A reader points out that Zirkle Fruit, the illegal immigrant employer and RICO case loser chronicled by Joe Guzzardi on Friday, was involved in an ingenious stratagem last year to find a legal way to undercut the local labor market: importing Thai farm workers under H-2A Visas. [New state import: Thai farmworkers By Lornet Turnbull The Seattle Times Febuary20 2005 Access requires free registration].

Employers are turning to Thais to solve a ghastly problem:

Growers also say many local workers “cherry pick” the orchards for the best jobs and pay, leaving some farmers guessing whether they’ll have enough laborers, especially in a big year.

Quitting one employer for another just to get better conditions! How un-American!

H-2A workers are attractive to their hirers:

…they get workers whose immigration status and loyalty are not in question. And…they know these workers — their English limited and their movements largely controlled — will show up to work.

(Charming - 17th Century Virginian planters no doubt said the same about their imported African slaves.)

Gary Hudson, human-resources director for Zirkle Fruit, one of the region’s biggest growers and a Global client for H-2A workers this year, said, “Because this is a 10-month-a-year job… you want to find those good-quality people who will stick with you…

(How about paying them enough to make them want to stay?)

[email Hudson]

“Global” is Global Horizons, Inc, the California firm functioning as Gangmaster for these workers. To add to the fragrance of the situation, Global had its license to operate in Washington State revoked early this year, for allegedly not fully paying its Thais. It is appealing.

Commiserate with Mordechai Orian, Global’s President (seen here with politican friends -thanks, W.C).

Warm congratulations to Rodney Hunt, President of the Mississippi Federation for Immigration Reform and Enforcement, for getting published in the Jackson MS The Clarion Ledger this morning as succinct and powerful a statement on the immigration reform as I have seen in quite some time. [Real ‘reform’ must end illegal immigration – February18 2006]

We have a shrinking middle class and a widening gap between rich and poor Americans due to loss of our manufacturing base and the influx of cheap illegal foreign labor. Democracy cannot survive without a strong middle class.

Illegal workers are depressing wages and taking jobs that Americans always did before the illegal alien invasion of our country…Meantime, $70 billion is spent each year for education, health care, welfare and incarceration of illegal aliens. Adding to this cost are the 363,000 children born to illegal aliens this past year, as estimated by the Center for Immigration Studies. This represents 10 percent of all births and 40 percent of all indigent births in the U.S.

President Bush’s idea of immigration reform includes a thinly disguised guest worker amnesty which will be introduced in the Senate in February. The president’s tough talk on border security is a public relations ploy intended to pacify unhappy Americans, but his guest worker amnesty would guarantee an unlimited supply of cheap labor for big business

American taxpayers will continue to pay the costs of illegal immigration while big business reaps profits. The median family income has decreased each year for the past five years when adjusted for inflation, with illegal immigration being a major factor. This decrease is seen more in African-American families than in any other ethnic group.

Extra Credit for noting the Birthright Citizenship issue:

…anchor babies” are granted citizenship at birth and immediately become eligible for publicly funded education, health care and other social programs. At age 21, they are entitled to sponsor other family members to migrate to the United States.

No discussion of allowing the parking of large quantities of alien workers in this country must be allowed to pass without raising this sophisticated issue. This is what could separate Corporate cheap labor hogs from those whose real agenda is to transform America.

Applaud the (presumably responsible) Editorial Director of the Star-Ledger, David Hampton, for allowing this piece to be carried.

Apparently, U.S Rep. Ted Strickland (D- Ohio) is running for Governor of Ohio. Some accord him a fair chance of success.

This has exposed him to a major bullying effort. Strickland had the courage and sagacity to vote for HR 4437, the “Border Protection Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005”.

According to Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer Immigration bill protesters converge on Strickland’s office – Brian Albrecht - Sunday February 12 2006[Access requires free registration]:

A staccato drumbeat and shouts of “No mas!” (no more) pounded at the door of U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland’s new gubernatorial campaign office on Detroit Avenue Saturday afternoon

Guests attending the office’s grand opening…hurried through the chilly chants of “Migration is not a crime!”

Illegal immigration not a crime? The term “Immigration” is no doubt deemed obsolete because of the widespread Mexican attitude that all American territory belongs to Mexico. One wonders if the Plain Dealer would have been so calm if a group of native Buck Eye Staters had gathered shouting “America for Americans” and “—- illegal immigrants” (Ancient Anglo Saxon colloquialism at least as legitimate as “No Mas” in American political discourse.)

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, no doubt under the stress of an election campaign, Rep. Strickland is wavering:

After meeting with members of the coalition, Strickland said he understood and shared some of their concerns. …”I assume and hope that a lot of the onerous provisions will be removed,” he said. “If not, I will not support it in its final form.”

Encourage him

Ask Plain Dealer reporter Brian Albrecht why no immigration reform perspective was allowed in this piece of propaganda

Further evidence that pro-immigration stories are mandatory in the MSM at present, as suggested Brenda Walker last night, comes from the Sundance FilmFestival:

Immigrant films win at Sundance : Two films about immigrants living in the US have won the top four awards at the Sundance Film Festival. BBC News Sunday 29 January

Just how desperate the pro-immigration forces are right now can be measured by their willingness to tolerate an award to a Cynthia McKinney puff piece, which (curiously) was, however, little publicized. “American Blackout” is a simplistic attempt to blame the heroine’s electoral misfortunes on Republican machinations. The downplaying of the award indicates other considerations are in play. At any other time, this woman’s views would have brought down anathema on the Sundance Film Festival.

In the aftermath of the subjectively crushing defeat at the Republican National Committee meeting last Friday of Randy Pullen’s Immigration restriction resolution, one can only salute Rep. James Sensenbrenner’s courage in giving a powerful and articulate interview to the Washington Times on Wednesday on Immigration restriction.

House Republican cites guest worker “amnesty” By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES January 25, 2006

Sensenbrenner says a number of correct things. But what he fails to say, and what is absolutely essential, is that birthright citizenship must be abolished. Without reform of this biziarre and fallacious misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, any immigration policy which permits the entry of young and virile aliens will result in America becoming an “Alien Nation”

Valuable Sensenbrenner observations (full reported text here):

Simpson-Mazzoli was based on the flawed premise that we would solve the illegal-alien problem by granting those presently in the country amnesty and not having an employer-sanctions program that would turn off the magnet for new illegals to come across the border. And it didn’t work because employer sanctions were not enforced.

I am very disturbed that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce invited Mexican Foreign Minister [Luis Ernesto] Derbez to Chicago to attack my legislation and to attack me by name…They should be ashamed of themselves

The following is really impressive because it suggests the Congressman actually understands economics:

…if you look at the percentage increase in the presence of illegal aliens from 2003 to 2004, the two top states are Iowa and Wisconsin, about as far away from the southern border as you can find…they concentrate in certain types of jobs that are low-skilled jobs and are labor-intensive jobs, which means, as I repeat, the people that are doing it the wrong way and getting such a terrific economic advantage in lowering their labor costs, that they either put out of business the people who are doing it the legal way or they drag down the wages of the U.S. citizens and green-card holders who are employed by the they drag down the wages of the U.S. citizens and green-card holders who are employed by them…

In other words, he blames the employers of illegals. Hot stuff, for a Republican.

And the conclusion:

Amnesty is not negotiable. The American public will not stand for amnesty, and amnesty didn’t work in Simpson-Mazzoli, and it’s not going to work here.

Sensenbrenner deserves to be encouraged.

A squabble broke out this week on NRO about immigration. It was not, as might have been expected from the priorities of these Beltway courtiers and groupies , about how Randy Pullen’s courageous resolution to the Republican National Committee this week should be handled. On that there was total, utter silence. It was about a remark, spectacularly dumb even by his standards, by John Podhoretz. In response to a post by Katheryn Lopez reporting that a correspondent had said:

It is important that conservatives be reminded - again and again - that the WSJ’s editorial board holds an absolutely indefensible position on our current immigration policies, and that the WSJ - again and again - uses vile and incendiary rhetoric to attack Republicans who hold different opinions on this issue.

Podhoretz said:

You want a warning label? Here’s a warning label: There is no one conservative position on immigration.

By definition, conservatives are sceptical about change. As the Eunomania blog noted, even his collegues flinched. Jonah Goldberg (infrequently praised here) made a totally reasonable statement, summarised as:

Goldberg does have it right for once–conservatives do need, at a bare minimum, to accept the conditions he set down to still be conservative, and those who can’t aren’t really conservative. This is what the folks at VDare, Chronicles and TAC have been saying about the Open Borders crowd for years.

Back in July, Clark Stooksburyhad it right as well:

In a just world, Poddy junior would be selling shoes with Al Bundy, instead of being a nattering nabob of the neocon punditocracy. He currently holds forth at National Review’s the Corner, which more and more resembles the Web equivalent of a high school study hall.

Anyone who has ever been in the presence of JP’s father, Norman Podhoretz (as I was, just last fall) realises that this is a spectacular case of regression to the mean. Norman is a very serious man.

But the question is, are the Podhoretz men, able or not able, good for America?

A Certain Slant of Light, amongst the most indefatigable immigration-skeptic blogs currently active, has a useful report on attending a Town Hall Meeting on Thursday in Conroe TX.

Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO)… spoke today to a standing-room-only audience of approximately 150 people…interrupted any number of times by strong applause (including a standing ovation at its conclusion) and loud vocal support…I find it interesting that a town hall meeting lacking MSM publicity drew such a solid crowd today — more people, really, than the room could comfortably accomodate. Many people stood along the walls of the meeting room; and more people were actually outside of the room in the hallway

Good point. One might also ask, how many Congressmen can get standing ovations - except from their own election workers?

A refreshing thing about Tancredo is that he seems to have grasped some of the economics of the immigration disaster, as ACSL’s summary of his talk notes:

“Cheap labor” is only cheap for employers who hire illegals, as taxpayers subsidize those wages by subsidizing the social safety net of services that illegals avail themselves of…

(This was also apparent in the brief but devastating remark the Los Angeles Times allowed him in their account last August of the new Amnesty-Lobbying effort.)

ACSL has a follow-up, noting the total lack of coverage of the meeting - after all by an out-of area national political figure to a metropolitan area with maybe half a million illegals - either before or after, by the Houston area media:

I did, however, find a story this morning that the Wendy’s hamburger chain is no longer putting tomato slices on its burgers unless the customer specifically requests them. That, of course, is need-to-know information.

This kind of repression is not going to work, now that the Internet has emerged as the Kentucky Long Rifle of America’s 21st century patriots

On early Thursday morning in Fort Lauderdale, between two and four young thugs beat, in seperate incidents, three vagrant men with baseball bats. One of the victims has died.

It appears that the assailants were white (or Hispanic - 10% of Fort Lauderdale is Latino). Judging by one surveillance video, at least one of the victims was black.

By late Thursday evening, Google News has almost 100 news stories on this incident, and rising. The major TV Networks have made it national news, newspapers all over the country have stories on their web sites and it has started to appear overseas.

On New Year’s Day in Richmond a white man who was once quite well known nationally as a musician, his wife, and two young daughters had their throats cut at the culmination of a home invasion robbery. The two black men arrested and charged for these killings have also been charged with the killings of three other blacks in another Richmond home the following Friday (one of the victims apparently was an accomplice to the first murders). They look likely to be charged in other killings and home invasions. Both have prison records: one being released after 10 years in prison in October.

As of late Thursday night, Google News has only 93 stories on this much more mature and bigger story. Almost all the coverage is local to the two towns where the accused lived and Philadelphia, where they were arrested. There has been little national coverage since the arrests.

Moronic young hoodlums making a sport of beating marginalised and pitiable derelicts is wicked and intolerable and has to be repressed.

But already-identified criminals invading apparently quite inoffensive functional homes and engaging in uninhibited slaughter is, bluntly, a far more important threat. Just as Black on white crime is far more serious than white on black. Society has to figure out how to deal with the type of people who do this sort of thing, and ignoring who they are is irresponsible.

As the European Ethnocentrism blog points out, the treatment of the Richmond massacre by the MSM is reminscent to the attempts to ignore the December 2000 Wichita atrocity. Disrupting that blackout was one of the more pleasurable activities of the early VDARE.com. Repudiating double standards is even more so.

The political consultant Dick Morris is presumably able to continue his strange career because professional politicians find some of his insights helpful. So they may well pay attention to the most substantial idea he advances in America is shifting leftward - The Hill January 11 2006:

the fundamental reason for the liberal drift is the salience of issues normally identified with the left. To reverse the situation, therefore, Bush has three options:…

(B) Raise new issues that have a built-in skew right and a Republican orientation…

Two new solid Republican issues are begging for attention from the White House: immigration and drugs.

The administration’s guest-worker program is a good step …but it must be accompanied by some red meat for the base — the border fence passed by the House…guest workers without the fence will do nothing to move voters toward the GOP.

Of course the paramount task of a consultant is to be hired, which means telling the clients mostly what they want to hear. While Morris has long displayed an interest in the immigration issue, he is always careful not to challenge hispandering impulses of the Washington establishment.

So identifying with the Border Fence strategem is a brave step.

Obviously, trying to recruit the Hispanic vote is futile and destructive for the GOP, as Pat Buchanan wrote today, and VDARE.com has conclusively and repeatedly demonstrated.

Furthermore, anyone who has had any dealings with Hispanic immigrants established enough to be voters knows that their enthusiasm for the competition presented by subsequent waves of immigrants is low.

The real, barely articulated issue here is holding on to the native- born vote. On this, Morris is an expert. Perhaps the White House could console itself by giving the fence-building contract to Halliburton.

Logical Meme has posted a lucid essay on the state of the Birthright Citizenship controversy, pointing out that America’s continued blunder in this area is now completely anomalous set against the policies of, for instance, the EU countries. VDARE.com has long had an interest in this question, the jugular of the effort to transform the American Nation. Over four years have passed since we published Howard Sutherland’s Weigh Anchor! discussion of the peculiar history of this devastatingly irresponsible bit of judicial legislation. At the time the issue was little known and undiscussed. This may prove to have been VDARE.com’s most influential posting.

Logical Meme concludes with a particularly juicy quote from Michele Waslin of the National Council of La Raza (which of course opposes reform):

“It’s an issue that we are very concerned about…This was always seen in the past as some extreme, wacko proposal that never goes anywhere….But these so-called wacko proposals are becoming more and more mainstream—it’s becoming more acceptable to have a discussion about it.”

Adding

You’re right on that last point, Ms Waslin.

VDARE.com adds: email Michelle Waslin.

(Another valuable Logical Meme posting was a couple of days earlier: Springfield MA’s 15 Minutes of Fame amplifying from the perspective of a resident on the recent New York Times story on the problems caused there by the failings of the town’s Somali immigrants. This has also been a long standing VDARE.com interest.)