Assuming you’re not patrolling the border between Presque Isle, Maine, and New Brunswick, it helps a lot for a Border Patrol officer to speak Spanish. That, and the demographics of Texas, New Mexico, and California, mean that there are a lot of Mexican-American Border Patrol officers.

The CBP is proud of this, and has a web page boasting about it, written Christopher Rodriguez, Hispanic Employment Program Manager, Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, which says:

The CBP Officers and Border Patrol Agents of Hispanic heritage play a vital role in protecting our nation. Esther Esparza, Entry Specialist at the El Paso, Tex. field office, notes that, “CBP Hispanic employees are an invaluable asset regardless of the duties they perform. Our biculturalism promotes a greater understanding of the diverse people we encounter and work with along the southern border.” For example, CBP Officer Jose E. Melendez-Perez was recognized by the Commissioner for his alertness in blocking the entry of a potential terrorist at the Orlando International Airport. The suspect was ultimately arrested in Afghanistan and is being held in custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.CBP Today - September 2004 - Hispanic Americans: making a difference in our communities and our nation

However, we’ve also mentioned resulting corruption:The Wall Street Journal & Border Patrol Corruption.

Anyhow, here’s today’s story from the El Paso Times

El Paso Times - Fugitive Border Patrol agent caught
A Border Patrol agent who was arrested last year on bribery charges and who fled to Mexico while out of jail on bond has been arrested in Mexico, officials with the U.S. Marshals Service said.

Arturo Arzate Jr., 47, is accused of waving loads of drugs through the checkpoint on Highway 62/180 east of El Paso, federal court documents state. He had been a Border Patrol agent for 20 years.

Officials said he was arrested Aug. 16 by Mexican officials in Torreon in the state of Coahuila. He had been a fugitive since February, officials said. He will be extradited back to the United States.

Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed and Youssef Samir Megahed have been indicted [PDF] for possessing explosives for “Violent Purposes.” These explosives were discovered by police in the are of Goose Creek, SC, on August 4, and they’ve been the subject of much speculation.

What I’d like to speculate on is this: why does the US Government give student visas to students from Islamic countries? One of the first suggestions we made after 9/11 was for the government to stop doing this.

In my article about the Elvira Arellano Melodrama, I reported that the recently-deported Elvira met with the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon.

According to initial reports, Elvira asked Calderon to help arrange her visa to the U.S. Calderon replied that he would study her case, but the issuance of a visa was up to American authorities, not the Mexican government. So Elvira exited Los Pinos (the Mexican White House), and made no statement to the media.

Later, however, Elvira held her own press conference elsewhere, and put a different spin on things. Elvira said that she’d requested Calderon designate her “Ambassador of Immigrants” in the U.S.:

“I asked him for a diplomatic visa to return to the United States as an ambassador of peace, justice and hope for many people.”

Did Elvira really request that? Initial reports didn’t say that she did, and the statement on the President of Mexico’s website said she requested Mexican government help in obtaining a U.S. visa from the U.S.

Either Elvira is lying about what she said to the president of Mexico, the Mexican government didn’t want to reveal it, or the initial reports simply didn’t include it.

In any case, I get the impression the Calderon administration is not too keen on getting mixed up with Elvira.

A positive result of the Elvira Spectacle is that, rather than endearing herself to Americans, her defiance, shamelessness, and willingness to utilize her son as a propaganda tool is not exactly winning over the American public. Like the protesting Mexican flag-wavers, I think it’s helping our side!

Here’s a defiant shot of Elvira, shaking her fist at us.

Keep it up Elvira, you’re showing more Americans that illegal immigration is a real problem that needs fixing.

I guess in an unintended and ironic way, she really is an “ambassador!”

NBC San Diego writes:

The Teamsters Union said it has been told by officials in the Transportation Department’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that the first Mexican trucks will be coming across the border on Saturday.

The union said Wednesday it would ask a federal appeals courts to block the Bush administration’s plan to begin allowing Mexican trucks to carry cargo anywhere in the United States.

Teamsters leaders said they planned to seek an emergency injunction Wednesday from the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

“What a slap in the face to American workers, opening the highways to dangerous trucks on Labor Day weekend, one of the busiest driving weekends of the year,” said Teamsters President Jim Hoffa.
Joining the Teamsters in seeking the emergency stay were the Sierra Club and Public Citizen.

I’m happy to see the Sierra Club get some sanity, even this late in this process. Ralph Nader has always had a bit more sense on immigration than most of the Liberal Establishment–which isn’t saying much.

Anyhow, when I see this, I wonder how much the Teamsters really got for their endorsements of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Anthropologist John Hawks offers some good suggestions:

Don’t get me wrong, I like physics as much as anybody. But once your list includes Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell, and then you throw in Galileo, well there’s not much room for anything else. None at all if you take Darwin as a given.

So I decided to do something a little different: What five scientists have had the greatest impact on human life? Yes, Newton was great, but gravity goes on without him.

Many later discoveries stood on his shoulders, but Newton’s achievements were far more intellectual than practical. I’m looking for people whose accomplishments saved lives, prevented wars, stopped hunger, or released people from endless drudgery. This isn’t a list of inventors — if it were, there would be a lot of ancient inventions like the moldboard plow that deserve more attention than anything modern. It’s a list of scientists whose impact stretched across many fields, and without whom life today would likely be worse.

1. R. A. Fisher. His work in population genetics laid the foundations for the vast productivity increases of twentieth-century agriculture. He was far from alone in this, but he stood apart from his contemporaries by inventing many of the statistical methods that would come to define scientific hypothesis testing. Without Fisher’s innovations in statistics, large-scale medical research studies would be meaningless. All this after he established the basis for Mendelian inheritance of continuous characters.

Fisher strikes me as the Newton of the 20th Century: the scientist / mathematical innovator.

For the rest of Hawks’ list, click here.