai but instead were flown to Baghdad to help build the $500 million embassy is stunning.
That story was broken by others, including David Phinney of Inter Press Service in June, who noted that contractor First Kuwaiti has reaped $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers for construction of military camps and the embassy. Phinney wrote:
Because of allegations of labour trafficking and other abuses, First Kuwaiti is also being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, an action precipitated by U.S. citizens claiming that company workers loaded onto planes in Kuwait were handed boarding passes for Dubai before flying directly to Baghdad. The passengers were mostly low-wage Asian migrant labourers earning as little as 250 dollars a month.
Wait a sec. As Phinney also notes, Filipino laborers at the new embassy are making much more than that:
The agreement also lays out salary: 346 dollars a month for eight-hour days, seven days a week, plus 104 dollars a month for mandatory two hours overtime every day.
Pay is marginally better in our fields. Gaouette's Times story mentions almost by the way that "almost three-quarters of farmworkers are thought to be illegal immigrants."
The percentage of people who mow our lawns is probably even higher, but anyway, Gaouette notes that the White House is extremely concerned about this aspect of the free-market economy:
"It is important for the farm sector to have access to labor to stay competitive," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. "As the southern border has tightened, some producers have a more difficult time finding a workforce, and that is a factor of what is going on today."
The push to speedily rewrite the regulations is also the Bush administration's attempt to step into a breach left when Congress did not pass an immigration overhaul in June that might have helped American farms.
These are truly salad days for government officials in the U.S. as they quietly chew on these labor-force problems. Gaouette noted:
The administration has pursued the project discreetly. The issue of immigration has generated friction between President Bush and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which has strongly opposed many of the initiatives that Bush has pursued.
Pursued not for the sake of the workers but of the corporate farms that depend on cheap labor.
Slave work in Baghdad or California — take your pick. Farmworkers don't get health benefits, and the embassy is going to have a full-time psychiatrist for counseling and drugs, so Iraq seems the better bet: At least your boss in Iraq will be medicated.
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September 24th
posted: September 24, 2007 3:53 EST
By Rick Anderson, Seattle Weekly
On average over the past five years, Seattle's federal immigration judges denied asylum to immigrants and illegals more frequently than the U.S. average, and, locally, Seattle Judge Kendall Warren denied it most often. With an 85 percent rejection rate of asylum appeals, Warren's denial rate ranked 34th among 238 judges included in a study released today by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University. The study was headed up by former New York Times reporter David Burnham and former Bellevue resident Susan B. Long, a college professor who also has fought memorable battles with the Internal Revenue Service.
Ranked 66th in the Syracuse study was Seattle Judge Anna Ho, with a 78 percent denial rate, followed by Victoria Young (72nd, 76 percent), Edward Kandler (106th, 67 percent) and Kenneth Josephson (118th, 66 percent). The Seattle court, which deals with a large percentage of cases involving Chinese asylum seekers, rejected about ten percent more requests than the U.S. court average.
The study found wide disparities from court to court - and within some courts. In New York, for example, two of 36 such judges denied asylum requests less than ten percent of the time while another denied requests more than 90 percent of the time. The result, the study concludes, "points strongly to a dysfunctional system where the law is not the law" and has traditionally been applied inequitably throughout the system.
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