Archive for July 2007

Morristown Mayor Donald Cresitello challenged Governor Corzine and other state officials to crack down on undocumented workers during a rally Saturday on the steps of Town Hall.

Cresitello has led his town into the national spotlight by asking the federal government, under a program known as 287G, to deputize 10 police officers as immigration agents.

“I challenge Jon Corzine today to hire additional inspectors and enforcers of the Department of Labor who have the legal obligation to monitor contractors, businesses, restaurants, corporations and make sure that they are following the laws of the state of New Jersey,” he said to the cheers of roughly 100 supporters on the front lawn of Town Hall.

“I also call upon the governors of this country and specifically the governor of the state to protect the rest of the workers of the state … and enforce the labor law of the state,” he said.

The rally’s sponsor, ProAmerica Society, contends federal authorities have not used the full arsenal of immigration laws to stop illegal entries or find and deport people who are in the United States unlawfully.

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LONG BEACH - Tensions over the immigration debate ran high in the summer heat on Saturday, as activists on both sides of the issue squared off at a protest in front of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

“It’s always been a quiet, community church,” said Sgt. Ernie Kohagura, who was one of a dozen Long Beach Police officers there to keep the peace. “But today it’s like ground zero.”

Members of Save Our State, an anti-illegal immigration group, and members of the Minuteman Project gathered outside St. Luke’s Saturday morning to protest the church’s decision to provide sanctuary for Liliana, a 29-year-old illegal immigrant, and her U.S.-born infant son.

Several groups, such as Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, came to support Liliana and the New Sanctuary Movement, which works to provide illegal immigrants with safe havens.

The number of protestors grew to well over 100 by early afternoon, with about 40 from Save Our State and Minutemen, and about 100 in support of New Sanctuary.

St. Luke’s Church has been providing sanctuary for Mexican native Liliana, whose last name has been withheld, and her son Pablo since June.

Although her husband, Gerardo, and three children are U.S. citizens, Liliana became ineligible for U.S. citizenship when she was caught trying to enter the U.S. almost a decade ago with a fake birth certificate.

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FORT WORTH, Texas — Fed up with deadly drive-by shootings, incessant drug dealing and graffiti, cities nationwide are trying a different tactic to combat gangs: They’re suing them.

Fort Worth and San Francisco are among the latest to file lawsuits against gang members, asking courts for injunctions barring them from hanging out together on street corners, in cars or anywhere else in certain areas.

The injunctions are aimed at disrupting gang activity before it can escalate. They also give police legal reasons to stop and question gang members, who often are found with drugs or weapons, authorities said. In some cases, they don’t allow gang members to even talk to people passing in cars or to carry spray paint.

“It is another tool,” said Kevin Rousseau, a Tarrant County assistant prosecutor in Fort Worth, which recently filed its first civil injunction against a gang. “This is more of a proactive approach.”

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FONTANAFREDDA – The grey, reinforced concrete wall is two and a half metres high and 800 metres long. At night, it will be lit by powerful floodlights. By 2010, when the development is complete, there will also be CCTV cameras and a 24-hour guard. Later, it might even have its own security service. The development will house 250 people, doubling the local population, and no one will be able to get into this latter-day fortified citadel without showing identification. Welcome to Borgo Ronche. This residential complex is currently under construction in the Borgo Ronche district of Fontanafredda, a municipality with 10,000 inhabitants five kilometres from Pordenone. It’s a secure, walled complex because here in north-east Italy, people don’t feel safe any more. “It’s the foreigners’ fault”, they say. “There are too many of them”. Here in the province of Pordenone, legal immigrants account for 12.6% of the population compared with a national average of 4.5% (ISTAT data for 2006). There is a big community of Ghanaians and then there are the Albanians and all the others. A thousand or so are illegals. It makes no difference if Pordenone’s chief of police Vincenzo Carella says that “the situation is under control. The number of burglaries has dropped. Insecurity is more perceived than real. People see a lot of foreigners and don’t feel relaxed any more but let’s not start scaremongering”.

Insecurity, albeit only perceived, and fear of foreigners are the best possible advertisement for Alpea Sas, the company that is building the walled village.

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Sweden is bad at integrating immigrants - that’s the view of Swedes themselves, according to a new Europe-wide survey.

The Eurobarometer survey interviewed 500 residents in each of 75 European cities to get their opinions on their home towns. In Sweden, the survey covered Stockholm and Malmö. The survey rated Sweden as one of the worst places at integrating foreigners and one of the places where it is hardest to find reasonably-priced housing.

In Malmö, only 12 percent said that foreigners who live there are well-integrated; 83 percent said they were not. A similar story was told in Stockholm, where 78 people disagreed with the statement that foreigners who live in the city were well-integrated.

No other city in Europe was more negative to the integration of immigrants; next most negative were Berlin, Vienna and Graz, while inhabitants of cities in Romania, Hungary and Poland were most satisfied with integration.

Another source of dissatisfaction was housing. Asked whether it was easy to find good housing at a reasonable price, 88 percent of Stockholmers said it was not, while only 8 percent said it was. This makes Stockholm residents more negative about housing availability than people living in Rome, London, Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Only six cities were more negative: Paris, Luxembourg, Dublin, Bucharest, Bratislava and Munich.

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Pope Benedict XVI’s private secretary warned of the Islamisation of Europe and stressed the need for the continent’s Christian roots not to be ignored. “Attempts to Islamise the west cannot be denied,” Monsignor Georg Gaenswein was quoted as saying in the weekly Sueddeutsche Magazin to be published Friday.

“The danger for the identity of Europe that is connected with it should not be ignored out of a wrongly understood respectfulness,” the magazine quoted him as saying.

Gaenswein also defended a speech Benedict gave last year linking Islam and violence, saying it was an attempt by the pontiff to “act against a certain naivety.”

Muslims around the world protested against Bendict’s speech, with churches set ablaze in the West Bank and a hard-line Iranian cleric saying the pope was united with U.S. President George W. Bush to “repeat the Crusades.”

An Italian nun was also gunned down in a Somali hospital where she worked, and the Vatican expressed concern that the attack was related to reaction to the pope’s remarks.

Recently, the influential archbishop of Cologne, Joachim Meisner, said in a widely-publicised interview on Deutschlandfunk radio that the “immigration of Muslims has created a breach in our German, European culture.”

The line on a Saturday night stretched out of Joy Yee’s Noodle Shop and into Chinatown Square. Clusters of young people in knee-length shorts and flip-flops, draped in backpacks and iPod cords, waited to order fruit smoothies or the tapioca confection known as bubble tea.

Nearby, teens with laptops crowded into Saint’s Alp Teahouse, staking out booths against bright orange walls. They tapped into Saint’s Alp’s free wireless Internet access and sipped cold, syrupy teas topped with whipped cream while checking out the crowd.

Louis Mui, a single IT consultant celebrating his 33rd birthday, crowded in with his friends, taking over almost half the seating area.

They might have been at home in the Bucktown or Lakeview scene, but there was never any question as to which hip destination they would choose for this special event: Chinatown.

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MOSCOW. July 25 (Interfax) - Around 300,000 ethnic Russians are expected to move to Russia with their families before 2012 under the program of voluntary immigration to Russia for ethnic Russians living abroad, chief of the Federal Migration Service’s department for ethnic Russians Yevgeny Manyatkin said.

A total of 55 Russian regions have expressed their desire to participate in the voluntary immigration program for ethnic Russians living abroad. In 2007, the program will be launched in 12 pilot regions, with the Kaliningrad region being the first among them. Currently, 33 of the 55 regions are in contact with the Federal Migration Service for approval of their programs to accept Russians.

The Equal Opportunity Tribunal has reserved its decision on whether to give a major defence contractor permission to exclude employees on racial grounds.

BAE Systems Australia has argued that it needs to exempt dual national employees from places including China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba and Iran from working on top-secret defence contracts.

BAE Systems says it needs to meet stringent security requirements imposed by the United States, Australia’s main defence ally.

BAE lawyers have tendered a letter from SA Deputy Premier Kevin Foley in support of their claim that the state could lose many millions of dollars if an exemption order is not granted.

But lawyers for the equal opportunity commissioner argue that “legitimate commercial business interests”, no matter how significant, should not “override fundamental human rights”.

The nation’s television screens many days recently have been filled with scenes of huge crowds carrying the colorful green and red flag of Mexico viewers could well have thought it was a national holiday in Mexico City.

It was instead, downtown Los Angeles, Calif., although the scene was recreated in numerous other cities around the country with substantial Mexican populations. Hordes of Mexican expatriates, many here illegally, were protesting the very U.S. immigration laws they were violating with impunity. They found it offensive and a violation of their rights that the U.S. dared to have immigration laws to begin with.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa mounted the podium, but any hopes that he would quiet the crowds and defend the law were soon dashed. Villaraigosa, himself, has spent a lifetime opposing U.S. immigration law.

For law-abiding Americans without knowledge of the dark side of our current illegal immigration crisis, all this is unfathomable. For those who know the truth about the “La Raza” movement, these demonstrations were a prophecy fulfilled.

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