I said yesterday to watch this space and the Yakima Herald-Republic for news of the Zirkle Fruit illegal immigration class action. And today Leah Beth Ward has proved me right. In “Zirkle settles job suit ” (December 30 2005), she breaks the news that Zirkle has capitulated on the eve of trial, paying $1.3 million that will be distributed to 20,000 legally-resident workers (actually court documents suggest it will be 5,000 at the most)…and, vitally, to their lawyers.

This is the most important victory for immigration reform since California’s Proposition 187 in 1994. Zirkle’s legal workers will get about an additional dollar for every hour they worked, compensation for the wage depression caused by competition from illegal aliens. The plaintiff lawyers, notably the heroic Chicago-based Howard Foster, who has made a number of appearances in VDARE .com, will get a third or more of the total award in contingent fees and expenses.

The result: blood in the water that will attract the attention of America’s shark-like plaintiff bar to the employers of illegal aliens. The Zirkle case is small, but the precedent it sets is huge. And Ed Rubenstein has shown that, while illegal aliens are not the pillar of the economy that is sometimes claimed, they may receive as much as one percent of GDP in wages - over $100 billion. If that came out of American workers’ pockets, putting it back could earn trial lawyers over $30 billion in contingent fees and expenses.

Ironically, I won one of my very few MSM journalism prizes, along with my co-author Leslie Spencer, for a 1989 expose in Forbes magazine of the trial lawyers’ formidable power. (They are what really created Ralph Nader, for example).

I am delighted to see this bunch of thugs and bandits descend on the corporate crooks who employ illegals aliens at the expense of Americans. I think they deserve each other.

As Winston Churchill said at the height of World War II, “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”

…for his post explaining , perhaps better than we’ve done, why people should support Vdare.com.

VDARE is also one of the only sites on the Internet whose publisher actually pays his writers. And one of those writers is yours truly. so, if you think that my work is deserving of support, please hit this link to give to VDARE. Thanks in advance.

One of the reasons why most of the material you read on the Internet is so godawful is that almost no one pays for material. And so, the typical Web “pundit” sits down in front of his pc and pounds out his “insights” in about ten minutes — even less, if he’s a fast typist. And who needs spell-check? (That begs the question: Why is most of the material one reads in newspapers and magazines that pay writers so bad?)

But work that demands to be read takes time to research and write. Hours, days, weeks, even months. It takes Web searches; it requires buying and poring over sometimes expensive, out-of-print books; sometimes it takes costly Lexis-Nexis searches; and it may take calls to lawyers, flacks, politicians and victims.

You can read the whole thing, but let me add that this is my actual job. I met a guy once, who was a very good street juggler, travelled around the world to Buskerfests and such, and he said that people would occasionally yell at him “Get a job!”

He said, (to me, not them) “This is my job, it’s on my passport as my occupation.” Well, that’s what you’re looking at here. Everything you see that’s exclusive to this site is edited by Peter Brimelow, and fact-checked and linked by me.

And you wouldn’t want me to starve to death, would you?