In the Marcus Epstein post below, he quotes a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle: Feinstein, Lofgren push for immigrant workers. [May 16, 2008]

While it sounds like they’re helping the impoverished workers, actually they’re helping the wealthy employers. It should say “Feinstein, Lofgren Push For Employers Of Illegal Foreign Labor.”

It actually says this in the story:

“It’s an emergency,” Feinstein said of the farmworker situation. “If you can’t get people to prune, to plant, to pick, to pack, you can’t run a farm.”

Of course, there’s no law that says you have to run a farm, and no law that says you have to plant labor-intensive crops. The atricle also mentions the Western Growers Association, which wants this amnesty because their members profit from illegal foreign labor–see Diamonds And Doom-Mongering: The Western Growers Association Wants More Illegal Mexicans, by Bryanna Bevens for the facts on this major California lobby.

Did politically motivated negligence on the part of the Knoxville Police Department contribute to the Knoxville Horror?

Eleven days after the carjacking-kidnapping-gang-rape-torture-murder of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, a federal prosecutor charged that Eric Boyd had been on a months-long crime spree with the alleged ringleader of the crime, Lemaricus “Slim” Davidson, then 25, and sometimes with Davidson’s half-brother, Letalvis “Rome” Cobbins, then 24. The alleged spree began with Davidson’s August 2006 release from West Tennessee State Penitentiary, and ended only with the January 11, 2007 arrest of Boyd, Davidson, and Cobbins.

Last month, Boyd was convicted as an accessory after the fact to carjacking, for helping then-fugitive Davidson elude capture.

Davidson and Boyd had met at West Tennessee State, where Davidson served a mere five years on previous convictions for carjacking and aggravated robbery, and where he—but not Boyd—joined the racist gang, the Black Gangster Disciples.

During a January 18, 2007 hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Stone declared, “Mr. Boyd’s criminal history in a word is quite scary. I can’t even count the (number of) aggravated robbery convictions” on his rap sheet.

She lost count at 12. A 34-year-old, 12-time loser. And Boyd is a gentleman, compared to Davidson and Cobbins.

According to Stone, Boyd and Davidson, who along with the other three defendants are black, had been “robbing restaurant employees, committing home invasion robberies and plotting a bank robbery.” And yet, they weren’t arrested until after the white couple’s bodies were found. During the period in question, Chief Sterling Owen IV’s KPD was missing in action. [Email Chief Owen] Was department policy, “All the robberies are on the house, but we have zero tolerance for murder”?

“De-policing” and the racial profiling myth have both been around since at least the 1960s, though they received their current names circa 1999. That year saw a coordinated, national campaign joining the MSM, black race hustlers, and white allies, promoting the Big Lie that black males’ astronomical rates of conviction for violent crimes was due to innocent blacks being rounded up and even murdered by racist white policemen. In order to avoid career-destroying “racism” smears, white policemen began increasingly avoiding black suspects.

The ability of Davidson and Boyd allegedly to operate unmolested for months at a time has all the earmarks of a de-policing scenario.

De-policing leads to cascading social pathologies and institutional failures. Think New Orleans. The bad guys come to own the night, and increasingly, the day, as well.

Even after arrests were made in the atrocity, Chief Owen’s primary concern was in placating the black community. He espoused the transparent lie that race had played no role in the crime. You’d think blacks had been the victims.

Chief Owen has Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom’s blood on his hands.

Friday night (May 16, 2008), VDARE editor Joe Guzzardi gave us an in-depth look at the bleating absurdity of the Washington Post’s recent sob series (and a similar “organ recital” by the 60 Minutes program on CBS) about the purportedly sub-standard medical care provided “immigrants” while they’re in Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] detention.

Another useful reaction to this trumped-up “scandal” appeared a few days earlier in a brief entry by Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian at National Review Online’s “The Corner“ blog. Mark quoted an unnamed insider at the Department of Homeland Security who made a very important and basic point:

One other thing about the Post article on ICE medical care; they make it sound like these people are detained and have no way to leave. That is not true. They can always choose to go back to their country of origin. The only reason anyone is held in detention is because they are fighting deportation and are considered a flight risk. Every one of them could leave detention tomorrow if they would agree to go back home. They chose to stay in detention because they want to fight to get a visa or a green card. Also, if they are sick they get better care in detention than they do at home in many cases. If you read the Post article you would think we lock these people up and don’t let them go home.

Last year I warned in Human Events that the open borders lobby would put their “comprehensive immigration reform” on hold and focus on piecemeal amnesties like the DREAM Act and AgJobs. We managed to stop the DREAM Act and it seemed like AgJobs had been stopped multiple times this year, but in the lowest form of Open Borders trickery, Dianne Feinstein is trying to tag it on to the Iraq Spending Bill. Technically this isn’t quite as bad as AgJobs.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle

Sen. Dianne Feinstein attached a farm guest-worker program to the giant Iraq spending bill Thursday in a last-ditch effort to remedy a shortage of workers in California’s produce fields as the federal government continues to crack down on illegal immigration and the political climate proves hostile to more sweeping measures…

Her addition to the Iraq spending bill would give temporary legal status to 1.3 million farmworkers over the next five years, but it would provide no path to citizenship or permanent residency. It passed the Senate Appropriations Committee 17-12 on Thursday.[Feinstein, Lofgren push for immigrant workers, May 16, 2008]

What the bill will do is give them legal status for five years with no promise of permanent residency or citizenship. I don’t think anyone honestly believes that once “they come out of the shadows and play by the rules” that they will be deported at the end of the five year stint. Many of them will have children with U.S. citizenship during that time.

Expect to see this “five year amnesty” come up in the next “comprehensive” measure.