In a past life, I was a Database developer supporting the integration of a credit card Fraud Detection System at a large bank. One of the things I was told by the experienced fraud investigators there was about 40% of all credit card fraud related to three categories of large, organized gangs:

• The Bloods and the Crips
• The Asian Fraud Rings
• The Nigerian Fraud Rings

Now, of these three, only the first is “home grown”–the management of the other gangs is foreign. These gangs depend on getting visas or immigration rights to get key people into the US to conduct operations here. The Nigerian Fraud Rings typically excel at “social engineering.” The Asian Fraud Rings have the capability to manufacture counterfeit credit cards in factories near Hong Kong and Beijing–and to distribute these cards into the US.

Now, while violent crime and crime against property may be falling in the US, fraud in various forms is on the increase. Credit Card Fraud in the US increased about 35% between 2003 and 2007.

Some kinds of crime do pay–and thus are growing. If we want to understand the real impact of immigrants on crime, we must look at the “growth industries” of the criminal world.

In the news, comes this report:

McCain, Romney hit over Confederate flag

Washington Times, January 18, 2008

By Stephen Dinan - COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Confederate battle flag — an issue that has confounded politicians in South Carolina for more than a decade — is back again, this time in the form of radio ads attacking Republican presidential candidates Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney for criticizing the flag.

Paid for by Americans for the Preservation of American Culture, the ads also single out rival Republican Mike Huckabee for praise, saying the former Arkansas governor defended the flag as a state and heritage issue. They began running yesterday.

“Mitt Romney’s been trying, but when it comes to bashing the Confederate flag, he can’t hold a candle to John McCain. McCain’s been doing it — calling the flag a racist symbol — for years,” one of the minutelong ads says.

Another ad goes straight for Mr. Romney, with the announcer saying, “Romney let fly in a CNN debate, saying ‘that flag shouldn’t be flown’ and ‘that’s not a flag I recognize.’ ”

Ron Wilson, a former national commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a South Carolinian who was involved in raising money for the ads, said they will be run through Saturday’s primary on every radio station in the state that carries the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly.

He wouldn’t say how big the ad buy was, only that he has been told the commercials will reach 60 percent to 65 percent of all Republican primary voters.[More]

Meanwhile, over at the Chronicles blog, Tim Manning warns that there’s no reason for Southerners to actually trust Huckabee, or think he cares about their heritage:

All along, Huckabee has said his liberal stance on illegal immigration is brought on by his desire to make atonement for slavery, “a second chance for America to get right with God.” He has, himself, over and over, repeatedly used all of the same politically correct slurs against the Confederate flag—not to mention grandstanding for the NAACP. Not only does this last minute ploy attempt to align Confederate flag voters with a bad and fraudulent candidate, but it plays into the national stereotype that those who like the Confederate flag will support a megalomaniac Big Government Liberal Republican. [Huckabee’s Confederate Flag Fraud]

Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete are charged with keeping illegals in slavery in Immokalee, Florida, locking them up and forcing them to pick tomatoes. The Deparment of Justice press release makes it clear that the perpetrators, as well as the victims are both aliens and illegal, saying that “Cesar, Geovanni, Jose, Villhina, Ismael and Michael Navarrete and Antonia Zuniga Vargas are also charged with harboring undocumented foreign nationals for private financial gain, commercial advantage, document fraud, and identity theft. Cesar Navarrete is charged with feloniously re-entering the United States after being convicted of a felony and deportation. Jose Navarrete and Ismael Michael Navarrete are charged with re-entering the United States after being deported.”[Emphasis added]

Here are some sample headlines about this, based on the Associated Press story

•  Florida Family Charged With Enslaving Immigrant Farm Workers
• Grand jury re-indicts Immokalee family charged with aiding illegal aliens : Crime : Naples Daily News
• Collier family facing federal slavery charges - News- msnbc.com
• Florida family charged with immigrant slavery - National News - Tampa Bays Local News
•  Six charged with enslaving immigrants

You’ll notice it’s never “Immigrant Family Charged With Slavery,” it’s always “Family Charged With Immigrant Slavery”–immigrants can only  be victims in the headline.

And one news outlet gets it right–Univision!

 Familia hispana acusada de esclavitud | Mexicanos y guatemaltecos los afectados AFP  de 2008

Florida, which was part of the Confederacy, abolished slavery over 140 years ago, and abolished its Jim Crow laws approximately 40 years ago, but there are still people who think Floridians are evil white racists. It would be nice if the headline writers would admit that these modern-day slaveholders are not Floridians, but Hispanic illegal aliens.

As Tim Manning predicted, here on VDARE.com, the Confederate Flag is now an issue in South Carolina. Mike Huckabee brought it up, using it against John McCain. This is from the New York Times:

Confederate Flag Takes Center Stage Once Again

By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: January 18, 2008

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Republican presidential candidates on Thursday moved to appeal to different types of conservative voters before the South Carolina primary, with Mike Huckabee using colorful language to declare the Confederate flag a states’ rights issue and Senator John McCain embracing a supply-side tax cut proposal.

“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, told supporters in Myrtle Beach, according to The Associated Press.

“In fact,” he said, “if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.”

This is via Instapundit, who seems to disapprove, and Riehl World View, where Dan Riehl considers the flagpole remark vulgar. Of course, the idea that outsiders shouldn’t be telling the citizens of South Carolina what flag they should have is one of John McCain’s positions. When I say “one of”  his positions, I mean he’s always been willing to change his position to whatever he thinks will get him closer to the Presidency. Bloggers seem to think that, as Bob Krumm puts it, this remark will “come back to haunt him” in the general election, if he gets the nomination. But who, among the general electorate,  hates the Confederate Flag? Only African-Americans, who vote 90 percent Democratic anyway, and far-left Democrats who will either vote for Democrats, the Green Party, or Bernie Sanders.

It amused me to see several references in news stories to McCain “mending fences” with conservatives, as in this Boston Globe story from last May , or this National Journal story yesterday.

Of course, McCain’s actual attitude towards fences is “By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it,” although he’s also said ”We Are Not Going To Build Fences And Barriers,” so who knows?

In the Wall Street Journal, the Hitch asserts:

“The enormous advances in genome studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of “race” as a means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it with color. The number of subjective definitions of “racist” is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is “one who believes that there are human races.”"

Obviously, Hitchens is an ignoramus about genome studies. More interesting, though, is the lack of self-awareness that political correctness inculcates! Hitchens is America’s most famous atheist, yet his entire life was turned inside out–to the point that he now drops by synagogues–when he discovered his mother was part-Jewish.