Category: Other Immigration

Release of Chinese Muslim prisoners is blocked

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Following up on our previous posts on the Chinese Muslims (called Uighurs) who are prisoners at Guantanamo, we have this report from the Washington Post:

A federal appeals court last night blocked the release of 17 Chinese Muslims into the United States from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until it can hear further legal arguments in the case.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stayed a federal judge’s order releasing the men, and it ordered oral arguments in the government’s appeal, to be heard Nov. 24. The government is appealing U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina‘s decision Oct. 7 to release the men, all Uighurs, who have been held at Guantanamo Bay for nearly seven years. The same panel temporarily stayed Urbina’s order a day later.

The government has been trying to find new homes for the Uighurs for years. It no longer considers them enemy combatants and provided no evidence that they posed a security risk. The men cannot be returned to their homeland because they face the prospect of being tortured and killed. China considers the men terrorists.

 Reuters has a piece on Uighurs in China, “China names eight wanted Olympic terror plotters.”

Later in the article:

China released on Tuesday a wanted list of eight “terrorists” it said had threatened the Beijing Olympics and were bent on achieving independence for its restive western region of Xinjiang.

The eight, all members of China’s mainly Muslim minority Uighur group, belonged to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which the United Nations listed in 2002 as a terrorist organization with links to Al Qaeda, police said.

“The eight are all key members of the ETIM, and all participated in the planning, deployment and execution of all kinds of violent terrorist activities targeting the Beijing Olympics,” Wu Heping, a spokesman for the Public Security Ministry, told reporters.

…. Beijing is also pushing the United States to hand over 17 Chinese Uighurs, held in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay since being captured in Afghanistan in 2001.

It describes the men as members of ETIM and terror suspects who must face “the sanction of the law.”

[But] Rights groups have accused China of exaggerating the terror threat in the region in order to crack down on Uighur demands for greater autonomy and religious freedom.

Postville, Iowa: Ground zero for nation’s immigration debate?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well maybe it would be if there was a debate going on!   Immigration is undoubtedly on many people’s minds as we head into next month’s Presidential election, but as we said before, the ‘I’ word never crosses any politicians’ lips; except maybe small town politicians like the mayor of Postville.

POSTVILLE, Iowa (CNN) — About a dozen Somali Muslims stand outside their makeshift mosque on Lawler Street, its sheet-draped windows emblazoned with the words “Sunday Mattress.” Women are covered head to toe in traditional Muslim robes.

Across the street, a couple of Latino immigrants stroll the sidewalk in front of the town’s long-standing Mexican restaurant. Just down the road, scores of ultra-Orthodox Jews walk down the street to the local synagogue. It’s not uncommon to see people from Russia, Ukraine and the tropical island nation of Palau here as well.

Welcome to ground zero of the nation’s immigration debate — the tiny town of Postville, Iowa, a rural community of 2,400 tucked into the northeast corner of a state that’s 94 percent white.

It’s a town that’s been turned “topsy turvy,” Mayor Bob Penrod says, since hundreds of heavily armed federal immigration agents swooped in a few months ago and raided its main employer, Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant.

“It makes a person feel kind of angry,” Penrod says. “It’s been nothing but a freaky nightmare since May.”

This is a story from CNN so it dances around what concerns the mayor, tensions building, but never really explains what the tension is (crime is up though).  Can’t say it CNN, a little too much multiculturalism?

The story does take a whack at ICE for the massive raid last spring that netted hundreds of illegal aliens working at the plant.   CNN then blames ICE for problems in the town, and ICE defends itself with this statement:

“It appears, based on 2007 fourth-quarter payroll reports, that approximately 76 percent of the 968 employees of Agriprocessors were using false or fraudulent Social Security numbers in connection with their employment,” ICE alleges in its affidavit.

I think those 735 people whose identities had been stolen might actually side with ICE instead of CNN!

We have written about Postville on a number of occasions, here.

Immigration: Australia is in the same deep stuff as the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update:  More on immigrant conflicts in Australia here.

Here is an article from Australia that asks the same questions of the Australian government that we ask of ours.    How can a country support opening its doors to low-skilled immigrants in huge numbers at this point in history?     In this case, the Rudd government has announced it plans to allow 500,000 immigrants to enter Australia over the next three years.

So how are they going to offer land, water, power and transport to more than 500,000 permanent newcomers Rudd hopes to settle here permanently in just three years?

Read the whole article and ponder how it is that Australia too has caught the civilizational death wish disease.

Congressman Lamar Smith reminds us of the cost to America of low-skilled immigrants

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:

This week as I, and you too I presume, became increasingly shocked at the precipitous fall of our economy, I wondered how on earth we could continue to import low-skilled immigrants to America.    Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) must have had this on his mind too when he blasted the US Chamber of Commerce on the bailout.  The Chamber said they supported the bailout and said it put Americans first.  In an opinion piece published this week,  Smith contends that the Chamber’s position on amnesty put a lie to that statement.

When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called on Congress to pass the financial rescue bill, they asked us to “put the American people first.” I agree with that sentiment. However, I can’t help but point out the irony of the Chamber’s statement given its own refusal to put the needs of the American people over those of illegal immigrants.

Smith then goes on to discuss other Chamber of Commerce positions regarding immigration and how those positions hurt Americans.

He reminds us of a study by the Heritage Foundation in the spring of 2007, “The fiscal costs of low-skilled households to the US taxpayer” by Robert Rector.   

According to a study by the Heritage Foundation, each low-skilled immigrant [legal and illegal] household received $30,160 in government benefits – including education, medical care, transportation and sanitation services – but paid only $10,573 in taxes. That means the average low-skilled immigrant household costs American taxpayers almost $20,000 per year. Also, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that low-skilled American workers lose an average of $1,800 a year because of competition from low-skilled immigrants for their jobs. Driving down the wages of American workers is not a route to “economic opportunity” the chamber claims is its goal.

Like it or not I believe we have all had a lesson in economics over the last two weeks and it’s a pretty clear lesson.      As jobs are lost, people can’t pay taxes, or as people lose money in the stock market, money is not there to collect in taxes.   If people lose houses, then local governments can’t collect property taxes.  If people aren’t buying stuff, then sales taxes are not paid.   If taxes don’t flow to various levels of government there will be diminishing services by the government to those newly created poor people who will be demanding more services in the form of welfare from already bankrupt governments.   (To my tax expert friends, don’t laugh at my simplification!)

So, how on earth can any rational person continue to promote the importation of more low-skilled labor?

Whoever becomes President of the US in next month’s election will have to face this ‘nut-cracking’ issue, and they aren’t even talking about it!

McCain getting hit from both sides on immigration

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I know this is a blog about legal immigration, but every once in awhile we throw in some stories about the illegal side of immigration.   This one about the Presidential election may give us a hint of what could come should McCain be elected or if Obama is elected.  From Politico:

Despite championing immigration reform in 2007, John McCain is poised to lose the Hispanic vote by a landslide margin that is well below President George W. Bush’s 2004 performance.

Polls show Obama winning the broadest support from Latino voters of any Democrat in a decade, while McCain is struggling to reach 30 percent, closer to Senator Bob Dole’s dismal 1996 result than to Bush’s historic 40% four years ago.

McCain seems to have wound up with the worst of both worlds: He appears to be getting no credit from Latino voters for his past support for immigration reform, while carrying the baggage of other Republicans’ hostility to illegal immigration.

And he’s been unable or unwilling to attack Obama—who was once thought to have taken a lethally liberal stance by supporting granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants—from the right.

So when McCain joined Kennedy in the summer 2007 and sought to ramrod a bill through Congress that would have given amnesty to millions of Hispanics living illegally in the US, he got nothing for his pains.

Also, note the last sentence in the quote above and go back and read how Hillary Clinton’s people thought that Obama’s support of driver’s licenses for illegals was his death knell.  And, of course, it is unlikely that McCain is going to bring that up in light of his own stance on immigration.