Archive for December 2007

A group of six men and one woman—some in camouflage ponchos— gathered Thursday night outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center on Varick Street. Despite the freezing rain, they smiled as they carried several American flags and got their whistles ready for action. They are among the city’s few but vocal anti-immigration activists, and they were giddy at the opportunity to disrupt a pro-immigrant candlelight vigil that was about to begin.
Just a few feet down the sidewalk, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs passed out candles to their flock of about 50 immigrants, advocates, and faithful. Then, when all the candles were lit, the show began.

“This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine,” the crowd of about 50 candle-holders sang.

“Illegals go home! Get the fuck out of my country!” the camo-wearers responded. “They should take their light back to their home countries,” quipped Joanna Marzullo, the president and founder of New Yorkers for Immigration Control Enforcement (NY ICE). She says there are 200 New York City residents in her group, which is “against illegal aliens, not legal immigrants.”

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Parents in California have started reacting to the state’s newly mandated homosexual indoctrination program by pulling their children out of classes, and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell is warning districts they’ll lose money if that happens.

A spokeswoman for a ministry called Considering Homeschooling said she already has seen an overwhelming increase in requests for information about homeschooling.

As a result, spokeswoman Denise Kanter told WND that her group is sending out 5,000 DVD packages to churches around the state that include basic “how-to” information to provide parents a direction to turn when they choose to protect their children from the new school agenda.

The new law demands, “No teacher shall give instruction nor shall any school district sponsor any activity that promotes a discriminatory bias because of a characteristic [including perceived gender.]”

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Seven grass-roots organizations across Virginia have joined together to form a statewide coalition to lobby state officials for tougher enforcement of immigration laws.

The umbrella group, called Save the Old Dominion, was started Dec. 13. A mission statement on the group’s Web site, at www.savetheolddominion.org, says its members are dedicated to “preserving the commonwealth for future generations” and “pursuing legislative action in Virginia to reduce the number of illegal aliens unlawfully present in the commonwealth.”

Greg Letiecq, president of the group Help Save Manassas and a co-founder of Save the Old Dominion, said yesterday that the group plans to form a political action committee. He said organizers likely will file for tax-exempt 501(c)4 status that will allow the group to accept donations, which organizers plan to use to support their lobbying efforts.

“What is missing is the engagement of regular citizens in legislative process,” Mr. Letiecq said. “The only people who showed up last year [to [JUMP]lobby the General Assembly] was the illegal alien lobby.”

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After Mass at St. Mary’s, a retired FBI agent who had worked as a boy in the great steel plant in Weirton, W.Va., whose father had died in an accident at the mill, handed me the Weirton Daily Times. “Where Do We Go From Here?” read the May 20 banner. The front page was devoted to the bankruptcy filing of Weirton Steel, which had once employed 14,000 workers in a town of 23,000. Mark Glyptis, president of the Independent Steelworkers Union, said it didn’t have to happen. It was a poignant story. When I began my campaign of 2000 at the Weirton mill, Mark and his ISU endorsed me.

That same week, a friend e-mailed me. Timco, a lumber mill where we spent the last day of the New Hampshire campaign of 1996, had shut down. As Weirton Steel had been hammered by subsidized steel dumped in the U.S. market, Timco had to compete with subsidized lumber from Canada.

Across America the story is the same: steel and lumber mills going into bankruptcy; textile plants moving to the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and the Far East; auto plants closing and opening overseas; American mines being sealed and farms vanishing. Seven hundred thousand textile workers—many of them minorities and single women—have lost their jobs since NAFTA passed in 1993.

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The long list of opponents to the cross-border trucking program isn’t exclusively made up of groups and truckers in the United States. Motor carriers in Mexico are waging their own fight to shut down the program.

In fact, the Mexican National Truck Drivers Federation is planning to block the border between Mexico and the United States in January 2008 if the program doesn’t come to an end. The threat to block the border was reported in the Mexican newspaper El Financiero.

The union of truckers is upset with the Mexican government for allowing U.S. trucks and truckers into their country.

“It is irresponsible of the Mexican Government, of Felipe Calderon, to allow the interests of a powerful 2 percent of people in the Mexican economy to hand Mexican trucking over to the Americans,” Elias Dip Rame, president of the Mexican National Truck Drivers Federation, told El Financiero.

According to the translated article, the federation has approximately 200,000 members who Dip Rame says will clog the border, effectively shutting down all cross-border traffic. The leader of the Federation cautioned authorities in Mexico to remember the strength of his organization.

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PHOENIX — Neighbors in a Litchfield park community say they didn’t know the idenitites of the couple that lived in one home.

“They hardly came out during the day. Mostly at night.”

But tonight neighbors do know them - and so do Phoenix police - because according to detectives residents Lorretta Christie and Gonzalo Olmeda are very experienced identity thieves.

Phoenix Police and the U.S. Postal Service were tipped off about the operation in Novemeber.

Just last week police searched the home and found an obscene amount of stolen mail and the personal information for thousands of people. Most of it stored in a 3 X 2-foot tub.

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WASHINGTON – African Americans are statistically likely to be religious, but their worldview is shaped by their race more than their faith, contends a born-again black author in her new book.

Long-standing social and political patterns in the African American community have molded black Christians to behave like secular black society, said former journalist Pamela G. Wilson in her book entitled, Finding Soul Brothers: Dismantling Black Christian Racialism.

Wilson defines the race-focused mindset, which is now expressed through political and social loyalties, as “racialism.”

On issues such as abortion and homosexuality, biblical principles are often sacrificed to support race agendas like social equality and economic justice, she contends.

“Most of the time, people (black Christians) are supporting a candidate for the sake of how they feel they will advance the race,” Wilson told The Christian Post.

“They want to put their support behind the candidates that will help the causes they’ve been fighting for over these last few decades – which there is nothing wrong with – but there is also a Christian standard and I don’t think you should support anything that makes you turn away from the Bible if you truly believe what the Bible says.”

Black Christians tend to be “stuck” in the civil rights mindset and not look beyond those issues even if they say they are a believer.

“People just jump on the black bandwagon at the expense of their faith,” Wilson said.

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Paula Higson, director of managed migration at the Home Office, told Personnel Today that firms will be stripped of their migrant workers if they fail to follow strict rules being brought in next year.

As she spoke at the Home Office’s Marsham Street headquarters, home secretary Jacqui Smith was admitting that a Nigerian man who has guarded the door to that building for 19 months had no right to work in the UK.

He was one of 11,000 suspected illegal migrants cleared to work by the Home Office agency the Security Industry Authority (SIA) before July this year.

Under the points-based system being phased in from early 2008, employers have to register as sponsors if they want to bring in foreign workers.

Sponsors will be subjected to inspections to make sure they are complying with guidelines such as maintaining contact details and reporting prolonged absences.

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More than 100,000 young Britons may have been pushed into unemployment by the new wave of Eastern European immigrants, an economic analysis on the impact of migration has revealed.

The study, by the influential Ernst & Young ITEM Club, found that although the recent influx has boosted Britain’s economy and kept inflation low, it may have increased unemployment for younger Britons and reduced pay increases for all.

Since 1997, 1.5 million foreign workers have entered the British workplace, with many of these arriving from Eastern Europe in the past three years since the European Union expansion. This new group typically earns 40 per cent less than British workers.

Since 2004, the number of unemployed British 18 to 24 year olds has increased by 100,000, according to the study. “There is some evidence that the growth of immigrant employment seen in the last few years may have come at the expense of the domestic workforce,” the report concludes.

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A few thoughts about illegal immigration — some original, some not.

First, the debate is not about immigrants or immigration. It is about illegal immigrants and illegal immigration. The distinction is important.

It is the policy of The Courier News to use the term “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant.” News outlets are under extreme pressure from activist groups to use terms such as “undocumented worker.” That would be like calling a drug dealer an “unlicensed pharmacist.” It is intentionally misleading. So is calling everyone — legal or illegal — an “immigrant.”

Almost everyone in America today is descended from immigrants. Legal immigrants followed procedures, filed the proper paperwork and adhered to the laws in order to arrive in this country. Illegal immigrants did not. Calling everyone an “immigrant” diminishes the debate to xenophobia. Manipulation of language to change the perception is crucial in diminishing the issue to one of inconsequential differences or elevating it to racism, depending on the tactic.

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