If you read about the story of the immigrants who died in a fire in massively overcrowded house, you know that Bill O’Reilly has already been condemned by the David Brock machine for mentioning that illegal immigration is dangerous to everyone’s health. NPR is in little danger from MediaMatters, though. Litterblog reports this:

I heard on NPR yesterday a follow-up story that was about how one of the fathers of some of the dead children was trying to return to Mali to bury them, but was having trouble because he couldn’t get a visa. “That’s strange,” I thought, “Why wouldn’t the Malians give him a visa?” It turns out that he was having trouble securing a return visa to the U.S. Again, I thought “how odd that they wouldn’t give a visa to he grieving father.” Finally, in the very last sentence of the story, as an aside, they pointed out that the father is an illegal immigrant. Thus his problem securing a visa; he’s not here legally to begin with. If he leaves he would have to re-enter illegally. It was preposterous that NPR would leave such a vital fact to understanding the entire predicament of why he couldn’t obtain a visa to be an aside mentioned in the last sentence, and is indicative of our deep denial about the problems that arise from our current stance on immigrants.Litterblog: Moral hazard and the fire in the Bronx

In the March 10 Tapei Times Max Hirsch writes:

Rampant cheating by tech-savvy students in East Asia, including those from Taiwan, has forced the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the US-based testing organization with an annual budget of nearly US$1 billion, to promulgate a new, “cheat-resistant” version of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) worldwide, testing officials said yesterday.

The GRE is a standardized test that most US graduate schools require prospective students to take.

Now the big potential reward for foreigners taking the American-based GRE is getting into a US university–with taxpayer support–and through that valuable immigration rights. Those immigration rights are so very valuable, we have seen some elaborate cheating rings. I’ve heard of once such ring that involved transmission of questions to students taking the test later. It makes sense that less skillful cheaters like Teddy Kennedy would admire these folks.

Students coming to the US are supposed to regard themselves as “non-immigrants”-but there are all kinds of ways to get around that (anchor babies, marrying a US citizen) once someone is physically in the US–especially for the more enterprising-and less honest-folks.

What is especially sad, is this pattern isn’t isolated in the case of China. China is a major source of fake credit cards used in the US–and the source of highly addictive narcotics like oxycontin sold in the US black market. What is especially disturbing is these moves have high level government support-and support among influential elements in the Chinese Military.

I can understand why many Chinese are distrustful towards-and competitive of the west and its allies after the legacy of the opium trade.
Still continual vengeance and rivalry catches a lot of folks in the cross fire.

We need to think about how to a world that works for everyone-not liquidating important public assets to those most driven to get them. Fraud can destroy lives as easily as violence–and the last thing that the US needs is more highly intelligent–and industrious–fraud artists.

Ten African immigrants, nine of them children, were killed in a fire in an illegally overcrowded house in the Bronx. Bill O’ Reilly’s program has acquired a floor-plan of the house and will do a report on the O’Reilly Factor.

The No Spin truth is that the “compassion crowd” is really the “chaos crowd,” the “new America” crowd.

Let me ask you a direct question. Is it compassionate for New York, a sanctuary city, to allow 17 children to live in a dumpy tenement with five adults? Twenty-two people sharing three small bathrooms and six tiny bedrooms? Is that compassionate?

The building had poor heat, no fire escapes, no sprinklers. Yet social services didn’t visit the dwelling, because the city of New York has a don’t ask policy toward all foreign born residents.

So the next time you hear the compassion crowd bloviate, show them pictures of people dying in the Arizona desert and being buried here in New York City.Illegal Immigration Reaches Critical Mass - Bill O’Reilly, FOXNews.com, March 14, 2007

This is a point we’ve made before–lack of immigration enforcement creates a “moral hazard” for illegal immigrants, who are rewarded for the dangerous things they do to get to America, and the not punished for the dangerous things they do here.

David Brock’s thought police at MediaMatters have already condemned O’Reilly for saying this, and Keith Olberman has awarded him a “Worst Person” gold medal for saying this, so he must be doing something right.