That “Surprise!” Thing Again

A few days ago, I posted about the apparently surprising news that enforcing laws against illegal immigration actually works in getting illegals to go back to their own countries. Lo and behold, Reuters has just noticed the same thing. Illegals are "self-deporting" at record levels.

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Mexican illegal immigrant Lindi sat down with her husband Marco Antonio in the weeks before Christmas to decide when to go back to Mexico.

She has spent three years working as a hairdresser in and around Phoenix, but now she figures it is time to go back to her hometown of Aguascalientes in central Mexico.

"The situation has got so tough that there don't seem to be many options left for us," Lindi, who asked for her last name not to be used, told Reuters.

The couple are among a growing number of illegal immigrants across the United States who are starting to pack their bags and move on as a crackdown on undocumented immigrants widens and the U.S. economy slows, turning a traditional Christmas trek home into a one-way trip.

In the past year, U.S. immigration police have stepped up workplace sweeps across the country and teamed up with a growing number of local forces to train officers to enforce immigration laws.

Meanwhile, a bill seeking to offer many of the 12 million illegal immigrants a path to legal status was tossed by the U.S. Congress, spurring many state and local authorities to pass their own measures targeting illegal immigrants.

The toughening environment has been coupled with a turndown in the U.S. economy, which has tipped the balance toward self deportation for many illegal immigrants left struggling to find work.

There is quite a lot of whining in the story about how the decline of the dollar has undercut the amount of money that the illegal immigrants can export back home and about how the US economy has weakened, making it tougher for them to find work. The upside of all that is that if enough of these folks leave, they will cease to exert downward pressure on wages in the US. It will also decrease the burden of illegal immigrants on local governments. Citizens will benefit.

Some of the illegals are moving within the US to areas where enforcement is not as strict - those places will continue to see that downward wage pressure and an increasing demand on public services and will suffer for it - eventually, the citizens will be screaming for enforcement in those areas as well. If anything, this all proves that the problem of illegal immigration can be solved. We can have strong borders while liberalizing our legal immigration programs.

High fence, wide gate. It will work.

I’ll Be Hosed For Christmas

Somehow, this just seems to go with the earlier post about British office parties.

(Bad Bob will love this one.)

Scottsdale, Arizona: No More

In response to the murder of a Phoenix police officer in September of this year, police in Scottsdale, Arizona have begun asking every, single suspect they arrest for proof of citizenship. If none is produced, Federal immigration authorities are notified. Why are they doing this? Because the cop-killer was an illegal immigrant who had twice been deported and had been arrested by Scottsdale police only 16 months before the murder. Had they taken the killer off the streets of this country then, officer Nick Erfle might not have died at the hands of Erik Jovani Martinez.

Scottsdale police had arrested Martinez on a misdemeanor charge 16 months earlier but they released him then because they didn't know he was an illegal immigrant who had been twice deported.

Erfle's killing "caused us to look at what were asking suspects," Scottsdale police Sgt. Mark Clark said. "If we arrest someone and then find that we called ICE (Customs and Immigration Enforcement) and they put a hold on them, then we know they have been deported and are back again."

Martinez was later killed by police after he stole a car and took a hostage, authorities said.

Now police in the affluent suburb ask every suspect about their citizenship, have ICE agents pick up those who are in this country illegally, and keep a database of possible illegal immigrants in case they turn up again.

Scottsdale Mayor Mary Manross supports the policy change and said that because every suspect is asked about citizenship, police are not engaged in racial profiling.

"I would not tolerate that," Manross said. "I think the chief has struck the right balance to do what we want to achieve."

ICE answers every call and helps get the lawbreakers out of the country. If police in the rest of the country did the same, how fast would the problem begin to go away? My guess is, not very long at all.

Coded Racism?

The Washington Post points out that many people are seeing an undercurrent of racism coming from the Clinton camp aimed at Barack Obama. There are some very unhappy people as a result of this.

It has unfolded mostly under the radar. But an important development in the 2008 Democratic battle may be the building backlash among African Americans over comments from associates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that could be construed as jabs at Sen. Barack Obama's race.

These officials, including Clinton aides and prominent surrogates, have raised questions or dropped references about Obama's position on sentencing guidelines for crack vs. powder cocaine offenses; on his handgun control record; and on his admitted use of drugs as a youth. The context was always Obama's "electability." But the Illinois senator's campaign advisers said some African American leaders detect a pattern, and they believe it could erode Clinton's strong base of black support.

They have examples of the reactions - people are not amused by this. There is also an undercurrent of a soft racism at work. Those who argue that Obama should not be nominated because people might choose to vote against him because of his race are in that camp. In effect, they are projecting their own feelings onto others and hiding their real objections this way. You have to wonder whether it is these perceived coded racial attacks that are the real cause of the steady erosion in Clinton's support.

National Health Incompetence Service

Happy Christmas, Britain. Just ahead of the holiday, the National Health Service delivers a gift to hundreds of thousands of victims patients of the socialized medical system. Yes, indeed, the NHS, shows its Christmas spirit, indeed.

By losing the medical records of hundreds of thousands of Britons.

Nine NHS trusts have admitted losing confidential patients’ information in the aftermath of the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) data loss scandal, it emerged today.

Hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have been affected by the breaches of strict data protection rules by the health service.

The losses were disclosed by the Sunday Mirror newspaper as police continued to hunt for two HMRC computer discs containing the details of 25 million child benefit claimants.

Since the tax discs went missing in the post it has also emerged that three million motorists’ details have been lost in Iowa, in the American mid-west.

The sheer level of bureaucratic incompetence involved here is stunning. The excuses trotted out by the NHS are pathetic:

“There is no evidence of any data falling into the wrong hands."

Oh, they promise that the guilty will be punished. They'll probably complete their investigations sometime around the next millennium. Or the one after.

Still think socialized medicine is a great idea?

Losing The Talent Battle

Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel Corporation, points out that Europe is making a smart move on granting visas to highly educated foreign immigrants, one that will severely disadvantage the United States in the brain game, as it were. While Barrett obviously has a dog in this fight, he also makes sense in pointing out the asinine visa system the US has in place at the moment.

The European Union took a step recently that the U.S. Congress can't seem to muster the courage to take. By proposing a simple change in immigration policy, E.U. politicians served notice that they are serious about competing with the United States and Asia to attract the world's top talent to live, work and innovate in Europe. With Congress gridlocked on immigration, it's clear that the next Silicon Valley will not be in the United States.

European politicians face many of the same political pressures surrounding immigration as their U.S. counterparts, and they, too, are not immune to those pressures. Nationalist and anti-immigrant factions in several Western European countries have made political gains in recent elections and are widely viewed as mainstream. Despite the hot-button nature of immigration issues, though, E.U. politicians advanced the "Blue Card" proposal in late October.

The plan is designed to attract highly educated workers by creating a temporary but renewable two-year visa. A streamlined application process would allow qualified prospective workers to navigate the system and start working in high-need jobs within one to three months.

This contrasts starkly with the byzantine system in place in the United States, which increasingly threatens America's long-term competitiveness.

To some extent, the high-tech industries have gamed the H-1B visa system, according to some other articles I read some time back, using the highly educated, but lower paid, immigrants to cut jobs for American programmers. So I am not entirely sympathetic to Barrett's arguments here. On the other hand, I am also very supportive of fixing the badly broken immigration system and the securing the border. That high fence, wide gate thing I keep writing about. If European governments approve the EU-backed measure, the US would, indeed, be at a disadvantage in the global talent market. This is something that needs to be fixed. Desperately.

Carnival Of The Insanities, Christmas Edition

Pat Santy, aka Dr. Sanity, has the special Christmas edition of the Carnival of the Insanities up. Many thanks to Pat for including a post from the Crabitat. As always, there are a lot of good blog posts from all over included in the merriment.

Bubba Fatigue

Michael Godwin has experienced an epiphany. It has suddenly occurred to him that he is utterly sick and tired of Bill Clinton.

Something was bugging me, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Then it hit me. While I was reading about the campaign, the realization came like a thunderbolt: I'm tired of Bill Clinton.

Tired of his half-truths and full lies about where he stood on Iraq. Tired of his bull, as when he says he'd campaign for Hillary "if we weren't married" and calls her a "world-class genius." Tired of his whining, as when he says the media has been too tough on her and too soft on Barack Obama.

All of this is as real as the lovey-dovey, hug-and-smile photo ops of them in Iowa. It's theater, staged for maximum political impact. We're being played again on the two-for-the-price-of-one angle.

But, as always, the game for him is about him. A vote for her is a vote for him. Vanity is a big part of it, with her victory the succession legacy he was denied when Al Gore lost.

All true, but I fear there is more to it now. He wants to be The Man, again. He wants it so much that it's not clear which President Clinton would be the President. The way he hogs the spotlight, the way he's trotted out to rescue her when she's in trouble and the way he sets the talking points mark him as the lead dog in the Clinton pack. Would he also make the decisions in the White House? All of them? Some of them?

One day he uses the phrase "roll of the dice" to warn against Obama, and soon she's using "roll of the dice" to warn about Obama. The echo chamber happens often enough that if she wins, Hillary could end up being No. 2 in her own administration. Maybe that's the plan.

That makes me really tired. I suspect I'm not alone.

That is precisely why a lot of people are feeling the way they do about the Clintons, I suspect. I also suspect that the campaign was worried about that too, at first. Remember that Hillary's campaign tried to keep Bill out of the spotlight until she started to slide in the polls. But pushing him out front the way they have now starts making people wonder who is actually being voted into office. Godwin isn't sure that this all isn't part of an engineered, Clintonian plan, however.

Even having to ask that question exhausts him, he says. Maybe enough people will experience Bubba fatigue to well and truly derail Hillary. We'll see.

Taking A Ride On The “Vomit Comet”

No, it isn't a new amusement park ride. That is what paramedics call the special medical vehicle that prowls the streets of London at this time of year, looking for drunken refugees from the traditional British office party. Or maybe notorious is the right word. The Washington Post reports on how amazingly out of hand the tradition is, which at least one commenter at The Guardian has vigorously defended with the words, "Projectile vomiting is our birthright."

LONDON — Just before midnight, the well-dressed, 25-year-old financial trader arrived by ambulance at the makeshift hospital tent pitched at a train station in central London. Blood oozed from his scalp, staining his elegant pink-striped shirt.

"What happened to your head?" asked Dixie Dean, an emergency care specialist with the London Ambulance Service, as she wrapped gauze around his head and checked for a skull fracture.

"I don't remember," said the dazed man. He was the latest injured drunk this busy night in the medical tent set up to care for casualties of the infamous British office party.

In many parts of the world, companies hold Christmas parties — or holiday, year-end bashes — for employees. But in Britain, the gatherings have become a particularly potent institution, legendary for massive booze consumption that leads to fistfights, firings and spur-of-the-blurry-moment indiscretions in boardrooms and parking lots.

Dean compared the Christmas season in Britain to New Year's Eve in New York — except that here, the binges run nightly for two solid weeks leading up to Dec. 25.

The spike in alcohol-related emergency calls from office parties is so predictable that the ambulance service has a special medical vehicle to patrol the streets. With room for five people, it's known as the "Booze Bus" or "Vomit Comet."

One power station I worked at had an annual Christmas party that was always put together by volunteers. It was the highlight of the holiday season for just about everyone. But it never got out of hand the way these British parties seem to. They also shut down the bars fairly early, so they avoided the worst kinds of excess, I suppose.

Bucking The Offensively Inoffensive

Mark Steyn looks at the Christmas ads that the presidential candidates have suddenly begun putting out. He pronounces the trend, led by Mike Huckabee, a revolt against the liberal's offensively inoffensive pseudo-religion. He also has an enormous amount of fun with the various ads.

In Sen. Clinton's Christmas message, Hillary is bundling up presents for all of us. They're beautifully wrapped, but oddly, instead of putting the name of the intended recipient on the gift tag, she's written out what's in them: "Universal Health Care," "Alternative Energy," "Middle-Class Tax Cuts." Strange. "Where did I put 'Universal Pre-K'?" she says. "Ah, there it is." If you thought Christmas at the mall was too materialistic, this is bonanza time. Message: It Takes A Santa's Village Staffed By Unionized Government Elves To Raise A Child, and I'm Santa and you're gonna need a much bigger chimney for all the federal entitlements I'll be tossing down there. Your stocking's gonna be packed tighter than Monica in fishnets.

And yet it's a strangely cheerless message. Less Santa than Frosty the Snowqueen.

John McCain's message is about the Christmas he spent being tortured. By having Hillary's Christmas message played to him over and over? No, silly. This was back in Vietnam.

John Edwards' message is the usual Dickensian affair about the two Americas. I forget the details, but the upshot is that one America is a land of spindly emaciated Tiny Tims with barely three farthings to rub together for their next cup of gruel, while the other's a marshmallow world where Dick Cheney, high on wassail, shoots a brace of turducken out of season, and then chows down as the Radio City Rockettes pop up out of his figgy pudding and come kicking across the dining table, singing "Santa Baby." You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by Edwards' poignant vignette of a divided America, tastefully lit with the warm glow of Christmas candles, unless it's the glare from his styling mousse.

He cheerfully savages the lot for the most part. One presumes he put this column to bed before Thompson's ad aired, since that one is not mentioned. His point about the revolt against the pseudo-religion of the First Church of Political Correctness is pretty well spot on (including Clinton's continued adherence to that faithless faith). He gives all the credit for the uprising to Huckabee's ad, which led the parade. So go read it all, it is Steyn, after all. So you know the wordplay alone would make it worth reading.