Blue Crab Boulevard

All too often lost in all the conflicting rhetoric about illegal immigration is one persistent bit of nastiness: human trafficking. A major smuggling ring has just been broken up in Arizona, with authorities raiding a large number of "drop houses", arresting 20 so far (more arrests are expected) and detaining 210 illegal immigrants. Suggling illegal immigrants is big business. Authorities allege that the smuggling ring pulled in as much as $130,000 per week. And this is just one of many smuggling rings.

PHOENIX — In a case highlighting this city’s prominent role in the smuggling of illegal immigrants across the border, the authorities conducted a series of raids on Thursday, arresting what they said were the leaders of a ring that helped transport hundreds of people to way stations in Phoenix.

In some ways, it was just a typical day here, where the police regularly discover houses with dozens of people held by smugglers until they can pay their passage from Mexico. In a separate operation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and the Maricopa County sheriff here announced the arrests of more than 100 people suspected of being in the country illegally who were on probation for various crimes.

But the raids on Thursday morning, by a task force of state, local and federal officers, provided a glimpse behind what the authorities described as one of the more elaborate operations that bring thousands of people across the border in this state, which has more illegal crossings than any other.

At dawn, officers swarmed houses, mostly in western Phoenix, seizing ledgers, money, weaponry and people suspected of involvement in a major, lucrative cell that controlled the transportation of people from a border town, Naco, to Phoenix.

The authorities made 20 arrests, including those of two Cubans accused of directing the operation. They also detained 210 illegal immigrants and discovered 13 so-called drop houses that were way stations for smuggled immigrants, the police said. In all, the authorities planned to arrest about 75 people, they said.

Authorities say that the smugglers charge around $2,500 per person to bring the illegal into the country. They were running as many as four loads of up to ten illegals per day. Again, this was only one of the rings operating in Arizona - 100 drop houses were discovered last year.

AFP has a dramatic, sob-story article about how Arizona's anti-illegal immigration law is beginning to cause what they dub 'Hispanic Panic.' It seems employers are firing illegals, many of whom are fleeing the state, either back to Mexico or to other states. But they apparently slipped in telling this narrative and left something in that bears paying attention to.

PHOENIX, Arizona (AFP) - One month after Arizona introduced a law cracking down on businesses which employ illegal immigrants, Latino workers are fleeing the state and companies are laying off employees in droves, officials and activists say.
 
Arizona has become one of the frontlines of the US immigration debate and broke new ground on January 1 with a law that threatens to put of business companies which knowingly hire undocumented workers.

The effects of the law have been immediate, according to businessmen, workers and rights activists who spoke to AFP, with companies driving up wages to attract labor while being forced to part company with prized employees.

Even though a federal judge ruled last week that there will be no prosecutions under the law until March, it has done little to prevent a phenomenon being dubbed "Hispanic Panic."

"There's a lot of fear and some people are leaving," said Salvador Reza, an immigrant-rights activist who runs a day labor center in Phoenix.

"The fear is not only at the worker level, it's at the employer level. I've never seen that before in my life."

Workers are going back to Mexico or to other states, Reza said. He predicted small businesses forced to lay off skilled employees like welders will now pay them in cash, creating a black economy.

"The underground economy is going to take hold now, and there will be less money for the state," Reza said.

Ten men were laid off at Ironco, a steel fabrication company in Phoenix which builds large-scale construction projects.

"We had to let them go," president Sheridan Bailey said. "Unfortunately some of these people were our best workers. This is terribly tragic."

Two out of three men who apply at Ironco, a construction firm that specialises in buildings and parking garages made with heavy steel, are Hispanic or foreign-born Hispanic, the company said.

Ironco has raised steel fitters' wages 30 percent from a year ago, according to Bailey. "We've raised wages, competing for a diminishing supply (of workers)," he said. "WeÂ?ve been on a campaign of quality improvement, training, scouring the waterfront, so to speak, for American vets, ex-offenders trying to find their way back into society."

Catch that? Wages have risen 30% for legal workers. They have been trying to hire people who have been forced to the margins of society due to a flood of cheap, illegal workers. And they are paying much better wages in order to do so. High fence, wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who play by the rules. And higher real wages for those who do.

I don't think they meant to tell that in their narrative.

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.

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.

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.

The Tucson Citizen reports that many illegal immigrants are fleeing Arizona in the face of the new state laws mandating sanctions on employers who hire illegals. It is still only a trickle, but the numbers will almost certainly increase if the new law survives the latest legal challenge and actually goes into effect in January.

The number returning to Mexico is difficult to calculate, but there is no question that many families are leaving, according to Mexican government officials, local community leaders and immigrants themselves.
 
"The situation in Arizona has become very tough," Jorge said minutes after driving into a Mexican immigration and customs checkpoint south of the border on Mexico 15.
Dozens of immigrants are leaving the U.S. daily, and even more are expected to leave once the sanctions law takes effect in January, provided the law survives a last-minute legal challenge, said Rosendo Hernandez, president of the advocacy group Immigrants Without Borders.
 
"If people can't find work, they won't be able to pay their bills, so they will leave," Hernandez said.

In what are considered bellwethers of permanent moves back to Mexico, the Mexican consulate in Phoenix has seen a dramatic increase in applications for Mexican birth certificates, passports and other documents that immigrants living in Arizona will need to return home.
In November alone, the consulate processed 240 applications for Mexican birth certificates, three times as many as the same month last year, said Carlos Flores Vizcarra, Mexican consul general of Phoenix.
 
Processing applications

The consulate also has processed more than 16,500 applications for Mexican passports this year, nearly twice as many as last year. Vizcarra attributed some of the demand for passports to stricter travel regulations among the U.S., Mexico and Canada slated to take effect in January. But he said many illegal immigrants are applying for passports in case they lose their jobs due to the sanctions law or a slowdown in the economy and therefore want to go back and live in Mexico.

"People are fearful. They are getting ready as much as they can (to leave)," he said.
Mexican officials and border authorities expect southbound traffic to rise significantly this week as Christmas approaches.

The exodus has drawn cheers from foes of illegal immigration.

The story should enrage people. The family they profile used falsified documents to obtain work. They are finally leaving because of the new law - which is already doing what it was intended to do before it goes into effect. It took the threat of the law for their employers to bother to check - whereupon the forged documents were discovered and both were terminated. They were then unable to find other jobs because the law, again, functioned as designed.

The paper fails to ask if the two used stolen identities, which would be nice to know, especially for the people who had their identities compromised. They're too busy trying to make the family into sympathetic figures. It would be nice to see some concern for their fellow citizens as well.

Clue to the politicians: enforcement actually works. We can severely reduce the number of people entering this country illegally, control the borders and liberalize the legal immigration system. A high fence, a wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who follow the rules. Short shrift for those who break them.

This is just lovely. It seems that US Border Patrol agents are coming under increasing numbers of attacks - mostly by rock-throwing Mexicans - at the US border with Mexico. Agents have responded more aggressively in recent months as longer-range, non-lethal weapons have become available. The agents are firing pepper ball weapons and teargas back at the rock-throwers.

The Border Patrol says its agents have been attacked nearly 1,000 times during a one-year period.

The agency's top official in San Diego, Mike Fisher, said agents are taking action because Mexican authorities have been slow to respond. When an attack happens, he said, American authorities often wait hours for them to come, and help usually never arrives.

"We have been taking steps to ensure that our agents are safe," Fisher said.

Mexico's acting consul general in San Diego, Ricardo Pineda, has insisted that U.S. authorities stop firing onto Mexican soil. He met with Border Patrol officials last month after the agency fired tear gas into Mexico. The agency defended that counterattack, saying agents were being hit with a hail of ball bearings from slingshots in Mexico.

U.S. officials say the violence indicates that smugglers are growing more desperate as stepped-up security makes it harder to sneak across the border. The assailants try to distract agents long enough to let people dash in the United States.

The head of a union representing Border Patrol employees said the violence also results from the decision to put agents right up against the border, a departure from the early 1990s when they waited farther back to make arrests.

"When you get that close to the fence, your agents are sitting ducks," said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

Border Patrol agents were attacked 987 times along the U.S.-Mexico border during the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, the agency said. That's up 31 percent from 752 attacks a year earlier, and it's the highest number since the agency began recording attacks in the late 1990s.

About two-thirds of the attacks were with rocks. Many of the rest involved physical assaults, such as illegal immigrants getting into fist fights with guards.

About one of every four attacks occurred in San Diego, and most of those happened along a heavily fortified, 10-mile stretch of the border starting at the Pacific Ocean.

By refusing to deal with this on their side of the border, Mexico is inviting a tragedy. When it comes - and it likely will - it will be their fault, not the fault of the United States.

UPDATE: Same AP report from MSNBC, that link should remain good unlike the Yahoo News one that expires after a short while.

Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School and the daughter of immigrants, pens an op-ed in today's Washington Post about the need for America to get it right on immigration. Getting it right means not veering to either extreme position in the debate. I think she presents somewhat of a caricature of many of the people who are opposed to the situation we have on our hands at this moment, but she still makes some excellent points.

If you don't speak Spanish, Miami really can feel like a foreign country. In any restaurant, the conversation at the next table is more likely to be Spanish than English. And Miami's population is only 65 percent Hispanic. El Paso is 76 percent Latino. Flushing, N.Y., is 60 percent immigrant, mainly Chinese.

Chinatowns and Little Italys have long been part of America's urban landscape, but would it be all right to have entire U.S. cities where most people spoke and did business in Chinese, Spanish or even Arabic? Are too many Third World, non-English-speaking immigrants destroying our national identity?

For some Americans, even asking such questions is racist. At the other end of the spectrum, the conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly fulminates against floods of immigrants who threaten to change America's "complexion" and replace what he calls the "white Christian male power structure."

But for the large majority in between, Democrats and Republicans alike, these questions are painful, with no easy answers. At some level, most of us cherish our legacy as a nation of immigrants. But are all immigrants really equally likely to make good Americans? Are we, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warns, in danger of losing our core values and devolving "into a loose confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory of what had been the United States of America"?

My parents arrived in the United States in 1961, so poor that they couldn't afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only Chinese at home (for every English word accidentally uttered, my sister and I got one whack of the chopsticks). Today, my father is a professor at Berkeley, and I'm a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America's tolerance and opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.

Nevertheless, I think Huntington has a point.

Around the world today, nations face violence and instability as a result of their increasing pluralism and diversity. Across Europe, immigration has resulted in unassimilated, largely Muslim enclaves that are hotbeds of unrest and even terrorism. The riots in France last month were just the latest manifestation. With Muslims poised to become a majority in Amsterdam and elsewhere within a decade, major West European cities could undergo a profound transformation. Not surprisingly, virulent anti-immigration parties are on the rise.

Not long ago, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union disintegrated when their national identities proved too weak to bind together diverse peoples. Iraq is the latest example of how crucial national identity is. So far, it has found no overarching identity strong enough to unite its Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.

I think that the number of people who are opposed to immigration on racial grounds is a very small minority, just as I think that the number of people who are in favor of in on racial grounds are a small minority. But Chua's ideas for fixing the current mess sound very familiar. Regular readers will recognize them as being very much in line with what I have been advocating for some time here: A high fence, a wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who play be the rules. The fact is that English should be our official language, but we can and should welcome legal immigrants into this country. Our admissions policies should favor talent and recognize that we do need a good mix of people from all over the world. But the melting pot is still a necessary framework for making America work. So is a strong border that lets us be in control of who gets in.

America has succeeded as a nation of immigrants because we have been able to assimilate wave after wave of people coming from all over the globe. While the new arrivals may always be more in tune with where they came from for many years, those immigrant's children have become Americans. That is how we should still be functioning. I would suggest reading all of Chua's piece. I think she gets the essentials correct.

John Fund comments again today on the deal Nancy Pelosi made with the Hispanic Caucus to kill a bipartisan amendment to a funding bill that provides money to FBI, NASA and Justice Department. That amendment would have indemnified the Salvation Army and other employers from efforts by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to penalize them for enforcing English language requirements in the workplace (original post here.). The Hispanic Caucus had refused to vote for a patch to the Alternative Minimum Tax bill if Pelosi didn't kill the amendment. Fund points out the destructiveness of the position taken by the Hispanic Caucus - to Hispanics and other immigrants.

In theory, employers can escape the EEOC's clutches if they can prove their policies are based on grounds of safety or "compelling business necessity." But most companies choose to settle rather than be saddled with the legal bills. Synchro Start Products, a Chicago firm, paid $55,000 to settle an EEOC suit against its English-only policy, which it says it adopted after the use of multiple languages led to miscommunication. When one group of employees speak in a language other workers can't understand, the company said, it's easy for personal misunderstandings to undermine morale. Many companies complain they are in a Catch-22–potentially liable to lawsuits if employees insult each other but facing EEOC action if they pass English-only rules to better supervise those employee comments.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), who authored the now-stalled amendment to prohibit the funding of EEOC lawsuits against English-only rules, is astonished at the opposition he's generated. Rep. Joe Baca (D., Calif.), chair of the Hispanic Caucus, boasted that "there ain't going to be a bill" including the Alexander language because Speaker Pelosi had promised him the conference committee handling the Justice Department's budget would never meet. So Sen. Alexander proposed a compromise, only requiring that Congress be given 30 days notice before the filing of any EEOC lawsuit. "I was turned down flat," he told me. "We are now celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English."

That's what pro-assimilation forces are moving to do. TV Azteca, Mexico's second-largest network, is launching a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that teaching English empowers Latinos. "If you live in this country, you have to speak as everybody else," Jose Martin Samano, Azteca's U.S. anchor, told Fox News. "Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people."….

….The alternative to Americanization is polarization. Already a tenth of the population speaks English poorly or not at all. Almost a quarter of all K-12 students nationwide are children of immigrants living between two worlds. It's time for people of good will to reject both the nativist and anti-assimilation extremists and act. If the federal government spends billions on the Voice of America for overseas audiences and on National Public Radio for upscale U.S. listeners, why not fund a "Radio New America" whose primary focus is to teach English and U.S. customs to new arrivals? 

Locking immigrants into a nether region where they cannot communicate with the rest of the people in the country is a recipe for creating a permanent under-class. It leads to balkanization and fragmentation of the society as a whole. The Hispanic Caucus has not done any favors for Hispanics or other immigrants with this. I disagree with Fund's characterization of people who want English only rules as nativist, however. Some are, but the majority are not. Most Americans are perfectly happy with legal immigrants who want to become Americans. What they are not happy with is an illegal underclass with a different language.

The Wall Street Journal reports that there is growing anxiety among Democrats over immigration issues (like the one in the previous post. Many of the politicians feel that they are in real danger of alienating traditional core constituencies over the party's stand on immigration. The issue is starting to become a very dangerous one for Democrats.

Democrats "are pretty jumpy on the issue," says Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat who pushed for immigration overhaul in the House. "They would prefer to allow the Republicans to shepherd the Hispanic votes into the Democratic column without having to scare away a single other voter themselves," he says.

"That's not likely to happen. "This election could turn on this issue if we don't handle it intelligently," says Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Democratic presidential candidate. After a recent Iowa City foreign-policy speech, four of the 30 questions passed up to him from the audience were about immigration.

In a Nov. 5 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 11% of adults — and 4% of Democratic voters — said illegal immigration is their top priority. But members of that minority, organized on the Internet, have created political turmoil by flooding lawmakers' offices with faxes and regularly raising the issue on the campaign trail.

Similarly, a November University of Iowa poll shows just 2.4% of Iowa Democrats consider immigration as the issue "most important" to determining their vote, but 85% said a candidate's position on immigration is important or very important to them.

The report indicates that blue collar, African-American and middle class voters are all in jeopardy for the Democrats if they turn too hard in the direction of appearing to champion immigrant's rights over the needs of those voters. (Which they essentially just did as I pointed out in the previous post.) This is a minefield for the Democrats. If the Republicans get this issue right, addressing concerns over border security and pointing out that stemming a flood of illegal immigrants is in the best interests of immigrants who are here legally as well as other groups who are feeling downward wage pressure, this could swing the election in a new direction.

Failure to address immigration issues hurt the Republicans badly in 2006. It could prove even more devastating to the Democrats.