I don't pretend for one minute to expect the LA times, to let me comment?
I do know California is suffering from a 14.0 billion dollar budget meltdown. Anybody who has a brain in their head, knows this is caused by the Golden state becoming a Cash-cow for the occupational forces of illegal immigrants. It is all very well offering sob stories about lawbreakers, who have stolen across our poorly guarded border. This means any illegal entrant; not just cheap labor from Mexico, but from other Latin American countries. From Ireland, Italy, Russia, China and the Pacific Rim nations. The limited resources of states has forced a growing trend towards limited immigration laws, to stop the hiring of foreign labor. Arizona has enacted strict employer sanction laws, to stop the badly hemorrhaging social services. That low income illegal immigrants know how to tap into health-care, education and much more.

The immigration stories this week only remind
U.S. citizens that Mexico continues to Illegally
Colonize the USA. Over 20 million are illegally
in the USA and the U.S. Government has lost control
of the situation. The Agenda to create a Mexican Nation
in the USA has been publicly stated by the last
three Mexican Presidents!

Some States make it easier to kill a baby, then to deport an illegal alien. I'm sick of listening to their whining, through an interpreter.

Who says we can't send 12 million people across the border....Mexico did.

WE SIMPLY CANNOT TAKE ANY MORE ILLEGAL PEOPLE INTO THIS COUNTRY. OUR PRISONS, HOSPITALS, SCHOOLS, LAW ENFORCMENT, AND MANY OTHER INSTITUTIONS ARE SUFFERING AND MAY BE ON THE EDGE OF COLLAPSE DUE TO THE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE COMING INTO OUR COUNTRY ILLEGALLY.
WE TAKE IN A MILLION LEGAL IMMIGRANTS EVERY SINGLE YEAR.
THE SHIP IS SINKING FOLKS!
LET'S DO SOMETHING BEFORE WE DROWN IN OUR
OWN POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.

KATHRYN KOBOR
PHX AZ.

the usual psycho comments. What would a story on the subject be without them,

Dean Smith wrote:
"I'm sick of listening to their whining, through an interpreter."

And I'm sick of sociopaths. You're far worse.

Well, last one got eaten or blocked so let's try again.

Every anecdote here could be balanced by a Bob Clark, Adrienne Shelley, or school kids in Minnesota (three instances of illegal immigrants killing Americans -- one murder, two driving incidents). And its really difficult to blame tight immigration policy for immigrant on immigrant violence. But lets get to the money

Businessweek just reported on H1-Bs. Turns out the lion's share go to Indian run businesses (Infosys for example gets 4 times as many as Microsoft. Its main officers are all Indian). Strange that its not Mohandas Pai testifying before congress on the great need for H1-Bs, as HR guy for Infosys, he's the one mainlining them. It seems this is more about helping the ethnic/national group than meeting any critical need in the US economy -- it's hardly a random occurance that 4 of the top 5 H1-B users are Indian dominated corporations. India and Indians show strong ethnic loyalties, so this doesn't come as a shock.

All this would be so gauling if India itself didn' t practice an ethnically exclusive immigration policy -- one whereby American-born Swati Pandey (I'm assuming) can basically relocate to India no questions asked, while American-born Mitchell Young (or even Amina Khan) could not.

Great post. In fact, any post that provokes angry responses from people who actually believe paranoid conspiracy theories to justify opposition to immigration, including legal immigration, is immensely helpful.

If we can just get this little clot of fired-up anti-immigration activists out of the way, then our country could return to having a rational immigration policy, with visas, rights, responsibilities, and rules everyone can follow. But the worked-up, Lou Dobbs for President, Tancredo for God 10% have been wagging the dog of our immigration policies and dominating the debate. The rest of us are getting sick and tired of them standing in the way of solutions.

Hi Mitchell ---
Your comment is well taken --- India does have some economic isolationist policies, still, though they've been steadily easing such restrictions since the early 1990s. And yes, their immigration policy does encourage Indians to come over, or to invest; see it as ethnic solidarity, or see it as a country wanting to take advantage of a fairly well-off and successful diaspora, or both. I believe if you have an Indian-born grandparent, you can easily immigrate, or apply for citizenship. I do have one, though I can't comment on Amina!
Of course, you and I disagree on what motivates the push for H1-B visas --- not sure how Bill Gates' testimony, or even the head of Infosys', would indicate ethnic/national solidarity with Indians any more than just needing qualified employees to fill jobs. I haven't read the Business Week report, thanks for alerting me to it. Don't want to say too much on that subject other than this isn't a zero-sum game, again, as Gates' testimony indicates.
Sorry if your previous comment got eaten; blocking probably isn't the issue unless there was some profanity, or a threat of violence, etc.
Thanks for reading and commenting.

visas, rights, responsibilities, and rules everyone can follow

Actually Andi, we have that now, its just that 12-20 million have chosen not to bother.

Oh, and that should be 'would not be so galling' a couple of posts up.

14 Billion shortfall. 14 Million Illegal Aliens. Do the math, then get on the phone to your Congressperson to ask they sign the Discharge Petition (remember movie Legally Blonde 2 ?) to get HR 4088 out of Pelosi's claws and out into the open for a vote on the House floor. Do this NOW.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Person of Indian Origin visas. I mentioned Amina Khan as a way of illustrating that India specifically excludes (at least the way I read it) people whose ancestors were from what is now Pakistan (and Bangladesh). Ms. Khan has blogged much about Pakistan, so again I am assuming her ancestors hail from there, but you know what they say about assuming. As the PIO extends back to great-grandparents (i.e. to British India days) if my reading is correct, that eliminates a bunch of people who would have been eligible.

To India's credit, I have read of European and Australian (anglo-celtic) backpackers getting work in call centers there, but I doubt there is any sort of 'path to citizenship' -- seemed like a strictly temporary thing.

I think the blocking was because I put a bunch of links in my first attempted post.

None of the cases described in the post would have happened if the Times and the rest of the MSM supported our laws and held politicians accountable for their failures to enforce our laws. The Times' solution is "reform", but that would make the situation even worse.

"Reform" would give even more power to those forces that currently oppose our laws (racial power groups, the MexicanGovernment, the far-left, etc.) and it would send a very loud message that anyone who manages to make it across the border will eventually get amnesty. And, the Times isn't going to do a 180, swtiching from not supporting our laws now to supporting our laws after "reform". They'll just keep doing the same thing after "reform": trying to use anecdotes to emotionalize the issue in order to encourage yet another case of "reform".

So, the Times' solution is no solution at all, and would lead to even more cases such as those described in the post.

Our country would be better off if we would just enforce our present policies

Who is the idiot that lumped the Irish in with the illegal immigration. Has he not heard of the Celtic Tiger? Dublin is the second richest city in Europe.
They now have their own problems with illegal immigration. They have changed their immigration laws, by mandating that newborns be in the country for five years or more , before being granted citizenship. If you leave the county during those five years you have given up your right to citizenship. They responded quickly to the problem of illegal immigration. Maybe we should take a page out of their book to deal with immigration problems.
In addition, young Irish graduates were the most sought after legal immigrants to the United States. However, the U.S. immigration policy limited the amount of immigrants from each county.This hurt many companies seeking highly educated graduates. The Irish speak at least three languages. The illegal immigrants coming across the border today, do not speak English and they have no desire to learn it. I have worked formany years ( too many), in the educational field and believe me Mexican students born and raised here, have no interest whatsoever in learning English. They speak Spanish with their family, their friends and even their teachers. They are in a comfort zone and do not want to improve. When are the idiots who govern this state and its educational policies, realize that we are dealing with a group of students who do not want to learn English. In paticular the students who were born here,. Then they throw in the recent illegal kids into the mix. Speaking not a word of English and being placed in their grade level. Come on, how could they not see the obvious? We are dealing with a group of people who are dragging down our whole educational system. The State of California's Education is literally, in crisis mode.
Before Ireland boomed economically it's greatest export were highly educated engineers....40,000 a year.
This was a drain economically on Ireland, whereas now that their youth are not leaving, they are contributing to the Celtic Tiger. The history of Ireland since the 1950's was that they had no internal market.
My family left Ireland in 1953. We emigrated to Canada, and it was the smartest move my parents made. The difference between Canada and the United States is too great an issue for this forum. Let's just say that I can't get out of fast enough. If it weren't for my job; I'd be long gone.

A Legal Irish Immigrant

to M.Power:
your acusation that students that are Mexican-AMERICAN do not want to learn english is a definite fallacy. accroding to your comment you have worked many years in the educational field. you are basing your claim on a biased degree which only accounts to your teaching area. as a matter of fact, in recent times many Hispanic students (they are not all desendant from Mexico) are loosing their spanish. as a proud american with a hispanic hertiage, and an honors student, how could you base your claim that ALL of us dont want to learn english. if you beleive that all hispanic students are "dragging down our educational system" then you should take into consideration those of us who are working hard to surpass those claims. but i do agree with you entirely on the fact that recent immigrant non-english speakers are placed in the same grade level as english-speakers is a very wrong action. how are they going to be able to learn english if they are not taught. every U.S. citizen should know how to speak english and the immigrants who come here illeagaly and legally should also have the desency to speak the native language.

What I would like to see in my lifetime, is for one news organization to report on the facts of illegal immigration without bias.

We know that people here illegal came to make a better life for themselves that not up for debate...

But lets talk about the cost to American citizens who have to compete with them in every area or their lives...

If we are to ever come to a rational policy that deals with the issue, we have to first be honest about it..

Research the issue, and put the FACTS on the table and let Americans judge for themselves what they are willing to sacrifice to help another countries people....

My mother always taught me two things coming up, 1. If you have to leave something out to make a point, the point was never worth making..

and 2. the only reason a person lies about a thing is because the truth would possibly deny them what they really want...

To every reporter & Advocacy group, put your ethics for good information ahead of your bias, and just tell it the way that it is, in the end you will always know that you did the right thing, you told the truth, without it, your character is always in question.

Immigration, a markedly controversial topic, stirs up heated debate. Unlike many issues, people’s positions on immigration are not necessarily determined by party affiliations and many people find themselves on the fence (no pun intended) about it. No matter how divergent people’s views are, everyone agrees that this issue has remained unresolved for far too long.

With the heightened concern with homeland security, we have been increasingly concerned with border control (installing new, and massive fences, spending grand sums of money on border security/ patrol etc), and yet, our dependence on the labor of illegal immigrants remains unacknowledged. As the editorial quoted by Swati Pandey says, “…we can all agree that the country cannot continue to have it both ways, relying on workers it pretends to keep out. This game needs to end. People are dying in the desert.”

The immigration controversy centers on concerns with employment. We have overcome much of the prejudice towards immigrants of various nationalities and backgrounds in the past. Both historically and currently, immigrants have accepted the most undesirable and lowest paid jobs. They tend to work in those jobs that native Americans refuse and they accept lower wages than would be acceptable to native Americans. While hiring and often exploiting immigrants who are desperate to work and who have few options may be objectionable to many Americans, there is little to prevent companies from hiring those who cost less to employ. When the Chinese first immigrated (many to California), they were immediately the victims of repugnant discriminatory acts:

There were between twelve thousand and twenty-two thousand of them in the city, all recent immigrants and visibly, achingly different in their Manchu pigtails and their “bizarre” customs…Then the Big Four had discovered that they made wonderful railroad-construction workers—patient, diligent, and above all, vulnerable and therefore cheap…The Chinese composed perhaps only 15 percent of the San Francisco labor force, but they were blamed and hated by apparently every unemployed or underemployed white San Franciscan. http://www.americanheritage.com/immigration/articles/magazine/ah/1993/1/1993_1_24.shtml

Retrospectively, the way we treated the Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s is obviously despicable, and humiliating.

Racism is not an appealing characteristic and as a country, we must ensure that legislation and policies regarding immigration are not influenced and/or determined by the racist attitudes of some of our ancestors. Senator Ellison Du Rant Smith argued in favor of the Immigration Act of 1924 (an act which placed tight restrictions on immigration). Senator Smith wanted to “Shut the door” in the face of new immigrants, as he believed that this was the only way to preserve American resources. “It seems to me,” he said, “the point as to this measure—and I have been so impressed for several years—is that the time has arrived when we should shut the door. We have been called the melting pot of the world…I think that we have sufficient stock in America now for us to shut the door, Americanize what we have, and save the resources of America for the natural increase of our population.” (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5079). It is my hope that if any senator spoke this way today, he/she would be sanctioned for their careless and revolting close-minded remarks. We must promote understanding and tolerance in order to reform our currently skewed system and make it one we can be proud of.

Our current hypocritical system is not only unfair and misleading, but it casts a shameful reflection on our country. It is imperative that we reform our nation’s current immigration policies. I believe that we must first focus on enforcing the law of the land. Additionally, we should create a guest worker program and a path to earned legalization and citizenship. Contrary to Kathryn Kobor’s fear that we “DROWN IN OUR OWN POLITICAL CORRECTNESS,” we should be proud of being citizens of a country that serves as a beacon of hope for so many people and that provides new opportunities for those people who seek to live in our country. When we have the power to give people a new start, to reunite families, and to help people escape persecution, we must do so. As Senator Barack Obama (and perhaps Future President of the United States) stated in his May 23, 2007 Statement on the U.S. Senate Floor, “The time to fix our broken immigration system is now… We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace… But for reform to work, we must also respond to what pulls people to America… Where we can reunite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should” (www.barackobama.com).

Hopefully, we have learned the lessons that immigrants of the past can teach us. Eventually, only we are left humiliated when we harshly discriminate against newcomers looking to turn over a new leaf. And two, America derives benefits from our melting pot image. Everyone’s contributions are valuable!

In our country, for many years, there has been a gap between the citizen and the immigrant. In the 14th amendment, our government pledged to protect all citizens, never to abridge their right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. What at the time was a reconciliatory effort to bring black Americans into the fold of protection that the United States had previously only offered to whites turned into a wall between what our government thought it owed to citizens and non-citizens. It is sad to see today that our government not only doesn’t protect the rights of non-citizens, but actively exercises its right to abuse them. Looking back through history, I think it becomes evident that the U.S. government’s dismissive (and often malevolent) attitude towards immigrants is based not only in an isolationist attitude, but often in ethnic and racial prejudice.

Since the beginning of our country, our policy on naturalizing citizens had been that only white were eligible (see the Naturalization Act of 1790). When this policy was challenged by Takao Ozawa in 1922, a man with white skin and features who seemed to fit all other criteria for citizenship, the Supreme Court denied his request on the grounds that only Caucasians were permitted to become naturalized citizens.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takao_Ozawa_v._United_States). The next year, Bhagat Singh Thind applied for citizenship, with his Asian Indian racial background, a race that had been anthropologically classified as Caucasian. The Supreme Court once again denied the request for citizenship, this time claiming that true white men had an intangible quality that the average man could easily distinguish from other races. ( http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5076/). These claims of a necessary aura as a qualifier for citizenship aside, the Supreme Court proved here very clearly not only that our country’s definition of citizen and white man were one and the same, but that they judged there to be something wrong with other races that did not qualify them for citizenship, and therefore did not qualify them for our government’s protection of their rights.

Since then, we have often used our immigration policies and processes to hide our government’s ethnically and racially discriminatory agendas. In the Immigration Act of 1924, the United States instituted a series of immigration quotas that severely cut down on the number of immigrants admitted from Eastern and Southern Europe, not-so-coincidentally the places where a great proportion of our immigrants had emigrated from in recent years. The United States voting populace (note that the right to suffrage was granted only to citizens, and very few immigrants were granted citizenship) were taken in by the idea of ethnic purity, and many resisted the idea of other races coming in and tainting their great Anglo-Saxon country. This point of view was perhaps best epitomized by Senator Ellison DuRant Smith, in his 1924 speech arguing for the bill to be passed, entitled “Shut the Door” (See here for full text: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5080).

Moving past the 1920s, there are many examples of discrimination against ethnic groups and immigrants, from the internment of over a hundred thousand Japanese, or descendants of Japanese in internment camps in the post-Pearl Harbor anti-Japan whirlwind in the 1940s. Even today, we detain hundreds of suspected Arabic terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, and thanks to their lack of citizenship, are legally allowed to put them through the cruel and unusual punishment that we save our own citizens from. What makes it especially upsetting is that today, not only are Hispanic immigrants receiving the short end of the stick, human rights wise, from the United States, but reverse racism is starting to bud as well. According to Campbell Cooke, a southern immigration attorney, “The perception from the Hispanic community today is they have been solely targeted by a bunch of racist rednecks.” (http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_9067948?source=most_emailed). These horrible things have to stop, if only because they violate the human rights I want our country to stand up for, but to do so, we will have to ask ourselves; Which pieces of our country’s legislation and culture are simply erasable vestiges of past racism, and which are we still fueling today?