Byron Harris, the Dallas reporter who did the exposé on the importation of Italian Welders below, is also the fellow who blew the whistle earlier on aircraft mechanics who couldn’t speak English, imported on NAFTA TN visas.

Harris wrote:

The problem with many Mexican mechanics is not necessarily their skill level, but that they don t speak or read English. They can t read the repair manuals that are in English, or communicate with the supervisors who have to sign off on their work.

“I would work with these guys sometimes and I was assigned a couple of mechanics,” said one certified American mechanic who used to work for SAA. “I would help them out. But, when it came to critical issues such as operation of flight control and systems and radio correspondence, I would refuse.”

See Harris’s story Loophole allows for easy immigration for aircraft mechanics, [WFAA.com, June 17, 2009]and my blog post TN visa used to import Mexican aircraft mechanics. Congratulate Harris.

Representative Steve King reaches across the aisle to help the President:

Speaking about America’s unemployment problem on November 2, 2009, President Obama expressed a desire for new ideas on how to create good-paying jobs. The President stated that “if somebody can show me a strategy that’s going to work, then we are happy to consider it.”

I have introduced legislation that the President should be “happy to consider,” right down to and including the bill’s title – New IDEA. On September 16, 2009, I introduced H.R. 3580, the Illegal Deduction Elimination Act (New IDEA), which will immediately reduce America’s unemployment and result in the hiring of millions of unemployed Americans. New IDEA will crack down on employers and illegal workers and level the playing field for law-abiding American employers and employees.

According to the Department of Labor, the December 2009 national unemployment rate in the United States was 10.0% and Iowa’s unemployment rate was 6.6%. There are 15.3 million unemployed American citizens while the Pew Hispanic Center reports that eight million illegal aliens hold American jobs. In Iowa alone, there are 112,700 unemployed workers while 35,000 illegal aliens hold jobs.

It is inexcusable for American citizens and law abiding immigrants to be jobless while law-breaking illegal aliens hold American jobs. New IDEA clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegal aliens are not deductible for federal income tax purposes. So if employers hire illegal workers, the wages and benefits paid to illegal workers will be denied as a business expense, resulting in taxable income for employers. [King: American Jobs Should Go To American Workers, Iowa Republican, February 6, 2010]

The headline says “Texas couple guilty of enslaving Nigerian widow” [The Associated Press ,Tuesday, February 2, 2010]

Of course the “Texas couple” are Nigerians as well.

FORT WORTH, Texas—The Justice Department says a federal jury has found a couple guilty of enslaving a Nigerian widow at their Texas home for nine years.

The department says in a statement that Emmanuel and Ngozi Nnaji each face up to 55 years in prison after their convictions Tuesday on conspiracy, forced labor and other charges.

The statement says the Nigerian-born couple [Emphasis added]seized the woman’s passport and made her work long hours as their servant with no days off and little pay. They provided no support for her six children in Nigeria and limited contact with her family.

The statement says Emmanuel Nnaji sexually assaulted the widow.

She escaped in February 2006 with the help of a Nigerian priest who lived in Texas.

I never got around to posting my old review from The American Conservative of the 2009 French movie “The Class.” So, for completists:

“The Class,” a slice-of-life drama tracking a year in an inner city Parisian junior high school, has been greeted rapturously, winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. The critical acclaim stems mostly from “The Class” not being Hilary Swank’s 2007 “Freedom Writers” or all those other tiresome Nice White Lady movies in which heroic teachers overcome “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and turn their charges into Nobel Laureates.

In contrast, this French film offers a refreshingly realistic depiction of the frustrations of teaching. It’s not wholly plausible—as in all school movies, there is only a single class in “The Class”—but it’s almost unique in suggesting that student quality matters.

(more…)

Nearly bankrupt California just figured out that it is a waste of money to give job training to illegal aliens who will be deported at the conclusion of their sentences, and who were never legal to work in the US in the first place.

A board that oversees vocational training and work programs at California prisons has voted to discontinue allowing undocumented immigrant inmates set for deportation to participate in the California Prisons Industry Authority certification program.

Authority spokesman Tom Collins said the aim of the Prison Industry Board action Thursday is to “ensure that the effective vocational training that CalPIA provides is first applied to inmates who will return to California’s communities following their parole, rather than training individuals who will not.”

The program, established in its current form in 1982, provides training and jobs in the manufacturing and agricultural industries for inmates in 22 prisons across the state.

Approximately 427 of the 5,700 inmates now participating are under an Immigration and Customs Enforcement hold and will be deported once their sentence is completed. Fifty-two of the 727 inmate workers enrolled in certification programs are also under an ICE hold, according to a staff report recommending the change.

Collins said he did not know why inmates with ICE holds were not previously deemed ineligible for the program, but that the recommendation for the change came up as the board was exploring options for lowering costs and improving the effectiveness of the program.

Recidivism rates for inmates who participated in the program are significantly lower than inmates who do not — 12 percent of certification program participants paroled in fiscal year 2007-2008 re-offend, compared to 42 percent of the general prison population paroled during that time, according to the report. The report also estimated that limiting the program to inmates eligible for parole in California could translate to fewer inmates re-offending and a savings of $784,000 a year in corrections costs. [Illegal-immigrant inmates no longer allowed in work program, January 30, 2010 ]

on the Minority Mortgage Meltdown(Links added):

“Before you knew it, once-respectable Wall Street institutions were buying investment products even more ludicrous than Mexican bonds: They were buying the mortgages of Mexican strawberry-pickers.

Why shouldn’t Wall Street trust in suicidal loans no sane person would ever imagine could be paid back? Time after time, when their bets paid off, they pocketed huge fees; when their bets failed, they sent the bill to the taxpayers.

With nothing to fear, the big financial houses bought, repackaged and resold investment products that included loans like the one issued by Washington Mutual to non-English-speaking strawberry pickers earning a combined $14,000 a year to purchase a $720,000 house.

But the financial wizards on Wall Street were trading these preposterous loans as if they were bars of gold. They may as well have bet the entire U.S. economy on a dice game in an alley off 44th Street.

Every mortgage-backed security bundle was infected with suicidal, politically correct loans that had been demanded by community organizers such as Barack Obama — as is thoroughly documented in Schweizer’s book.[Architects of Ruin: ]

On the off chance that mammoth mortgages to people who could barely afford food somehow went bad, Wall Street firms could be confident that their Democrat friends would bail them out.

Even the Republicans would have to bail them out this time: They had strapped the dynamite of toxic loans onto the entire economy and were threatening to pull the clip. Wall Street had infected every financial institution in the country, including completely innocent banks.

But now Obama says he’s going to “fight” Wall Street, which is as plausible as claiming he’ll “fight” the trial lawyers. “[CAN'T WE AT LEAST GET A TOASTER? January 27, 2010]

Riverside, California, is awash with drugs and gang violence but these events have become so common in southern California that they fail to make the national headlines. Not only are the Mexican gang members selling drugs, they are also murdering African-American gang members in Riverside. Apparently, diversity isn’t working out so well in California. [Local, federal authorities arrest 50 in Riverside gang sweep, By Paul Larocco And John Asbury, The Press-Enterprise, January 27, 2010]

FYI: the Florida unemployment rate for December was 11.6 percent, considerably higher than the national average.

Florida voters don’t want immigration laws waived to make it easier for Haitians to stay in the United States or immigrate into the country, a new poll shows.

Fifty-one percent of 1,618 registered Florida voters surveyed by Quinnipiac (Conn.) University said they wanted immigration laws enforced compared to 43 percent opposed to them being waived in the wake of the deadly Haitian earthquake Jan. 12.

Voters were opposed, 50 percent to 46 percent, to a decision by the Obama Administration to grant temporary legal status for 18 months to Haitians living in the U.S. when the earthquake hit and divided on allowing more immigrants into the country. Quinnipiac said the survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. [Poll: Fla. voters want immigration laws enforced,Miami Herald January 27, 2010]

What sense does it make to welcome thousands more people into the country where there are no jobs for anyone? It doesn’t help Haitians and serves to harm citizens.

If reality managed to encroach on the Bizarro World title that New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press gave a January 21 story, the result might be: “Police: Illegal Alien Honduran Elizabeth man recruited teens to help him burglarize homes.”

Meet “Elizabeth man,” aka “29-year-old Elizabeth man,” aka “Union County man,” aka “Joeys Sebastian Cruz,” aka “Jorge Luna,” aka “Joeys Sebastian Cruz Morales,” aka “Manuel Gomez,” and aka “Jorge Armondo Vadladares Luna.”

Police from various New Jersey jurisdictions say that they have no idea what this individual’s real name is, but seem to be certain that he is 29 years of age. He has been charged with “burglary, theft, conspiracy to commit burglary and theft and hindering apprehension,” with more charges likely to come. One 15-year-old alleged accomplice—also “from Elizabeth”—has so far been “charged with burglary, theft and conspiracy to commit burglary,” with more teenaged accomplices expected to be charged. They will all likely be “local boys,” from places like Honduras.

Most of Asbury Park Press reporter Michelle Sahn’s story is an unintentionally comic exercise in euphemism and misdirection:

“MIDDLETOWN — Police arrested a Union County man who they say operated a burglary ring, using juveniles to help him steal from homes in Monmouth and Somerset counties….

After further investigation, police determined an Elizabeth man was having juveniles accompany him to homes to commit burglaries, the lieutenant said….

[And my favorite:]

The Elizabeth man was arrested Tuesday in his hometown [where, Tegucigalpa?] by the Middletown and Holmdel detectives, with help from city Detective James Ponto.”

Police: Elizabeth man recruited teens to help him burglarize homes: Burglary ring targeted homes in Monmouth, Somerset counties, police say by Michelle Sahn, Asbury Park Press, January 21, 2010.

Only in the 14th and final paragraph, after many readers will have already moved on, does the truth finally come out:

“He is a native of Honduras and believed to be in the United States illegally. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has issued a no-bail immigration detainer for him, pending the outcome of their investigation.”

Hey, it could have been worse; Sahn and the APP could have suppressed the truth altogether, and left it to readers to guess, based on their profiling of immigration journalists, what the euphemisms stood for.

Write Michelle Sahn at: msahn@app.com

Write Managing Editor Gary Schoening at garys@app.com

Send a letter to the paper at yourviews@app.com

Be polite.

Found, thanks to American Renaissance.

As part of my continuing coverage of unusually cinematic Southern California crimes, complete with the kind of multi-culti bands of perps that are more interesting than the usual gangs of half-cousins, here’s an excerpt from the Orange County Register:

Nearly three years after a father and daughter were set ablaze and the mother, Dhanak, had her throat slit, details surrounding one of Orange County’s most notorious cases are surfacing.

[Iftekhar] Murtaza, 25, of Van Nuys, and his two friends – Vitaliy Krasnoperov, 24, of West Hollywood and Charles Anthony Murphy Jr., 25, of Mission Hills – remain behind bars.

The trio of suspects is accused of killing Jayprakash Dhanak, 56, and Karishma Dhanak, 20, the father and sister of Shayona Dhanak, Murtaza’s former girlfriend. …

The prosecutor, Senior Deputy District Attorney Howard Gundy, said a dispute over religion was at the core of the crime.

Shayona Dhanak’s parents disapproved of her nearly three-year relationship with Murtaza, who was Muslim. Murtaza was angry with the Dhanaks, who are devout Hindus, for interfering with his relationship, according to court records. The couple broke up several weeks before the slayings.

Gundy said Murtaza wanted to kill Shayona Dhanak’s family so she would have no one left but him.

One problem today’s youth face in living up to the high marks set by past generations at committing a high volume of crimes is that they are so addicted to electronic communications that they leave digital trails everywhere, making it hardly worth their while to break the law. For example, the kid who stabbed seven times this woman my wife knows while stealing her cell phone and laptop, immediately called his gang friends with the stolen phone. The cops traced the calls and came down hard on the friends a few hours later, and they rolled over on him. He was arrested the day after his crime.

Similarly, these three guys in this story exchanged lots of text messages such as:

IFTEKHAR SaYz: shayonas parents made us breakup

crowseeker: (expletive deleted)

IFTEKHAR SaYz: dude I wantto kill them

crowseeker: how?