Archive for July 2007

SOUTHFIELD, Mich., July 24 /PRNewswire/ — New vehicle registrations among ethnic groups increased by nearly 11 percent from 2003 to 2006, according to data released by R. L. Polk & Co. Hispanics, Asians and African Americans are represented in the category. Polk also reports non-ethnic new vehicle registrations are down seven percent for the same timeframe.

“Auto manufacturers can no longer afford to ignore ethnic markets or assume that they will respond to mainstream marketing,” said Mark Pauze, solutions consultant, for R. L. Polk & Co. “Manufacturers that focus on these markets and measure their progress are making important inroads with them. Polk works with many manufacturers to identify opportunities in the ethnic markets and to track their performance.”

Polk’s enhanced data on ethnic markets shows who owns and buys vehicles based on the actual registered owner, and not just the characteristics of the neighborhood in which they live. The data also utilizes two independent sources to enhance Polk’s ethnic coding by utilizing sophisticated algorithms to provide detailed segmentation of Asian, Hispanic, African American and many other ethnic groups.

“By targeting minority customers with messages that resonate with their own unique heritage and culture, automakers and auto dealers can strengthen relationships, create deeper bonds with customers and sell more vehicles. Polk’s new methods for tracking minority customers will allow automotive marketers to analyze the ethnicity of eight major ethnic groups and up to 287 individual ethnic backgrounds. Polk’s new ethnic coding system has increased our coverage and accuracy in identifying ethnic households across the board,” added Pauze.

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Five years after Cambridge began using family income instead of race to assign students to schools, the system has become more racially segregated, a Globe review of data shows.

Nearly 60 percent of Cambridge’s 12 elementary schools are racially imbalanced, compared with less than 40 percent in 2001-02 before the new policy took effect. White students continue to be the largest racial group at four schools popular among white middle-class parents.

School districts across the nation are considering Cambridge’s approach as an alternative after last month’s Supreme Court ruling banned the use of race in Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., desegregation plans.

But school leaders in Cambridge, one of the first cities in the nation to try income as an integration tool, urge others to proceed with caution as they search for a solution to keep them out of court. Income does not necessarily serve as a substitute for race and ethnicity, they say, even though most of their schools have achieved greater diversity in family income and a national report recently heralded the school district’s policy as a model.

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The Project on Fair Representation filed a complaint against the University of Texas at Austin at the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C.

In a letter to the university, POFR has written that the law has been violated because UT-Austin, during undergraduate admissions, has reintroduced race and ethnicity as criteria for admissions. This reintroduction is considered illegal and unfair by the director of POFR, Edward Blum, and he, in his letter, has demanded a stop to this system before the next applications are taken in. He has requested the U.S. Department of education to step in and stop it immediately.

The aim of POFR is to help and represent organizations or individuals who have some problems regarding race and ethnicity and would like to challenge the government for it. So they have actively taken up this issue to protest against the introduction racial preferences at UT Austin.

Racial and ethnic preferences during admission to colleges and universities have earlier been granted for a period of 25 years, when the U.S. Supreme Court granted permission to the University of Michigan in 2003, but the condition was to perform the admissions by “race-neutral means”, before resorting to racial and ethnic preferences

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Last night Kepiblanc reported on the methods nightclubs in Copenhagen use to handle the problem of Muslim “youths” and their tendency to react violently when they can’t have their way with Danish girls.

Two commenters on the post then reported on the same problem as it occurs in other parts of Scandinavia.

First, Vasarahammer has translated an excerpt from the interview of Sedu Koskinen, owner of several nightclubs in Helsinki. The entire interview is available in Finnish at Viisi Tähteä:

Sedu Koskinen spoke of a politically sensitive subject in the Haaga Studia Restonomia seminar, namely allowing entry of foreigners to a night club.

“Today there is a problem with foreigners. One must raise this issue in some forum. I sometimes get tens of complaints that there have been too many foreigners in our place. Regular customers find that disturbing. Foreign men don’t necessarily respect others, especially women. They openly grab, fondle and behave badly. That is the reality.

“And when the foreigners start making trouble, it is not that do I hit first or do you. At that point they have already hit, usually with a knife or a beer mug. And normally they come in groups. They make sure that the group is there and then they start hitting.

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FARMERS BRANCH, Texas — The councilman who steered his Dallas suburb into the nationwide political debate over immigration says his campaign to force out illegal immigrants began with late-night drives around his hometown.

Tim O’Hare said he saw too many people crowding into unkempt homes, upscale houses languishing on the market and empty storefronts throughout this city of about 28,000.

“The retail spots … for every two that went vacant, one would be filled by a Spanish-speaking business, then, you … saw what was once a really, really, really nice neighborhood start to decline,” O’Hare, 37, said in an interview with The Associated Press at the ornately decorated two-story home he shares with his two dogs.

O’Hare, a first-term city councilman and personal injury lawyer, said he believes those issues could be resolved if illegal immigrants left Farmers Branch.

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The New York journalist, and I use the term “journalist” generously, was attempting to take me to task for claiming that slovenliness and laziness are unnecessary choices anywhere, anytime, but especially in America.

I had just explained to him how, as a child of a lower middle-class family living on the outskirts of Detroit in the roaring 1950s, I got nothing unless I earned it.

We did without. We were frugal by design. You want a guitar, kid? Get a job. Or two.

I went into detail how my mother and father loved me and properly parented us kids in the most powerful and positive of ways by teaching us real-world self-esteem as something that only comes from genuine effort, sacrifice and intelligent, conscientious prioritization.

By age 12, I had two paper routes, washed cars, swept sidewalks and driveways, sold night crawlers, shoveled snow, raked leaves, cleaned eaves, painted fences, mowed lawns, trimmed hedges, cleaned windows and performed a myriad of other work duties beyond my routine household chores.

It was expected in my family. I took pride in earning my keep and contributing to the family asset column.

Plan B is for the Osbournes and Paris Hiltons of the chump world.

Sad, really.

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Eighteen months after her tumultuous tenure in Trenton ended, former Secretary of State Regena Thomas is the centerpiece of a whistle-blower lawsuit that accuses her of ordering subordinates to consider only African-Americans for jobs, grants and loans at a college loan program.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Trenton by the former head of the state’s higher-education loan program, charges Thomas and other top officials in former Gov. James E. McGreevey’s administration with racial discrimination, misuse of federal funds and retaliating against an official who blew the whistle.

Former Higher Education Student Assistance Authority Executive Director Elizabeth Wong contends Thomas disregarded the program’s independence.

“I never imagined that what I viewed as an opportunity of a lifetime would subject me to unthinkable discrimination and eventually result in my wrongful termination and public humiliation — all because I refused to comply,” Wong said in a recent interview at her lawyer’s office.

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Washington, D.C. - Employers, beware. With comprehensive federal-immigration reform comatose, state and local politicians are rushing to do something about illegal immigration. And increasingly, employers, as well as illegal immigrants themselves, are being targeted by these frustration fueled efforts.

Earlier this month, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano signed the toughest employer sanctions in the nation: Beginning Jan. 1, all 130,000-plus Arizona employers will be required to use a now voluntary Web-based federal service–commonly known as the “basic pilot program”–to check the legal work status of new hires. Any business that “knowingly” or “intentionally” hires illegal immigrants would, after a second offense, lose its license to operate in Arizona. In effect, it would face a corporate death sentence.

Already, two employer groups, the Arizona Contractors Association and the Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform, have filed suit in federal court to block the new law, asserting, among other things, that it denies employers due process and is pre-empted by federal laws.

Kris W. Kobach, a University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law professor, who worked on immigration policy for former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and who helped draft the Arizona statute, insists that it’s narrowly targeted to take advantage of an enforcement mechanism Congress left the locals in 1986. At that time, Congress made employing illegal aliens a federal offense and explicitly pre-empted state and local criminal charges and civil fines.

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Six million Britons are living in households where nobody works - costing the taxpayer almost £13 billion a year in benefits alone, a spending watchdog report reveals today.

An astonishing one in six households across the country are officially classified as ‘workless’ - having adults of working age but none with a job - and almost 1.8 million children are now growing up in these homes.

The National Audit Office report lambasts the Government for failing to tackle this hard-core group, and warns that those living in workless households risk drifting into a spiral of joblessness, poverty, ill-health and crime - with a huge cost to society.

The report acknowledges that schemes to help unemployed people find work are having some success “for those who participate”, with the number of those in work at a record high, but says millions at the bottom of the heap are falling through the net

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Two groups of legislators Wednesday said they’re fed up with a lack of federal action to curb illegal immigration.

Utah spent up to $85.4 million in a single year educating undocumented immigrants, and now lawmakers want the feds to pay up. Lawmakers have also charged a group with finding a way to ensure that employers don’t hire undocumented immigrants.

The federal immigration debate came to a crashing halt late last month when U.S. senators failed to gain the support needed to move to a vote on a bill that would have given most of the nation’s 12 million immigrants a way to earn legal status. It also would have addressed issues such as border security and work site enforcement, and created a new guest worker program.

Activists on both sides of the issue now predict that frustration over Congress’ apparent failure for the second year in a row to reach an accord on immigration could translate to action that state lawmakers have been reluctant to take in the past.

The Education Interim Committee voted to seek federal reimbursement for the costs related to federal “failed immigration policy” that leaves states to shoulder the burden of educating children of undocumented residents.

The committee voted to send a letter, with a copy of the state’s audit, to the U.S. Department of Education, immigration officials and Utah’s congressional delegation, seeking the reimbursement.

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