Several days back, I blogged here about a particular phony asylum case from about eight years ago that’s subsequently turned into an organized campaign against deportation for the Albanian-born teenager Herta Lushlo and her mother Tatyana.

My blog entry also pointed VDARE readers to a means for them to weigh in on the side of our national interest (Deportations Now! Deportations Tomorrow! Deportations Forever!). If you haven’t yet stepped up on this armchair-activism opportunity, I encourage you to do so now, since the problem is metastasizing, as we learn from an article in the Boston Globe: Case by case, activists fight deportations | Immigrant students benefiting from blitz (click through to second page, too) [by Maria Sacchetti, September 7, 2009]

This latest front (a guerrilla front) in the war for American sovereignty is well summarized by reporter Sacchetti:

The bespectacled honor student [Llusho] is the third young person in the past few weeks to successfully delay deportation amid extraordinary public campaigns that combined grass-roots organizing with online social networking. Frustrated by the failure to pass federal legislation called the Dream Act that would allow illegal immigrants brought here before they were 15 to apply for legal residency, advocates are pushing to halt their deportations, one by one.

“It’s not just working because we’re getting lucky,’’ said Carlos Saavedra, lead organizer of the Student Immigrant Movement in Massachusetts, who has joined Facebook pages and sent faxes and e-mails to support the immigrants. “Those faxes mean power, and we’re getting the right message out.’’

Got that? The article makes clear that the steam is building on this.

Sacchetti also does a competent job reporting our point of view, quoting ALIPAC’s leader Bill Gheen:

Critics, while sympathetic to immigrants who were brought here as children, say immigration officials are caving to public support and failing to enforce immigration laws. One critic said the immigrants are being used as “political pawns’’ to push for a broader amnesty for 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. An estimated 65,000 illegal immigrants graduate from high school in this country every year.

“It’s very wrong to try to use such anecdotes to appeal to the American citizenry that has a large concern about illegal immigration,’’ said William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, or Alipac.us, an Internet-based organization with 25,000 members who favor reduced immigration. “Americans are being told that we’re at fault. We are not at fault. We’re not the ones that brought them here.’’

The article recounts recent “successes” of a year’s deferral of deportation for a 23-year-old illegal alien from Argentina and of a similar deferral for a Bangladeshi illegal-alien college student, with more individual sob-story cases in the pipeline.

The 90-plus reader comments for Sacchetti’s article as of 6:30 p.m. ET on September 7 are heavy with lack of sympathy for the sob stories. Doing a sparse sampling, I particularly liked this one, by “boazrg” at 10:16 a.m. ET:

As a Mexican-American whose family obeyed US immigration laws to the letter when we came to the USA in the forties and fifties, I’m “Up to here” with the orchestrated sob stories of all the “Herta Llushos” and “anchor babies” that have made a mockery of the American tradition of immigration! Herta Llusho, and all those like her, play to our feelings of sympathy, and make us feel guilt and shame about enforcing US immigration laws. Too bad! When my family came to the United States, we had to sign affidavits that we would not seek public assistance of any kind, and that the the family members who sponsored us to enter the USA would support us. We were fools to abandon these immigration requirements! Naturally, my family had to learn english ASAP, and we did! Heck, you really could not get a job with knowing some english! It was not easy for my older relatives, but they did it! … Why do you think the state of California is bankrupt? Other states will follow! … The USA is not responsible for taking care of the whole world! When will Americans wake up and put a halt to the widespread abuse of our traditional open door policy toward immigrants? Here’s my bi-lingual response to the millions of illegals and their supporters: “Ya Basta!” (Enough already!)

So please weigh in on the bureaucrats with your own push-back against the Llusho sob story, starting from that prior blog entry.

Feeling energetic? Start your own blog to focus on this specific subject, something Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch tells me can be done for free! Make yourself the national expert on these particular doings of the enemy (see here), as Ann has with RRW. You’ll have an impact.

As VDARE’s Thomas Allen has informed us over the years, the U.S. refuge and asylum programs are fraud factories, back-door routes to legal immigration, with no real cap on the numbers admitted. (During the past two years, the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog has become the go-to source for all themes involving refuge- and asylum-abuse. See also what Temple U. law professor and former Assistant INS Commissioner Jan Ting had to say several years ago on this general subject.)

And, as Michelle Malkin has emphasized over the years, “It ain’t over ’til the alien wins.”

Now that you’re primed, meet Herta Lluscho and her mother Tatyana, and read the highlights of their particular sob story:

A 19-year-old University of Detroit Mercy student is fighting to stay in the country after getting a letter from the U.S. government saying that she and her mother face deportation to Albania this week.

(more…)

When it comes to healthcare on the public tab, big-ticket items like organ transplants immediately get people’s attention. The initial surgery is enormously expensive and the procedure requires a lifetime of anti-rejection drugs. It was reported in 2008 that the “cost of a liver transplant and first-year follow-up is nearly $490,000, and anti-rejection medications can run more than $30,000 annually.”

There is no question that foreigners illegally enter the country to get million-dollar transplants not available at home, e.g. Ana Puente and Jessica Santillan, who received at least seven organs between them. The Chicago Tribune recently reported, “Liliana Cruz, 16, and her family came to the U.S. illegally in 2005, trying to get a kidney transplant for her.” She hasn’t gotten a transplant and complains about receiving free-to-her dialysis provided by taxpayers. So inconvenient.

A new illegal alien poster boy for free-to-them healthcare is Omar Castillo. Predictably, the press put on a full-tilt sob story to snooker the public, since Americans don’t want rare organs given to lawbreaking aliens instead of citizens; every organ given to a freeloading foreigner is one not given to a sick American who may die without it. In this case, Omar’s brother donated a kidney, but that’s unusual.

[Debate heats up on healthcare for illegal immigrants, Chicago Tribune, August 11, 2009]

Reporting from Chicago - Pushing around a cart filled with steamed corn, sliced cucumbers and other street food, Omar Castillo is the embodiment of what has become a third rail in the healthcare debate.

The 19-year-old, who received a kidney transplant last year, is in the U.S. illegally and has no ready access to long-term medical care. So peddling snacks is how he pays for the expensive drugs he needs to stay healthy.

What a load. Omar doesn’t pay for his expensive medicine, the taxpayer does, albeit indirectly in this case.

To cover the needs of an estimated 6.8 million uninsured illegal immigrants, some advocates have proposed broadening the healthcare overhaul legislation now before Congress.

But fierce opposition has kept the idea off the table.

Another lie. Congressional Democrats have voted against requiring identity verification to receive Obamacare. As legislation stands now, illegal aliens will indeed get freebie medical care on the backs of citizen taxpayers.

Castillo received his transplant and a year of free medicine as part of a hospital study at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago after lobbying by Latino activists and a call from the governor’s office. With the study over, his last free prescription is running out.

“We don’t know what we’ll do when the medicine is gone,” said Castillo, holding two nearly empty bottles of the immunosuppressants he takes to ward off an organ rejection.

Aliens quickly become accustomed to first-world medical care and come to see it as their rightful entitlement. Illegal alien and multiple tranplant recipient Ana Puente declared, “They should take care of me at UCLA for the rest of my life because I’ve been there since I was a baby.”

That idea was essentially the same argument used against the Florida hospital that deported an illegal alien patient back to Guatemala after it spent $1.5 million treating him.

It is immoral, immigration activists say, for hospitals and doctors — as well as a nation — to deny healthcare to the seriously ill, no matter their legal status. But proponents of tougher immigration enforcement and others fighting to contain runaway costs fear that providing such services would encourage more illegal border crossings.

Immoral? Liberals are so virtuous with other people’s money.

If voters think we have a budget problem now, just wait till word gets around that America is the free Obamacare medical center for the world, no questions asked. There will be no sick people left overseas.

An August 7 WSJ article (France Fights Universal Care’s High Cost) included a sidebar of 30 nations’ healthcare expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Mexico (5.9%) ranked just above rock-bottom Turkey (5.7%). Mexicans evidently think they can more easily outsource their expensive medical cases to the stupidly obliging Uncle Sucker to the north.

The Chicago ABC affiliate put up a video last year about the pre-surgery complain-a-thon, but nothing more recent that I can find. It shows more of Omar than you might want to see, including his gangsterish haircut and plaintive appeals in Spanish.

Here’s a disquieting thought: a sob-story case will be heard by the Supreme Court to decide whether alleged gang violence in the home country can be added to the list of excuses to claim asylum.

Three recent high school graduates from South St. Paul who fled gang violence in their homeland of El Salvador are in the middle of a deportation battle that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case is expected to set a national precedent on whether resisting forced recruitment into violent gangs in other countries is grounds for asylum here.

Pablo, Rene and Silvia Mira left El Salvador in 2004, illegally crossing the border to live with their mother in Minnesota. Arrested by immigration agents shortly after entering the United States, they argued they were fleeing recruitment by the notorious MS-13 gang, whose criminal activities include drugs, human trafficking and murder.

Although their case was still making its way through judicial appeals this summer, the Miras were unexpectedly seized at their family apartment July 6. Deportation was slated for this week — until their appeal was referred to the full U.S. Supreme Court by Justice John Paul Stevens.
[Immigration law: El Salvadoran family fights deportation, Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 30, 2009]

Of course, there’s no proof at all that the forlorn fable recounted by the family is true. Former Assistant Commissioner of the INS Jan Ting estimated that “95 percent” of refugee and asylum applications are fraudulent.

Some officials have cautioned against widening the asylum window, warning that it could lead to unwanted immigrants, including possibly gang members fleeing violent lives.

Or gang members looking for more profitable territory. Criminals from around the world come to America because there is so much here to steal.

Below, the illegal alien Mira family hopes their gangster sob story will get them gilt-edged green cards.

Ever since the New York Times Magazine ran that sob story by NYT Federal Reserve reporter Edmund Andrews about how he had been lured by lenders into taking on too big a mortgage to pay back, what with his $4k per month alimony payments, anonymous posts have been showing up in various blog’s comment sections saying that a missing part of the story involved the reporter’s new wife, Patricia Barreiro, an Argentine immigrant with a passion for fashion.

Megan McArdle has now tracked down the facts that Andrews left out of his book. She paid eight cents per page to look at court documents:

In September 1998, California bankruptcy court records indicate that Patty and her first husband declared bankruptcy. The financial statement they filed with the court indicated family income of $174,000 in 1996, $87,000 in 1997, and $126,000 in the first nine months of 1998. The income fluctuations are not surprising, given that her husband was in the film production industry. By the time of the filing, the couple owed about $30,000 on 8 credit cards, over $200,000 in back taxes, and almost $15,000 in private school tuition, as well as substantial car and mortgage payments.

In 2007, nearly as soon as she was eligible, Patty Barreiro filed again in Montgomery Country. When called for comment yesterday, Andrews was unavailable, but there is no question that it is his wife: his income and occupation are prominently featured in the docket.

This is really highly unusual. For starters, the overwhelming majority of people who file bankruptcy do not make anything close to $100,000 a year–the standard estimate when the 2005 bankruptcy reform was passed was that about 80% of filers had household incomes below the median income in their state. The number of affluent people who file twice is even smaller, and has presumably gone down since the 2005 filing largely eliminated abusive serial Chapter 13 filings, which used to be used, often by quite wealthy people, to forestall evictions or foreclosure.

The bankruptcy code requires filers to wait 8 years after a previous Chapter 7 discharge. Barely four months after she became eligible, Patty Barreiro filed again. And the filing shows some suggestion of strategic debt management.

Ms. Barreiro filed separately from Andrews, and had to amend the filing to include Andrews’ income after a complaint from a creditor who wanted to force her into a Chapter 13 repayment plan. She filed when her income was at rock bottom, consisting only of unemployment; the timing may have just excluded having to declare $5,000 in freelance editing income Andrews mentions in the book. And she shed what appear to be jointly incurred debts, such as a Comcast account. Comcast does not service the address listed on the 1998 filing, but as I can attest (to my sorrow), it is the main cable provider in Silver Spring, where she moved to live with Andrews in 2004.

Serial bankruptcies can, of course, happen to anyone with enough bad luck. But they usually don’t. And when they do, they usually hit people with marginal incomes that leave no margin for error in the budget. Most people, even in LA, are able to build a sustainable budget out of an income in the low six figures.

Moreover, pesky bad luck isn’t really the picture painted by either filing. Rather, Ms. Barreiro seems to have spent most of the last two decades living right up to the edge of her income, and beyond, and then massively defaulting. If you structure your finances so that absolutely everything has to go right, it’s hard to blame the mortgage company when you don’t quite make it.

Andrews has been admirably open about many of the poor decisions and the wishful thinking that led him deep into debt. Nonetheless, he has laid much of the blame onto irresponsible bankers and mortgage brokers. The missing bankruptcies substantially undermine this basic narrative arc of Andrews’ story. Particularly in his book, the bankers are the villains, America’s current troubles are the inevitable denouement of their maniacal greed, and the Andrews household stands in for an American public led, by their own greed and longing and hopeful trust, into the money pit.

Sure, the two married couples had seven children between them, but what’s that to stand in the way of Love? And a “stately” home in Maryland?

By the way, an unwritten part of the story of the mortgage meltdown has to do with quiet importation of Fiesta Culture attitudes toward saving and spending.

The Boston Globe’s Maria Sacchietti has another inchoate immigrant sob story [Jailed Immigrants Buoy Budgets, February 9, 2009]. This article is also accompanied by a short video clip. The images of razor wire are obviously supposed to illustrate the alleged inhumanity of detaining illegal immigrants.

“In Massachusetts, a majority of detainees are being held for immigration violations, not crimes, and are kept apart from the general jail population.”

Actually, it is a crime to enter the country illegally or to overstay one’s visa. And Sacchietti never tells us how many detainees have committed violent crimes, but it’s safe to assume that the number is high (Hey Maria, that razor wire is there for a reason).

“But advocates for immigrants say the government should dramatically reduce the number of detainees, by releasing them pending deportation. They complain about the burden on taxpayers.”

Has the Globe’s immigration reporter really never heard of the disastrous “Catch & Release” policy? And does anyone seriously believe that immigrant advocates are concerned about the “burden on taxpayers”? [Email Sacchietti ].

Still, the article does inadvertently show that, in a time of tight budgets, it pays to support immigration enforcement. County jails are being compensated $90 a day per immigrant, which often translates into multi-million dollar annual reimbursements. This has enabled many sheriffs to significantly upgrade all of their facilities. Thus, it’s no wonder that immigration enforcement is becoming more popular, even in liberal Massachusetts.

The Boston Globe is owned by the New York Times – which means it is now part-owned by Mexican plutocrat Carlos Slim. So expect their immigration reporting to get even worse.

Here’s my candidate for Sob Story of the Day…

PLAINFIELD, N.J. –- Dozens of unemployed Central American immigrants who lost their jobs and can’t afford to pay rent have moved into caves, reports El Diario/La Prensa. Immigrants have been living in the makeshift homes in Plainfield and North Plainfeld, N.J. for three months, and call their new residence the “Devil’s Cave.”[Inmigrantes desempleados en la ‘Cueva del Diablo’] Their decision to move into caves is a testament to the harsh climate of the current economic crisis, which has had a greater impact on the undocumented who have more difficulty accessing government aid after losing their jobs.[Unemployed Immigrants Move into Caves, January 24, 2009]

Say, why don’t they move into the nearest comfy Mexican Consulate?

Here’s a sob story with above-average arrogance and stupidity: it concerns the unhappy state of poor Hispanic foreigners who can’t wangle a legal way to immigrate: [Immigration policy: Law gives many no shot at U.S., Des Moines Register, November 29, 2008, by Tony Leys].

As if immigration were some sort of universal right.

As Steve Sailer has pointed out, there are five billion persons on this planet who live in countries poorer than Mexico; most of them would like to come here, given the chance.

Many Guatemalans considering immigration to the United States have two choices: Try to sneak into the country illegally or stay home.

Marilu Cabrera, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said most unskilled workers from Guatemala and similar countries have no practical way of legally immigrating to the United States. The exceptions would be for those who have immediate family members already living here legally, or for those who would take temporary jobs at employers who prove they can’t find other workers.

“You do need that sponsorship. You can’t just decide ‘I want to live in the United States,’” said Cabrera, whose federal agency helps coordinate the supply of permits.

Even if they had immediate family members here legally, would-be migrants from Guatemala and most other countries would have to wait four to 11 years for a visa, Cabrera said. People from Mexico could expect a longer wait, because of the huge demand from that country, she said.

The rules have not stopped Guatemalans from making the trip, however. The country, which is about three-quarters the size of Iowa, has about 13 million people. Federal experts estimate about 500,000 are living in the United States illegally. By comparison, only about 18,000 Guatemalans obtained permanent-resident permits, or “green cards,” last year. Only about 8,000 became U.S. citizens.

Big surprise — they newbies are not interested in becoming Americans. It’s money that they love.

Where I live in overpopulated California, Alameda County already has mandatory water restrictions, and the rainy season is not starting out well — the Oakland area has received only half the normal amount of rain so far. Water supply alone means that the billions of Earthlings who might wish to move here cannot. Not to mention the other issues of sovereignty, infrastructure, employment, schools, healthcare and social comity.

Oh, and what the citizens want. Americans want immigration to be legal, controlled and reduced.

Persons living in poor countries should avail themselves of strategies like microlending, because America can’t rescue the unhappy billions. See my blog item, Microlending Creator Says His Strategy Outshines Immigration.

This Wall Street Journal piece begins by laying out a sob story about a poor Guatemalan illegal (sniff!) who was so broke from lack of work that he had to return to his own country. What is America coming to when we can’t supply a middle class life for tens of millions of illegal alien foreigners?

So in January, Mr. Carrillo sliced open the green plastic piggy bank he’d bought at Wal-Mart and counted $3,100 in change and bills. “There was enough to buy a plane ticket home and ship my truck to Guatemala,” recalls Mr. Carrillo, 37 years old. Now back in San Juan Alotenango, a town of dirt streets and sporadic running water, he hauls fruit, firewood and recyclable metal for a few dollars a trip. [Latest Immigration Wave: Retreat, By Miriam Jordan, October 2, 2008]

But once you wade through the sob story tripe, there are some interesting facts.

The Census Bureau reported last month that the income of U.S. households headed by non-citizen foreigners dropped 7.3% in 2007 from the previous year, after rising 4.1% in 2006. Pew Hispanic says that among households headed by Central Americans, the drop in income has been in the double digits.

As a result, flows of money to Latin America from U.S.-based workers have slowed for the first time since the Inter-American Development Bank began tracking remittances in 2000. The rate of growth in remittances to Mr. Carrillo’s home country of Guatemala has slowed in each of the past four quarters. The bank estimates that in the last quarter of this year, remittances will fall for the first time.

Some 1.35 million Guatemalan citizens — 10% of the country’s population — live in the U.S., according to the Central American Institute of Social and Development Studies, an independent think tank in Guatemala. Some 3.5 million people back in Guatemala depend on these remittances to get by, the group says. Remittances are the top foreign-exchange earner for Guatemala, at $4.12 billion in 2007, ahead of coffee, sugar and other exports.

Such income fuels everything from construction and appliance sales to spending on services. When the remittances shrink, “the first things to go out the window are education and health care — things that determine a family’s long-term earnings potential,” says Robert Meins, a remittances specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank.

An immigrant exodus wouldn’t be unprecedented. As many as one-third of the nearly 30 million foreigners who arrived in the U.S. between the Civil War and World War I returned to their native countries. Arrivals from Latin America also ebb and flow, with the influx to the U.S. last slackening during the 2001-02 recession.

Yes, some go home–it’s normal! Let’s encourage that trend.

And about those remittances… note that at least in some countries it’s only the rate of growth that is not increasing. Foreigners are still stripmining and removing billions of dollars from the United States every year.

As I predicted on Tuesday, the Somali/Beef Packer row in Greeley, CO is continuing to flare. The company has bravely dismissed over 100 Somalis for disrupting a shift, and the Somalis are blaming their Hispanic colleagues for a large part of the trouble:

(Somalis) Abdi and Isse claimed their attackers were mainly Mexican immigrants and described the two ethnic groups as battling over scarce jobs at the plant…said Isse(:) “First we had an agreement and they told us we can have a break at 7.30. Then the Mexicans got together and said we don’t want a break at that time…

Muslim workers sacked by US meat plant Gretchen Peters The National September 12 2008

(Hat tip for the last three links to Refugee Resettlement Watch, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite websites: indispensible on this and related subjects)

Meat Packing, of course, is very arduous assembly line work requiring tight discipline and close team work. If the Somalis were capable of this, their country would not be the basket case it is.

The Rocky Mountain News has today published a sob story: Somali refugees forge new lives after life in war by Lisa Ryckman September 13 2008, inadvertently revealing how unsuitable these ultra alien Somalis actually are:

“Once I came to America, I learned a lot of things I never knew before,” Dhies said. “You have to get up in the morning. You have to go to school. You have to go to work. You have to get your life going…”

Mohammed Nur…now runs the Somali American Community Center in Denver A guy with a camel comes here and never done anything except sit under a tree giving water to the camel is different than the guy who comes from the city who understands that working hard, you can achieve the goal,” Nur said.

The truly valuable element in this article is the Comments section:

CIS247 writes:

I have family in the middle-Tennessee area and the middle-Tennessee region had Somalis’ shipped in by the plane loads… literally thousands, if not tens of thousands.
Most Somalis got off the plane, were given a place to stay (paid for by the Fed gov), a new vehicle (again paid for by the Feds), Food Stamps & Welfare (again the Feds), and on and on (yep, the Feds)…
They were “encouraged” to take classes in learning English and how to integrate into “western” society (but was not required). Less than 1% came to any of the classes.
Not only were most not interested in integrating into American culture or society, many were/are belligerent, sexist, rude, and just plain ignored anyone and everyone else.
There was (and probably is still) a problem, that many Somali drivers would get into auto accidents (anything from minor fender-benders to major vehicle/property damage, DWI’s, and even including motor vehicle fatality accidents) and not stopping to check on the victims, or any damage they caused, or anything else.
For many, their livelihoods in Somalia was centered around the illegal drug trade. Most never gave it up. The middle Tennessee area has seen a huge rise in the production, distribution, and use of illegal drugs since the Federal Government started shipping in the Somalis, along with other VIOLENT crimes. Many may have left the brutality of the war over there in Somalia for freedom here in the US. But many brought the brutality they learned over there, over here, with them.
If anyone bothered to check any of the local newspapers from the middle-Tennessee area, or any other areas where they have had a large influx of Somalis, you will see the same issues as stated.

Tell Lisa Ryckman to read these comments - and wise up.