Archive for September 2006

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Armed with a computer and less than $100, Joseph Turner two years ago formed a group called “Save Our State.” His goal: save California from turning into a “Third World cesspool” of illegal immigrants, he says. The group doesn’t have a formal membership, and Mr. Turner counts barely 2,000 people on his email list and message board.

Yet this meager base has proved to be a powerful springboard. Through his Web site, Mr. Turner has recruited supporters to hold confrontational protests outside Home Depot stores, where unauthorized workers often gather to seek jobs. He has also helped ignite a nationwide movement by local governments to crack down on illegal immigration. So far, about 10 towns have passed ordinances to drive out undocumented immigrants after getting the idea from Mr. Turner. Dozens of other towns are considering such measures.

“My idea of activism is aggressive, street-level and in-your-face activism,” says Mr. Turner, who strikes a clean-cut look with slicked-back black hair and icy blue eyes. He adds: “I don’t believe in turning the other cheek.”

Mr. Turner is part of an anti-immigrant brushfire that is gathering force at the grass-roots level around the U.S. Small groups like Mr. Turner’s Save Our State are cropping up from coast to coast, recruiting members and devising tactics to tackle illegal immigration in their communities. Critics call many of these groups racist, a charge organizers deny. What no one disputes is that they are tapping into widespread frustration over the federal government’s failure to adopt a national immigration policy while a deeply divided Congress clashes over how to deal with 12 million illegal immigrants.

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The farcical state of our justice system has again been highlighted by the recent sentencing of Abdus-Salaam Ebrahim, former co-ordinator of the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad), to four years imprisonment for an attack on the home of drug dealer Mogamat Madatt.

This came after he had served an eight-year sentence for public violence.

Three of his co-accused, although also found guilty, were sentenced to two years’ house arrest. The magistrate, Johnny Vermeulen, said that sentencing Abdus-Salaam “to house arrest would have sent the wrong message to the community” and, furthermore, that as a person who was “highly intelligent and with strong leadership qualities” he still had an important role to play in the fight against crime.

The judge evidently thinks this fight is better fought from behind bars.

In spite of the contradictory sentiments expressed by Vermeulen, what is particularly galling is the fact that the only message the community is being sent is that those of us frustrated by the police’s limp-wristed approach to fighting crime will not get any support from our justice system.

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Sept. 28 — IFCO Systems NV said it expects to post a “minor pretax loss” for the third quarter due to legal costs and a decline in productivity related to investigations into the company by the U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement Agency.

The company, the largest pallet recycler in the United States, had about 1,200 of its employees arrested in April after the agency made a sweep through 26 company sites looking for illegal immigrants.

“The company anticipates improvement in the productivity and profitability of the PMS business segment as well as declining legal costs, and therefore expects a positive result for the fourth quarter 2006,” IFCO said.

The Herndon Town Council took the first step towards providing Herndon Police officers with immigration enforcement training on Tuesday night after voting 6 - 1 to request Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] training.

The request came after an often emotional public hearing that featured dozens of speakers both in support and opposed to the training, highlighting the polarization of a town that has been in the midst of a brutal debate on immigration since last summer.

Town manager Steve Owen will now work with Herndon Chief of Police Toussaint Summers to draft a letter of interest requesting a relationship with ICE officials. The next step is forming a Memorandum of Understanding [MOU] between ICE and the Town of Herndon outlining the specific authorities that the police would have under the training.

The Town of Herndon, if accepted for the training by ICE, will be one of the first town-level law enforcement agencies to engage in the immigration enforcement training. At the time of publication, ICE training agreements had been in place solely with state and county law enforcement agencies - many of them correctional institutions, according to ICE officials.

While supporters have said that the training is necessary to combat the threat of gang violence and sexual crimes, opponents have underlined that associating local police with immigration enforcement officials would only further alienate the Hispanic community from the town.

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Something odd is happening in Scandinavian politics. Or rather, something normal has stopped happening. Everybody knows that for the better part of a century, social democrats have been building Keynesian welfare states in Scandinavia. The news is that economic liberals (”liberals” in the classical, continental sense of the term) have basically ceased to attack them. In fact, Scandinavia’s center-right parties now actively embrace the welfare state. And suddenly — and not coincidentally — voters like them.

For generations, political power in Scandinavia has rested overwhelmingly with the labor-oriented social democrats, interrupted only by brief periods of center-right government. But last week, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who took office in 2001, achieved the status of longest-sitting prime minister ever from Venstre, the traditionally economically liberal party of Denmark. (The last time a prime minister from Venstre held office close to this long was in the 1910s and 1920s.) And as of yet, according to polls, Rasmussen has nothing to fear from the center-left opposition.

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Members of Houston’s community banded together to raise donations to the family of Officer Rodney Johnson, allegedly slain by an illegal immigrant on September 21. Volunteers wielded buckets and brushes to wash cars and raise funds for the widow of Officer Johnson, and also stopped motorists in Houston to ask for donations. By the evening of Sunday September 24th, the group had raised over $7,000 for Johnson’s widow and five children. Members of the community cited Johnson’s kindness and professionalism in his service to the city.

The murder of Officer Johnson is raising concerns about conflicts between Houston’s immigrant Hispanics and native-born black communities; in addition, the Houston police department’s current policy of not questioning suspects about their immigrant status. Police Chief Harold Hurtt appeared on national television to defend this policy and to declare that he would need another 2.500 officers in order to address illegal immigration in his city. Hurtt blamed the Federal government for inadequately defending Texas’ border with Mexico where thousands of illegal immigrants cross into the US every year. Estimates of the number of illegal immigrants living in Houston range from 250,000 to 400,000.

Mexican national Juan Leonardo Quintero (32) was stopped on September 21 by Officer Johnson near the Houston’s Hobby airport for a traffic violation and arrested because of Quintero’s failure to bear any identification. Quintero was driving a pickup truck and was accompanied by a female companion who fled the scene. Houston police are not quite certain exactly what then transpired once Quintero was handcuffed and seated in the rear seat of Officer Johnson’ patrol car. According to procedure, Officer Johnson would have frisked the suspect and searched for any weapons on his person. However, the officer apparently failed to notice a pistol in the alleged murderer’s waistband.

Somehow, Quintero was then able to fire four shots into the face and head of Officer Johnson who was later declared dead at Ben Taub Hospital in Houston. Quintero was still in the back seat of the police vehicle and in possession of the apparent murder weapon, an automatic pistol, when other police officers arrived.

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ON THE FENCE: With a bill sanctioning a 700-mile border fence cleared by a House majority this week, attention now turns to the upper chamber where the Republican leadership will work against a ticking legislative clock ahead of the midterm elections. Sen. Bill Frist (R., Tenn.), the majority leader, makes the case for the fence legislation — even apart from the “comprehensive reform” package he has supported — in a San Diego Union-Tribune op-ed. “All in all,” he writes, “I’m convinced that the finished network [of fences] would give us the protection we need to achieve what immigration law enforcers all ‘operational control’ over the entire border.” A border fence around San Diego achieved just that, Mr. Frist notes, but the rest of the California border remains largely unobstructed: “Today, one can walk in a more-or-less straight line from Mexico’s Baja California to Riverside without encountering a single physical barrier.”

Meanwhile, a newspaper in Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy’s home state of Vermont accuses the politician of straddling the fence issue. A double-layered fence extending 700 miles would be “a scar on a fragile desert ecosystem, and a scar on our legacy as a nation of immigrants,” Mr. Leahy argued in a speech on the Senate floor. But, writes Battleboro Reformer reporter Evan Lehmann, “Four months ago, he was on the other side of the fence issue when he supported construction of a barrier along 370 miles of the southwest border. … Leahy voted yes to the shorter fence.”

For National Review editor Rich Lowry, writing an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune, the momentum behind the fence is a victory for the Neanderthals — and he means it in a good way. Today’s bipartisan support for the border fence marks a reversal; earlier in the year, when immigrants and their supporters took the streets, “polite opinion scoffed” at the fence in favor of reforms that included a guest-worker program and citizenship for some illegal immigrants. “But a funny thing happened on the way to ‘comprehensive reform’ — the political marketplace worked,” Mr. Lowry says. The Minutemen, with their border vigils, “have shown that Washington can be made to respond to public opinion on immigration, for a change.”

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SCOTTISH Labour MPs want Tony Blair to introduce restrictions on the thousands of migrant workers expected to come to Britain from Bulgaria and Romania next year.

It is claimed that over the past two years some Scottish jobs that would have gone to local people have been taken by Poles, Czechs and Lithuanians whose countries were among the 10 which joined the European Union in 2004.

MPs spoke out yesterday as European leaders gave Bulgaria and Romania the green light to join the Union on January 1 next year.

While the back benchers acknowledge the major contribution made by foreign labour in filling skills shortages, they are fearful of the impact a second wave of migrants could have on local job markets, wages and services.

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Allentown City Councilman, Louis Hershman says he plans to collect signatures from voters to present to council on his new immigration law.

A city provision allows an issue to go on City Council’s agenda if 35 registered Allentown voters sign a petition asking for it.

He hopes to get his bill on the agenda for the mid-October meeting.

Under his new bill, city officials would be required to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration laws.

HILTON HEAD ISLAND - State lawmakers began meeting last week to discuss proposals that they hope will give South Carolina some of the toughest laws against illegal immigration in the country.

With mounting disappointment at the stalled attempts at comprehensive immigration legislation at the federal level, state legislators said they are confident they will be able to introduce a bill in January with wide support in the Statehouse. The bill probably will mirror Georgia’s immigration legislation that Gov. Sonny Perdue signed last spring.

“We are increasingly frustrated by the inability of the federal government to enforce its laws,” said Sen. Jim Ritchie, R-Spartanburg, chairman of the study committee appointed to recommend solutions. “The states are acting where they can. We have very limited power with issues of immigration.”

A survey released last year by the Pew Hispanic Center estimated South Carolina is home to between 20,000 and 35,000 illegal immigrants.

The committee held its first meeting Sept. 19, when it began looking at steps other states have taken to curb illegal immigration.

It heard testimony from various groups, including Homeland Security officials and advocates for tighter immigration laws, Ritchie said.

The Georgia law the committee is particularly interested in immediately drew national attention when Perdue signed it last year, making it one of the toughest such acts in the country, especially for a nonborder state. Most of the provisions go into effect next summer.

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