Illegal alien Hispanics residing in the Crescent City are full of complaints about the place they chose to occupy after Hurricane Katrina three years ago in pursuit of dollars [Immigrants reshape post-disaster New Orleans, Google-AP, Dec 23, 2008].

“Life is hard here, harder than any place I’ve been in the U.S.,” said Jose Campos, 37, who came here from El Salvador, by way of Florida. He pedaled his bicycle to Unique Grocery, a cavernous establishment off Bourbon Street that offers the wire service through bulletproof glass and tall-boy beers from icy bins.

Get on home, Jose. There’s a comfy seat awaiting you on ICE Air, the one-way airline that repatriates illegal foreigners.

Further on, this New Orleans immigration update contains some dreary statistics about the battered city.

In the three years since Hurricane Katrina, immigrant laborers drawn to the construction and service industry jobs created by the storm have transformed this rebuilding city. In an accelerated version of the already rapid Latino migration to the South, they are forging their own support networks, establishing businesses, packing churches and starting families — a process that usually takes a decade or more.

“There’s no place in the world like New Orleans in terms of how rapid the population change has been,” said Margie McHugh,  [email her] co-director of immigration integration policy at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank in Washington D.C. [...]

Since Katrina, the Hispanic population of New Orleans has risen from 15,000, or 3.3 percent of the pre-storm population, to 50,000, 15.2 percent of the current population, according to the New Orleans Economic Development office.

A 2006 study by Tulane University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that nearly half the rebuilding work force was Latino. Fifty-four percent were working illegally in the United States, and nearly 90 percent of illegal workers lived in the U.S. before coming to town.

The foreign males came to make mucho dollars, then brought in the baby-makers. Now the American taxpayer is forced to fund the mini-population boom of Hispanic jackpot babies in New Orleans.

Beyond the statistics, there are the offices of Dr. Kevin Work, who has forged a business by delivering a generation of Latino children to the city: “Thirty to forty deliveries a month,” he says. [...]

The year before Katrina, Emergency Medicaid expenses were $1.7 million in metro New Orleans. It was the common childbirth benefit used by recent immigrants, but provided no prenatal care. This year the program expanded to include prenatal care and five times as many patients, ballooning costs to $7.8 million.

Subsidized medical care is another cost of “cheap” labor.

Add to that the expense of increasing social pathology (e.g. drugs, alcoholism, crime) that arises from a growing foreign population with no roots in the community. Pricey programs designed for the specific ethnic group tend to appear rapidly.

In response, the organization has established yet another Hispanic outreach in New Orleans, this one to educate youth on the dangers of drugs.

“We have young people who have not seen their parents in five years,” said Italia Castillo Duran, who directs the effort. “We have parents who have one child here, and another back in their homeland.”

As usual, the taxpayer is supposed to fix the endless problems caused by the behavior of the illegal aliens themselves.

Geoff Mulvihill writes at AP:

Five Muslim immigrants face possible life prison terms after being convicted of plotting to massacre U.S. soldiers in a case that supporters called entrapment and prosecutors said was a pre-emptive strike against terrorism.

The five men were convicted Monday in federal court of conspiring to kill military personnel but acquitted of attempted murder. Prosecutors acknowledged the defendants were probably months away from an attack at Fort Dix and did not necessarily have a specific plan.[5 immigrants face life behind bars for Army plot, December 23, 2008]

I suspect this is just the tip of an iceberg. These guys don’t appear to be serious conspirators. However, there are real potential issues with a diverse military. A lot of old scores can get settled on a battlefield or in other aspects of the military.

If I were a strategist for a major terrorist organization, infiltrating the US military and key parts of US infrastructure would be high on my list of priorities. Muslim organizations have been up against the Mossad for decades now–and I suspect they’ve learned quite a bit from that process. I doubt we’ll understand what is really going on here until it is too late.

Lisa Fernandez writes at the San Jose Mercury News:

A one-time computer salesman who rose through the ranks to help build Fry’s Electronics into a robust retailer is facing allegations that he defrauded the San Jose company out of $65 million, much of which he used to pay off enormous gambling debts in Las Vegas.

Ausaf Umar Siddiqui, 42, who goes by “Omar” and was Fry’s vice president of merchandising and operations, appeared Monday in federal court, where prosecutors filed a complaint alleging he masterminded a “secret kickback scheme to defraud Fry’s Electronics of millions of dollars.”[Fry's exec accused of $65 million fraud to pay off gambling debts, December 22, 2008]

I haven’t found any hard biography on Siddiqui–so I’m not sure of his immigration status. It is pretty clear to anyone that has visited a Fry’s store in Silicon Valley or Seattle that Fry’s is a pretty immigration intensive operation in their hiring practices. As a patron there, I’ve found it hard at times to find a native English speaker to get service from. According to the Wikipedia article on Fry’s, Siddiqui was one of the top 5 people-and one of two of the top 5 who wasn’t a member of the family that founded the closely held corporation.

It sounds like Siddiqui’s American Dream was something of a nightmare:

A woman who appeared in court on Siddiqui’s behalf declined to comment. During the court hearing, conversations in court also revealed that Siddiqui has no close family; he is estranged from his siblings and his parents are deceased. He has no wife or children, and according to his civil attorney, who appeared as a “friend of the court,” Siddiqui has several casinos after him to pay off gambling debts.

I don’t think the US government is doing a favor to the American people or the immigrants themselves admitting folks who can’t become well integrated into some American community. A life centered around money is a hollow one–and a nation centered around money isn’t really a nation.

Barack Hussein Obama has announced that he’s  going to take the oath of office with all three names, (as anticipated by this blogger) and you can watch Ann Coulter demanding an apology from Alan Colmes here. Colmes had complained about Coulter’s using  Hussein’s middle name, (she likes to call the President-elect B. Hussein Obama) and Colmes is still defending his whine,  on the grounds that her intention was wrong.

Of course, her intention was to remind ordinary Americans that they were thinking of electing a guy named Hussein, which is a legitimate point. [See Why Barack Hussein Obama's Middle Name Matters, by Steve Sailer.] After all, what kind of message do you think it sends to the Muslim world to elect a guy named Hussein?

Of course,  McCain’s campaign tried to prevent normal Americans from mentioning any such thing–a Google search from McCain and Hussein

• McCain Again Forced To Rebuke Allies Over “Hussein” Attack
• McCain Repudiates ‘Hussein Obama’ Remarks
• Political Radar: McCain Apologizes Profusely for ‘Hussein Obama’

and

• Cunningham Renounces McCain After ‘Hussein’ Flap : NPR

The last one refers to radio host Bill Cunningham, who was denounced by McCain for mentioning “Hussein” in an introduction, and decided not to support McCain anymore. Apparently a lot of people felt like that.

Most of what the Indian writer Harish Baliga wrote for IndiaDaily is right on the mark. He describes the exploitation that occurs in the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program and compares it to slavery. There is one thing he wrote that is rather strange:

If you are a US Citizen, grown up, and hold a job, they hate you. They know their cat will be out of the bag and you can challenge them. They will do everything to stop you from getting a matriculated status. Government in United States does little to stop this abuse.[The biggest slave trading and labor law abuse happen in the American Universities -- alien teaching and research assistants work twenty hours a day for almost no pay, by Harish Baliga, IndianDaily.com, Dec. 20, 2008]

Baliga greatly exaggerates our ability to prevent foreign workers from obtaining green cards, as evidenced by the recent extension of the OPT authorization period and the constant attempts by Congress to raise the caps on H-1B and green card visas. No doubts about it, there are many US citizens like myself that would stop foreign graduates from obtaining green cards if we could. In fact, given the choice we would also abolish OPTs so that foreign students would no longer be able to take jobs that our own college kids need to survive.

Baliga’s other mistake is to overemphasize the role of hate as the motive to stop the foreign labor importation programs. We are the most welcoming nation in the world when it comes to immigration so it’s quite obvious that hate isn’t a major factor in the rising opposition to foreign labor importation. Americans are acting in their own self interest to protect middle class lifestyles and to guarantee some type of future for their offspring. If there is hate involved in this great nation of ours it’s coming from the corporatocrats and educrats who consider students and wage earners as mere units of labor.

The two minor errors in Baliga’s article are probably mostly Indian street mythology. The rest of his article is definitely worth reading.

NOTE: Baliga never mentioned what the foreign students are using to work in the USA, but by his description I’m assuming it’s mostly students on F-1 visas with OPTs. There may also be some H-1Bs since they are used quite often by postdocs.

The biggest slave trading and labor law abuse happen in the American Universities — alien teaching and research assistants work twenty hours a day for almost no pay, by Harish Baliga, IndianDaily.com, Dec. 20, 2008

Slavery never left America. It actually intensified under the rug. Lift the rug and you can see the American Universities. In the schools of engineering and science you can see those Chinese, Indian, and East European faces, some struggling with their English but all working twenty hours a day with little pay. Professors receive research grants from American Government Agencies including Department of Defense. These Agencies seldom check the labor law abuse by the schools, colleges, and universities.

When Research Assistant (RA) or a Teaching Assistant (TA) is hired, he or she is supposed to work for twenty hours a week and study nine credits of graduate level courses per semester. Most of these aliens are made to work far more than twenty hours (sometime as much as sixty hours) and paid far less than minimum wages. It is a violation of labor laws, violation of moral ethics and above all a form of slavery allowed by the American Universities in the name of education and research. [More]

Peter Brimelow will be on the Radio Free Rocky D show today at 1:00 p.m. The show airs in Charleston, SC and can be listened to here.

He will be discussing the War Against Christmas.