NRO Immigration enthusiast Larry Kudlow is troubled by information that’s new to him. This is from NRO’s Blog, February 26, 2007

A Troubling Immigration Development [Larry Kudlow]

From today’s Washington Times:

Mexican wives seek ouster of husbands from U.S.

…They have created an English-language Web page where they identify themselves as the “wetback wives” and broadcast their pleas, both to their men and to the U.S. government.

“To the United States government — close the border, send our men home to us, even if you must deport them (only treat them in a humane manner — please do not hurt them),” it reads….

This is an interesting and important angle on the whole immigration question.

These Mexican wives seem to be saying that family breakup is a bad idea, even though their husbands are sending extra money back home.

As a free trader, I favor the Bush comprehensive immigration reform plan, which includes better border security, temporary worker cards, and ultimately, a path to citizenship.

However, family breakup is very troubling for a social conservative like myself.

Frankly, the extent of this family breakup problem is new information to me. I find it troubling.

02/26 01:54 PM

Now there are a couple of points–it’s interesting that Kudlow didn’t know about this, we’ve been covering it here since 2001, when we published Allan Wall’s DOES EMIGRATION REALLY HELP MEXICO? It’s a fairly obvious side effect of mass immigration.

It’s also interesting that he didn’t get worried about the multiple bad effects of immigration until it started affecting Mexican families. What about American families?

But think about it, what if instead of being a writer for NRO, he was a reader of it? Then he’d know even less, since he had to learn about this from Stephen Dinan in the Washington Times. [Mexican wives want U.S. to return husbands ,February 26, 2007 ] He would be unlikely to learn about in the pages of National Review.

UPDATE:Vanishing American has more thoughts on Kudlow.

Clay Moore is one smart — and lucky — young fellow. The 13-year-old resident of Parrish, Florida, was kidnapped at gunpoint by an illegal alien on Friday in an attempted kidnap-for-ransom plot. Clay cleverly used a safety pin to escape being duct-taped to a tree in a remote wooded area 20 miles from the abduction, and then found a farmer with a cell phone which he used to call for help.

On the day he was kidnapped, Clay Moore’s parents made the 13-year-old use a safety pin to mend his school uniform because he was to blame for tearing it.

That safety pin became key to Clay’s escape from the kidnapper, who snatched him at gunpoint from a school bus stop last Friday and left him in an East Manatee woods taped up and gagged.
[Clay Moore's incredible tale of escape from an armed kidnapper, Sarasota Herald Tribune 2/27/07]

Below: Clay Moore appeared with his family at a press conference.

This case is a very concerning example of Mexicans bringing their culture of crime, particularly kidnapping, to this country.

Kidnapping for ransom is nearly non-existent in the whole of the USA. In Tijuana, there were close to 100 reported incidents of it last year.
[Crime wears on Tijuana, San Diego, USA Today 2/05/07]

Suspect Vicente Beltran-Moreno, who earlier worked as an agricultural picker nearby, remains at large, and may have already escaped to Mexico. Naturally, the local illegal alien community fears a “backlash.”

Meanwhile, parents have begun accompanying their children to bus stops.

Instapundit linked to this story about a Nashville cabbie named Ibrahim Sheikh Ahmed, who tried, for some unknown reason, to run over two American students with his cab after a religious argument.

Instapundit just wrote “And Tom Elia notes a surprising lacuna,” which apparently caused enough traffic to overwhelm Elia’s New Editor website. With the aid of RSS, I was able to dig it up, and here it is in its entirety. Disclaimer: Elia isn’t associated with us, or vice versa, I’m only reproducing this because it makes a valuable point and it has temporarily vanished from the web.

Title: Cabbie Runs Down Students in Tennessee, Part II

Last week, we linked to a story about a Nashville cab driver who attempted to run over two customers following a dispute about religion.

According to The Tennessean, the cabbie, Ibrahim Sheikh Ahmed, has a disciplinary hearing before the Metro Transportation Licensing Commission on Tuesday.

The story includes this tidbit: (emphasis added)

According to a police report, the three men had a conversation about religion while in the taxi that “became heated.” Shortly after the men paid Ahmed, he chased them in his van across the parking lot and over a curb, police said.

Metro police spokeswoman Kris Mumford said one of the students is Catholic and the other is Lutheran. Mumford said that Ahmed’s religion was not known.

Come on, are we really expected to believe that the religions of the two victims is known to The Tennessean, but that of the accused, Ibrahim Sheikh Ahmed, is not?

Good grief, how stupid.

Here are links to four relevant articles about Mexico, all four written in English.

The first is from the Cuban news agency, and is entitled “Mexican Congress: No More Servility to US” which reports criticism of Mexican President Calderon by Mexican opposition parties, who “denounced President Felipe Calderon’s foreign policy for strengthening U.S. security. ”

It’s typical for Mexican opposition politicians to accuse the president of being too subservient to the gringos, and of not defending illegal aliens strongly enough. But why is it bad for Mexico if the U.S. is more secure?

The second article
“Opposition Lawmakers Grill Foreign Relations Secretary” , reveals that some members of the Mexican Congress have discovered the SPP and don’t care for it either. According to Cuauhtemoc Sandoval, Mexican congressman from the left-wing PRD:

“We (Mexicans )are taking steps toward the integration of our economy, military, energy and security with the United States . And (the Mexican) Congress isn’t being invited to participate.”

That’s a pretty good summation of the situation from the point of view of either Mexico or the U.S . Interestingly, the opposition to the continental merger in the U.S. is usually from the right, in Mexico the opposition is on the left.

Then there’s a recent article in the Washington Times. The Times has discovered that immigration has bad effects in Mexico, which I have been saying for years . The Times article tells about women in Tecalpulco, Mexico, asking the U.S. to deport their husbands so they can return. [Mexican wives want U.S. to return husbands ,By Stephen Dinan, February 26, 2007 ]I have corresponded with the Tecalpulco women and wrote about them in a previous VDARE.COM article “How to Help Mexico- Close the Border!

That’s why you need to read VDARE.COM, to stay ahead of the mainstream media!

Another article, on the Inter Press Service News Agency, is entitled “Staple Foods at Risk From Free Trade” asks what will happen to Mexican small farmers when NAFTA opens up the floodgates of corn and beans from the United States. I wrote about this four years ago, here .

Bill Gates writes:

This issue has reached a crisis point. Computer science employment is growing by nearly 100,000 jobs annually. But at the same time studies show that there is a dramatic decline in the number of students graduating with computer science degrees

Now Bill Gates has had as much to do with creating this crisis as anyone. Basically Microsoft depends a lot on H-1b visas–and getting them at next to nothing. The closest they have to serious competition are the companies that produced the free Linux operating system. Now, if you look at the LCA filings, you’ll see something rather interesting. Red Hat and the related companies seem to produce an operating system that is less expensive-and by many measures better-but without dependency on H-1b visas.

If Microsoft “needs” H-1b visas, why can’t they pay for those immigration rights(the current market rate would be at least $100,000 per visa)? The reason is simple: despite all their financial and political muscle, Microsoft has never really been about innovation, and they can’t compete on a basis in which there is an honest accounting of all costs. Microsoft is utterly dependent upon practices like buying political influence to maintain its shareholder equity.

There will never be substantial interest in technical and scientific professions in the US if those occupations are more subject to the wage lowering effects of immigration than alternative occupations. Folks like Gates depend on mining the value of American citizenship to maintain their absurd net worth.

If you want a really competitive America, we need to think about how to reward real innovators-not businessmen like Gates that figure out how to work the system to their own benefit.

The Bill Gates article is being discussed on Slashdot.

Just when you think you have seen all the third world brutality toward women you can imagine, there’s this…

In China, a group of gangsters was recently arrested for killing women to sell the bodies as “ghost brides” for dead bachelors. In order to make the deceased males happy in the afterlife.

The men preyed on the superstitions of ill-educated farmers eager to ensure that a dead son was happy in the afterlife. It is not uncommon in rural parts of China for a family to seek out the body of a woman who has died to be buried alongside their son after the performance of a marriage ceremony for the deceased pair. [...]

Mr Yang chanced upon the trade in dead bodies when he paid 12,000 yuan (£800) for a mentally handicapped woman whose family hoped to marry her off for a price. The trade in women as wives is a common practice in rural China and a woman may be sold several times by intermediaries before meeting her eventual husband. [Ghost brides are murdered to give dead bachelors a wife in the afterlife, Times of London 1/26/07]

It’s bizarre that such activities occur when there are not enough women for the living, since Chinese have long been busy whacking millions of unwanted female babies and fetuses — to the point where by 2020, it’s estimated 30 million men of marriageable age will be unable to find a wife. Yet in parts of China, dead husbands get more deference than prospective live ones. And women are murdered to serve traditional misogynous beliefs. Again.

Incidentally, Chinese immigrants bring their disdain for women to this country, as shown by a New York Times article from 2001: Clinics’ Pitch to Indian Émigrés: It’s a Boy.

But Indians are not the only immigrant group to be offered sex-selection procedures so directly. Chinese immigrants in New York City can find a gender-selection clinic right in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where Dr. Robert M. Nyein started offering the Ericsson sperm-separation technique as part of his gynecological practice about four years ago.

Nearly all the Chinese immigrants who come to him, said Dr. Nyein, want boys.

Chinese in China can complain that they are allowed only one child under the national policy. But Chinese immigrants to America may have as many children as they wish, so their anti-woman culture is the only reason for them to expunge females.

Chinese immigrants may be hard-working and smart, but their variety of diversity leaves much to be desired.

This is from a New York City teacher’s blog, about some of the teachers who are really bad, and can’t be fired. (See The Worm In The Apple on some of the reasons for this.)I was struck by, among other things, the intra-minority prejudice.

It seems that members of minority groups are prejudiced against other minority groups, and since they don’t suffer from the famous “white guilt,” they don’t restrain themselves from saying so.

There’s also, if you read the post, an instance of a genuinely bigoted white teacher, and the fact that he hasn’t been fired shows how powerful the teachers unions are.

Let’s say a Taiwanese teacher of Chinese shouts in front of God and everyone “I hate Chinese,” and proceeds to denounce the majority of our Chinese-speaking students as shiftless commies. Let’s say she treats them as such and manages to stay in the system until retirement.

Maybe a teacher posts on the board an offer to write college recommendations for 50 bucks a pop. Let’s say that teacher is from Spain and regularly tells Dominican and South American kids they are ignorant and don’t know their native languages. Let’s say further this teacher makes disparaging remarks about their parentage, of a most unpleasant and vulgar variety.

Let’s take a teacher who teaches a foreign language, but is verbally incomprehensible both in that language and English as well.NYC Educator: Bad Teachers

This photo looks like something straight from Baghdad, but it’s actually just across the border in Tijuana. The Mexican government has stationed military checkpoints on the edge of town so the army can check for serious weapons (RPGs are popular) and other signs of criminal activity. As well it should, since more than 300 people were murdered last year in the city. Many Mexican police are on the payroll of the drug cartels, so el Presidente Calderon’s only hope of rescuing his country from total crime anarchy has been to send in the troops to various hot spots.

Not only is tourism down, but kidnapping for ransom is up, and many well heeled Tjuanans are “moving” north to San Diego. At least the worsening crime wave is swell news for the armor-plating shops.

SAUL GONZALEZ: While most Mexicans see corruption, crime, and the country’s general climate of fear as crises, Mexico’s growing personal security industry see them as opportunities.

At Tijuana’s Blindado Seguro-Total Shield Company, customers come to have their cars and trucks armored with enough steel-plating and other protective material to drive through a war zone. The cost of the automotive makeover ranges from $30,000 to $80,000. The company’s president is Carlos Guerrero.

CARLOS GUERRERO, President, Total Shield (through translator): This is a high-end job, a level five that can protect you from automatic weapons.
[Mexican President Orders Crackdown on Crime, PBS 2/22/07 - includes video version]

In other Mexico meltdown news, “Federal police to permanently guard Acapulco hotels” because of the cartel violence in the once glamourous vaction spot. In Nuevo Laredo drug crime is destroying the honest businesses of the community: “In the past year, 700 small- and medium-size businesses shut down… and about 40 of the city’s top business leaders have set up shop across the border.”

As I write this, television news has been reporting the kidnapping of 13-year-old Clay Moore in Florida by Mexican illegal alien Vicente Beltran-Moreno. According to Manatee County Sheriff Charlie Wells, “This was an absolute kidnapping for ransom.” Fortunately, Clay was resouceful enough to get loose from the tree to which the Mexican had tied him and call the police.

The details of the crime are disturbing indeed: Beltran-Moreno forced the boy at gunpoint into a pickup truck at a school bus stop Friday morning as other students watched. Apparently Mexicans believe they can bring their criminal culture to this country and use their crime skills against innocent children to make piles of money.

I was interviewed on the February 23rd, 2007, edition of “The Heart of the Matter” with Ralph Ovadal of Wisconsin . We discussed the Mexican War (1846-1848) and its legacy, meddling Mexican congressmen and the border situation, and I put in a plug for VDARE.COM.

You can hear the interview here, my portion of the program begins at 51:35.

Until just recently, I had not heard of the syndicated columnist Bill Press. (Why, oh, why, could I not have been left alone to wallow in my own ignorant bliss?)

I came to know him after stumbling across his column praising the bottom-feeding Bank of America for having the good business sense to get its oily hands into a new market, i.e., giving credit cards to illegal aliens and, among other things, saying Rep. Tom Tancredo is someone “who has yet to see an immigrant he didn’t hate,” “Bank of America Rejects English-Only Plastic,” Feb. 22.

Here’s the part of the column that makes me wonder whether Press [Send him mail] has been paying attention to the news in recent years:

” . . . the bank is not promoting illegal immigration. It’s not luring these immigrants across the border with the promise of a credit card. They’re already here.”

I suppose Press also believes that more illegal immigration isn’t encouraged by amnesties like the one now proposed by the loathsome Sen. Edward Kennedy, or those goofball state and local governments that give illegals drivers licenses, instate tuition and accept Mexico’s matricula consular as valid ID.

Press is the second person I’ve seen who notes that Bank of America was founded by A. P. Giannini, the son of Italian immigrants, “for the express purpose of serving poor immigrants, mainly Italians at that time, to whom no other banks would make a loan.”

Why is it that Press, like his fellow apologists for the moral lepers who run much of Corporate America, always fail to mention certain critical facts when they fall all over themselves demonstrating just how much they don’t know about the immigration issue? In this case, that the “poor immigrants” Giannini wanted to help had entered this country playing by the rules.