A judge's decision out of Missouri last week means that federal courts are now split on the question of whether cities and towns may take steps to curb illegal immigration.

By MICHAEL RUBINKAM Associated Press Writer
ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) - February 6, 2008

Anti-illegal immigration activists hailed the ruling by U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber as giving a green light to municipalities nationwide to enact laws targeting illegal immigrants.

Opponents of local efforts say the issue is far from settled, noting that in a nearly identical case, a federal judge in Pennsylvania forbade the city of Hazleton from cracking down on illegal immigrants.

"This is a landscape characterized by significant legal uncertainty and these questions are going to glide their way up through courts," said Peter Spiro, who teaches immigration law at Temple University. "It certainly won't be the last word."

In the Missouri case, Webber upheld an ordinance in the St. Louis suburb of Valley Park that penalizes businesses that hire illegal immigrants. The judge rejected the American Civil Liberties Union's argument that the law discriminates against Hispanics and tramples on the federal government's exclusive power to regulate immigration.

The ordinance "is not pre-empted by federal law, to the contrary, federal law specifically permits such licensing laws as the one at issue," Webber wrote.

Webber's colleague in Pennsylvania came to a radically different conclusion last summer, striking down the Hazleton law as unconstitutional and saying the city had no business taking on what he called a federal responsibility.

Hazleton's measure, approved in 2006 and challenged by the ACLU, would have denied business permits to companies that employ illegal immigrants, fined landlords who rent to them and required tenants to register and pay for a rental permit.

"Whatever frustrations officials of the city of Hazleton may feel about the current state of federal immigration enforcement, the nature of the political system in the United States prohibits the city from enacting ordinances that disrupt a carefully drawn federal statutory scheme," U.S. District Judge James Munley wrote.

In his opinion, issued six months after Munley's, Webber noted he was free to depart from the ruling in the Hazleton case.

"The Court respectfully notes that the Pennsylvania decision is not binding, and therefore, the Court will conduct its own thorough analysis of the issues presented," he wrote.

Hazleton has appealed Munley's ruling to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The city's lawyers plan to file a brief with the court on Thursday arguing that Munley erred in his interpretation of federal law - and citing Webber's decision in the Valley Park case.

"Judge Webber's reasoning is painstakingly careful and detailed," said Kris Kobach, who represents both Hazleton and Valley Park. "In many ways the opinion is written to persuade not only the parties, but to persuade an appellate court that it is the right interpretation of the law."

But Omar Jadwat, an ACLU attorney who fought both ordinances, predicted Webber's decision will not be as influential with the court as Munley's.

"It's plain the Valley Park decision is a real outlier," he said. "Increasingly, municipalities have seen that these laws are not the right way to go, because they have serious legal flaws and because they are really counterproductive and unhelpful and don't get at whatever problems they actually have."

Hazleton's ordinance was based on a model provided by the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which favors limits on immigration and is affiliated with the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Inspired by the Hazleton crackdown, dozens of local governments, including the one in Valley Park, passed similar measures that seek to curtail illegal immigration.

John Allison, left, protests with others against NAFTA and the North American Union in front of the Civic Center where former Mexican President Vicente Fox spoke.
BY PAUL B. SOUTHERLAND, THE OKLAHOMAN
LPN

Mexico's ex-president advocates law reformRelated Information

By Don Mecoy
Business Writer
newsok.com February 6, 2008

Oklahoma and other states have launched immigration legislation because Congress has failed to act, former Mexico President Vicente Fox said Tuesday in Oklahoma City.

Fox, speaking at the Civic Center Music Hall, said the United States must develop a sensible national immigration policy.

"At the very end, it's a federal issue so in the end it should be satisfied by the federal government, by the U.S. Congress,” Fox said. "Immigration is an asset to every nation. It's an asset to the United States, no doubt. What we need to do is take advantage of that asset by bringing order to it, and by bringing legality to it.”

Oklahoma lawmakers last year adopted HB 1804, which has been called the toughest immigration statute in the nation.

Fox, 65, president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, spoke at an Executive Management Briefing sponsored by Oklahoma State University's William S. Spears School of Business. Fox, before his political career, was head of Coca-Cola Latin America.

Fox said he favors a plan similar to a bill authored by Sens. John McCain and Ted Kennedy in 2005 that would have provided a path to legal citizenship for many of the millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. The bill, which never came to a floor vote, also would have provided funding for increased border security.

A reasonable temporary guest worker program would solve many problems by providing documented foreign workers who need good wages for the American economy, Fox said. Fox said most Mexican immigrants don't want to become American citizens; they want to help their family and then return to their homeland.

"They like better tacos, tortillas and chilies than hot dogs or hamburgers,” he said.

The United States should join its economic might with its neighbors, Mexico and Canada, to meet the challenges of the world marketplace, Fox said.

"This century will be the century of Latin America,” said Fox, who noted that Mexico's economy is forecast to be the world's fifth-largest by 2040.

About a dozen protesters from Oklahomans for Sovereignty and Free Enterprise demonstrated outside the Civic Center to voice their opposition to a closer economic relationship between the United States and Mexico.

"I don't want a North American union established,” protester Robert Forrester said. "That's why I'm here.”

Fox, whose American-born grandfather emigrated from Ohio to Mexico to find his "American dream,” said only dictatorial governments build structures to keep people in or out such as the wall that has been proposed to control illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.

"I'm totally opposed to building a wall. That's the worst of the answers to a problem that has to be dealt with among different nations,” Fox said. "The threat to the United States is not immigration. ... The threat to the United States is isolation by building a wall.”

Fox suggested support for building a wall to stop illegal immigration might arise from "understandable” fears born in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"I am not for disorder. I am not for walls,” he said. "I am for wisdom.”

In response to questions from the audience of about 500, Fox prompted applause when he said that the United States should withdraw its troops from Iraq "as soon as possible.” Fox opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Fox, an admitted fan of President Bush, said the next U.S. president will have to rebuild relationships among nations.

"The United States has lost, I'm sorry to say, a lot of respect,” he said.

He also drew laughter and applause when, responding to a hypothetical question about northern Mexico states possibly joining the United States, he suggested that his country instead might re-annex Texas.

Farm-Worker Plan Aims

By JOHN D. MCKINNON and MIRIAM JORDAN
online.wsj.com
February 7, 2008; Page A10

The Bush administration rolled out a set of proposed rules aimed at stanching the flow of undocumented workers who have been crossing the border to work on U.S. farms.

The rules would encourage farmers to hire more legal guest workers from other countries under a 20-year-old visa program covering agricultural workers. The changes would modernize what is known as the H-2A visa program by loosening many of its stricter requirements, particularly on wages that must be paid to guest workers and on housing. Currently, critics of U.S. immigration policy say, farmers are encouraged to hire illegal workers because they are so much cheaper than legal guest workers or U.S. residents.

Groups that push for better conditions for immigrants were critical of the changes, saying they could lead to worse conditions for legal immigrant workers. The government's recent efforts to crack down on illegal immigration alone should get employers to start using the H-2A program and putting more workers under its wage and housing guidelines, said Bruce Goldstein of Farmworker Justice. Instead, he said, the changes appear aimed at "making it easier and cheaper for agricultural employers to hire [legal] temporary farm workers from poor countries," he said. "There is no valid justification for doing this."

Some farmers also questioned whether it would be effective in straightening out what has become a tangle of red tape. For example, they said, the changes leave out some types of agriculture, such as dairy farms.

"This is not the solution," said Maureen Torrey, who runs Torrey Farms in Elba, N.Y., and is a former chairman of United Fresh Produce, a farm-industry group. "It could be part of a short-term solution, after we look at it. But we need real immigration reform to give us a workable guest-worker program. We need action by Congress."

The government estimates that only about 75,000 workers take part in the H-2A program, while there are an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 illegal immigrant workers on U.S. farms. Some private-sector estimates of the number of undocumented farm workers run higher.

Farmers complain that the H-2A program's rules on wages and working conditions leave them open to lawsuits from worker advocates. But some farm-worker advocates -- as well as some critics of U.S. immigration policy -- say illegal workers are simply cheaper to employ.

The new regulations are likely to narrow that cost gap. But Jack Martin, special-projects director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a critic of U.S. immigration policy, said the real key is stepping up enforcement to reduce the supply of illegal workers and to discourage farmers from seeking out illegal immigrants in the first place. Without that, "this change in regulations will not have a major effect," he said.

Write to John D. McKinnon at john.mckinnon@wsj.com and Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com

FARMWORKERS FACE CRISIS OF CARE

Florida's fields dangerous playground for children of migrant farmworkers

Kumari Kelly | Sentinel Staff Writer
January 31, 2008

WAHNETA - Florida's fields and groves can be dangerous -- sometimes deadly -- playgrounds for children of migrant farmworkers who are often left unattended or are drafted to help pick crops.

And while improvements in migrant child care have been made during the past three decades, funding cutbacks have reversed some of those strides, advocates say.

"The issue remains: There is not enough child care all the way around," said Veronica Arteaga, center coordinator at the Redlands Christian Migrant Association day-care center in Wahneta.

Fourteen months ago, 2-year-old Ruben Velazquez of Winter Haven was crushed in a Polk County citrus grove by a 1994 Ford F-250 truck driven by his 10-year-old brother.

The boys and their 7-year-old sister were supposed to be staying in the vehicle while their parents picked citrus, Polk law-enforcement authorities said.

Lourdes Villanueva, Head Start manager at the center, said children have been in the fields and groves as long as she can remember -- including when she worked alongside her own parents. She and others at the center said affordable child care remains one of the most challenging hurdles.

Florida has about 97,200 undocumented children in public schools, many of them children of migrant workers, according to the Urban Institute Press.

The Florida Migrant Child Survey 2003 showed that by the age of 12, a farmworker's child may be laboring 16 to 18 hours a week. An estimated 100,000 migrant children work on farms in the United States, according to OxFam America, a national nonprofit.

"A lot of people take them [children] to the fields," said one Polk County migrant grove worker, whom the Sentinel is not naming because he is undocumented.

The 35-year-old man's two preschool children have free day care through the Redlands program.

The agency serves about 8,000 migrant-farmworker children throughout Florida. Without such help, the only option for some families is taking kids to work.

Budget constraints this year forced the program to cut hours at the Wahneta center and to close a Polk County after-school program for siblings of the preschoolers.

Family income: $8,500

"Some people bring the little ones -- 2, 3, 4, 5 [years old]. You try to keep them in the truck, but the kids want to get outside. They want to play," the worker said, adding that he and his wife earn $1.40 per box of citrus.

They usually pick about 80 boxes a day, for about $112, he said. The average migrant family earns $8,500 annually, according to government officials. While child care is free at the migrant center, the worker's paycheck must cover $400 a month for rent, food, medical care, transportation and other living expenses.

About 250,000 to 300,000 seasonal and migrant farmworkers, many of whom are parents, travel throughout Florida each year, according to the Florida Department of Health.

Migrant children contribute to the $28 billion produce industry, despite often being untrained, ill-equipped physically and psychologically and legally underage to work, according to studies such as one by the Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy in California.

And groves are among the most dangerous agricultural work environments, according to the National Agriculture Safety Database.

Kids as young as 10 can work

Labor laws in Florida allow children as young as 10 to hand-pick fruit seasonally if the employer has a waiver from the secretary of labor, but only children who are 16 and older may work in agricultural jobs considered hazardous, which includes riding a tractor or handling chemicals.

The trucks and cars line up at the day care in Wahneta before the doors open.

Last year, the center opened at 6 a.m., but rising costs forced a later opening at 6:30 a.m., center officials said.

The Redlands Christian Migrant Association, which receives funding from state, federal and nonprofit sources such as United Way, serves children in more than 75 centers in 21 Florida counties including Polk, and has about 2,000 children on waiting lists. A new center is being planned for the Mulberry area of Polk County.

The Wahneta facility serves up to 66 preschool children of migrant-farmworker families in Polk County free of charge, Arteaga said. To qualify, parents must provide proof that they work in the fields and that the whole family travels seasonally.

Carmen Garcia, 20, of Wahneta is a U.S. citizen, born to migrant-farmworker parents.

She travels between Florida, where she picks oranges, to Michigan, where she picks apples, with her husband and two boys, Arturo Benitez, 2, and Jorge Benitez, 3.

She knows, though, that unless something changes, her family's income will take a deep hit when her first child starts school.

She plans to quit traveling to give the children educational stability, a move that will disqualify her from all child care at the center. For now, though, working remains her only real option.

"Why would I be lazy and just stay home," she said. "We have to pay bills."


Kumari Kelly can be reached at kkelly@orlandosentinel.com or 407-931-5933.



WATCH VIDEO: Polk County Grove Worker Shares His Experience

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/orl-migrantkids3108jan31,0,4748344.story

Slavery is not just the shameful stuff

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/moderndayslavery/content/moderndayslavery/

About the Series

For nine months, The Palm Beach Post explored the roots of modern-day slavery. Reporters and photographers traveled to destitute Mexican villages, crossed the desert with a smuggler, rode across the U.S. with illegal immigrants, found new claims of slavery, uncovered rampant Social Security fraud, and found that Florida's famous orange juice comes with hidden costs.

• Meet the investigative team

Updates: Get latest news

Audio Slide Show

1. Used and abused
2. How they come
3. The real cost

Lives affected by slavery
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/moderndayslavery/content/moderndayslavery/

Migrant Workers in Washington State:

a Boon to the Tree Fruit Industry


Photo by Harold A. Laney,
courtesy of the Washington Apple Commission.

Sons and Daughters of Dustbowl Migrants Pick Fruit in 1970's (Part 1)

When I started picking fruit in 1970, I was amazed that my fellow workers looked just like the folks Steinbeck had described in The Grapes of Wrath.

I had thought these people had disappeared with the end of the Great Depression, but here they were: large families, often including half a dozen children, working together in the orchard and living in trailers, campers, or tents in the orchard camps. They seemed to be part of a vast migrating network of extended families who picked the nation's fruit. Who were these people? Where had they come from?

I learned that these workers were the sons and daughters of the Dustbowl migrants that Steinbeck had written about in his novel. Many of them had left the southern states with their parents in the 1930s and had come west, mainly to California, where work was plentiful picking cotton and peas, but also, later, to the Pacific Northwest.

By the time I met them, some forty years after the dust bowl migration, the Anglo workers who followed the harvest were so proficient that it seemed they had been "fruit tramps" forever, and were destined to remain Washington's primary work force. But by the 1980s, the agricultural work force had changed radically, and by the early 1990s, only a handful of "Okies" still followed the fruit run. There had been other groups of orchard workers before them, and there were to be others after them.

In the 1920's People Packed Their Own Fruit (Part 2)
In the 1920's, when I was a kid going to high school, quite often the school was shut down for harvest, and if they didn't, a lot of the kids who lived on orchards stayed home and helped the parents harvest. In those days, almost everybody packed their own fruit," recalled Orondo orchardist Grady Auvil.

Native Americans: One of the Earliest Groups of Migratory Workers (Part 3)
One of the earliest groups of migratory workers in Washington State, particularly in the northern part of the state, consisted of Native Americans."The Canadian Indians came with their horses and tents and buggies and camped down here while they picked fruit," said Len Wooten, who remembered the early days of orchard labor from his boyhood in Chelan, Washington.

Indians came from Canada to the Okanagon every year until the 1950s. Auvil, who worked as an orchard foreman in 1928, remembered that he was paid 75 cents an hour, while workers received 40 cents an hour. But all that changed, Auvil said, after the 1929 stock market crash. When the banks collapsed in 1932, wages plummeted: Auvil's wages went down to 25 cents an hour, while the workers received only 15 cents. "So, in order to support ourselves, we worked on a road job that summer and got 50 cents an hour," Auvil recalled.

Okies and Arkies Pick Crops During the Depression (Part 4)
Wooten also remembered orchard work during the 1930s. "When the Great Depression hit, growers couldn't sell their fruit, and north central Washington was declared a disaster area. Growers were walking away from their orchards." Those who did keep their orchards, could hardly afford to pay their help. Wooten remembers being pulled out of high school and sent to work picking apples forthree and a half cents a box.

Despite the hard times and the low wages, for once, there was no trouble finding plenty of hands at harvest time. There were thousands of people who were destitute and desperate for work. These were the "Okies" and "Arkies," the names attached to the Anglo migrants from the Great Plains, who came from the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, or Texas. A
combination of factors, from mechanization to drought, dust storms, and a depressed economy, had driven these dispossessed families westward to seek employment
...What did these migrants do after the harvest? "For four months, they follow the fruit and are tolerated. But, as soon as the trees and fields become bare and the harvest is done, they are told to move on," Blanchard wrote in 1940. "Local farm help is adequate to care for the fields during the next eight months. Communities, moreover, do not want these poverty-stricken wanderers settling down and becoming a drain upon already sorely taxed school, health, and welfare services."

Many Anglo migrants, as well as Mexican-American migrants from Texas who worked in theYakima area, traveled south for the winter months, to work and live in California, Texas, Arizona,Florida, or other states. Yet others did settle successfully in Washington. By 1941 and 1942, while many migrants were leaving farmwork to work in the booming defense industry of World War II,others were just coming to the state to look for work in the orchards. "People came from Arkansas in '42, '43, '44," said Auvil, "and in three years, our school went from 25 to 150, so we had to build new schools."

WWII Labor Shortage Brings Braceros to Work in the Fields (Part 5)

After the United States entered World War II, everybody went to work in the shipyards and defense plants. The demand for workers was so high that the government initiated a program to recruit braceros--Mexican nationals imported temporarily to work under contract in the fields.

Although the labor shortage of the 1940s and 1950s was difficult for the growers, migrants tend to remember this period fondly. For workers who decided to follow the crops as a way of life,everything improved after 1941. As the Depression era's oversupply of labor faded from memory,wages rose and pickers were once more in demand. They would leave the orchards of the Northwest in the late autumn and travel to Arizona and California to pick two major crops: cotton and peas.

Many of the workers I met in the 1970s remembered this period with nostalgia. "I have some good memories from that time," said Dale Jones, who picked cotton in California as a child. "I remember when you could work anywhere. Wherever cotton grew, there was work. You could make good money at it."

Bad Experiences Remembered By Some (Part 6)
But not everyone remembered the migratory life so fondly. "Cotton was my worst experience," said Gladys Wilson, whose family left Oklahoma in 1940 and picked cotton in Arkansas, Mississippi,and California. "It was always so dusty. One time, Ma made Jello, and it was all covered with dust... We had to travel from town to town. That's why us kids never got much education." Wilsonwas grateful when her parents started working in Washington State and decided to stay. "We settled down and didn't travel so much when we started picking apples and cherries. We could thin, prop,and prune in the same area."

1940's and 1950's: Search for Seasonal Labor (Part 7)
Now that there was no longer a surplus of workers clamoring for jobs, growers had to become more resourceful in the 1940s and 1950s to meet their need for seasonal labor. The larger fruit companies regularly sent buses to Spokane, Seattle, or Portland during the harvest season to recruit workers, not only for picking, but also for packing, sorting, and grading the fruit. They tried to make the jobs enticing. "We had our own cooks and kitchens, and served lunches," said Wooten.

Still, despite the busloads of people brought into the area, the labor problem was far from solved. Many of the transient workers were alcoholics who couldn't handle the demands of the work, and often the buses were almost as full on their return trips to the cities as they had been on their trips to orchard country.

This kind of recruitment continued into the 1960s. "When I came to this area in 1962, I was managing a big orchard which needed a lot of labor," remembered Ing, "and we chartered bus after bus out of Portland, and the Employment Security Service sometimes helped us round people up,and sometimes we'd send somebody down the night before and get them out of the restaurants.
Early in the morning, we'd load the bus, at four in the morning, and we also got some people out of Seattle. Yakima didn't do that because Yakima is a big enough town that it had a pretty sizeable casual labor group and a pretty good size Skid Row. In fact, we hauled some labor out of Yakima sometimes. People would say, 'Well, here comes another load of wine and flesh.' Of course,sometimes these people were in really bad shape and they couldn't work the first day, and they'd just stay in a cabin, and then some of them became excellent workers, they'd stay the whole season

and were just great people."

Hippies Worked in Orchards(Part 8)

Ing also remembered a nearly forgotten--and often maligned--source of labor: the hippies. They arrived at the orchards in psychedelic painted vans and pickups with cabins built on the back. "There were thousands and thousands of people that went on the road in this country as a kind of a protest against everything...and these kids were out on the road, and they did a lot of work. A lot of them were quite able-bodied young people, and they kind of liked to work next to the soil, and that kind of thing. We got a lot of labor from them...they contributed to the labor supply, and some people used them quite intensively."

Mexicans Became a New Source of Labor (Part 9)

By the late sixties, there were signs of a significant new labor source: Mexicans. Since the end of the bracero program, most workers from Mexico, and later from Central America, came to the United States illegally. "Yakima, Top*****h particularly, always had a Mexican-American population, people who had immigrated from Texas, and along the border, so there was a large group there who worked in orchards and hops, etcetera," Ing said.

"But the people we have now, the Mexicans that were mostly illegal, started coming about in the late sixties and early seventies...and I remember the transition. I was managing Mount Adams orchard, a big operation here locally. Well, we ran a cookhouse, and we fed the people, the Skid Row people that we brought in, we had as many as 250 people at a time, and anyway, there came a time then that we had a greater percentage of Mexicans, and so we quit running the cookhouse, and the people cooked for themselves, and there was a transition there all through the industry, where Mexicans became the principal labor force. It started in the late sixties, but it was probably 1980 before the labor force was mostly Mexicans."

Undocumented Latinos Replace Previous Workers (Part 10)
For the Okies, the people I worked with throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, the influx of undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America spelled the end of a way of life. Suddenly, they couldn't find work in the orchards they had worked for years; they had been replaced. When they could find work, wages were low, families could no longer work together because of child labor laws, and it seemed that employers no longer valued them as much as they
once had.

Additionally, mechanization of many crops had made the life of a migrant far more difficult. Cropslike cotton, peas, and beans no longer required hand labor; even fruit crops like juice oranges were being harvested mechanically. Pickers had become more reliant on fresh fruit crops, but now, with the deluge of workers from Mexico, there were few jobs available. Discouraged and disheartened,many of them left the orchards for other kinds of work. "Most of the Okies and Arkies gave up a long time ago," said Bill Wilson. "There are not many places a white family can work anymore."

But what was bad for the pickers--a surplus of labor--was good for the growers. The new workers--most of them, at first, males--were eager, and sometimes desperate for employment and money to send back to their families. And by the late sixties, more workers than ever were required to pick apples.

Research Changed Labor Practices (Part 11)
Researchers had discovered that fruit wasn't being picked at the optimum time, and this, said Wooten, caused a change in labor practices. Once workers picked apples into November; now a grower had only about five days from the time the fruit was ripe to get it off the trees. This meant that a larger supply of pickers were needed for a shorter period of time. Anglo migrants grumbled,but workers from Mexico and Central America, who welcomed what work they could find, proved efficient and cooperative at a critical time. They became the workers of choice. "It would be very difficult if it weren't for them," Auvil said.

More Changes, More Workers Needed (Part 12)
As the composition of the labor force was changing in the 1980s, so the requirements of labor were once again changing. With the varietals, there was more year-round work, blossom thinning,limb-tying, and color picking orchards several times. The demand for labor was higher than ever, and the employment opportunities began to extend beyond the basic four months. "We hire more people than we ever did now," said Auvil. "We hire as many as we possibly can year-round. A good share of our people work most of the time, anywhere from eight to ten months. You do a better job
growing fruit if you have a plentiful supply of good labor."

As different varieties of apples extended the harvest season and required more hand labor, more workers have been encouraged to settle permanently in orchard areas. Since many foreign workers have been granted temporary or permanent residence status under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, male workers who formerly came north alone began to bring their families, and Latino workers became a more stable force in Washington State's orchards. Like the Anglo migrants before them, they began to establish themselves in the tree fruit industry.

"Many orchard workers can do pretty good," said Auvil. "These people all have families, good cars, and a good living. A lot of Mexican orchard workers are doing very well, and some of them are going into business for themselves, the same as did the people from Arkansas."

Many Things Had Changed Since the 1920's (Part 13)
In 1992, picking cherries next to a family from Mexico, I realized how much things had changed. The people I worked near now were no longer from Arkansas and Oklahoma, and the children under16 were no longer allowed to help their families pick fruit. Instead of migrating to California,Arizona, or Florida to pick fruit in the winter, the family that worked next to me returned to Mexico each winter to visit their relatives. They were able to collect unemployment during periods without work --an advantage most Okie migrants never experienced. And they were more settled than most of the people I used to work with: this family had bought a mobile home in East Wenatchee, and the father found enough work in the area to keep him employed for eight months of the year.


Some Things Were Still the Same (Part 14)
But in other ways, things had stayed the same. Like the workers I talked to 20 years before, the Latino workers liked the outdoor work and the ability to be near their families. Too, they preferred the piece-rate system of payment that rewarded them for working hard, and the seasonal work that provided variety.

Children of Mexican migrant workers posing at entrance to El Rio FSA Camp, El Rio, California, 1941. Photo by Robert Hemmig.

Illegal aliens cost Florida taxpayers nearly two billion dollars annually from outlays in the following areas:Education,Health Care and Incarceration.

El Sol Resource Center a.k.a. "Jupiter Illegal Hiring Hall" has been called a "model" for others to implement. Centers like this throughout the US are setting a dangerous precedent and represent utter capitulation. As Jupiter has seen, build it and they will come, illegals that is. It is shocking that the taxpayer is expected to just grin and bear it. This is a national issue. Aside from the negative impact that a mass influx of illegals has on a community i.e. Social resources, schools, law enforcement, local hospitals , wage suppression,etc. , these locations make an utter mockery of every legal immigrant who took the time to do it right. If Amnesty is ever granted I would guess these resource centers would then be used as an immigration centers to as quickly as possible legalize unknown millions of illegal aliens. This center and others are openly defying Federal and State law. City governments within our US democracy are supposed to obey Federal law and represent the interests of their constituents. Yet the elected officials of Jupiter Florida are committing felonies through the official sanctioning of the illegal hiring between illegal foreign workers and illegal employers, to the detriment of taxpaying citizens and immigrants (legal by definition).

Come join us every Saturday from 9am-12am and protest in front of El Sol, bring friends and a sign. If El-Sol is allowed to continue, there may be many more with no end in sight. In the end we the taxpayers pay the price for other peoples cheap illegal labor

VIDEO COPY
2/2/08 Illegals cost Florida taxpayers $2 Billion a year
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYknSDmBxQ8

Keep The Faith—McCain (and Amnesty) Will Fail
By Joe Guzzardi
February 06, 2008

Let’s start with the good news. John McCain, the likely (but not absolutely certain) Republican nominee, will never be president.

(What are my credentials for such a bold statement? Wait until the last paragraph of this article!)

Coming after eight years of the disastrous George W. Bush administration and its legacy of war, lunatic immigration enthusiasm, indifference to the middle class and the crushing mortgage crisis, McCain would have a tough climb even if he were the ideal GOP candidate.

But in most ways, McCain is the worst possible candidate. He’s Bush all over again—maybe worse. Open those borders! Let’s stay a hundred more years in Iraq! (See McCain’s speech on YouTube here).

Good luck to McCain campaigning on a platform that echoes Bush and his 30 percent favorable poll rating.

Now for the bad news. If McCain doesn’t become president, then a Democrat will—most likely Hillary Clinton but there’s still plenty of time for Barack Obama to maneuver his way to the nomination.

Both are proud of their amnesty stances. And each insists, wrongly and hurtfully, that more non-immigrant worker visas are essential for the American economy to thrive.

To be sure, it’s a ***mer that Republicans don’t have a solid patriotic immigration reform candidate that we can count on at the forefront of the race.

But have faith! Don’t panic! Amnesty will not come automatically regardless of who is elected. History and momentum are on our side.

Have readers totally forgotten how far we’ve come and the magnitude of our 2007 victories?

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Throughout Clinton and Obama’s campaigning and especially since McCain’s resurgence, my in-box has filled up with the direst messages—“ It’s all over now,” “This is the end!” and “Amnesty is inevitable!”

Rightly outraged correspondents are aghast that Obama endorses driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. To them, it is beyond the pale.

And I agree that, after watching N.Y. governor Eliot Spitzer get put through the sausage grinder on alien licensing, it is astonishing that any candidate would touch the subject, especially when it is so easily dodged by merely saying that states—not the federal government—regulate driving.

But that’s my point: who really cares what Obama thinks about licenses? He has no control over it. Any governor foolish enough to plunge into that rough and icy water will do so at his own risk.

And the same can be said about presidential opinions on amnesty: that issue is determined in Congress, not the White House.

To better understand the strength of our position, let’s review what’s happened in the amnesty wars since Bush took office.

Bush, at the outset, blindsided many (not all) of us. We didn’t foresee his fanatical devotion to open borders.

As hard as this still may be for some Republicans to swallow, it is impossible—as a practical matter—to be a bigger open borders advocate than Bush.

Remember that Bush’s first out-of-the country trip was to Mexico and the first foreign leader he invited to the White House was Vicente Fox. And Bush had barely survived the dangling chad vote count before he floated an amnesty trial balloon in the spring of 2001.

Then, after his 2004 re-election, Bush vowed to use what he perceived as his accumulated “political capital” to push for amnesty. Result: nothing!

And yet again after the 2006 mid-term election and as Bush worked non-stop with the pro-open border Democrats who controlled Congress, he still couldn’t push through an amnesty despite a series of passionate pleas he made in Arizona and during a rare (for a president) personal visit to Capitol Hill.

In short, for eight years Bush was repeatedly embarrassed on the immigration issue by both Republican- and Democratic-controlled Congresses.

Since Senators Clinton, Obama and McCain were all present and close-up witnesses to the series of beatings Bush took, is it realistic to expect that the first matter of business for whoever is elected will be amnesty?

Not very likely…and that’s not just my opinion either.

During a trip to Washington D.C. in December I attended separate meetings with immigration reform leaders that included NumbersUSA Executive Director Roy Beck, Mark Krikorian and Steve Camarota of Center for Immigration Studies, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow John Fonte and the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The overwhelming consensus is that amnesty is “too toxic” a subject and that it will not rear its ugly head until 2010 at the earliest.

This is a huge change. Remember that in January 2007, when the 110th U.S. Congress was sworn in, nearly every immigration reform advocate on Capitol Hill assumed that the Senate would pass an amnesty again after a tough fight (as it did in 2006), and that we would ultimately have to stop it in the House of Representatives.

Beating it back in the Senate was seen as requiring something of a political miracle, given the odds against us.

For a solid six months, newspaper editorial boards, the majority of columnists and reporters as well as the leadership of businesses, unions, civil rights groups, universities, religions (most visibly the Roman Catholic Church) and ethnocentric lobbyists predicted that “comprehensive immigration” legislation was inevitable.

They were all wrong. Instead, the bill was stopped in the Senate without ever getting to the House.

Here’s what happened instead:

The Senate defeated amnesty and a green card increase in May…and again in June!

A smaller amnesty, the Dream Act, also considered inevitable because of its impact on “the children” went down in October.

As a result of three consecutive defeats and despite a massive assault by the print media and the Chambers of Commerce nationwide predicting bushels of unpicked rotting fruit, an AgJobs amnesty never surfaced.

The new Democratic leadership in the House headed by illegal immigration fanatic Nancy Pelosi did not even attempt to move an amnesty bill through a subcommittee—let alone the floor.

In the meantime,

Rep. John Gingrey (R-GA) introduced H.R. 938, the Nuclear Family Priority Act that will reduce the numbers of family sponsored immigrants (chain migration) and limit them to spouses and minor children. The bill currently has 31 co-sponsors.

Rep. Robert Goodlatte (R-VA) has added 58 co-signers to his H.R. 1430, the Security and Enhancement Fairness for America Act that would eliminate the 50,000-diversity visa lottery. This is a significant move forward in reducing legal immigration.

And, most significantly, Congressional Democrats proposed tough enforcement legislation

Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) introduced the SAVE Act (Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement) that bulks up the E-verify system to identify legal U.S. workers. The bill has been co-signed by 142 representatives—50 Democrats and 92 Republicans.

Mark Pryor (D-ARK) and David Vitter (R-LA) forwarded legislation similar to Shuler’s in the U.S. Senate.

Use 2007—widely but incorrectly predicted to be a disastrous year for patriotic immigration reform—as a guideline.

And, big difference, in 2008, we are forewarned and forearmed.

Not the slightest clue exists that Americans are more receptive to amnesty than they were in 2007. In fact, the reverse is true.

Judge for yourself where we standing by asking this simple question: would you rather be on our side, winning the battles as we fight them, or on La Raza’s team, consistently losing while its captain, Janet Murguia, becomes more frighteningly unhinged with each defeat?

Sure, it would be nice not to have to go to the mat again and again. I’m at a point in my life where I’d like to write fewer columns so I could spend more time upgrading my butterfly collection.

But I’m confident that no matter who wins the November election—the bad, the worse or the worst—we’ll beat back our opponents as consistently and as thoroughly as we have for the last several years.

We have brought immigration into the limelight of presidential politics—a huge triumph in itself—and we’ve won on the playing field.

So don’t fall victim to negativity. Based on our recent record, there’s no real reason for it.

And my credentials for saying this? I don’t like to blow my horn. But I predicted that the McCain-Bush-Kennedy Immigration Surge/ Amnesty bill would fail and when it was exhumed, I predicted it would be reburied. I predicted that front-runner Giuliani would flame out. I said that Mitt Romney should stop Hispandering and run against illegal immigration—without which, as Steve Sailer has pointed out, Romney “would have been tarred and feathered and run out of California on a rail”. And I warned New York’s Spitzer that his driver licence plan would end in Gray Davis-type humilation.

So I repeat: McCain won’t be President. Amnesty will not pass.

http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/080206_amnesty.htm

Surprise! The roosters were used for illegal **** fighting. Hmmm.. Let me think what culture condones this? Can someone please check a map and see if I am still in the USA? BTW The measure passed overwhelmingly.


Measure would limit roosters in parts of Riverside

By: Associated Press

RIVERSIDE -- Rooster owners in this Southern California city may be about to get their feathers ruffled.

Measure A on Tuesday's ballot seeks to ****le incessant ****-a-doodle-dooing and curb cockfighting by limiting the number of roosters residents can own in rural areas.

"It just goes from about 3 o'clock in the morning to 8 or 9 o'clock at night," said Lee Scheffers, who said his neighbors had up to 200 roosters at one time. "There's just a lot of crowing going on. Every one is more macho than the other one."

After he complained to the City Council, code enforcement officers took action -- but not until Scheffers had lost a lot of sleep.

The current law allows 50 birds, but the measure would only allow seven and require the birds be confined to an "acoustical structure" at least 100 feet from neighbors from sunrise to sunset.

If the measure passes, those with too many roosters would have to trim their flocks.

Riverside County has strict laws limiting rooster ownership, which had driven illegal ****-fighting operations into the city, particularly in rural areas of citrus groves, nurseries and ranches where local law mandates no more than one house per five-acre lot.

"It's a real quality of life issue, but it's also an animal cruelty issue," said Councilman Chris Mac Arthur, who said the measure is also aimed at stopping cockfighting.

Mac Arthur, a Riverside native, said he favors the measure although it won't have a direct impact on him. The measure needs a simple majority to pass.

"I've lived in this area most of my life, but I do not have any crowing fowl -- or any fowl to speak of," he said.

http://www.northcountytimes.com/articles/2008/02/05/new...e/14_42_352_4_08.txt

Don't know what that has to do with illegal mexican exploitation, but that type of fighting goes on a lot in the US. Pit bull fighting too.

Do you not hear it on the news? There are always cases every week, in fact if you watch Animal Planet I think it is, with the SPCA...there are hundreds of cases every year.