The new administration has sent nothing but bad signals about immigration law enforcement. One indicator is how successful strategies like 287(g) and E-Verify have come under attack. The 287(g) section of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act set up procedures and legal authority for local police to assist federal enforcement, in particular to check the status of persons already arrested.

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) has been a strong supporter of enforcement, particularly against drunk-driving illegal aliens, who have killed innocent citizens in her district and state. She first introduced the Scott Gardner Act, named for one victim, in 2005. It would have required all illegal aliens found guilty of drunk driving to be immediately deported after their incarceration.

Rep. Myrick and Mecklenburg County Sheriff Chipp Bailey had a press conference on Monday to set straight how 287(g) has been used locally with positive results [Sheriff Bailey, Congresswoman Myrick defend deportation program, WFAE-FM, Charlotte NC, March 9, 2009].

In the last two weeks Duke University and the Government Accountability Office in Washington released reports criticizing the immigration program known as 287g. They say it is being used to nab petty criminals for things like traffic violations rather than serious crimes. They also say it fuels a fear of racial profiling among Hispanics.

Congresswoman Sue Myrick sees a deeper meaning in the Washington report.

“I think it was unfair and I think it was biased in the way it did it,” Myrick said Monday at a press conference at the Mecklenburg County Jail. ”And the administration, I’m concerned, is laying the groundwork frankly to gut the funding for the 287g program.  And this to me says we are just giving up the fight on illegal immigration, period.”

Mecklenburg County was one of the earliest to participate in 287g in 2006. The program gives sheriff’s deputies the ability to determine the legal status of immigrants in the county jail.

So far, Mecklenburg County has processed about 6,000 illegal immigrants for deportation. A majority were accused of misdemeanors and traffic violations. [Mecklenburg Sheriff Chipp] Bailey says most were arrested only after failing to appear in court on a previous citation. He insists his deputies do not check for immigration status until a person has been arrested for another offense.

If federal authorities wanted the program to focus only on serious criminals, Bailey says they never said so.

“It says, that if they are arrested then we should check’ em.  And that’s exactly what we do.  There’s no delineation about the type of crime that they’re brought into,” he said.

Both reports place much of the blame for problems with 287g on inadequate communication and oversight by federal immigration authorities. Still, Bailey maintains Mecklenburg County is safer because of it. He says it’s resulted in the deportation of more than 500 accused felons.

The Mecklenburg County information page on immigration notes the basics of the 287(g) program and how it is followed there.

Under 287(g), ICE provides state and local law enforcement with the training and subsequent authorization to identify, process, and when appropriate, detain immigration offenders encountered during their regular, daily law-enforcement activity. [...]

Using equipment and technology called IDENT, deputies now fingerprint and photograph all non US born arrestees.  The IDENT system searches a special biometric database that only contains information on aliens that have been arrested by immigration or have had some other type of immigration encounter.  Additional information regarding an arrestee’s immigration status will be determined based on an in-depth interview of the individual.

That sounds pretty straightforward. What’s the problem? Is enforcement working too well? Mecklenburg County got rid of 500 accused felons and is doubtless a safer place because of it.

You can read the GAO report online, Immigration Enforcement: Better Controls Needed over Program Authorizing State and Local Enforcement of Federal Immigration Laws. A major complaint seems to be that the program snares persons for “minor crimes, such as speeding.” Reckless driving is not serious? Many Americans have been killed by drunk and/or speeding illegal aliens.

And whatever happened to “broken windows” policing that was so popular for a while? The idea was for police to take out bad guys for lesser crimes and that approach would decrease the incidence of big stuff. “Broken windows” has been successful, but an inclusive approach to illegal aliens already in jail (!) brings out the open-borders wackos, both in and out of government. They want zero immigration enforcement, and don’t care about the price paid in blood and suffering by American victims of illegal alien criminals.

Steve Sailer will be on WABC-NY, at 10:30 Eastern, 7:30 Pacific, talking about America’s Half-Blood Prince Barack Obama’s “Story Of Race And Inheritance”. Click here to listen live.

As proof of what I said below about blacks being better off not voting for the left-wing Democrat, Carol Swain, a black law professor at Vanderbilt, writes

Immigration apparently not high on Obama’s priority list | www.tennessean.com | The Tennessean

By Carol Swain, February 28, 2009

Our president has lofty goals. Under his tutelage, we will cure cancer, end our dependence on foreign oil, reform health care and guarantee higher education to everyone who wants it.

I would like to focus on something that the president has not addressed: illegal immigration and its impact on unemployment, job creation and our failing educational system. Until he is willing to acknowledge the obvious, our best efforts are doomed to fail.

Over the next two years, his job-creation plan promises to save or create 3.5 million jobs. Meanwhile, there are an estimated 6 to 7 million illegal immigrants working in low-wage, low-skill positions that could be filled with U.S- born workers with high school educations or less.

A detailed breakdown of U.S. Census unemployment data released by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals startling levels of unemployment for U.S.-born blacks and Hispanics without a high school education. Blacks had a 24.7 percent unemployment rate and Hispanics were at 16.2 percent.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for legal and illegal immigrants without a high school education was 10.6 percent.

The president can act now to ensure that all American jobs go to people authorized to work in the United States.[More]

But he won’t.

John Derbyshire has a piece in Takimag on Steve Sailer and his book on Obama. But it’s not a book review:

Probably most Takimag readers have heard of Steve (and his blog). Most, I’d guess, have read a couple of his pieces. Who is the guy? How did he come to write a book about Obama? Will citizenism catch on?

To speak first of the book:  It is a convention of the book business that if you have once blurbed a book (that is, been quoted on the book’s cover offering words of praise), it is ill-mannered to then do a full-dress review. What follows is therefore not a review of America’s Half-Blood Prince. I am only going to use some of Steve’s observations in the book, and elsewhere, as starting points for commentary on the topics in my title up there above.

To formally review America’s Half-Blood Prince would in any case be an odd sort of exercise, since the book is itself a sort of very extended book review. When, late in 2006, it first seemed probable that Barack Obama was going to run for president, Steve did a careful reading of Obama’s introspective 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance. In his subsequent writing about the presidential campaign, Steve drew extensively from Obama’s book, quoting the candidate’s own written words and parsing them in the context of external facts about Obama’s life and career. America’s Half-Blood Prince, which I am absolutely not reviewing here, is an organized compilation of Steve’s observations. Obama’s book is quoted on almost every page. So to review Steve’s book—which I am not going to do—would be to review an extraordinarily long and deep review of Obama’s book—a review of a review.[Sailer-ism By John Derbyshire, March 10, 2009]

Read the whole thing, always remembering that it’s not a book review.

I recently read James Fulford’s post on “What’s the Matter with Harlem?“. I’ve never lived in Harlem, and I’ve only known a few people from Harlem-mostly fellow students at U of Chicago. However, I spent 5 years living in Side of Chicago neighborhoods- Hyde Park(2 years), Woodlawn(3 years). I’ve known quite a few people from that area pretty well who had nothing to do with the ivory tower at U of Chicago, so I feel competent to comment here.

I can say from personal experience: a lot of urban African-Americans are strongly of the opinion many of their political leaders are full of excrement and utterly corrupt. However, we have to be realistic about what it takes to run a successful congressional race. It isn’t just a matter of name recognition or street cred. Any successful congressional campaign takes money-a LOT of money.

There really isn’t that much in the way of institutions that are really run by and for the African American community. Most “Black” groups are really rather dependent on various special interest groups in the larger society for funding and support–and the range of options any black politician has in that area are traditionally pretty narrow.

Many white politicians that have tried to reach out to the black community have gotten burnt pretty badly. Richard Nixon tried to operate a campaign on the South Side. After a long search, his operatives found someone who really could and did pass out Nixon campaign literature. However, the end result here was that Richard Nixon has his picture taken with a major figure in the Blackstone Rangers Street gang
–something the Democrats in Chicago found rather amusing and used to their advantage.

Similarly, there have been Black leaders like homeless advocate Ted Hayes who seriously reached out to the Republican leadership-and got snubbed rather nastily. Hayes ran against Maxine Waters with essentially no money-and still got 13% of the vote in a heavily black SoCal district. His platform was largely in line with the standard GOP platform except that he is strongly against illegal immigration and supportive of a stronger social safety net for African Americans than most Republicans.

Part of essential problem here is that most Republican intellectuals are in strong denial just how strong the trick up effect from the Reagan Bush years was-and a failure to take advantage of the Clinton administration catering to somewhat different wealthy interests. The only major Republican figure I have seen that has put anything serious on the table that could be credibly presented in the African American community might be Charles Murray’s income and medical care support proposal. However, even that program is flawed because it doesn’t address the fact that recent increases in wealth have overwhelmingly been concentrated among American families with net worth in the top 1% (over $5 Million per family) and the relationship of recent increases in the value of assets to a national debt that exploded since 1980. The Murray program also simply would be utterly unworkable until the US improves its selection of immigrants a great deal compared to recent decades-and implements incentives to insure immigration of talented foreigners don’t simply displace Americans.

What mainstream US political leadership has offered African Americans since the end of the civil rights era is largely a chance for a few of them to enter the middle class–often via programs like Affirmative Action–at the cost of a lot of black men winding up either on the streets or involved in the justice system and with the tacit understanding that African American leadership wouldn’t effectively threaten the wealthy in America like Martin Luther King did by supporting universal income support along the lines that Huey Long did.

If Paleo-conservatives want to credibly appeal to African Americans, they have to have a program that is fairly simple and will clearly, as a package benefit African Americans. I suspect that part of that will mean revisiting the policies of universal income support that Martin Luther King supporting right before he died. On the part of African American politicians: it will mean renouncing programs like Affirmative Action that have too often been transfers from middle income and wealth holding Americans and directly attacking the most very wealthy interests that have grown rapidly since the end of the civil rights era.

When I look Ted Hayes: a big part of the problem with his rhetoric is that he was simply too accommodating to the Republican leadership in areas like foreign policy in hope of getting support that never materialized. Part of the lesson of that campaign is that the national Republican can’t do anything to someone that runs under the Republican label in a district with no Republican presence except withhold money from them. Part of the problem on the South Side is that more enterprising souls haven’t realized that they can use the Republican party apparatus to advocate policies that are so abhorrent to the Republican leadership that the GOP leadership will come up with enough money for someone to run a credible campaign simply to get that type of activity stopped. I think Hayes did the right thing in appealing to the GOP base on issues like immigration-but the wealthy interests behind the GOP were never going to support him once he attacked mass immigration and Hayes was simply too restrained towards them.

A reader writes:

I thought you might be interested in the Toronto School Board’s parent census. They surveyed parents in Toronto and tied the results of the survey to the child’s Grade 3 and Grade 6 standardised test performance. Basically no surprises here. Math performance goes something like this… East Asians, Whites, South Asians, Latin Americans, Blacks. Generalissimo Franco is still dead.

http://www.tdsb.on.ca/wwwdocuments/about_us/media_room/docs/2008ParentCensusK-6SystemOverviewAndDetailedFindings.pdf

The funniest graph is Table 28 where parents answer whether the amount of homework assigned is just right, too little or too much. Most parents answer Just Right, and the rest are fairly evenly split, but the East Asian parents vote 38% to 2% for Too Little over Too Much. (There’s no word on what East Asian children think about how much homework they’re getting.)

Apparently in January, U.K Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered Royal Navy assistance to stop arms being smuggled into the Gaza Strip.

Last month a conference of Muslim leaders in Istanbul released a declaration condemning any interference with traffic into Gaza:

“The closure of the crossings, or the prevention of the entry of weapons through them, should be regarded as high treason in the Islamic Nation, and clear support for the Zionist enemy.”

…according to the Istanbul declaration, there is an obligation for “the Islamic Nation to regard the sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the smuggling of arms to Gaza, as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression, and a clear violation of the sovereignty of the Nation”. It continues: “This must be rejected and fought by all means and ways.”

This was signed by a number of “British” Muslims, including Dr Daud Abdullah, deputy director-general of the Muslim Council of Britain.

British Muslim leader urged to quit over Gaza Jamie Doward The Observer Sunday 8 March 2009

Dr Abdullah is a particular pet of the Labour government.

In January, he briefed the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and communities secretary Hazel Blears on the situation in Gaza and its likely impact on social cohesion in the UK.

(The British Authorities have been funding alleged “moderates” in the U.K. Islamic community, a policy denounced in a new report coincidently published this weekend:

£90m anti-terrorism project is fanning the flames of extremism By Duncan Gardham Telegraph.co.uk 09 Mar 2009)

I wonder in any “American” Muslims were present?

Hat tip, The Kvetcher, who efficiently highlights the US dimension

It’s so unfair that we don’t have more of this sort of thing here on a continuous basis, so please support Progress By Pesach. Because the Muslims aren’t strangers…they’re our beloved cousins. It’s family unification!

Also don’t miss the Kvetcher’s witty post Breaking “Perfidy By Pesach” News about a news release from

Jewish Community Action, a far-Left organization that considers white people racist and seeks their replacement by people of color (OH, YES THEY DO!)

The Kvetcher’s assessment:

What a tremendous victory for Progress By Pesach! They actually convinced the Hispanics to demand more Hispanics, of all things. I can’t believe it. I have to sit down in awe of the outreach executed and the alliances secured by these extremely talented advocates.

This Progress by Pesach campaign is not wise.

I found this item via Glaivester who writes “Racist police are apparently also sexist, because they kill a lot more black men than black women.“ He’s being sarcastic, but the feminist blog he’s linking to is not. It’s for real–see the comments that say things like “But also kyriarchy, right?” (This is a real word.)

.Police murders of men of color are a feminist issue

Posted by Ampersand | March 4th, 2009

There’s been a fair amount of discussion of whether or not police murders of men of color are a feminist issue.

I’ve always thought they are, but for a different reason than I’ve seen described in the recent discussions. It’s because the police are sexist in how they act out their racism; although both women and men of color are murdered by racist police, the police disproportionately single out men of color to kill. [More]

I would bet a dollar that the woman who wrote that owns a T-shirt saying she’s a member of the “Reality-Based Community” but she apparently has no connection with Planet Earth.

I mean, I’ve written columns to say that men are stronger and more dangerous than women, that blacks are very dangerous to police, rather than the other way around, and that life is not like that, but the simplest explanation of this situation comes from Charles Murray, who remarked on “the male propensity to produce an overwhelming proportion of the world’s crime and approximately 100 percent of its wars. ” He added “But this is just one more of the ways in which science is demonstrating that men and women are really and truly different, a fact so obvious that only intellectuals could ever have thought otherwise.”