Mexidata.info

U.S., Canadian and Mexican workers want a single union

The United Steelworkers (USW) and the National Union of Mine, Metal, Steel, and Allied Workers of the Mexican Republic met December 10, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada to move forward on their joint commitment to, as they agreed in June of this year, “propose immediate measures to increase strategic cooperation…”

HERE

Fox News

Cartels may benefit from latest Obama Regime travel scheme

Mexican citizens will soon be eligible to apply for a “trusted traveler” status that will allow them to bypass some elements of airport security when they fly into the United States — a U.S. government-approved program that critics say could be exploited by violent drug cartels…

HERE

According to her (own) Key WiKi entry, now state Senator Nan Orrock happily went to Fidel’s communist Cuba in 1970 and was “privileged” to “cut cane” as part of the Venceremos Brigade.

“From its founding in 1969, the Venceremos Brigade was used by Cuban intelligence agency the DGI, to recruit American agents for use against their home country.”

HERE

Orrock, a rabid anti-enforcement advocate on American immigration laws, is listed below Jane Fonda as a “Founding Friend” of the Sam Zamarripa organized open borders GALEO Inc. She will be part of the fringe minority opposing enforcement legislation in the Georgia legislature this year.

NAFBPO Speaks Out on Murder of Border Patrol Agent
Thursday, December 16, 2010, posted on NumbersUSA

The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers issued a strong statement after the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. The association criticized the leadership in Washington for its mishandling of the border violence issue and is calling for the immediate elimination of restrictions that prohibit border patrol on public land.

Read Full Story

Green Valley (Arizona) News

Border Patrol agent had a life full of plans

When their first date was at a McDonald’s in Benson, Sarah Brelsford knew she and Brian Terry had a lot in common. — Both led busy lives, were passionate about their jobs, and they had to work to make time for a relationship. She was a teacher, he was a Border Patrol agent on the elite BORTAC unit…

HERE

Tolerance Mafia

Who watches the hate watchers?
By W. James Antle III

Ken Silverstein is an unlikely ally for those trying to get control of the nation’s borders. A liberal journalist, he finds the Minutemen “crackpots” and Arizona’s immigration-hawk Sheriff Joe Arpaio a “kook” whose activities are “reprehensible.” Silverstein’s wife is Dominican, and he freely admits he does not know whether she originally came to America legally. Yet there he was at the National Press Club on a panel sponsored by the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

“I have different immigration views than the center,” Silverstein said in his presentation. “But I don’t believe I have a monopoly on wisdom.” What he does believe is that free speech is too important to be shouted down by ersatz civil-rights organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. “The SPLC squelches free speech and free debate,” Silverstein argued. And, he would add, they raise an awful lot of money from unsuspecting liberals in the process.

Silverstein was there to mark the release of a powerful CIS report entitled “Immigration and the SPLC: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Invented a Smear, Served La Raza, Manipulated the Press, and Duped its Donors.” On that last point, Silverstein is something of an expert: he wrote “The Church of Morris Dees” story for Harper’s a decade ago documenting how Dees, the SPLC’s founder, had enriched himself by posing as a defender of racial equality against a rising tide of hate.

What calling could be nobler than working against the cross-burning knuckle-draggers of the Ku Klux Klan? But the country that elected Barack Obama president is not the America of “Mississippi Burning.” Organizations like the Klan have been thoroughly marginalized, their racist ideologies soundly rejected by Americans of all colors and creeds. To raise money as if they constitute anything more than an unpleasant reminder of our Jim Crow past is to perpetuate a fraud.

That’s why Dees and his merry band of politically correct enforcers have had to branch out, endlessly expanding the list of “hate groups” to include perfectly mainstream organizations with which they disagree. Advocates of reduced immigration levels and stronger border security are high on the SPLC’s list of targets because of the obvious racial component of the immigration issue.

Locating cranks who have made ill-tempered remarks about immigrants is not terribly difficult work for highly trained members of the thought police. But Morris Dees’s marauders have not been content to stop there. In late 2007, the SPLC labeled the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a hate group. This troubling designation by extension tarred organizations like CIS and Roy Beck’s NumbersUSA—and quickly achieved its intended chilling effect on the immigration debate.

The SPLC’s smear became the centerpiece of the National Council of La Raza’s “Stop the Hate” campaign. “Hate” was loosely defined as any position that differed from La Raza’s advocacy of loose borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants. La Raza used the SPLC’s “findings” to try to silence its critics, and the mainstream media, always eager to portray conservatives as racists, cheerfully repeated the slur in its woefully biased coverage of the amnesty debate. Stop the Hate claimed its biggest scalp when Lou Dobbs stepped away from his microphone at CNN—by most accounts, a voluntary move, but one hastened by the network’s growing discomfort with the controversy surrounding Dobbs’s outspoken views on immigration.

FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA are far from hate groups. They are wonky, white-paper-generating organizations committed to nothing more controversial than cutting back immigration from its post-1965 high of 1 million new immigrants a year to the more traditional level of 300,000. They shy away from the more racially charged aspects of the debate, which reflects their roots in the wing of the immigration-restrictionist movement animated primarily by environmental and economic concerns rather than blood and soil.

But such facts cannot be allowed to get in the way of a good fundraising mailing—or a malicious attempt to drum certain viewpoints out of polite society. In its fevered writings about immigration reformers, the SPLC has concocted conspiracies so elaborate they would raise eyebrows within the John Birch Society. While the Birchers have David Rockefeller, the SPLC has Michigan environmental activist John Tanton: the “puppeteer” supposedly pulling the strings whenever leading immigration reformers Mark Kirkorian and Roy Beck speak, the all-purpose explanation for why seemingly colorblind arguments against mass immigration can be readily dismissed as thinly disguised racism.

Krikorian’s CIS decided to strike back. Senior fellow Jerry Kammer, a respected journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for helping to uncover the Congressman Duke Cunningham bribery scandal, wrote their report slashing much of the SPLC’s work to ribbons. “The SPLC’s decision to smear FAIR was the work of a kangaroo court, one convened to reach a pre-determined verdict by inventing or distorting evidence,” Kammer wrote. “The ‘Stop the Hate’ campaign would more accurately be labeled as a campaign to ‘Stop the Debate.’” The tactic is so effective that liberals have begun deploying it in debates on issues with no obvious racial connotations—healthcare reform, deficit spending, and Tea Party protests.

Without denying either the SPLC’s good early work on civil rights or the existence of bad actors in the immigration-reform movement, Kammer shows that Dees is no nonpartisan, dispassionate observer of the immigration debate, which may explain why the SPLC only detects hate on one side of the issue despite ample evidence of racist remarks by La Raza radicals. Kammer also skillfully debunks the SPLC’s immigration conspiracy theory, conceding that Tanton has occasionally been reckless in his statements and associations but documenting that the SPLC has inflated both the charges against the early immigration reformer and his influence on the contemporary movement.

Kammer’s report also focuses on an aspect of the SPLC long denounced by liberal magazines and newspapers—the excessive fundraising that has won Morris Dees a place in the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame but no comparable honor in the civil-rights movement. The SPLC took in over $32 million in contributions in 2008, an average of $88,755 per day. At the end of the 2008 fiscal year, the SPLC had more than $174 million in the bank even after its investments lost over $48 million in the financial crisis.

The CIS report claims Dees promised to stop his profligate fundraising after the SPLC’s endowment exceeded $50 million, but continued shaking the money tree after it reached $200 million. The group’s lavish headquarters, nicknamed the “Poverty Pentagon,” have made it a laughingstock among erstwhile allies on the Left. The Nation called Dees “a millionaire huckster”; left-wing journalist Alexander Coburn dubbed him the “arch-salesman of hatemongering.” “Morris Dees does not need your financial support,” Silverstein wrote in Harper’s. “The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America. … The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the SPLC one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors.”

“Hate sells; poor people don’t, which is why readers who go to the SPLC’s website will find only a handful of cases on such non-lucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety, or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and 1980s,” JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in The Nation in 2001. “Why the organization continues to keep ‘Poverty’ (or even ‘Law’) in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt.” At the CIS event, Silverstein quoted a civil-rights attorney as calling Dees’s operation “the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker of the civil-rights movement. And I don’t mean to demean Jim and Tammy Faye.”

Even some of the SPLC’s legitimate civil-rights work was exploited for profit. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million verdict against a Klan group that had brutally murdered a young black man. The Montgomery Advertiser reported that the SPLC “used nationwide fund-raising letters to create the image of a mighty Klan that actually had $7 million” to pay the victim’s mother. In fact, the woman only received about $52,000, most of which she had to pay back to the SPLC, which had given her an interest-free loan. Meanwhile, the SPLC raised $9 million in two years from mailings highlighting her case.

The SPLC’s antics, ranging from the above outrage to the merely absurd—Dees signing fundraising letters to Jewish potential donors as “Morris Seligman Dees”—harm more than guilty liberals’ wallets. To the extent that our current immigration policy is not in the national interest, the SPLC stands in the way of a solution. And it may ultimately foster the racism it claims to oppose.

Consider the case of Carol Swain, an African-American law professor at Vanderbilt who has been sounding the alarm about “the new white nationalism.” Because she approaches the subject from a scholarly rather than a fundraising perspective, she has raised the SPLC’s hackles. “When my face was smeared across the papers in my state with accusations that I was an apologist for white supremacy, I thought it was time to get involved,” Swain said at the CIS press conference. Driving the immigration debate underground, she argued, will silence legitimate restrictionists and empower genuine racists.

Swain concluded, “If we are concerned about extremists, the best thing we can do is include their voices in the dialogue. … [The SPLC] is actually making more converts to extremist organizations than they would if they let them talk about their concerns.” For years, Morris Dees has been expanding the number of hate groups on his fundraising lists. It would be a tragic result if his tactics helped them proliferate in real life.

HERE__________________________________________

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

Brunswick News

Verifying work status is a necessary step

12/20/2010

There is a strange debate raging in this state. It’s an argument between legislators that’s drawing more proponents than opponents just weeks before the beginning of the 2011 session of the Georgia General Assembly.

The issue is illegal immigration – or, more specifically, what the state can and ought to do to protect itself from men and women who are here illegally.

To most Americans, that might not sound like much of an argument. After all, who supports illegal immigration? Anyone who remembers Sept. 11 and the sudden need to know who is in this country and why would be inclined to favor stepped up efforts to identify who’s working or traveling in this country.

Amazingly enough, there are those who apparently disagree. These people actually believe that any new Georgia law that does what federal law is already supposed to be doing – verifying the status of noncitizens – would be an economic attack on the agricultural industry in this state.

It is unclear how checking the work status of noncitizens in Georgia, an idea being debated by a special legislative panel, would harm farmers. Surely they are not saying that anyone should be able to penetrate U.S. borders and do as they please and go anywhere they want. Surely they are not saying that, not after Sept. 11 and the deaths of thousands of people at the hands of terrorists on U.S. soil.

Any man or woman who is in this state legally – that is, those who went through the proper channels and checkpoints to get here – are welcome. They have a right to be here.

Those who are in this country illegally, however, are not welcome, nor should they ever be. They should be required to return to their native lands and fill out the proper paperwork for entry into the United States.

Georgia, like every other state, ought to know who is living in its communities. That’s really all those who favor a state law that requires work status verification really want.

Yes, this is a federal issue, but like so many other of its responsibilities, Washington is slow to act, if it even acts at all.

HERE

Virginia county trims government, cuts taxes by cracking down on illegal immigration
Caroline May
The Daily Caller Fri Dec 17, 2010

While many localities in America are facing budget shortfalls and mounting debt, one county in Virginia has escaped massive deficits and instead measurably reduced the overall size of government.
Prince William County (PWC) is the second largest county in Virginia and now the number-one job growth locality in the region – with one of the lowest tax burdens – a distinction the chairman of the Board of County Supervisors, Corey Stewart, contends is directly attributable to the disciplined implementation of conservative principles and a harsh crackdown on illegal immigration.

In 2007 the county adopted a very strict illegal immigration policy, which, according to a study by the University of Virginia and the Police Executive Research Forum has likely resulted in a 46.7% drop in aggravated assaults and a 32% drop in violent crime.

Stewart told The Daily Caller that one of the best cost cutters was the reduction in the number of illegal immigrants in the county.

“It gave us the ability to cut costs because the cost driver for the county is the school and we had such an influx of limited-English speaking students between 2002-2007 and those limited-English students are extra costly to the school system. That was the prime cost driver, the influx of those students,” Stewart said, citing the importance of being able to reduce the number of expensive English as a Second Language classes, which had increased over 250% in the previous five years.

Every area of PWC has made reductions and, as of today, the county has cut more than $140 million from the cost of government, and is employing the lowest number of full-time government workers in the D.C. region. Indeed, residents of the county pay tax bills nearly 30% lower than in neighboring counties.

The business community has responded, PWC is now the number one job growth county in Virginia and the D.C. region and number two in terms of job growth on the East Coast.

“It proves that when government gets off the backs of businesses and reduces the size of government, business will respond and create those jobs. It is not the job of government to create jobs. It is the job of government to get off out of the way,” Stewart said.

According to Stewart, people have appreciated the reduced size of government, especially the reduction in its cost.

“The tax bill today for Prince William County is below where it was in 2007. We have reduced the size of government and tax bills. And adjusted for inflation, it has been a 14% drop in the tax bill.”

In accordance with its small government allegiance, the PWC Board of Supervisors refused to use its portion of the $249.5 million allocated to Virginia by the Federal Education Jobs Fund Stimulus bill to hire more teachers – as the one-time payment would have resulted in expensive ongoing costs.

“The problem was of course, that this whole thing is sham, because it provides enough compensation for one year,” Stewart said. “After the year is up the locality on the hook for their continuing compensation and at that point the locality would be faced with one of two options. Either raise taxes or lay off teachers and we were unwilling to do that. So we rejected the funds and to my knowledge we are the only locality to do so.”

Stewart wants other counties to take a serious look at the small government model his board has applied to PWC.

“We all know that cutting taxes is popular, but cutting spending most people have perceived as being a political liability, but in our experience it has been a plus,” Stewart said. “Even those who have been effected by those cuts have appreciated the fact that their county has bitten the bullet and reduced the size of government.”

HERE

Stateline.org

Arizona’s Next Immigration Debate: Anchor babies

Fresh off of passing a law to combat illegal immigration that was so controversial the federal government sued to block it, Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature is poised to push the limits of immigration policy yet again, this time by challenging the basic rules that decide who is an American…

HERE

“…The U.S. Census Bureau always needs to have good population estimates, and you need to know how many illegal immigrants there are to refine those estimates,” she says. But since the census doesn’t ask if someone’s an illegal immigrant, getting a count is “tricky,” she adds.

The census does ask for place of birth, duration of residence in the United States and whether the person is a U.S. citizen, “so we have a pretty fair sense of the size of the foreign-born population,” explains Van Hook, who earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas in 1996 and has been at BGSU since 1999.

Administrative records—of births, deaths and naturalizations, for example—are used to develop estimates of the legally resident foreign-born population, which in 2000 numbered roughly 23.6 million. At the same time, the 2000 census indicated about 31 million foreign-born people were in the United States, leaving a difference that can be assumed is illegal immigrants—but with assumptions, she points out.

HERE

For instance, because foreign-born legal residents leave the country, too, an emigration estimate is built into the legal-resident count. The problem, however, is that the government stopped keeping actual records of “outmigration” of the legally resident foreign-born in the 1950s, so that factor may not be accurately estimated, according to Van Hook…”

AJC: Your reporters shouldn’t require more than a week or two to figure this out.