Tag: Immigration

Pahrump, Nev.: El Lugar Bueno ser Detenido

Trish

The town of Pahrump, Nev. is bracing for a crime wave after passing ordinances meant to show foreigners who’s boss.

Although Pahrump experienced a 32 percent drop in criminal activity in recent years (more about this in a minute), that was before so much stuff became illegal.

The ACLU will probably take legal action against the town. “People are nuts out there, totally nuts.”

First, there’s flying flags. Anyone who flies another country’s flag — say, just as a random example, Mexico’s — above an American flag, or worse yet, all by itself without an American flag, will get a $50 fine and 30 hours of community service.

Then there’s English. It’s now the official language of Pahrump, so don’t even think about speaking something else like — oh, off the top of my head — Spanish.

Finally, illegal immigrants will henceforth be denied benefits from the town. Which is kind of a hypothetical denial anyway.

“We don’t have any” benefits, town manager David Richards says. “If we ever have any, they’ll be denied to illegal immigrants.”

Pahrump is having a kind of time-delayed reaction to those uppity immigrants who made their presence known last spring.

The ordinance’s sponsor, Michael Miraglia, a retired Illinois state worker, said the flag restriction was a reaction to nationwide demonstrations in May against a crackdown on illegal immigration. He said he didn’t like seeing protesters waving Mexican flags and demanding immigrants not go to work that day.

“In Pahrump, we had Mexican restaurants closed that day,” he complained. “Only one restaurant stayed open.”

Well then, you can understand the outrage. It was probably a chain restaurant like Chili’s or Taco Bell. I’d pass a law too, I guess, but the American Civil Liberties Union is being a party pooper.

[Nevada board member Lisa] Rasmussen said the ACLU would probably take legal action against the town.

“People are nuts out there,” she says. “Totally nuts.”

Maybe so, but we at Pensito Review have a soft spot in our hearts for Pahrump. The town, about 60 miles closer to L.A. than Las Vegas is, arrested one Jon Ponder last year for robbing the Bank of America. Don’t worry, Buck and I made sure our Jon Ponder had an airtight alibi. Still, we’re keeping an eye on the town, just in case.

U.S. Border Patrol: A Longer Fence Will Just Increase Corruption In the Ranks

Buck Banks

Do the math: Southern California has a 200-mile-long fence along its border with Mexico. Of the 172 current corruption cases involving U.S. Border Patrol guards, 72 – 40 percent – involve guards from Southern California. Now, if the U.S. government extends the wall another 700 miles, increasing its length by a factor of 3.5, then we could realistically expect the percentage of corruption cases centered on the U.S.-Mexico border to approach 90 percent or more.

Why? Because when they make it more difficult to cross the border, it causes an escalation in tactics by criminals. The bribe money goes up, the women they use to entice agents get more irresistible and the potential payoffs increase geometrically, not arithematically. And then there are the illegal aliens working for the Border Patrol, helping friends, relatives and countrymen to come to this great country where you can lie about your citizenship on a job application, pass a nonexistent background check, get a cool badge and be given the keys to the henhouse.

Of course, with the Border Patrol among the lowest-paid federal agencies, with morale in the toilet and the fact that the BP has started scraping the barrel bottom for new recruits, it’s no wonder picking up a few grand of easy money for letting a couple of cars pass through unsearched is difficult to resist.

Sorry Mr. Frost, good fences don’t make better neighbors, they just make worse border guards. For more details, go here.

Buck, Look Out for the Caribbean Crazy Ants!

Trish

I think these are the ones I noticed on the floor of the bathroom this week.

Caribbean Crazy Ants are now welcome in Trish’s bathroom. But no reggae after midnight.

As the saying goes, almost no one living in Florida is from Florida…

The Caribbean Crazy Ant has made its way to Florida.

“There are ants that were imported into Florida through cargo ships and freighters,” said [Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens Senior Veterinarian Nick] Kapustin.

Jacksonville’s thought to be its second stop in this country, making its first appearance in West Palm Beach.

Hear that Buck? West Palm Beach! Just up the turnpike from you!

But actually, they don’t sound so bad.

“They’re not harmful to the animals, they’re not a problem for our guests, they’re just literally, a nuisance,” said Kapustin.

The Caribbean Crazy Ant, called that because they don’t move in any real direction, isn’t just new to this country. It’s new to the world.

And unlike many other species, these ants don’t usually eat food we leave behind…

“They eat other insects. They’ve been known to eat fire ants,” said Kapustin.

Well, O.K. then. Plus, I like the name. The ones in the bathroom were milling around so randomly that I felt kind of bad stepping on them. Next time, maybe I’ll let them live. I think it’s what Bob Marley would do.

As Midterms Near, GOP Chooses Fences Over Real Immigration Reform

Buck Banks

Fence me in: As Congress struggles mightily to appear to be doing the important work of legislating in the remaining weeks before the November midterm elections, the Republican Party has decided to concentrate on something easy — building a 700-mile-long fence — rather than address the challenge of comprehensive immigration reform. The message is simple: Let’s close off our borders first, then deal with the illegals who then would be trapped inside America. Yep, that message will sell very easily to the same people who still think Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.

From the Washington Times:

“It’s time to secure the border with Mexico,” Majority Leader Bill Frist said [Monday] night before filing the parliamentary motions to force the House-passed bill onto the Senate floor in a final effort to get a major immigration bill on the president’s desk before the elections.

‘Mr. Frist was for comprehensive reform before he was against it’
— Jim Manley

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Minority Leader Harry Reid, said the move “smacks of desperation” and was a “clear repudiation of President Bush’s call for comprehensive legislation.”
The Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was easily approved by the House last week, contains none of the “comprehensive” measures that President Bush, Democrats and some Senate Republicans have demanded. Those include provisions to grant citizenship rights to about 10 million illegal aliens living in the country and a guest-worker program that would usher hundreds of thousands more foreign laborers into the U.S.
“Mr. Frist was for comprehensive reform before he was against it,” Mr. Manley said.
On the Senate floor [Monday] night, Mr. Frist said he still supports comprehensive immigration reform legislation. But, he said, because no consensus can now be reached on other issues, Congress should move ahead with border security. It’s not “enforcement only,” he said, but “enforcement first.”

This will be the second time the Senate has debated an enforcement bill. The first died a stalemately death when all but two Democrats and 20 Republicans refused to even debate it. Now, there’s a triumverate of senior GOP senators that looks good for derailing the current effort to swap out a fence for comprehensive reform: John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John W. Warner of Virginia.

Those three senators also are bucking the GOP party line on the president’s call for expanded illegal detention and interrogation without representation for the Guantanamo detainees. Frist’s move to file a cloture motion Monday night to limit debate and prohibit amendments to the bill means the three Repug renegades may have to fight a two-front battle in the Senate this week, as Frist is aiming to get the immigration — excuse me, fence-building permit — passed on the Senate floor by week’s end and then sent on to the guy who likes to build fences, not mend them, to sign before the midterms.

When the House last year approved its border-security legislation, it included almost exactly the same fencing provisions. The fence came to symbolize what many Democrats said was an unforgiving bill. They said the fence proved that Republicans harbored a hostility toward immigrants.
But last week, the stand-alone fence bill was approved 283-138, with support from more than 20 Democrats and a handful of Republicans who dropped opposition to the earlier fence proposal.
Still, most Democrats are adamantly opposed to the fence bill, calling it a new “Berlin Wall” and an election-year “gimmick” intended to portray them as weak on security measures. In addition, internal Republican polling has found that immigration is as powerful a motivator for voters as any issue with which Congress is grappling.
“They’re obviously done with legislating for the year,” Mr. Manley said. “Now, they’re just playing to their base.”

Indeed. The question is, how will the Democratic base respond to watching Dem leaders doing their typical hand-wringing and crying foul over such an obvious late-season political ploy.

Whose Anniversary?

Trish

Ever since Jamestown, Virginia announced its intention to celebrate its quadricentennial next year as “America’s 400th Anniversary,” residents of my own St. Augustine, Florida have been in a snit. It’s not just the fact that St. Augustine celebrated its 400th anniversary back in 1965, or that the city was the thriving capital of the Spanish colony before Jamestown had a name.

American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling in Jamestown, Va., in 1607…The lessons have left out a lot.

We sniff the barest hint of (dare I say it) racism in Jamestown’s pronouncement. The Spanish, after all, were part Moorish by the time they came ashore in Florida, in stark contrast to the lily white English. They were also Catholic, which was just slightly more exotic than what the Pilgrims had in mind.

Juan Ponce de Leon declared Florida to be Florida in 1513. Its mission system had been in place nearly 200 years before the first mission in upper California was built. Florida had flown three flags (Spanish, French, British — and Spanish again) by the time it joined the Union 15 years before the Civil War, and had ended the Third Seminole War just two years earlier, in 1858.

The Spaniards had very different relations than the English did with the people who were already here — and the runaway slaves who had escaped to Florida from the United States to live among the Creek and Miccosukee. It might be a little rosy to say we all lived together in peace and harmony, but it was better than after Spain lost us to the British or when Andrew Jackson launched the first War of Indian Removal, aka the First Seminole War, in 1817 — in which he banned “Negroes” from Pensacola to the Suwannee River.

Now others are starting to notice the same thing St. Augustinians did in Jamestown’s slogan: the implication that British settlement in this country is somehow more noteworthy than any other. The Boston Globe:

American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling in Jamestown, Va., in 1607. They hear about how white Northerners freed the black slaves, how Asians came in the mid-1800s to build Western railroads. The lessons have left out a lot.

Forty-two years before Jamestown, Spaniards and American Indians lived in St. Augustine, Fla. At least several thousand Latinos and nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought in the Civil War. And Asian-Americans had been living in California and Louisiana since the 1700s.

Now, more of these and other lesser-known facts about American minorities are getting more attention. The main reason is the nation’s growing diversity.

The Globe story goes on to note there are “hundreds of efforts underway to tell the untold stories” of America’s history. Jamestown telling the truth — and changing its slogan — would be a good start.

Fruit Rotting in Florida Thanks to Immigration Threats

Trish

Tough talk about immigration reform is hurting the Florida citrus industry. Fruit is going left unpicked, thanks to rumors about INS crack-downs.

Word had spread through the Hispanic community to return home if they want U.S. jobs in the future

As many as 6-million boxes of oranges may go unharvested in Florida this year because of a shortage of fruit pickers made worse by fears about what changes may come in immigration law.

The citrus season usually ends in late June, but will extend to at least late July this year with juice processors hoping to get as many oranges as possible off trees…

Orange production in the state could become the lowest since 1992…

Growers have reported difficulty finding enough workers. Industry officials say labor supply was tight from the beginning of the season in October, but grew worse by the middle of May when a large segment of the Hispanic labor force seemed to leave the state…

Lake Wales citrus grower Marty McKenna said word had spread through the Hispanic community to return home if they wanted U.S. jobs in the future.

But inflaming us-against-them emotions seemed like such a good idea at the time. Bush’s polls were down and gay marriage was starting to wane as a sure-fire firing-up mechanism. Who would have thought Big Agriculture would suffer in the end? We’ll just add a failed Florida citrus season to the list of unintended consequences the Bush administration couldn’t possibly see coming.

DHS Under Scrutiny for Proposal to House Illegal Immigrants on Cruise Ships

Buck Banks

Floating the floating prison idea: We reported on this lame-brained idea when it was first mentioned in June. The suggestion to house detainees on cruise ships came in response to Customs and Border Patrol managers asking their departments for suggestions on how to handle the predictable surge in detainees once illegal immigration is deemed, well, really double-illegal.

Now, what was only a brainstorming idea last month has come back to haunt Michael Chertoff — and no doubt make him wish for a hurricane just to deflect attention — in the form of a letter from two high-ranking House Democrats asking him to, in effect, explain the half-baked notion.

Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., are requesting, in addition to an explanation of why the idea of using cruise ships is even being countenanced as well as why a questionable contract was awarded to a Halliburton subsidiary to build border detention facilities. Here are some excerpts from the letter:

According to a recent account on GovExec.com, Customs and Border Protection “is considering a variety of methods to accommodate what is expected to be a surge in illegal immigrants detained, including holding those arrested on ships to await trial.” One option under active consideration, according to this account, is “buying out-of-service cruise ships or leasing them to create ‘detention barges’ at sea.” These ships “would act as jails, housing alleged violators of U.S. immigration law.”

If accurate, this report raises several red flags.

Recent experience shows that using cruise ships for temporary housing is enormously expensive. In September 2005, the Military Sealift Command, acting on behalf of FEMA, awarded Carnival Cruise Lines three contracts worth a combined $236 million to provide temporary housing to Hurricane Katrina evacuees and emergency personnel. Under these contracts, the federal government paid more than $50,000 to house a single person for six months, almost $300 per person for each night’s lodging (nearly $600 per night double occupancy). As Congressman Lynch pointed out at a recent Committee hearing, it would have been cheaper to rent a suite at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, a two-bedroom apartment at Trump World Tower in New York City, or Fanningstown Castle in Ireland than to house evacuees on cruise ships under the contract with Carnival.

Waxman and Lynch ignore the fact that the Carnival ships were used for housing first responders in New Orleans — on-site where they were needed — not in Las Vegas. But why confuse them with the facts when they are having so much fun picking on Chertoff.

To assist Congress in its oversight of federal spending, we request that you confirm whether the Department is again considering the use of cruise ships to provide temporary housing. If the report is accurate, we further request that you explain what lessons the Department has learned from the experience after Hurricane Katrina and what steps the Department will take to prevent a repeat of the wasteful spending on cruise ships that occurred then. We also request copies of any documents relating to the possible use of cruise ships to house illegal immigrants.

Ouch! We know what documents can do to one’s credibility, eh, Brownie? But wait, there’s more:

In January, the Army Corps of Engineers, on behalf of the Department, awarded Halliburton subsidiary KBR a $385 million contract for “establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing … facilities” and to “provide migrant detention support.” This contract “provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities.”

As the recent report Dollars, Not Sense: Government Contracting Under the Bush Administration released by Congressman Waxman documents, Halliburton’s recent track record as a government contractor in Iraq has been marred by “egregious overcharges” and questioned and unsupported costs in excess of $1 billion. It is unclear how this performance record was taken into consideration in the award of the January contract for detention facilities and what steps the Department and the Corps of Engineers plan to take prevent a recurrence of the waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement that have characterized the Halliburton contracts in Iraq.

For these reasons, we also request (1) the documents relating to Halliburton’s bid and selection for the detention center contract and (2) an explanation of what audit and other oversight mechanisms will be applied to the Halliburton contract to protect taxpayer interests.

Dang, that almost makes us feel sympathy for Chertoff — not! This is clearly just another instance of more cronyism, waste and incompetence inside one of the biggest departments in the gubmint.

Stay tuned for Chertoff’s response, which he’s supposed to supply by July 19.

Katherine Harris Aims for Democrat Nelson, Hits Republican Martinez

Trish

The best campaign strategy for Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson to use against Katherine Harris might be to just give her the floor. She makes an effective case all by herself that she’s too mentally impaired to hold office. Her hometown paper, the Lakeland Ledger:

“She’s trashing the senator of her own party,” Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin told The Tampa Tribune.

It turns out that when it comes to political potshots, Harris is no more cautious than Dick Cheney on a hunting trip…

Nelson, said Harris, is “weak on immigration” because he favors a bill that would provide “amnesty to illegal immigrants.”

That’s because Nelson supports a bill drafted and sponsored by — oops — his Republican counterpart from Florida, U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez.

“She’s trashing the senator of her own party,” Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin told The Tampa Tribune.

Hello? Katherine? Katherine’s handlers? Anybody? Somebody get research on the phone!

Nelson said last month that he favors [the Martinez] approach, “To get these people out of the shadows, working and paying taxes — which they are not — is what we need to do.”

Nelson has also proposed two amendments to the bill. One would add more beds in detention centers for illegal immigrants who will be deported. Another would increase the use of technology along the border for better patrolling.

Martinez told the Tribune that he thought the bill was “tough enough” before Nelson’s amendments, and that Nelson’s position on immigration may be tougher than his…

Harris has made it clear that Nelson is her main target. But with him standing so close to Martinez — one of the few Republicans who haven’t openly questioned her ability to win the election — Harris might want to use something other than a shotgun on the next attempt.

Become a Minuteman Without Leaving Home

Trish

Rick Perry’s next job will likely be head of mall security.

The Republican Texas governor has announced a plan that will solve the problem of illegal immigration: install web cameras at the border.

The live video would be made available to anyone with an Internet connection.

Under the plan, announced on the eve of the state GOP convention, cameras and other equipment would be supplied to willing landowners and placed along some of the most remote reaches of the border. The live video would be made available to law enforcement and anyone else with an Internet connection.

Viewers would be able to call day or night to report anything that looks like trespassing, drug smuggling or something else suspicious.

Plus, it will only cost $5 million.

The Border Patrol already has lots of its own surveillance cameras along the border, but the images are not made available to the public.

For good reason, many say.

”This leaves the door open to anyone who has a vindictive state of mind or a racial motive,” [Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund attorney Luis] Figueroa said. ”Anyone down there could easily be mistaken and falsely accused of something they didn’t do.”

Other possible glitches include people figuring out where the cameras are and adjusting travel accordingly, law enforcement agencies being overwhelmed with bogus information, and the possible illegality of inviting the public to view searches of innocent-until-proven-guilty people.

But Perry’s not concerned with such details.

”This isn’t our first rodeo,” he said.