The Associated Press. Awrites:

OKLAHOMA CITY A spokesman for Governor Henry says the governor will study the final version of an immigration bill before deciding whether to sign it into law or veto it.
Supporters of the bill say the measure would save the state up to 200 (m) million dollars a year.

It would deny jobs and public benefits to illegal immigrants and targets businesses which knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

The bill is sponsored by Representative Randy Terrill who says it will also limit state driver’s licenses and identity cards to citizens and legal immigrants. And it requires state and local agencies to verify the citizenship and immigration status of applicants for state or local benefits.

Now, I fully expect that if Henry does sign this bill, some federal judge will declare the law “unconstitutional.” Still, at the least the Oklahoma legislators are trying.

From the Associated Press

PHOENIX — Gov. Janet Napolitano has vetoed a bill partly intended to help combat illegal immigration by going after day laborers and those who hire them.

The bill would have made it a misdemeanor trespassing offense for day laborers to seek work on public streets and sidewalks and for people who offer or solicit day labor work on private property after the owner asks them to leave.

I doubt very much this veto will really resolve this issue.

With the stories of Rupert Murdoch trying to buy the Wall Street Journal flying around, we at VDARE.com can’t help wondering if this means that immigration, either in the form of Murdoch himself or one of his feisty Australian editors, is finally going to affect the livelihoods of the Editorial Board itself? That would be really, really, sad.Really!

But they say it helps to laugh, so if it does happen, we’ll laugh really, really, hard, just to keep from crying. Condolences, and offers of jobs picking fruit, can be sent to the WSJ here.

Surely the stress-related immigrant “Familicide” Brenda Walker wrote about last night isn’t going to be a trend, is it? This just in…

Police: Man admits setting fatal fireFort Worth Star-Telegram, May. 01, 2007
By BILL MILLER

A Dallas man has told police he set a house fire early Tuesday that killed his teenage stepdaughter to punish his wife who wanted to divorce him, police said.

Santiago Lara, 46, faces capital murder charges after telling police he set the fatal fire at 2006 Quarry St., said Sgt. Gene Reyes, Dallas homicide detective.

The blaze, which was reported about 12:30 a.m., killed Destiny Brown, 18, according to a spokeswoman for the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Reports that Lara was hiding in bushes outside the home while firefighters battled the blaze could not be confirmed Tuesday.

Reyes, however, said the man approached firefighters and police at the scene and was arrested. Later he told police why he set the fire.

“It was marital problems,” Reyes said. “She had asked for a divorce and this was his way of retaliating.”

The family’s house was in a neighborhood just west of the intersection of Interstate 30 and Loop 12, also called Walton Walker Boulevard, in far west Dallas.

The fire was intense, said Joel Lavender, spokesman for Dallas Fire-Rescue. He said firefighters had it under control at 1:14 a.m.; they subsequently found Brown’s body in the rubble.

No other information was immediately available.

At some point in the future, all this might change. But when America’s elites tell you that illegal immigrants are too powerful a political force for anything to be done about illegal immigration, they are lying. The reality is that they don’t want to do anything about illegal immigration.

Peter Prengaman writes at the Associated Press:

LOS ANGELES — Immigration rallies held across the country Tuesday produced only a fraction of the million-plus protesters who turned out last year, as fear about raids and frustration that the marches haven’t pushed Congress to pass reform kept many at home.

In Los Angeles, where several hundred thousand turned out last year, about 25,000 attended the first of two scheduled rallies, said police Capt. Andrew Smith, an incident commander. In Chicago, where more than 400,000 swarmed the streets a year earlier, police officials put initial estimates at about 150,000.

I tend to think this means the money behind these rallies is starting to realize they’ve stirred up a hornets nest. Now, the right tactic here is to press on. The ill-gotten gains of the wealthy who have profited from illegal immigration should be expropriated-so they can’t do anything like this again in the future.

Really, there has to be a better name than “Britons” to call Arab terrorists with British citizenship. UK citizens? British subjects?

Omar Khyam was found guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions made from a chemical fertilizer that could endanger life. Also found guilty were Anthony Garcia, Jawad Akbar, Waheed Mahmood and Salahuddin Amin. 5 Britons get life sentences in terror plot, By David Stringer, Associated Press, May 1, 2007

Katrina Vanden Huevel writes in The Nation:

Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, were both on hand to pledge their leadership on what Task Force co-chair Peter B. Edelman, professor of Law at Georgetown University, called “a national shame…. There should be no one [in this country] who’s poor.”

This is one of the great scandals of our times. In the richest industrialized nation in the world, 37 million Americans–one in eight citizens–live below the official poverty line (just $19,971 income for a family of four); in 2005, more than 90 million Americans had incomes below 200 percent of the poverty threshold (less than $40,000 for a family of four); the United States ranks 24th out of 25 developed nations in the share of the population with an income below 50 percent of the national median income–and the US is dead last among 24 rich nations when the same measurement is used to assess child poverty. Nearly 20 percent of American children are poor, and it’s estimated that allowing children to grow up in persistent poverty costs our economy $500 billion per year. Lastly, income inequality has reached record highs and is getting worse.

“From 1947 to 1973, we saw every economic quintile growing together, and those at the lowest level were growing the fastest,” Kennedy said. “In 1980, with President Reagan, you see the beginning of growing apart…And now, those at the lowest end of the ladder are not even keeping up while there is an explosion at the highest level.”

In fact, the post-tax income of the top 1 percent rose $145,500 between 2003 and 2004; it rose just $200 for the bottom fifth during that same period.

The report goes on to make some specific proposals on how to end poverty in America–the most dramatic of them were some changes to the EITC that would theoretically lift 5 million Americans out of poverty. The combined cost of all the steps was around $90 Billion per year.

Now, the big omission in this program was looking at how immigration policy impacts poverty in America.The simple fact is that many of the poor in America came here to be less poor than they were in Mexico or Central America. Furthermore, the expansion of the US labor pool via immigration has had a significant downward pressure on the wages of the lowest skilled, and lowest earning Americans.

We have also seen the rise in illegal immigration to the US accompanied by an increase in poverty in Mexico.

I think by and large, the steps in this report are decent ones–but if they are to work,they must be accompanied by a sane immigration policy in the US, a regional plan to address poverty throughout North America and a program to improve technology to create a realistic and sustainable basis for global prosperity.