There’s a new book out, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy which sounds interesting.

Some of the material it covers will be familiar to VDARE.com readers, particularly if you read Rape And Cryptoslavery Bush’s Pincer Attack On American Workersby Steve Sailer.

Most Americans would be shocked to discover that slavery still exists in the United States. Yet most of us buy goods made by people who aren’t paid for their labor–people who are trapped financially, and often physically. In Nobodies, award-winning journalist John Bowe exposes the outsourcing, corporate chicanery, immigration fraud, and sleights of hand that allow forced labor to continue in the United States while the rest of us notice nothing but the everyday low price at the checkout counter.

Based on thorough and often dangerous research, exclusive interviews, and eyewitness accounts, Nobodies takes you inside three illegal workplaces where employees are virtually or literally enslaved.

In the fields of Immokalee, Florida, underpaid (and often unpaid) illegal immigrants pick the produce all of us consume, connected by a chain of subcontractors and divisions to such companies as PepsiCo and Tropicana. At the top of the chain are stockholders and politicians; at the bottom is a father of six, one of whose children suffers from leukemia, who entered America only to become the unpaid employee of a labor contractor nicknamed “El Diablo” for his cruelty.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the John Pickle Company reaped profits for years making pressure tanks used by oil refineries and power plants. Feeling squeezed by foreign competition and government regulations, JPC partnered with an Indian and Kuwaiti firm to import workers from India. Under the guise of a “training program,” fifty-three workers, including college-educated Uday Ludbe, came to the United States, only to have their documents confiscated and to find themselves confined to a factory building. Pickle laid off Americans and paid the Indians three dollars an hour.

Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific where the author lived for three years, has long been exempted from American immigration controls, tariffs, and federal income tax–a status quo assiduously protected by lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Congressman Tom DeLay. There, garment magnates–selling to clothing giants like the Gap and Target–live in luxury while thousands of foreign factory workers, 90 percent of them female, work sixty-hour weeks for $3.05 an hour and spend weekends trying to trade sex for green cards. The garments they make are allowed to be labeled MADE IN AMERICA.

Nobodies is a vivid and powerful work of investigative reporting, but it is also a lively examination of the eternal struggle for power between free people and unfree people. Against the American landscape of shopping mall, outlet stores, and Happy Meals, Bowe reveals how humankind’s darker urges remain alive and well, lingering in the background of every transaction and how understanding them may lead to overcoming them.

Greeley, Colorado, would have been an interesting place to be on Tuesday, since it was the site of a community forum focused on the crime victims of illegal aliens. One citizen who told her story was mother Sandy Ross, who lost her home and job because of a drunk-driving foreigner.

“None of this would have happened if this person had been taken off the street,” she said in a videotaped message.

Only a few hundred people were expected at the meeting, but close to a thousand turned out to hear more about how illegal immigrants who commit crimes are impacting the community.

“We may not have 10,000 illegal immigrants committing crimes in Weld County, we may just have a couple hundred, but each one of them impacts someone in a significant way and we want to make sure we help these folks,” said [Weld County DA Ken] Buck.

Like Sandy Ross, for example, who was one of several victims who shared her story. Two years ago she and her 4-year old son were hit head on by a career criminal who was drunk and in this country illegally. “I was more upset that he was driving under the influence, that his license had been suspended, that he had stolen someone’s car and that he had priors. He should have been deported the first or second time this happened,” said Ross.
[DA rails against illegal immigrants at community meeting KWGN-TV 9/19/07]

Congratulations to District Attorney Ken Buck for shining a light on forgotten Americans who have been harmed or lost a family member as a result of the criminal activities of illegal aliens. He has had to deal with plenty of noisy open-borders supporters who got lots of press coverage prior to the event.

There are more details about what happened to Sandy Ross in a Denver Post article, Immigration Strains Greeley:

Sandy Ross, 55, is among a group of people who will talk about how crimes committed by illegal immigrants have damaged their lives.

Ross said she was driving home from church in Weld County on Sept. 2, 2005, when a car driven by Armando Rodriguez Romero slammed into hers. Rodriguez Romero was here illegally from Mexico and had stolen his brother’s car.

Ross suffered two broken legs, a broken arm and a crushed right foot in the crash. Her 4-year-old son also was injured and traumatized by the crash.

“For the longest time, he would just break down and cry,” Ross said.

Ross lost her apartment trying to pay bills related to the crash and now lives with a friend in Arvada. Rodriguez Romero is serving an eight-year sentence for vehicular assault while under the influence.

Rodriguez Romero had four previous DUI charges over 10 years: there were four earlier opportunities for police to deport this habitual criminal, but he was allowed to stay and injure two innocent citizens.

If you want to thank the DA for standing with citizens rather than lawbreakers, write him an email at kbuck@co.weld.co.us. (Other contact info here.)

There’s a shortage of places in California nursing schools, but they have a plan–outsource Nursing School:

If all goes as planned, as many as 40 bilingual Californians now stuck on nursing school waiting lists will begin classes in January at a college in Guadalajara, Mexico – apparently the first attempt by any state to outsource nursing education to another country.

Program supporters say it’s a reasonable way to train more Californians, especially those who can work in communities that need more Spanish-speaking health care workers.[Outsourcing education,By Keith Darcé, The San Diego Union-Tribune, September 16, 2007]

And of course the reason they need Spanish-speaking health care workers is because of the massive influx of illegal immigrants who can’t speak English.

Via Joanne Jacobs, who asks

Given the very high demand for nurses, which is sure to continue as the baby boomers age, why is it so difficult to offer competitive salaries to instructors and expand U.S. nursing schools?

The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, by Washington Times columnist Diana West is a very interesting (read: heartbreaking) book about how the authority-challenging, mores-rejecting 1960s generation has wreaked havoc by never growing up.

Particularly interesting, especially to me, is this passage:

In Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster, a bracingly unequivocal assessment of the cultural and political shambles that make up U.S. immigration policy–the basis of sovereignty–author Peter Brimelow opens his preface with a provocative statement.

“There is a sense in which the current immigration policy is Adolph Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism and xenophobia. Eventually, it enacted the epochal Immigration Act (technically, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments) of 1965. And this, quite accidentally, triggered a renewed mass immigration, so huge and systemically different from anything that had gone before as to transform–and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy–the one unquestioned victor of World War II: the American nation, as it had evolved by the middle of the twentieth century.”

Brimelow doesn’t elaborate on Hitler’s revenge, but further consideration is illuminating. It’s easy to imagine that in its revulsion at Adolf Hitler’s genocidal anti-Semitism and obsession with Aryan racial purity, the U.S. political elite wanted to put as much distance between itself and any policy or practice smacking of the evils of the Third Reich. Ditto for the Nazi regime’s rigid, if buffoonish, authoritarianism. Remember the Hechingers [Grace and Fred M. Hechinger, authors of a 1963 book, Teen-Age Tyranny], with their astute observation that postwar American culture expressed an instinctive animus toward the autocratic classroom, its pedagogical authority, and the blind obedience of rote memorization. This old-fashioned model wasn’t , as they observed, going to fly in the new postwar day. Having just triumphed over a German dictatorship and a Japanese divine monarchy, American culture was in a decidedly democratic mood; this, as the Hechingers demonstrated played out in the widespread receptivity to new, nonauthoritarian, child-directed education theories, and a growing emphasis on self-expression.

Brimelow has picked up on another aspect of the postwar mood–the passionate concern of the postwar elite “to cleanse itself from all taints of racism and xenophobia.” This, he maintains, culminated in the Immigration Act of 1965. By reconstituting the immigrant pool to accommodate non-Europeans and nonwhite peoples, this new legislation codified a policy of non-racism (”racism” understood as discrimination against nonwhites) within an official American embrace of non-Western cultures. The practical impact of this landmark legislation still hasn’t been acknowledged; the emotional effect on proponents, however, was undoubtedly instantaneous as warm waves of self-satisfaction foamed with newly proven purity–not race, of course, but rather of intentions.

Such idealistic trends, the one cited by Hechingers, the other by Brimelow, were at heart emotional trends–part of the same national mood swing of postwar exuberance. The “democratic” classroom that no longer saluted authority embodied the difference between the heil-Hitler bad guys and the power-to-the-people good guys; so, too, did “democratic” immigration legislation (”a national emotional spasm”) that sent Western European émigrés toward the back of the line for American entry. Just as we were now inclined to bridle at the traditional hierarchy in the classroom, we were also ready to reject the traditional hierarchy of cultures. This would ultimately, however, call into question our own place on top.

And therein lies Hitler’s revenge–the cultural leveling that either emerged from, or was, in some crucial way, accentuated by, natural outrage over the crimes against humanity committed by the Third Reich. Hitler, of course was totally defeated, along with his tyrannical notion of cultural (Germanic) and racial (Aryan) “supremacy.” But so, too, perhaps, were all notions of Western primacy regarding culture and race (which I take here to include nationhood) - even ones that supported, not supremacy in a murderous form, but judgment in a rational form. Grounded by notions of sovereignty and cultural affinity, such judgement determines the kids of attitudes and choices–on everything from religion to law to literature–that are expressed in cultural identity. In the case of the United States and its European allies, these attitudes and choices derive from a specifically Judeo-Christian identity forged in fire, ink, and steel by those whom our modern-day multiculturalists insultingly deride as “dead, white men.”

Having failed to destroy the democracies by making Nazi war, then, Hitler may have unwittingly managed to destroy the democracies by effecting a post-Nazi peace in which the act of pledging allegiance to the flag itself, for example, would practically become an act of nationalist supremacism - racism, even; bigotry, too. Quite sudddenly, it didn’t matter whether the culture in question led to a reign of terror, or to liberty and justice for all.

Hear, hear.

In an article focused on tech positions of major presidential candidates, Aaron Ricadela writes at Business Week:

The foreign-worker problem faced by tech companies is played out in the struggle over so-called H-1B visas, which are awarded to foreign nationals who attend American universities and want to work for U.S. companies. This year the government allocated 65,000 of the visas. Tech companies, eager to land well-educated and highly skilled employees from abroad, say that’s too few. “Historically, America has succeeded because the best and the brightest come here,” says Maeder of Highland Capital Partners.

A sweeping 2007 immigration bill proposed raising the cap on the visas to 115,000 in 2008, but it was defeated in the Senate in June. Microsoft is taking matters into its own hands. In September the company opened a development office in Vancouver, Canada, largely to employ foreign workers who were prohibited from employment in the U.S. “We haven’t given up hope,” Krumholtz says.

McCain was a strong supporter of President Bush’s attempt at immigration reform, which also included a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and measures to strengthen border security. According to McCain policy director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, standalone H-1B legislation could also be a possibility. In a policy paper written for BusinessWeek.com, the McCain campaign says the Arizona senator supports expansion of the H-1B cap but that the measure alone won’t make the U.S. more competitive. “Opening new and integrated world markets won’t automatically translate into higher quality of life for every American,” the paper says, echoing a position taken by opponents of H-1Bs. The government should do more to help U.S. workers get education and training, McCain’s campaign says.

Edwards’ position may be seen as less tech-friendly. He would require employers to show they couldn’t have given an H-1B job to an American, and he would increase fees for companies that employ H-1B workers, his campaign says.

Now, first off, “tech” isn’t just the interest of tech shareholders. I would suggest that low-cost H-1b visas are similar to paying farmers not to grow crops. You get higher prices at the expense of a loss of overall productivity capacity. These Visas are extremely valuable. Edward’s proposed fee increases are nowhere near the level that would be necessary to equalize supply and demand. Doing that would require something like an auction. Now, with an auction, tech companies could get a visa pretty much whenever they really needed-and were willing and able to pay. The proceeds could be used for something like education of US technical workers-or R&D grants, that would tend to benefit tech companies-so the net cost to tech companies would be zero–but the relative cost of US tech workers and foreign tech workers would change substantially.

The thing is, this isn’t about technical competitiveness of the USA, or helping poor people in India or China. It is about maintaining huge corporate welfare grants that benefit the wealthy in the US.