Breitbart reports:

A company that owns 11 McDonald’s restaurants in Nevada was fined one million dollars Wednesday after pleading guilty to employing 58 illegal immigrants.

The company, Mack Associates Inc., knew the employees were illegal immigrants and had offered them names and social security numbers belonging to other people, the US Justice Department said.

You are going to see reports that this is indicative of some serious crackdown on illegal immigration. I would suggest that we really need to look at the numbers involved here. How many violations were really involved here? I would expect 58 is just the tip of the iceberg–just what the prosecuting attorney had an ability to prove. I’d be surprised if there hadn’t been at least 200 violations over the lifetime of this company. I wonder if in the past, the company’s employees have benefited from one of the amnesty programs?

What is the potential economic value of 200 violations? I’d expect at least a half of those folks have–or expected to–grabbed the brass ring of a US green card. Each of those green cards has considerable economic value-on the order of at least $200K. The cost to the public of each incidence of illegal immigration is at least $100K according to the NSF.

So we have here a case in which a $1 Million fine was appraised for a theft that involved $20 Million or so of value transferred to the shareholders of this company at the expense of American workers and the American taxpayer. Now, I would suggest that hardened corporate criminals will just see that as a cost of doing business.

The public doesn’t understand the economics here yet–most economists don’t either. For a criminal penalty to be effective, the cost of getting caught times  the chance of getting caught must exceed the value of getting away with the crime.

This phony tactic of election year immigration enforcement may work politically. However, I think long run, it will have problems. This level of enforcement isn’t going to stop illegal immigration. It may reduce it a bit–but it won’t stop it.

I would suggest that VDARE.com readers need to solidify their political resolve here. Why shouldn’t all eleven of those McDonald Franchises be sold to compensate the victims of illegal immigration? Why shouldn’t there be laws on the books that would closely examing the complicity of the McDonalds Corporation in granting a franchise to a company that was obviously violating US immigration laws? Does America really need enormous concentrations of wealth to maintain a functioning market economy? If not why not give the little guy a break and tax those economic dinosaurs more appropriately for past crimes?

Hector Becerra of the LA Times visits a high school near downtown LA that has basically no whites or blacks, and asks students and teachers “Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos?”

Lincoln Heights is mostly a working-class Mexican American area, but it’s also a first stop for Asian immigrants, many of them ethnic Chinese who fled Vietnam.

With about 2,500 students, Lincoln High draws from parts of Boyle Heights, El Sereno and Chinatown.

Both the neighborhood and student body are about 15% Asian. And yet Asians make up 50% of students taking Advanced Placement classes. Staffers can’t remember the last time a Latino was valedictorian.

“A lot of my friends say the achievement gap is directly attributable to the socioeconomic status of students, and that is not completely accurate,” O’Connell said. “It is more than that.”

But what is it? O’Connell called a summit in Sacramento that drew 4,000 educators, policymakers and experts to tackle the issue. Some teachers stomped out in frustration and anger.

No Lincoln students stomped out of their discussion. Neither did any teachers in a similar Lincoln meeting. But the observations were frank, and they clearly made some uncomfortable.

To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few generalities: Latino and Asian students came mostly from poor and working-class families.

According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic Decathlon team. …

Asian parents are more likely to pressure their children to excel academically, the students agreed. …

The journalist winds up with the usual George W. Bush-style postmodernist explanation–the soft bigotry of low expectations. If only everybody would just assume the two groups are equal, then they would be.

Try and falsify that proposition!

Of course, the long article doesn’t mention the two dread letters, but, on the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that Chinese tend to overachieve and Mexican-Americans tend to underachieve relative to their IQs. Family expectations and pressure are certainly a plausible explanation for over vs. underachievement.

The subtler question that I want to focus on, though, is whether it’s better, all else being equal, for Hispanics to be in a school that’s 85% Hispanic and 15% Chinese or in a school that is 100% Hispanic?

That’s a tough problem for social science to crack since all else is never equal. If the school was really bad, it wouldn’t be 15% Asian–the Chinese parents would get their kids out. So you can assume that Lincoln isn’t a really awful, dangerous school like, say, Jefferson, where there were brown vs. black race riots a few years ago. Not a lot of Chinese at Jefferson. (Here’s Roger D. McGrath’s 2005 American Conservative article on Jefferson High. By the way, I don’t think there are many high schools that are perpetually 85% black and 15% Asian–it sounds unstable – but I could be wrong.)

I don’t have much of a hunch what a good study would find. I could see it going either way. Having 15% Asians around might help the smart, nerdy Hispanics find friends, and might keep better teachers around the school. (Good teachers like to teach–i.e., to impart learning–so good teachers gravitate toward schools with good students–i.e., those more able and willing to be taught.) Being 15% Asian means there are enough advanced students around to justify advanced classes.

On the other hand, having an “academic-dominant minority” of Asians in a high school may well further racialize attitudes toward studying. If your name ends in Z and you are a student at Lincoln, what’s the point of setting out in 9th grade to be valedictorian? No Hispanic has been valedictorian at Lincoln H.S. since the mind of man runs not to the contrary. To study hard is to act Asian, to betray La Raza. If Mexican students tried to beat the Chinese at their own game, and failed, well, that would just prove the Chinese are smarter. So it’s better for Mexican racial self-esteem to make sure nobody even tries, to proclaim that studying is just something Asians high school students do because they’re, uh, no good at tagging and getting pregnant.

That’s basically what the most respected institutions in our society–the LA Times, the State Superintendent of Schools, etc.–tell them to think, right? That there can’t possibly be an innate intelligence gap between the Mexicans and the Chinese, because if there were, it would be the worst thing in the history of the world. It would mean that Hitler was right, that Nazis should rule America. So, to prevent a Nazi takeover, the Hispanic students will do their part by screwing off instead of studying. (It’s not hard to persuade teens not to study.)

In contrast, at a 100% Hispanic school like Garfield or Roosevelt (nearby East LA schools that don’t include Chinatown–Jaime Escalante taught AP Calculus at Garfield), well, somebody Hispanic has to be valedictorian each year. So, trying to be valedictorian there, while nerdy and uncool, is likely to be less racially fraught than at an integrated school.

As I said, I don’t really know which way it would go. People have similarly argued over this type of question concerning Historically Black Colleges for a long time–is a black kid with an 1100 SAT score better off at Howard where he’d quite competitive academically or at Georgetown, where he’d feel like Michelle Obama did at Princeton and Harvard Law School?

From the Washington Post:

Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, was president of the Homeownership Alliance, which advocates the expansion of homeownership through low-interest mortgages funded by Fannie and Freddie. Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr., who is heading McCain’s vice presidential vetting panel, was a lobbyist for Fannie Mae. Mark Buse, a longtime McCain aide, lobbied for Freddie Mac before returning to McCain’s Senate staff.

And the list of Republican Fannie and Freddie lobbyists includes some of its most notable rogues — including Tony Rudy, Edwin Buckham, Kevin Ring and David H. Safavian, all of whom were linked to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal — as well as some of its leading power brokers, from Reagan White House chief of staff Kenneth M. Duberstein to uberlobbyists Vin Weber and Tom Korologos. Alberto R. Cardenas, one of McCain’s top fundraisers, has lobbied for Fannie Mae, as have former Montana governor Marc Racicot and tax-cut advocate Grover Norquist.

Obama also has ties to the firms. James A. Johnson, the former head of his vice presidential vetting panel, was a chief executive of Fannie Mae, as was Franklin D. Raines, who said this week that he has been consulting with the campaign on housing issues. Maria Echaveste, a top Clinton White House official whose husband, Christopher Edley Jr., is a close Obama friend and adviser, has lobbied for Freddie Mac, and former commerce secretary William M. Daley, a top Obama backer, was an in-house lobbyist.

Other Democratic luminaries who have advocated for the mortgage giants include strategist Steven Elmendorf, Rep. Doris Matsui (Calif.), former Al Gore aide Ronald A. Klain, former Clinton aide Steve Ricchetti and former congressman Harold E. Ford Jr. (Tenn.), now the head of the Democratic Leadership Council. Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was also vice chairman of Fannie Mae.

That payroll has cost Fannie and Freddie nearly $200 million in lobbying and campaign contributions over the past decade, according to lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission disclosures. It has also won them plenty of protection from calls for greater regulation, less federal protection, and even nationalization.

From Robert Novak’s column:

As financial storm signals appeared the past 18 months, some Bush officials urged drastic reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But, according to internal government sources, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson objected because it would look “too political.” The Republican administration kept its hands off the government-backed mortgage companies that are closely connected to the Democratic establishment.

Paulson is a Republican, but as head of the Goldman Sachs investment bank he had close ties with Democratic-dominated Fannie Mae.

After prominent Democrat James A. Johnson’s departure from Fannie following eight years as chairman and chief executive, and after Johnson joined the ZymoGenetics biopharmaceutical firm, he was named head of Goldman Sachs’s compensation committee, helping to set Paulson’s abundant salary there.

Via Kathy Shaidle, this disturbing note from Jack Langer in Human Events

Many Americans can only shake their heads at the nutty excesses of multiculturalism in Canada. Government investigations for insulting people? That kind of thing could never happen here . . . Right?

Wrong, probably. Multiculturalism may not be as advanced in America as it is in Canada, but it’s on the same path. The U.S. already has a number of federal multicultural policies, most notably the annual Diversity Visa Lottery. However, as the sorry lesson of Canada demonstrates, the key to pushing multiculturalist laws from the level of the mildly ridiculous into the rarified realm of the monumentally stupid is to advance them first on the local level, where action attracts little public scrutiny.

The infrastructure for this sort of action is already in place in many American cities which, though largely unknown to the public, have their own human rights commissions.[The Sensitivity Police: Where's American Multiculturalism Heading? by Jack Langer, July 16, 008 ]

This is true–writing about the Geno’s Cheese Steak case in Philadelphia, in which a local agency took two years to decide that it was OK to order cheese steaks in English only, I said

not only does every wide spot in the road have some kind of “Commission On Human Relations” to harass business-owners, but there’s a federal civil rights bureaucracy that does the same thing.

The Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations is only one of many. Is there one in your town? Or one for your whole state? Ordinarily you can only get into trouble with these guys as an employer, or by operating a restaurant or renting a room in your house. But if Canadian style hate laws are passed, everyone who engages in free speech will find himself under the thumb of such commissions.