Republican politicians like Marco Rubio and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen are springing into action to keep illegal immigrants in the US of A! These illegals who are here to leech off our system include a local Florida high school valedictorian with a 6.7 GPA (!??) and her brother, who just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. When will these foreigners stop sneaking into our country and taking our jobs (as valedictorians and as soldiers in unpopular wars)?
"The number of children between the ages of 5 and 9 in the county decreased by 21% from 2000 to 2010"—and demographers are panicking about how that's going to impact the local workforce in the future. But that seems a remarkably old-world way to think about population trends. This isn't Ames, Iowa, with a brain drain and nobody about to take care of aging parents! With 15 million people in the metro area, around a city where 40% of the population is foreign-born, it's not the children who are going to be doing the future working. It's a city of transience and immigration, and Los Angeles has become [...]
1. "A slow-rolling, slow-motion terrorist attack on the United States."
2. "Every time we give amnesty for an illegal alien, we deport a liberal."
3. "As a result of this perverse incentive, an entire ‘anchor baby’ industry has developed which exploits a legal loophole caused by a misinterpretation of the Constitution."
Let's say you're a climate-change denialist who believes that the worst threat to this country comes from darker-skinned people, particularly those who speak Spanish and head here from points south. Congratulations, you represent the current mainstream of Republican party thinking! But also, how would you wrap your head around something like this?
I have a friend I'll call Patrick who lives in Tucson, the small southern Arizona town where I spent 14 years of my childhood. A six-four wall of a man, softened in parts by pints and whiskey, Patrick and I have been close since high school, when his family–a big, pasty, Irish affair–moved to town from Phoenix. Once, on a trip to a low-budget Mexican beach community named Rocky Point, Patrick and I conspired to eat our vegan friend's entire supply of peanut butter and jelly while he was in the shower, leaving only his toothbrush in an empty jar of Skippy. While he screamed, "Do you know how hard [...]
"The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), the Arizona-based anti-illegal-immigration group whose members keep watch on the border, is disbanding as a national organization, after its leader asked for volunteers to come 'locked, loaded, and ready,' then got more than she bargained for." LOL… eh. The group had trouble fundraising recently, mostly, it seems, because vigilante citizens were required to report suspected illegal immigrants to the authorities instead of hunting them down like this was Liberty City. Just wait. There's a lot of hungry reality TV producers out there…
[The curtain opens on a tiny village in the south of Mexico. JUAN sits atop a donkey, as MAMA cries and implores him not to immigrate to America.]
MAMA: But Juan, why now? Why must you leave at this moment?
JUAN: Don't you understand, woman? President Obama is sending signals that if I cross the border illegally today, I might be eligible for an amnesty so I can stay in America later!
Leroy Smith challenged [Republican state Sen. Scott Beason] to pick a bucket full of tomatoes and experience the labor-intensive work.
Beason declined but promised to see what could be done to help farmers while still trying to keep illegal immigrants out of Alabama.
Smith threw down the bucket he offered Beason and said, "There, I figured it would be like that."
OH, SNAP. RUN AND TELL YOUR ADORABLE LITTLE WHITE BABY, SCOTT BEASON, YOU GOT BURNED. In other news about Alabama's new (and thoroughly illegal) immigration laws, the first immigrant sent off for "indefinite detainment"… actually had legal U.S. status. Oopsies! Also here are the [...]
Nebraska is starting to look a lot like Arizona—legally, at least. Over the past few years, the state has enacted a spate of anti-immigration laws; and whether it's State Senator Charlie Janssen's unconstitutional witch hunt against all brown people, an ordinance in Fremont that bars employers from hiring illegal immigrants and landlords from renting to them, or, the latest assault, a law that denies public assistance to legal immigrants who have lived in the country less than five years, it seems the legislature and governor have one thing on their minds: making Nebraska a less friendly, less tolerant state. In February, Governor Dave Heineman ordered the [...]
"According to Corrections Corporation of America reports reviewed by NPR, executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market. Last year, they wrote that they expect to bring in 'a significant portion of our revenues' from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that detains illegal immigrants." —The sheer nakedness of how corporations helped to create laws like Arizona's anti-immigration scheme is amazing.
The proud non-immigrant organization Concerned Citizens of the United States has been sending their list of suspected "illegal immigrants" in Utah-there are 1300 whole names on it!-to anyone who'll listen. The feds wouldn't, so then the "Citizens" distributed this menu of Mexican and Central American people to the cops and the newspapers… who are now expending their energy trying to find out who made the list. (What? While these immigrants, some of whom have green cards and U.S. citizen children, are taking our jobs?) Yes, unfortunately for the people of Concerned Citizens (by which I mean, the one person who did this), "they" are going to eventually go to [...]
"An employer shall not intentionally employ an unauthorized alien," nor shall anyone ever let one in his car, or it's curtains for you in the great state of Arizona. This is GREAT NEWS for job creation, as the hundreds of thousands of jobs performed by "aliens" shall now be performed by AMERICAN CITIZENS. Hooray! This will happen because the non-citizens can't go anywhere now: it's trespassing for a non-citizen to be on any "public or private" lands. (Trespassing to paint REFRIED BEAN SWASTIKAS on government offices!) This really puts a lot of fine Fox News-watching people in a tricky place when [...]
There is good news on the employment front, even though 30 million Americans are out of work. (Yes. That is the real number, including people who have given up looking for work, or people who are making ends meet with part-time or off-the-books labor.) They are still firing all the Mexican janitors so we can do their jobs! For instance, ABM Industries, which is an immense corporation that had annual revenue of $3.6 billion in 2008. How do they do it? The easy way-they employ undocumented labor which they then fire when the feds come around. So now they have disposed of 1200 janitors in Minneapolis. (That company's total [...]
There's one thing everyone can agree on: the current administration holds the post-Eisenhower record for immigrant deportations. (USA! US…A?) But here's two views on the practice of "illegal reentry": it is either harder than ever, or more popular than ever. But—FUN FACT!—it is, according to the Times, for the Feds the most-prosecuted felony of our day!
Our hometown hiphop heroes Das Racist have been denied entry to the U.K. and deported back to Switzerland. They apologize to Londoners: "Sorry to everybody who was planning on coming to Cargo last night, it was a show and city we were all incredibly excited for and it was a shame yr govvy doesn’t like us! Because of our POLITICAL VIEWS! We’ll be back soon, maybe we’ll leave the airport next time."
Yes, indeed, that was a truly bizarre episode of Stephen Colbert, Congressional immigration expert.
It's pretty amazing that no matter how many times people point this out, no matter how many times local police say that Arizona's new immigration law is bad for them, apparently no one can hear it. The murder rate in a number of border towns-including San Diego, El Paso and Tuscon (which is not really a border town in the same way El Paso is)-actually dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009. In fact, El Paso and San Diego both made the most-recent top five list of large American cities with low violent crime rates. If you really crunch some numbers, you find that the states with the [...]
Here in the great old USA, we have porous land borders, over which Americans slip under cover of night into the welcoming arms of Mexico and Canada. But what about England? It's an island, basically, I think! (Or is that Iceland?) So when you're brassic and Lee Marvin and you want to become both 1. illegal and 2. immigrant-well, folks used to have to get a boat to leave the horrid land of France? But now they can take advantage of The Chunnel! So what they do is they hop onto a "coach" (much like "jitney," that's English for "bus") and try to hide in the luggage, in hopes to [...]
Our economy is so bad… HOW BAD IS IT? It is SO BAD that Mexicans won't even immigrate any more. We will remember this era with horror as The Great Siesta.
