Archive for November 2006

Every day, about 1,000 Danes leave their foreign-born spouses in Sweden and cross the “Love Bridge” to jobs in Denmark, where immigration laws prevent their husbands and wives from settling.

The Oresund Bridge linking the two nations has become a flashpoint in the debate over Sweden’s open border. The Sweden Democrats tripled their support in two cities near the span in September elections after demanding tighter immigration laws.

“When I look over the bridge, it’s like looking over the Berlin Wall,” says Mattias Karlsson, a party spokesman. “Denmark has much more rigid laws on foreigners, and that’s steering a lot of asylum seekers and foreigners toward Sweden.”

European Union politicians are struggling to assimilate overseas-born residents while toughening entry requirements for outsiders. That may leave Sweden as one of the few EU nations to welcome Romanian and Bulgarian workers when the trade bloc expands to 27 members in January.

The Paris suburbs were rocked last year by rioting among Muslim youths that resulted in about 3,000 arrests. Italian and Spanish authorities are trying to stem the tide of Africans who arrive in makeshift boats. The U.K. government is debating ways to reduce the isolation of its own Muslim community after alleged terror plots that police say were planned by British citizens.

Closing the Door

Sweden, Ireland and the U.K. were the only western European nations that didn’t put restrictions on workers from the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004.

Britain and Ireland said Oct. 24 they would reverse open- door labor policies and limit migration from Bulgaria and Romania. In both countries, jobseekers will be required to obtain work permits before going to work.

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The first prominent Hispanic to publicly speak out against illegal immigration is among the country’s leading gang experts with decades of evidence that illegal immigration is strongly associated with crime, violent gangs and drugs.

Richard Valdemar, a retired sergeant with the Lost Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who specialized in Hispanic gangs, draws from his 33-year career arresting aliens in a crime-infested portion of the Golden State that has become known as the nation’s illegal immigration capitol.

In a four-part series broadcast on an educational public affairs cable network, Valdemar, the grandson of poor Mexican migrants, says it’s his duty as a Hispanic to talk about this hot-button issue because he cannot be labeled a racist like so many others who have publicly opposed illegal immigration.

The veteran sergeant said numerous Southern California cities have already been infiltrated by Mexican drug cartels that often set up phony businesses and launder money. Not surprisingly, the cities include working class areas with large Hispanic populations such as Lynwood, Bell Gardens, South Gate and Huntington Park.

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CHARLOTTE — The Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office calls its effort to fight illegal immigration a success. Last spring, the sheriff’s office partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to empower local deputies with the tools they need to spot illegal immigrants with criminal records and to take the first steps toward deportation.

“They are searched in a federal database to search for their prior criminal history and their prior immigration arrest,” said Sgt. Quinn Stansell.

Since May, local deputies have fingerprinted and processed nearly 2,000 inmates of questionable identity against federal records. The sheriff’s office found 930 to be here illegally.

The Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office calls its effort to fight illegal immigration a success thanks in part to a partnership it has with the Department of Homeland Security.

“That success frankly has triggered interest throughout the entire country in our 287(g) program,” said Julie Myers, with the Department of Homeland Security.

The program has been around for years, but Mecklenburg County is one of the few communities taking advantage of the 287(g) program that allows local law enforcement to initiate the Federal Deportation Process for illegal aliens.

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CAPITOL HILL Congressional investigators have found that the government has processed some 30-thousand citizenship applications even though thousands of background files used to determine eligibility were missing.

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Susan Collins of Maine released details of the investigation by the Government Accountability Office today.

The G-A-O reports 110-thousand so-called alien files were missing from offices of Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of Homeland Security. The files contain applications and other documents from non-citizens.

Grassley and Collins say they requested the investigation after Homeland Security granted citizenship to a suspected terrorist four years ago, without checking the alien files.

On December 4 the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases — one from Louisville and one from Seattle — that challenge the constitutionality of race-based student assignments in K-12 public schools. Since it is uncontested that the two school systems are engaging in racial discrimination, the legal issue is whether the use of race is “narrowly tailored” to a “compelling” interest. The Court should rule that there is no such compelling justification for the school systems’ racial balancing, for three reasons.

First, while the school boards assert that racially balanced student bodies yield educational and other societal benefits, the social-science data on which they rely are controversial and disputed. If the benefits are not certain, but only possible, then their value must be accordingly discounted.

If the social-science evidence put forward here is accepted as sufficient to establish a compelling interest, then rest assured it will be put forward to justify racial balancing in many other contexts (employment, housing, the makeup of various public boards, and jury selection, to name just a few). There are few government functions that cannot be described as rooted in some interest that seems “compelling,” and it will always be possible to find some social scientist who supports the notion that the consideration of race will improve that function. The State Board of Optometry (what is more precious than eyesight?) can insist on racially balanced appointments (can it be doubted that some survey will show that racial balance helps ensure greater sensitivity to the medical needs of this or that community?).

Acceptance of this controverted social-science evidence would also require the Court to revisit many of its earlier decisions. For instance, there is little doubt that social-science evidence could be adduced that a child is better off if the adoptive parents match his or her race. Likewise, there is social science that supports racial discrimination in teacher hiring because of the “role models” provided by teachers of this or that skin color. Indeed, there is — and was — social-science evidence that segregated settings provide educational benefits. But the Supreme Court has ruled against racial discrimination in all three contexts. As these examples also show, social-science data can be used to justify discrimination against individual members of groups that have already suffered historically from discrimination (as it already is in higher education against Asians and women).

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It’s time to admit that “diversity” is code for racism. If it makes you feel better, we can call it “nice” racism or “well-intentioned” racism or “racism that’s good for you.” Except that’s the rub: It’s racism that may be good for you if “you” are a diversity guru, a rich white liberal, a college administrator or one of sundry other types. But the question of whether diversity is good for “them” is a different question altogether, and much more difficult to answer.

If by “them” you mean minorities such as Jews, Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans and other people of Asian descent, then the ongoing national obsession with diversity probably isn’t good. Indeed, that’s why Jian Li, a freshman at Yale, filed a civil rights complaint against Princeton University for rejecting him. Mr. Li had nigh-upon perfect test scores and grades, yet Princeton turned him down. He’ll probably get nowhere with his complaint – he did get into Yale, after all – but it shines a light on an uncomfortable reality.

“Theoretically, affirmative action is supposed to take spots away from white applicants and redistribute them to underrepresented minorities,” Mr. Li told the Daily Princetonian. “What’s happening is one segment of the minority population is losing places to another segment of minorities, namely Asians to underrepresented minorities.”

Mr. Li points to a study conducted by two Princeton academics last year that concluded that if you got rid of racial preferences in higher education, the number of whites admitted to schools would remain fairly constant. However, without racial preferences, Asians would take roughly 80 percent of the positions now allotted to Hispanic and black students.

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A south Georgia poultry plant is busing in felons on probation and homeless men to fill jobs left empty when federal immigration agents arrested illegal Mexican immigrants in raids two months ago.

Each day, about 40 convicted felons from the Macon Diversion Center are bused in to work at the Crider Poultry plant in Stillmore. Sixteen men from the Garden City Rescue Mission in Augusta have worked in the plant, and the mission is looking to send more.

Crider President David Purtle said that’s just a drop in the bucket for a plant operating at 450 employees, less than half of the 1,000 workers there before the raid.

To fill the gap, Crider also has been outsourcing jobs in its raw deboning plant to Alabama, has raised wages to attract new workers and has turned to an outside company to hire about 100 cleaning workers. The plant has seen its processing slow down because of the smaller workforce, officials said.

Purtle said the company is also spending more on hiring _ paying to bus in the probationers, for example _ and on training, because many of the new hires have poor attendance and quit quickly.

Federal immigration officials began visiting the plant in May, estimating that about 700 workers there were using false identification. Many employees were confronted and fired. Some left on their own.

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PALMDALE - More than 50 people carrying American flags and signs that read “Stop illegal immigration” demonstrated Saturday at an intersection where a young Palmdale man was fatally injured in a crash blamed on an unlicensed, uninsured undocumented immigrant who tried to walk away after the collision.

The protesters said local government officials should do more to deter illegal immigration, including turning over to federal authorities undocumented immigrants who have been arrested on suspicion of drunken driving and similar crimes rather than releasing them to await trial.

“If they release drunk illegal-alien drivers after they sober up, they’re setting us up for more deaths of American citizens,” said Frank Jorge, founder of the Antelope Valley Independent Minutemen, which organized Saturday’s demonstration.

With songs such as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and the Eagles’ “Lying Eyes” playing on loudspeakers, the demonstrators stood along 10th Street West at Avenue O, beside a memorial cross and candles for 20-year-old Tyler Lundin of Palmdale. Passing motorists honked and waved.

“It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” Jorge said of the response from passers-by. “I don’t think I’ve seen anybody give us a thumbs-down or a middle finger.”

Lundin died four days after an Oct.22 crash in which his pickup truck collided with a compact car that turned left in front of it. The car’s two occupants tried to walk away after the crash, but they were caught and detained by several people who witnessed the crash, sheriff’s deputies said.

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THE HAGUE — Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende’s right-of-center Christian Democratic Appeal party, which has led efforts to curtail Muslim immigration in the Netherlands, won the most seats in parliamentary elections Wednesday.

But voters voiced strong discontent with his government by giving unprecedented support to extremist parties at both ends of the political spectrum.

After five years of politically motivated murders and some of Europe’s most acrimonious debate over the rapid influx of immigrants into this once-homogeneous country, election results reflected a public split over how to resolve the country’s problems and laid a political minefield for creating a coalition that can effectively govern.

As expected, no party won enough seats for a majority in the lower house of parliament. The erratic voting patterns shifted significant numbers of seats to parties with extremist views and reduced the influence of moderate parties, a result that surprised government officials and political analysts.

“It’s a new signal from the voters,” said Jan Marijnissen, leader of the Socialist Party, which won the third-highest number of seats. The party promotes an anti-globalization, anti-European platform and advocates greater public spending on the poor and elderly.

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“If you’re more concerned about getting sued than getting murdered, you can’t do the job like it needs to be done,”
U.S. law enforcement agencies are struggling with the threat of lawsuits regarding the conduct of officers.

Officials said the threat has become so acute that many officers would rather die than be sued. They said this has seriously hurt law enforcement and endangered the lives of officers.

“Some officers today are more afraid of being sued than being murdered,” Olympia Fields, Ill. Police Chief Jeff Chudwin said.

In a recent address to a police convention, Mr. Chudwin said the actions of numerous officers have created additional victims of crimes. He said officers often avoid using deadly force even when it’s legal and required.

“If you’re putting an offender at the top of the list for safety, then you have your priorities screwed up,” Mr. Chudwin told the Association of SWAT Personnel-Wisconsin. “Why are we catering to the person who created the problem?”

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