Besim Tabuku, an Albanian Refugee admitted to this country in 1999, operates a restaurant in the village of Mount Clare, in downstate Illinois. An idyllic case of immigrant entrepreneur creating employment, right?

Wrong. Tabuku was sentenced to 5 month in prison on Tuesday for employing nine Mexican illegals, whom he accommodated in a house he owned (enterprising!).

Restaurant owner gets five-month sentence By Maggie Borman The Telegraph October 23 2008

In total, nine illegal aliens were found to be working for Tabaku and residing at the Benld home that Tabaku owned. All nine illegal aliens were deported to Mexico.

Mount Clare, incidentally, while 97% white, is not a rich town: median household income in 2007 was estimated at $43,100. Difficult to believe native-born labor was not readily available.

It looks like Joe Guzzardi might be right. The ICE agency is doing things differently.

It also looks like these Refugees are an ungrateful lot, with no respect for the America which gave them shelter

“We threw the pie because we didn’t want to engage in debate and legitimise what he was saying.” is the explanation given by a spokeswoman for No Borders, a radical pro-immigration group in Britain after Phil Woolas, Minister For Immigration, had been hit with a pie believed to made of “Bourbon Cream biscuits and vegan cream.”[BBC NEWS--Migrant row minister hit by pie] She also said “What he was spouting were right wing anti-immigration policies. The danger is that people like him are making such views mainstream.”

And what, you might ask, where these right-wing policies? Something to do with race or religion, the two main problems with immigration to the UK? No, even the Minister for Immigration can’t talk about that in the UK, he’d be investigated by the police. His sin was to suggest the possibility that their could be numerical limits to the number of immigrants to the United Kingdom, and that the British population should not exceed 70 million.

Of course, the refusal to engage debate is typical–Ann Coulter described this style of argument in 2005:

Liberals enjoy claiming that they are intellectuals, thrilled to engage in a battle of wits. This, they believe, distinguishes them from conservatives, who are religious fanatics who react with impotent rage to opposing ideas. As one liberal, Jonathan Chait, put the cliche in The New Republic: Bush is an “instinctive anti-intellectual” and his administration hostile to “fact-driven debate.” In a favorable contrast, Clinton is “the former Rhodes scholar who relished academic debates.” Showing his usual reverence for fact-checking, The New York Times’ Paul Krugman says the Republican Party is “dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research.”

I’m not sure how these descriptions square with the fact that liberals keep responding to conservative ideas by throwing food.[AnnCoulter.com - Archived Article: IT'S ONLY FUNNY UNTIL SOMEONE LOSES A PIE, November 13, 2005]

From Forbes:

Forget Miami, Los Angeles and New York–America’s newest immigrant capitals are the country’s recent boom towns.Top of the list: Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., with a 122% increase in its foreign-born population from 2000 to 2007, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of U.S. Census Bureau information. …

Just as it’s easy to spot America’s boom towns by looking at where immigrant growth has increased the most, the places where the bubble has burst are also instantly recognizable. Case in point: Cape Coral, Fla., where 28% of the metro area’s working immigrant community worked in construction-related jobs in 2007. Now that the Real Estate party’s over, Cape Coral-Fort Myers is one of the worst places to ride out the economic storm.

The situation is much the same in Las Vegas, which ranks No. 4 on our list. It has been one of the fastest-growing cities in America in terms of gross domestic product (67% increase from 2001 to 2006) and foreign-born population (65% increase from 2001 to 2007). Census Bureau data show 58% of Sin City’s working immigrants held vulnerable construction or service-sector jobs.[America's New Immigrant Capitals, By Brian Wingfield and Jewel Edwards, October 24, 2008]

So, we had this stupid housing bubble creating lots of construction jobs in boom towns like Las Vegas. But actual American citizen workers didn’t even much get in on the benefits of having those jobs building unneeded McMansions in the desert because we let in millions of immigrants who would do those jobs for $5 or $10 less per hour.

As you may have noticed, John McCain hasn’t had any kind of theme to his campaign. He can’t go after Obama on what Obama is vulnerable on because that’s all tied into race, so Obama gets a free pass on that.

What John McCain should have done in this race is embrace his Grumpy Old Manness and run as the we’ve-got-to-live-within-our-means candidate. Run against the whole Debt Debauch, the no-money-down culture, the get rich quick attitude. Run against Bush’s campaign against down payments.

Don’t run in favor of “regulation,” run in favor of “thrift” and “prudence,” on old fashioned non-ideologue conservatism.

Embrace his old scandal. Talk about how you let a donor get you involved in the S&L bad loan scandal in the 1980s, and that was shameful and humiliating and you learned a big lesson from that.

Talk about how your opponent just wants to take your money and use it to expand the number of government employees in his political base, social workers. And we can’t afford that.

Of course, there would have been a big walk the walk problem with McCain, since he doesn’t seem very thrifty himself. For example, he’d probably have what you’d call a gambling problem if he didn’t have a rich wife. Like John Kerry, he’s a good catch who used his attractiveness to women to land a rich wife. (Not a bad strategy, by the way.)

And I imagine McCain wasn’t actually against all this stuff back when it was going on. Nobody who was anybody was.

But at least this would have given him a theme.

At a rally in Richmond, Virginia, Obama responded by saying, McCain “isn’t fighting for Joe the Plumber; he’s fighting for Joe the Hedge-Fund Manager.”

Obama, McCain Pit Plumbers vs Hedge-Fund Managers in Tax Debate By Kim Chipman and Hans Nichols Bloomberg.com October 23 2008

Perhaps Barack Obama’s script writers are just ignorant, or perhaps the candidate, who has certainly done enough fund-raising now to know better, felt confident enough to venture into effrontery (that is English for chutzpah). Hedge Fund managers overwhelmingly support the Democrats.

Based on calculations from data supplied by OpenSecrets.org, from Federal Election Commission data released on October 19th, Obama himself has collected 25.1% of the money given by Hedge Fundsin the Presidential race, and the combined take by the three top Democratic Presidential aspirants is 58.4% of the total pool. John McCain comes fourth on the list with only 14.1% of the loot: and all the Republicans as a whole gathered only a 34.5% share.

The picture is the same when donations to all federal races are considered. Furthermore it has almost always been true, although total contributions have swollen tremendously recently.

This might be thought odd, because the Hedge Fund model, which involves splitting up ordinary income flows at the end of each year, cannot work in a regime of high marginal tax rates. The scope to defer income or bury profits as capital gains is limited. A return to the confiscatory top rates of a generation ago would destroy the industry.

Very likely this tells us that increases in income tax rates by an Obama regime will hurt mainly the middle class, with the top rate set at a fairly low level of income.

Why do these quintessential beneficiaries of capitalism support Obama? Partly, it is unquestionably a question of class disdain (very vividly shown in the disparagement of Sarah Palin). James Pinkerton has pointed out

the Democrats are emerging as the new party of the rich, the party of Wall Street, the party that champions financiers at the expense of producers. For years now, the most affluent precincts in the country—mostly on the two coasts—have been solidly Democratic.

As a personal level, as I drive around I notice the wealthier the area, the more Obama signs. McCain/Palin signs are frequent only in genuine middle-class districts.

But there is a more practical and effective explanation. The Hedge fund business is very heavily Jewish, particularly at the top. Not a few literally had grandparents who were dedicated Marxists or Socialists in the Bund tradition. Sudden accessions of great wealth do little to erase strong family traditions. All that happens is the already limited comprehension of how difficult it is for the average American to support a family decently is eroded further.

The political enthusiasms of this group have not always turned out well. We have to hope that this time is different.