Captain Ed discusses stepped-up enforcement efforts against the employers who profit from illegal immigrantion, complete with statistics et. al. About time, too. He also included this tidbit:
"And what, exactly, did Garcia Labor do with all of these illegal workers? They contracted them to ABX Air, a contractor of DHL. The workers sorted the freight for the delivery service, and had access to the airplanes while doing so. One might wonder how illegal immigrants get so close to commercial freight aircraft in a post-9/11 world."
But of course, illegal immigration isn't a security issue....
It's obvious that at some level, everything can become a "security issue".
We can only hope that our elected officials, charged with providing for our well-being and security, understand where to apply their efforts (or more properly, our limited national resources) in proportion to the "threat".
And furthermore, it would be an even greater aspiration that the populace would also be able to distinguish between real threats and policial fear mongering.
I fear that both hopes are largely pipe dreams in this Republican corporatist political "philosophy" to which you ascribe, Herr Katzman.
I like the "Herr" honorific. Just when one thinks Mike Godwin has become obsolete...
But of course, illegal immigration isn't a security issue....
IMHO, its almost purely a security issue.
it would be an even greater aspiration that the populace would also be able to distinguish between real threats and policial fear mongering
By "populace" do you mean you fellow Americans, my Comrade?
Yikes, my magic number is 666333!!!
Was anybody putting scare quote around threat while watching the world trade center collapse live on CNN? Or the train blow up in Madrid? Or the London Metro? Or the Bali resort? Or the Khobar Towers? Or the Cole? Or the African Embassies? Did the border agent that stoppe the Millenium bombing? did the guy sitting next to the Shoe Bomber watching him light matches on his foot? Or the folks at the El Al reservation desk at LAX? Or the people in the little girl with the gun to her head at the Jewish Federation?
Obviously we need to build a wall on the Canadian border.
Frankly I'm amazed no one has suggested it already.
Or were you referring to a threat to our job security?
One of the most interesting things about the illegal immigration issue is watching The Left, that champion of the working class against corporations, shill like two-bit crack-whores for corporations to import a nearly unlimited servitor class under conditions that allow them to ignore most of the rules set up to protect workers. And they'll do it with a smile on their face.
The fact that an insecure border also becomes a way in for terrorists is a feature, not a bug... one that seemingly trumps everything they have supposedly stood for over the last 100 years.
The paranoid obsession with 'security' seems overdone. The real destruction of 9/11 was to civil libertys: and that was self inflicted. There is no way to get to zero risk, though we could reach zero civil libertys... and still get blown up. However despite government incompetance and blunders, we haven't been struck again. I wonder if upsetting our economy and civil libertys over a freak occurance will seem crazy to future historians.
#7 Joe:
Between the Left Right Axis in this country, we are really screwed. There is no party that addresses the needs of the working man. We need a new governing structure. Then maybe we could get things done and escape the emptyness of the Left Right doggeral.
I answered your challenge in a previous post.
Herr Katzman;
As usual, I have little idea where you are coming from.
What I am being critical of, clearly, is the effort of the Republicans to link "security" with "xenophophia". Nowhere did I indicate what I think about illegal immigration, or what should be done about it.
The problem has a human dimension composed of 11 million parts, many of them women and children. There is no quick and easy solution which can be expressed in a sentence on a bumper sticker and which is designed primarily to divide America against itself and maintain an electoral advantage, not to address the problem. This is the Republican strategy on every issue, and I am disgusted by your efforts to reduce it to a "us vs. them" campaign of fear of "security" for purely political gain.
Go back to Canada...we don't need your kind in America.
Tom, I wonder if you and your little buddy Andy would be good enough to delineate exactly which civil liberties you, personally, have lost since 9/11/2001.
Not potentially, not maybe, not in a far-off distant future when the unicorns die, but right here and now what civil liberties have you lost?
If ANYone is crying "wolf" in this conversation, as you claim Mr. Katzman is about immigration, it seems to me it is you making claims about disappearing civil liberties that haven't.
Unless, of course, your name is really Achmed, and you've been here from Pakistan on a student visa for the past 17 years while you're trying to figure out how much is the proper amount to tip for a lap dance.
Here's a few, #11:
We have lost First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly. Many people have been detained or arrested who attempted to excercise this right in public places during Bush/Cheney or Republican Party political rallies. The pentagon admits to spying on peaceful protesters through TALON.
We have all lost the right to privacy. We can no longer hold domestic telephone conversations without knowing whether they are being monitored, and by whom and for what purpose.
We have all effectively lost the right to a fair trial. We cannot face our accusers and be tried by a jury of our peers if we are labeled a "terrorist" or "enemy combatant" by the Bush Administration. We can be held indefinitely.
True Americans will not wait for the trend to continue downward. When your question can be answered by making even longer lists, then clearly (as I'm sure you and all totalitarian enablers know) it will be to late to reverse them.
Chesire,
Are you really as ignorant of the state of the law pre-Sept 11 2001 as you appear to be? Surveillance of overseas phone calls without warrant had been occurring long before George W. Bush was elected. Go use Google to read about reports on Echelon. Surveillance with warrant has always occurred. And I'm curious, if you were going to do anything about Representative McDermott's invasion of other's right to private telephone calls?
As for free speech, control of the location of protestors during Presidential visits was not invented during the current administration either. And if being ejected from an opponent's political rally is the death of civil rights, you may need to see if you can buy some perspective, it seems in short supply. Thank god we have far more freedom of speech under the Bush administration than we had under most Democratic administrations in wartime.
As for enemy combatant trials, maybe you could read some history - here's a hint the Quirin decision dates back 6 decades. I'm completely baffled by people who whine about the detention of combatants, did I miss when each prisoner was tried in a criminal court during the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish American War, World War I and II, and Korean War?
The Constitution has always provided processes for indefinite detention in wartime or insurrection, perhaps you should read it sometime.
Andy --
There are approximately 5 billion people poorer than Mexico's poor. Can they all live with you?
America cannot, must not, should not become like Brazil (the Left's dream); lots of desperately poor and a few Hollywood-type uber-rich.
Quite apart from the economic threat immigration poses to wages, quality of life, spending (a dollar spent for health care for Mexico's poor is a dollar not spent policing or immunizing or anything else), the security threat is real.
Andy -- What member of your family or friends are you willing to sacrifice to a terrorist attack with Nukes or Bioweapons? Unless you are willing to blithely contemplate Al Qaeda or Hezbollah slaughtering them IMHO you are a humbug artist of the highest order. Twain's Huck Finn's "King" and "Duke" could learn a thing or two from you.
Nuclear technology is 61 years old. Denial of the threat is pure lunacy at this point.
Well... I don't believe that we CAN secure our borders from terrorists.
It's not that I dissagree with your analysis, Joe. We see eye to eye on the truth of our national policy towards illegal immigration; I just wish that nobody in my camp would mix illegal immigration with anti-terrorism.
The issues really don't have much in common, and the national debate on this subject is such that any excuse to shift the spotlight from the real impact of illegal immigration and argue over non-issues will be siezed upon by both ends of the axis.
This case looks like a one-off to me. I'll believe the government means business when it is no longer the White House deciding whether to "administratively fine" employers or prosecute them, but rather law enforcement investigating and charging employers who hire illegals because its the law.
Direction to enforce the law shouldn't have to come from the White House, and in most cases it doesn't. I'll ask rhetorically, how on earth did we get here?
I can only say more illegal immigration = more terrorism...........its high time to realise this fact before there is another 9/11. Better be late than never.
FWIW, Rudy Guliani gave a good description of the issue on the O Reilly show last night.
He faced 400K illegal immigrants in NYC during his mayoralty when the INS was only deporting 2K a year.
His solution (as I heard it):
- Deal with the realities
- Reach out, provide essential services
- Decriminalize to the extent that immigrants are unafraid to report crime and participate in the society
(He points out correctly that as long as the illegals are ‘under the table’ they provide cover to criminals and potentially terrorists)
- DO seal the border, make no mistake, we are under attack
- Prime directive, get a handle on who is in the country
If he could only get past the Republican base in the 2008 primaries.
Giuliani is a gun-grabber. I am not saying that is the sole reason to oppose him, but he has plenty of other negatives in the eyes of Republicans that the bloom will come off the Giuliani rose plenty fast.
No choice (Guliani) is perfect. Check out the PajamasMedia podcast interview of Sen George Allen. I like the guy, but he sounds he is pausing to read a cue card when he says IslamoFacist.
Too many of these people are adequate managers, but not neccessarily statesman material.
There's a well-documented literature about terrorist use of human smugglers to pass borders. Here's one with particular relevance today:
Article
Joe: A lot of these commenters are (presumably) Americans and have been for all their life.
I wish I could apologize for them. I am so ashamed.
#11 NahnCee
I had to read several times to determine whether you were serious or ironic. Read the USA act, the Patriot act, and FISA. RICO if you have time. You seem like you might be a little lazy, intellectually. Not that there is anything wrong with that, if you like propaganda and just want to regurgitate what you've heard. I don't engage in the whole Left Right kabuki, and form my own opinions.
Two of those laws were passed in the 1970s. Should NahnCee also read the Alien and Sedition Acts?
#24
It would help in Nahncee would read something fact based. You too. I can't believe I forgot the Financial Anti-Terrorism Act. FISA, RICO, and other acts have been reinterpreted and amended since 9/11, schmart guy.
Tom,
I've not only read those laws, I've taught classes explaining the meaning of several of them including the PATRIOT Act.
And so far, I find the rhetoric about "lost freedoms" silly and overblown. If you can't actually explicate an real and significant infringement for discussion, you are wasting our time.
Did any of the illegal inmigrants working at the airport know how to pilot a plane? I don't think so.
Moreover, the Millenium bomber came from Canada, 9/11 terrorists were legally in the U.S, London bombers were British nationals and 3/11 was carried out very probably by ETA.
What has all of this to do with inmigrants?
#26 Robin:
I disagree. The loss is with enactment. The loss comes when a government gives itself the power to disapear people, not when the party thugs kick in the door. Logic chopping wont change that. These acts overrerach and defy good sense.
You pick an act and section; we'll discuss it. Do you have a website? Where can I find your curriculum vitae?
Robin,
God help those students.
Do you "teach" about the case of Jose Padilla in your "class"?
...
"U.S. citizen Jose Padilla was kept by the Bush administration in solitary confinement in a Naval prison for 3 1/2 years without being changed with any crime and without even having access to a lawyer. He was finally charged with crimes only because the administration wanted to avoid a ruling from the Supreme Court on whether it is constitutional for the U.S. government to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil and then keep them indefinitely locked away without charges of any kind -- a power which not even the British King possessed, at least not since the Magna Carta.
When the Bush administration finally indicted Padilla, they did so with extremely vague allegations that had nothing to do with the original public accusations that Padilla was a diabolical "Dirty Bomber" trying to detonate a radiological bomb in an American city. And now that the Bush administration is being forced to actually prove its accusations against Padilla in a court of law -- the way the Founders required -- they are having great difficulty doing so.
With much fanfare, the U.S. government charged Jose Padilla last fall in a South Florida terror-conspiracy indictment. He was brought to Miami in January under heavy guard, shackled hand and foot, helicopters flying overhead. But now a federal judge says the case against him appears "very light on facts."
...
I have no idea whether Jose Padilla worked with terrorist groups or is guilty of crimes, but the point has always been that, as a U.S. citizen, it is a grave assault on the most basic constitutional guarantees to incarcerate him without charging him with a crime and then securing a conviction in a criminal trial by a jury of his peers -- just the way the Constitution quite unambiguously mandates.
Under our system of government, the President doesn't have the power to unilaterally declare people guilty and then treat them as criminals. That is the very power which the Founders sought to prohibit and, as always, the most astonishing and revealing fact is that these principles are even in dispute. The Padilla case, as has been true from the beginning, is one of the most powerful illustrations of the very real dangers -- not abstract dangers, but very real ones -- posed by this administration's claims to unlimited executive power."
....
(comments excerpted from a website.)
Sorry you find the "rhetoric" "silly and overblown". Ignorance is no defense, and your feelings on the subject are clearly irrelevant to its veracity.
You cannot prove that you or I, or any other American citizen, cannot be treated exactly as Jose Padilla is simply by declaration of the President.