Supermarket settles discrimination claim Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008 8:16 am
CHARLOTTE (AP) — A supermarket has agreed to pay a total of $40,000 to three former employees who accused the store of discriminating against non-Hispanic workers.
The former employees filed the complaint last year, saying they were forced out of their Compare Foods jobs in 2004 because they were not Hispanic. Two of the employees were black and one was white.
Compare Foods lawyer Phil Van Hoy said the company treated the workers fairly, arguing that a company with lots of Hispanic customers is allowed to have employees that can communicate with them.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorney Lynette Barnes said Compare couldn't prove that it was necessary job qualification to speak Spanish or relate to Hispanics. The company agreed to the settlement in federal court this week.
The grocery store chain was founded in Freeport, New York, and now has 50 supermarkets in seven states.
Arizona Seizes Spotlight In U.S. Immigration Debate
State’s Aggressive Stance Is Spurred by Newcomers; ‘We’re Being Overrun’
MIRIAM JORDAN
PHOENIX — Arizona is at the heart of what many say is the biggest, angriest storm over immigration to hit the U.S. in nearly a century.
Efforts to combat illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America are popping up across the state, fueled in part by an influx of immigrants of another sort: Americans from the North and East.
The collision of these two groups has helped turn Arizona into a laboratory for new ways to crack down on illegal immigrants. Employers here can lose their licenses if they hire undocumented workers. English is now the state’s official language. And the latest idea being floated in the state legislature would bar U.S. citizenship to babies born to illegal immigrants.
Immigration has become one of the most hotly contested issues heading into Tuesday’s presidential primaries. Arizona Sen. John McCain was an architect of the defeated U.S. Senate bill last year that included a guest-worker program and a pathway to legal status for illegal immigrants. He is now the Republican party’s front-runner, but the issue has hurt his standing among some voters. Among the remaining Democrats, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton support comprehensive immigration reform.
Tensions are palpable in greater Phoenix, home to two-thirds of the state’s population. Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County headline-grabbing sheriff whose jurisdiction includes Phoenix, recently unveiled a hotline for citizens to report suspected illegal immigrants. The hotline is advertised on the side of the sheriff’s vehicles with a big red “Do Not Enter†sign and the word “Illegally†scrawled over it.
Mr. Arpaio has also given his deputies new authority to arrest illegal immigrants in the course of duty — taking on a job normally reserved for federal agents. In the past year, he says they have arrested hundreds of people as a result.
The sheriff’s actions have turned him into a household name in the Latino community. Many say they avoid leaving the house except to go to work or to buy groceries, for fear of arrest. Spanish-language radio and television report frequently on locations where deputies appear to be stopping drivers. In some extreme cases, people are crossing back over the border to Mexico. “Isn’t it great to spread fear so they follow the law,†said Mr. Arpaio in an interview.
Politicians and law-enforcement officials say they are responding to the sentiment expressed by residents like Bill Seaber. Mr. Seaber moved to Phoenix from Pittsburgh about a decade ago to settle a community called Paradise Peak West. “We’re being overrun by illegals,†Mr. Seaber says. “We need to do whatever it’s going to take to get rid of them.â€
Isolationist Sentiments
Hostility toward immigrants has waxed and waned throughout U.S. history. At the turn of the 20th century, restrictionists denounced Italian and Eastern European immigrants as crime-prone, diseased and unable to assimilate. After isolationist sentiments flared during World War I, nativists in Congress pressured President Warren G. Harding into signing the first immigration Quota Act in 1921. The law effectively ended the open-door policy that had allowed millions of foreigners to settle in the U.S. in the previous decades. The National Origins Act of 1924 further stymied the flow, and the impact lasted for decades — the stanched flow of immigrants to the U.S. did not pick up again until the 1960s.
Today’s debate is partly a reaction to the fact that the U.S. is now home to more than 35 million immigrants, an all-time high in absolute numbers, scholars say. The density of the foreign-born population — almost 13% of the total — is approaching the 15% peak reached in the last massive wave of immigration from the 1880s to 1920s, according to scholars who study immigration. “In the last two years nativism has become as intense as it was during its last peak, the 1920s,†says Gary Gerstle, an immigration historian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.
The current wave of immigration has reached pockets of the country untouched by immigration for decades, and the fact that a huge number of the immigrants — 12 million — are here illegally further inflames passions.
Nationally, more than 1,500 pieces of legislation were introduced in state houses last year related to illegal immigration, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Coming from all but four states, 244 of them became laws — three times as many as were passed in 2006. Arizona is one of the top states in terms of enacted laws last year, with a total of 13. The proposals typically tackle employment, law enforcement, drivers’ licenses and public benefits. Many of them are facing legal challenges; others are yet to be enforced.
Perched on Border
Perched on Mexico’s border with the U.S., Arizona was long accustomed to the presence of Spanish speakers who moved back and forth between the porous borders. But the harsh desert terrain along its 340-mile-long border meant that most illegal immigrants tended to cross over the Texas or California border instead. Arizona only became ground zero in the immigration debate after the federal government began beefing up enforcement along the other two states in the 1990s. Today, Arizona is considered to be the main passageway for Latin Americans sneaking into the U.S.
For years, most undocumented workers just passed through Arizona on the way to other destinations. But as the economy boomed, many chose to stay in the bourgeoning Valley of the Sun, as the Phoenix area is known to locals. They were drawn by cheap housing and job opportunities fueled in part by the arrival of Americans from other states. All told, the population of greater Phoenix grew at the rate of 18,000 a month between 1990 and 2000, adding more than two million people in a decade, to reach 3.1 million, according to the Census Bureau. Today, Phoenix is the fifth-largest city in the country.
Over time, the newcomers settled into an uneasy coexistence. Arizona residents were inundated with a steady stream of news about migrants dying in the desert, border patrol chases on highways and illegal immigrants held hostage by smugglers in drop houses. In day-to-day life, Latino immigrants and their children became increasingly visible — in stores, schools and hospital emergency rooms. Arizona’s foreign-born population surged to 900,000 in 2005 from about 270,00 in 1990, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. More than half are believed to be illegal immigrants.
“We’re a border state that has always had Mexicans,†says Arizona state historian Marshall Trimble. But, he adds, “a lot of these people who moved here in the last few years are uncomfortable when they see so many folks who are brown-skinned and speak another language.â€
A particularly rancorous part of the debate involves the question of whether illegal immigrants are a burden on the state’s schools, health-care system and other public services. Dueling economic-impact surveys have done little to settle the argument. Some researchers say immigrants’ contributions outweigh their cost because they help stimulate the economy with their labor and by consuming goods and services. Others say unauthorized workers depress the wages of legal workers, especially among low-skilled laborers.
Much of the recent legislation has addressed economic concerns. Proposition 200, for example, a ballot measure passed in 2004, halted all nonfederally mandated assistance, such as state health care, to illegal immigrants.
“Immigrants who had been contributing to the economy by doing jobs no one else wanted felt under attack,†says Joe Rubio, lead organizer for the Phoenix Industrial Areas Foundation, a coalition of local faith-based groups that fights nativist measures.
In 2006, about three-quarters of all Arizonans voted in favor of four more ballot measures aimed at illegal immigrants, including one that bans undocumented immigrants from receiving in-state residency tuition for college and other benefits. Another denies an award of punitive damages in any civil court to an illegal immigrant.
Republican state legislator Russell Pearce, who speaks of an “invasion†from Mexico, has launched at least a dozen bills to combat illegal immigration.
“In the face of federal government inaction, Arizona has become a laboratory for how to deal with illegal immigration,†says Janet Napolitano, the state’s governor, referring to a series of failed federal immigration reforms and lack of enforcement at the border.
The nonstop legal volleys reflect the immigrant-related conflict raging across the state. In a working-class neighborhood in central Phoenix, a handyman named Ken Adams, 40 years old, says, “At one time Mexicans were a minority. Not anymore.†For a supervising job in construction, for example, “you have to speak Spanish to deal with employees who just speak Spanish,†Mr. Adams says.
Mr. Adams and his wife, Suzi, are home-schooling their two daughters, 13 and 14, partly because they believe the quality of education has deteriorated due to the influx of Spanish speakers. Ms. Adams remembers attending the school across the street from their home when the student body was overwhelmingly white. Now, like most schools in the area, the students are mostly Latino. “My biggest problem is the culture thing,†she says. “They come here and disrespect our culture…by not learning English.â€
It is the future Hispanic face of the state that has propelled many anti-immigrant forces into action. At Lela Alston Elementary School, which opened six years ago, 95% of the 380 students are Hispanic and 78% come from homes where English isn’t the dominant language. Virtually all the children are entitled to free meals because their families live at or below the poverty line.
In one kindergarten class, Carrie Bergum teaches 22 students — only one is not Hispanic — how to read. “They come to us not knowing anything,†says Ms. Bergum, but “most of the kids pick up English within two months, some of them in less time.†On a recent afternoon, almost all the kindergarteners, including newcomer Michael Garcia, spelled cat, box and jet correctly. “We winners!†declared the 6-year-old boy, flashing a grin. Last year, the elementary school in the heart of a Latino neighborhood won a “highly performing school†designation from the state as a result of its students’ performance on standardized tests and attendance record.
Kent Scribner is the superintendent of Phoenix’s Isaac School District, where 95% of students are Latino. He says the immigrant crackdown is driving some families out of state. “We have requests for student transcripts from schools in Utah, Colorado, Texas and New Mexico,†he says, adding that about 5% of these students didn’t return for the second semester of the school year that began last month.
Diana and Adrian Arce moved to Phoenix 15 years ago from Guadalajara, Mexico, to “seek a better future for our children,†she says. Her husband held a steady job as a painter, and she cleaned houses. They saved enough to make a down payment on a house and buy two cars. Two years ago, their eldest daughter graduated from high school and won a full scholarship to a community college.
After the employer-sanctions bill passed last year, Mr. Arce lost his job, which paid $14 an hour. He scrambled to find another job until finding one that paid only $7.50. Because he is an unauthorized worker, “the employer knew he would take the job,†says Mrs. Arce.
State Tuition
When the proposition banning undocumented students from paying in-state tuition went into effect last year, the Arces’ daughter lost her scholarship and had to withdraw from college because the family can’t afford to pay the $360 out-of-state fee per semester. Their second daughter, who is 19, works at a fast-food chain and has postponed plans to attend college. Their 18-year-old son is hoping to get a soccer scholarship at a private university. Only their youngest daughter is a U.S. citizen.
Mrs. Arce, who earns $12 to $15 an hour cleaning houses for “puros americanos who treat me very well,†says families for whom she has worked more than a decade recently asked whether she is here legally. “I tell them I am a citizen,†she says. “Or they’ll fire me immediately.â€
On her way to work recently, Mrs. Arce conferred with her friends by cellphone about where Mr. Arpaio’s deputies might be stationed and changed her route accordingly. The family restricts its outings to a minimum, she says. “We used to like visiting the park and the library,†says Mrs. Arce. In the last year, “everything has changed,†says Mrs. Arce. “We’re thinking of moving to another state but it’s hard to start from scratch.â€
For 29 years, John Gibson has provided a public service.
As a state employee, he administers the federal government’s food-stamp program in Morgan County. Established in 1964, the program has fed millions of hungry children and adults, most often in single-parent households.
But in recent years, Gibson has noticed a change in his clientele.
In ever increasing numbers, his office has provided food-stamp benefits to the U.S.-born children of illegal Hispanic immigrants.
While the benefits are prorated according to the number of non-citizens in the household, Gibson said, the influx is taxing his staff, which frequently needs translators.
800 percent increase
Since 2001, the number of non-citizens living in Morgan County food-stamp households has climbed more than 800 percent, from 36 to 289, according government records.
Despite the increase, Gibson said, he is not short of federal funding and his superiors have encouraged him to proceed with outreach programs — an effort to help more qualifying people apply for food stamps.
“It appears, from my point of view, that the funding is never ending,†he said.
At other government offices and some charities, officials reported similar increases. They said the influx is taxing their ability to provide services.
At the Morgan County Health Department, spokeswoman Craven Gibbs said increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants have forced them to utilize translators.
“It’s taxing on the system, because it takes a lot more time,†she said.
Unlike the food-stamp office, she said, the Health Department is legally required to provide service to anyone who walks in.
“We take care of them just like we take care of everyone else,†she said. “That’s our mission.â€
The local Salvation Army also reported an increase.
According to spokeswoman Valerie Cohen, services provided to Hispanics through the Salvation Army food bank and clothing store jumped from four individuals in December to 29 in January.
“I don’t know if it’s because there’s been such an influx of them, or if it’s because the economy has gone to pot, or maybe they’re just realizing services can be obtained,†she said.
Cohen said the Salvation Army is meeting the demand but donations have declined slightly in recent years.
“God always sends us what we need right in the nick of time,†she said.
At Decatur City Schools, officials said the number of students who speak mostly Spanish has been climbing steadily for years.
Since the school started its English Language Learners program in 1993, it has expanded from 27 students to 1,022 students this year. That’s about 10 percent of the school system’s student population.
According to Superintendent Sam Houston, that leaves the school system with difficult challenges.
He said federal legislation mandates that Spanish-speaking students participate in required annual proficiency tests after just one year in the ELL program. But research shows it takes five to seven years to become academically proficient in a new language.
“That would literally be the same as taking my child or your child and sitting them down in front of a test totally in Spanish when they’d only had Spanish I,†he said.
The result is poor test scores that damage the schools system’s standing and the child’s self-esteem, he said.
Schools that don’t meet minimum proficiency levels for multiple years face a host of penalties, including loss of federal funding. Houston said all of Decatur’s schools are in the clear this year.
Other challenges, Houston said, include funding the federally mandated ESL program.
He said the school system spent more than $750,000 on the program in 2007 but received only $180,000 from the state to pay for it.
“It’s an unfunded mandate,†he said. “We have to provide significant local funds to meet that mandate.â€
Federal law prohibits the school system from turning any child away, regardless of whether they are documented.
While the influx continues in Decatur, it could be slowing soon, experts say.
According to Allen F. Burns, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, the nation’s slowing economy is leading many immigrants to return to their country of origin and enticing fewer to come.
He said Hispanic immigration rates have been climbing for 30 years but spiked during the past five years — the result of a booming economy.
“We just needed so many workers that there was no way for the boom to continue without getting the labor to do it,†he said. “I think it was more of a pull to our country than that things were so bad off in theirs.â€
Burns also said “almost virulent†anti-immigrant laws and attitudes are contributing to many immigrants leaving.
“I know so many immigrants that are kind of holed up in their houses waiting to go back to Latin America,†he said.
Illegal Immigration Debate Rages in Utah Friday, February 01, 2008
By Sara Bonisteel
E-Mail Print Share: DiggFacebookStumbleUpon Sara Bonisteel/FOXNews.com
SALT LAKE CITY — The battle over illegal immigration is being waged on a surprising front — Utah, where some lawmakers are scrambling to drop perks that have lured tens of thousands of undocumented workers to the Beehive State.
Since the opening of the 2008 session on Jan. 21, Utah legislators have discussed around a dozen measures that would dramatically curb rights for illegal immigrants in this non-border state, which has become an unlikely battleground in the nation's immigration debate.
"It’s not a good situation," said Utah Rep. Glenn Donnelson, R.-North Ogden. "As other states take away the benefits, then we become a magnet, and I say that the best fence to build is not chain link and barbed wire, but is to take away the benefits — take away the perks of being an illegal immigrant."
The state legislature is considering bills that would eliminate driver-privilege cards and in-state tuition for undocumented workers, give local authorities expanded power to fight illegals, and add safeguards to combat identity theft.
Legislators are under pressure from citizen groups such as the Utah Minuteman Project, whose members have demanded an end to Utah's position as "a sanctuary state where illegal aliens and their children feel welcome to ignore any and all of our laws."
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Immigrants Stream Into Utah in Search of Better Life
"There’s a vague sense of disquiet, discomfort and unease about the situation by virtually everyone in Utah that’s not a liberal or not a Democrat and doesn’t want these people here," said Eli Cawley, the chairman of the Utah Minuteman Project. "They want the law followed. The politicians have noticed that."
A poll conducted early last month by the Desert Morning News found that 60 percent of Utahns favor a local role in the enforcement of illegal immigration laws, with 85 percent desiring citizenship checks before immigrants can receive public benefits.
The firestorm surrounding the debate has frustrated Utah's Hispanic community, which makes up approximately 11 percent of the state's approximately 2.65 million population.
*Margarita Rodriguez, the president of Centro Civico Mexicano, a community center in Salt Lake City, says the state's Hispanic residents are not unlike their neighbors. "They want the same things: for their children to be educated, for them to have enough food on the table and to pay the bills," she said. "Across the board, they want the same things."
Roughly 100,000 people are estimated to be living in Utah illegally. Migrants are attracted to the Beehive State by seasonal and manual labor, lower rents and a community that puts a strong emphasis on family and religion. Church charities also aid needy arrivals.
"Coyotes" — people who smuggle immigrants into the U.S. from Mexico — bring many undocumented workers to the state where a cottage industry peddling "la micas" — fake green cards — can help them get work, Rodriguez said.
The increase comes amid an overall population boom in Utah, which saw a 13.7 percent increase between 2000 and 2006, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Complicating the issue in this deeply religious state — the home of the Mormon church — are spiritual calls for compassion toward those who may be in Utah illegally.
"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has taken no position regarding immigration legislation but simply expressed the need for compassion when dealing with any of God's children," said Michael Purdy, a church spokesman.
Mormon missionaries minister to new Utah arrivals, but "church leaders and missionaries do not necessarily know the legal status of those who might express an interest in joining the Church and do not seek to know," Purdy said.
The Latter-day Saints count around 4.7 million members in Central and South America — with 1.1 million in Mexico alone, he said.
The Catholic Church has been more vocal in the debate; the leader of the Catholic Diocese in Salt Lake called on Sunday for a path to citizenship for those immigrants currently in the U.S. illegally. Bishop John C. Wester said the church itself could be called "Immigrants 'R' Us," as he called on his parishioners to "welcome" the needy stranger, according to a report Monday in the Deseret Morning News.
Charitable arms of both churches — Catholic Community Services of Utah and Welfare Square — offer support to immigrants, Rodriguez said.
The influx of new arrivals has changed the face of the state's capital, Salt Lake City. At the city's oldest Mexican store, Marisa's Fashion and Market, little more than a mile from the Mormons' Temple Square, owner Refugio Perez notes the change to his community, where Spanish-speaking immigrants have populated neighborhoods near downtown and on the city's westside.
Perez, a U.S. citizen who came here from Mexico illegally three decades ago, said the community knows who is here illegally, but most of the illegal immigrants work hard and don't cause trouble.
"They need us, but we need them too because there’s nobody going back to the fields and do the job," he said. "Nobody’s going to do the dirty job that they’re doing."
Arguments like that don't fly with Cawley and his group. They say that by entering the country illegally, immigrants have forfeited their shot at the American dream.
"All that we ask is that you respect our flag, you obey the law and you assimilate into our value and culture, that’s all," Cawley said.
At Rita Valencia's candy and candle shop in a new Latino shopping development on the city's westside, her merchandise includes spiritual candles that offer help finding jobs and legal aid. She said most of her customers are here illegally, and many have been here for years, establishing good credit, buying houses and finding good jobs.
"Here, they can still find a job without legal documents," she said.
While the percentage of undocumented workers is relatively small in relation to Utah's legal Hispanic population, the immigration debate dominates newspapers and airwaves, creating an atmosphere of intolerance toward those here legally, too.
"I hear people say, 'Mexicans are lazy. They come here and they take — they use up our money,' and then in the next sentence, 'We don’t like when you come because you take our jobs,'" Rodriguez said. "So which one is it? Are we lazy, or do we take your jobs? We can’t do both."
Every year it gets worse and worse, she said.
"A growing percentage of people have made up their mind that they are no longer going to give Hispanic-looking people the benefit of the doubt," Cawley said. Doing so, he contends, aids and abets illegal immigration in Utah.
"They don’t deserve to be met with this hostility and this anger and resentment by people like me. They don’t deserve it," Cawley said. "But I’m not going to take that risk anymore."
Representatives in the Utah House have already acted swiftly, pushing six bills through committee as of Thursday, including bills that repeal in-state tuition and driver-privilege cards.
"We need to obey the law," Donnelson said. "The federal government needs to do something about the law, and they are not, and it is left up to the states. And so we become between a rock and a hard spot because of that."
*Looks like the illegals are running out of places to get their freebies. One state at a time the lunatics running the asylums are finally realizing the tremendous tax burden that illegals really are. If you take away the freebies they leave.
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By KEVIN FREKING,AP Posted: 2008-01-31 23:11:12 Filed Under: Politics News
WASHINGTON (Jan. 31) - President Bush's 2009 budget will virtually freeze most domestic programs and seek nearly $200 billion in savings from federal health care programs, a senior administration official said Thursday.
Overall, the Bush budget will exceed $3 trillion, this official said. The deficit is expected to reach about $400 billion for this year and next.
Bush on Monday will present his proposed budget for the new fiscal year to Congress, where it's unlikely to gain much traction in the midst of a presidential campaign. The president has promised a plan that would erase the budget deficit by 2012 if his policies are followed.
To that end, Bush will propose nearly $178 billion in savings from Medicare over five years— nearly triple what he proposed last year. Much of the savings would come from freezing reimbursement rates for most health care providers for three years. An additional $17 billion would come from the Medicaid program, the state-federal partnership that provides health coverage to the poor.
The budget for most domestic programs funded by Congress will look similar to last year's, according to the official, from the Office of Management and Budget.
"It's a very small increase," he said. "Very small."
A second administration official said domestic discretionary spending would increase by less than 1 percent under Bush's proposal.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the budget has not yet been released
In his State of the Union address Monday, Bush said his budget envisioned a surplus in 2012. "American families have to balance their budgets, and so should their government," he said.
The federal government is expected to spend about $650 billion on Medicare and Medicaid in 2008. It represents more than $1 out of every $5 spent by the federal government.
The OMB official said the president views the budget as a final opportunity to slow the growth of entitlement programs but recognizes that Congress probably won't go along.
He said spending on Medicare would increase under Bush's new budget, but not as quickly as had been expected. "Medicare will grow at 5 percent. It just won't grow over 7 percent," he said.
Savings also would come by charging wealthier people higher monthly premiums for Medicare's drug program.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the Bush budget would project the 10-year cost of the program, from 2008 to 2017, at $915 billion. That's $117 billion less than what had been forecast last summer. The agency attributed the lower estimate to smaller increases in the cost of medicines, and better deals negotiated between insurers and drug manufacturers.
The agency said 25.4 million people were now enrolled in a Medicare drug plan.
Bush last year asked Congress for nearly $65 billion in Medicare savings over five years. Congress refused to go along.
Independent experts have warned that the government needs to address the rising cost of health care for businesses to stay competitive and for the government to be able to pay for other important programs in the decades ahead.
"In fact, if there is one thing that could bankrupt America, it's runaway health care costs. We must not allow that to happen," David M. Walker, the U.S. comptroller general, told lawmakers Tuesday during a congressional hearing.
But Democrats said Bush's budget targets the wrong health care providers for cuts. They said insurers subsidized to provide Medicare coverage are being overpaid.
"The president is proposing to once again slash health care coverage for seniors and low-income working Americans," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said. "The president's cuts are exactly the wrong medicine when the cost of health care and the number of uninsured continue to rise and families are feeling economically insecure."
Health care providers said the president's recommendations would make it harder for them to meet expenses, which would continue to rise as a result of inflation, even as their reimbursement rates were frozen.
"That level of reduction is so outrageous that it will be summarily rejected by members of both parties in Congress," said Tom Nickels, senior vice president of federal relations for the American Hospital Association. "I don't think it will be taken seriously."
*If they stop paying for illegal alien births, anchor baby welfare payments and rescind the 14th Amendment that will save us gazillions. Take away the freebies and they will leave.
Agents nab 406 suspected illegal immigrants I-20 has become main line for smugglers
Ana Radelat • Clarion-Ledger Washington Bureau • February 1, 2008
WASHINGTON — Federal agents, with the help of local law enforcement, detained 406 suspected illegal immigrants between Vicksburg and Jackson on I-20, which authorities say is becoming a major corridor for smugglers.
"Operation Uniforce" a two-week effort to cut off the traffic of undocumented workers to the East Coast, was "very successful" compared with similar operations run out of the Customs and Border Protection's New Orleans office, said spokesman Ramon Rivera.
Similar Border Patrol operations were conducted last year along I-10 in Baton Rouge and Mobile, resulting in hundreds of deportations and detentions. Operation Uniforce began Jan. 13 and wrapped up Saturday.
Most of the immigrants detained were taken to a federal facility in Oakdale, La. Six were turned over to federal prosecutors on smuggling charges, and one kilo of cocaine was seized, Rivera said.
Most of the detainees are Mexican nationals.
Operation Uniforce was an effort for the border patrol agents to try to disrupt networks or roads used by smugglers. Federal agents hope to force the traffickers to take longer, costlier and more circuitous routes to discourage the practice.
"It is not an unusual operation, but it's new to this area," Rivera said of Operation Uniforce.
He also said federal agents may return to Mississippi. Forty border patrol agents were involved in Operation Uniforce.
Capt. Steven Pickett, spokesman for the Hinds County Sheriff's Department, said he would welcome the return of federal agents. Immigration law is a federal concern, he said. "Locally, our hands are somewhat tied," he said.
The Sheriff's Department had a role in Operation Uniforce, however, helping staff traffic stops and transport detainees, he said.
I-20 is becoming almost as popular as I-10 for transporting immigrants to farms, poultry plants and construction jobs in Eastern states. It runs across the South and links up major highways, including I-95 that runs from Florida to the Canadian border.
The UK's Opinion Research Business has released another statistical study of Iraqi casualties since the launching of the American invasion, one that updates, revises, and essentially confirms their earlier estimate of a million-plus dead. The price of "liberation" is indeed high, but was it worth it? The Iraqis have a simple answer: some 60 percent tell pollsters attacks on US and allied military personnel are justified. So much for being greeted with garlands of flowers and hailed as "liberators."
The Americans have a similar, if less emphatic answer: a recent poll asking if the invasion and subsequent occupation "was or was not worth the number of U.S. military casualties and the financial cost of the war" yields a resounding no, with 59 percent – up three points.
A million dead – and for what?
So that the neoconservatives could stand astride Washington and the world, bellowing threats and beating their chests in the wake of 9/11, braying that everything – everything – had changed, especially the basic rules of human decency. Because it was "doable," as Paul Wolfowitz put it. Because our foreign policy is in large part built around the concept of making the Middle East safe for Israel. And, most of all, because of the sheer hubris of those who thought themselves above the laws of God and man – who thought they were gods, and let loose American thunderbolts with reckless abandon, with deadly consequences.
The response to the last ORB data release was vehement: the US government, which doesn't even bother counting Iraqi dead and wounded, derided it, and the neoconservative pundits lit into it as "propaganda" and an exaggeration, whilst the more ambitious assailed the methodology of every attempt to measure the vast war crime that the killing fields of Iraq represent.
Yet the results of the ORB study have been expanded, to include estimates from rural as well as urban areas. The major criticism of the previous study was that the emphasis on conducting interviews in urban areas skewed the results in the direction of an overestimation: the revised study meets this critique head on, covering all areas of the country except for Karbala and Al Anbar, for safety reasons, and also Irbil – for political reasons. It seems Kurdish regional government officials weren't eager for a full accounting of the war dead, for reasons best known to themselves: the interviewers were barred from conducting interviews in the area. The impact of these omissions pushes their estimate downward, and yet the number is astonishing.
Think of it: a million plus dead. A full 20 percent of all Iraqi households have endured a death in the family not of natural causes, the great majority of these being Sunnis.
In light of this horror, I couldn't help but think of John McCain's remarks the other night at the Republican debate, defending his stated contention that we could and probably should stay in Iraq for a hundred years:
"We are going to be there for some period of time, but it's American casualties, not American presence. We've got troops right next door in Kuwait. We'll probably have them there for a long time. We have troops in Bosnia. We've had troops in South Korea for some 50 years. By the way, President Eisenhower didn't bail us out of Korea.But the point is that we need to protect America's national security interest. It's not a matter of presence. It's a matter of casualties."
American, not Iraqi casualties: the latter don't even figure into McCain's moral calculus, such as it is.
As long as Americans aren't dying in any great numbers, it's okay to drive us into bankruptcy, alienate the peoples of the world, and fuel the fires of anti-American terrorism. Since our national security is so often invoked by McCain and his ilk to justify their policy of perpetual war, it needs to be emphasized that the tactics employed by suicide bombers and other terrorist acts have historically been responses to military occupation by a far superior force. Yet McCain looks forward to extending our suzerainty over Iraq for a hundred years. How many more Iraqis will die in the span of Iraq's American century?
McCain is not so much of a maverick that he doesn't bother looking at the polls: he knows how many Americans think the war wasn't worth it, and he knows he can't win unless he confronts this sentiment. So he's going out there with his line about how "it's a matter of casualties." For all his self-promoted concept of himself as some sort of crusading idealist, in this instance at least his cold political calculation is that Americans just care about American dead, and screw the Iraqis.
Except it isn't true. Soldiers are coming home with terrifying tales of the war and the level of violence, which is not declining but visibly rising after a brief lull even as the neocon pundits sing paeans to the surge. The American people are horrified by what Bush and his neocon brain trust have wrought in Iraq, and they aren't going to be anything but repulsed by this kind of moral blindness, which only takes into account our own costs, both human and material.
Not that McCain, whose self-confessed difficulty with economic issues comes as a surprise to no one, cares much about the latter. He grimaced and rolled his eyes during the debate, as Ron Paul laid out the economic consequences of the McCainiac hyper-interventionist foreign policy. In answer to a question about whether we're better off now than we were eight years ago, the Texas troublemaker averred:
"No, no, we're not better off. We're worse off, but it's partially this administration's fault and it's the Congress. But it also involves an economic system that we've had for a long time and a monetary system that we've had and a foreign policy that's coming to an end and we have to admit this. … We were elected in the year 2000 to have a humble foreign policy and not police the world, and yet what are we doing now? We're bogged down in another war. We're bankrupting our country and we have an empire that we're trying to defend which costs us $1 trillion a year."
It's coming to an end, and we have to admit this, because the markets are roiling as the prospect of an American super-recession takes shape, and the central bank acts with unprecedented boldness to shore up the shaky foundations of an economy built around artificial bank credit expansion. This, after all, is how states finance wars, and especially wars of choice (i.e. wars of aggression) such as Iraq: the invisible taxation of bank credit expansion, i.e. inflating the money supply. Without the link to gold, or some other commodity or basket of commodities, governments are free to debase their own currencies, and thus destroy the very basis of commerce.
The three branches of the federal government are bound by the chains of the Constitution, and yet when gold was separated from the value of the currency the government was "freed" from its bounds, and unchained it went forth – to make war.
Financing wars, especially unpopular wars, is a tricky business: direct taxation is the least desirable option. It might create undue awareness of the war's real costs. Much better to exact the invisible tax of inflation, which eats into people's savings and takes its highest toll on those least able to afford it. It's the most regressive tax of all, yet both political parties support it fulsomely. They'd rather sell the country's assets off to the Chinese than give up their bipartisan delusions of Washington as the Imperial City, the capital of a rising world empire. Paul's dark warning that we have "a foreign policy that's coming to an end and we have to admit this" certainly rings true as the financial markets quiver on the edge of a massive meltdown.
Our empire is a bubble that's about to burst, along with the economic bubble the Federal Reserve lives in mortal fear of. Whether this is punishment from on high, or simply economic "blowback" rebounding from our fiscal and foreign policies, is a matter of taste and disposition. I'll leave it to the secularists and the faithful to argue it out, and simply note that we're about to pay the price of our deadly hubris.
Feb. 3, 2008, 12:16AM Laws aimed at hiring illegal workers drive many to Texas
Crackdown in nearby states brings influx
By JAMES PINKERTON Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Comments (104) Recommend (2)
RESOURCES Blog: Immigration Chronicles
NEW IMMIGRATION LAWS
A look at recent legislation enacted in other states regarding illegal immigration:
• Oklahoma: The statute, which took effect in November, makes it a crime to transport, harbor or employ illegal immigrants.
• Arizona: Effective Jan. 1, the law suspends the business license of employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers. On a second offense, the license is revoked.
Illegal immigrants are flowing into Texas across its long borders. But they aren't just swimming across the Rio Grande from Mexico or making dangerous treks through the rugged desert.
Instead, a new rush of illegal immigrants are driving down Interstate 35 from Oklahoma or heading east to Texas from Arizona to flee tough new anti-illegal immigrant laws in those and other states.
Though few numbers are available because illegal residents are difficult to track, community activists say immigrants have arrived in Houston and Dallas in recent months, and they expect hundreds more families to relocate to the Bayou City soon.
''They're really tightening the screws," said Mario Ortiz, an undocumented Mexican worker who came to Houston after leaving Phoenix last year. ''There have been a lot coming — it could be 100 a day."
The growing exodus is the result of dozens of new state and local laws aimed at curbing illegal immigration. The two toughest measures are in Oklahoma and Arizona.
The Oklahoma statute, which took effect in November, makes it a crime to transport, harbor or hire illegal immigrants. Effective Jan. 1, the Arizona law suspends the business license of employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers. On a second offense, the license is revoked.
''It's a wave that's happening across the United States," said Nelson Reyes, executive director of the Central American Resource Center in Houston, which has helped immigrants who recently relocated in Houston from Virginia and South Carolina. ''There is a migration, within the United States, to the states and cities more receptive to the reality of the undocumented immigrant."
So far, results of the new laws have been dramatic.
No restrictive laws here
In Oklahoma, one builder estimated that 30 percent of the Hispanic work force left Tulsa. Reports out of Arizona indicate that several restaurants have closed in Phoenix because of a shortage of workers, and vacancies at apartment complexes are increasing, in part because of departing immigrants.
Experts predict immigrants will flock to Houston and other cities in Texas because of the state's reputation as a welcoming destination.
The construction industry in Texas has largely weathered a national housing slump, they note, adding there is a long tradition of relying on skilled labor from Latin America.
And so far, Texas has not passed any statewide law targeting the employment of undocumented workers.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 1.6 million illegal immigrants were in Texas in 2006.
''Texas is still very much an entrepreneurial place, where you can find your place in this economy," said James Hollifield, a Southern Methodist University professor and migration expert. ''It's not an immigrant's paradise, but if you work hard and keep your head down you can get ahead."
*Mayra Figueroa, director of American For Everyone, a Houston nonprofit that advocates for labor rights of immigrants, said the strict laws in other states are pushing immigrants to Houston.
*'There were a lot of people moving from Houston to Oklahoma, and now they're coming back because they are not able to work," said Figueroa, adding that many of them are Central American refugees. ''I can say hundreds of families are coming to cities like Houston, because of the law."
But the influx of undocumented workers into Texas is not welcomed by everyone. Critics say illegal immigrants are taxing government resources, such as hospital emergency rooms and public schools.
''That is not good," Larry Youngblood, leader of the Houston chapter of the Texas Border Volunteers, said about the new wave of immigrants. ''We've got about 400,000 to 450,000 in Houston already. And obviously they're not all day laborers — not all are criminals — but we don't need more."
''We have to assume they'll bring some wives and kids with them, so therefore our schools will be re-inundated. And traffic will be worse, too."
Labor up, income down Some of the new residents are working as day laborers in Houston including Oscar Jeovani Fernandez, a 36-year-old Honduran native who left Oklahoma.
He said he is lucky now if he can work two or three days and earn $150 a week — a far cry from his steady job pulling down $600 a week hanging wallboard for a home builder near Tulsa.
''I was working there in September, but they passed a law that allows the local police to act like immigration agents," Fernandez said. ''I came here 25 days after they passed the law — I wasn't going to let them experiment on me."
Ortiz, a native of southern Mexico, said he left Phoenix eight months ago working 60 to 70 hours a week as a nursery worker.
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In 2006, about three-quarters of all Arizonans voted in favor of four more ballot measures aimed at illegal immigrants, including one that bans undocumented immigrants from receiving in-state residency tuition for college and other benefits. Another denies an award of punitive damages in any civil court to an illegal immigrant.
“My biggest problem is the culture thing,†she says. “They come here and disrespect our culture…by not learning English.†
"It’s not a good situation," said Utah Rep. Glenn Donnelson, R.-North Ogden. "As other states take away the benefits, then we become a magnet, and I say that the best fence to build is not chain link and barbed wire, but is to take away the benefits — take away the perks of being an illegal immigrant." 
The state legislature is considering bills that would eliminate driver-privilege cards and in-state tuition for undocumented workers, give local authorities expanded power to fight illegals, and add safeguards to combat identity theft. 
WASHINGTON — Federal agents, with the help of local law enforcement, detained 406 suspected illegal immigrants between Vicksburg and Jackson on I-20, which authorities say is becoming a major corridor for smugglers.
but
The Oklahoma statute, which took effect in November, makes it a crime to transport, harbor or hire illegal immigrants. Effective Jan. 1, the Arizona law suspends the business license of employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers. On a second offense, the license is revoked. 
''We have to assume they'll bring some wives and kids with them, so therefore our schools will be re-inundated. And traffic will be worse, too."