At its core, NAFTA was less a trade pact than a political, immigration, and investment agreement.

Pat Choate, Dangerous Business, 2008

A Dallas, Texas TV station (WFAA) did an excellent news report recently. In it, they tell how NAFTA TN visas were used to replace 100 American airline mechanics with cheaper ones from Mexico. It all happened at a company called San Antonio Aerospace (SAA).[Loophole allows for easy immigration for aircraft mechanics, WFAA.com, June 17, 2009]

This newsletter has discussed the TN (Trade NAFTA) visa many times. It is used to import the same types of foreign professionals as H-1B, except that the TN visa has far less protections for Americans, and the number of visas is unlimited from Canada and Mexico. It’s a recipe for disaster!

I wrote a paper in 2003 about TN visas. Nothing has changed since then so you can read about it here:

Embedded Visas by Rob Sanchez, Social Contract Press, 2003

The WFAA research and investigative journalism is first class, and the video report on their website is stunning and very scary. My only problem with the article is that they blamed what happened on loopholes in NAFTA. After close examination I just don’t think the loopholes they allege exist. Let me explain:

For starters, NAFTA doesn’t have a loophole to allow mechanics, and even AILA agrees.

“In order for an occupation to qualify as a “Scientific Technician/Technologist” under NAFTA Appendix 1603.D.1, the position must involve the use of principles of science, research and development, and/or scientific observations and calculations. (This is from the DOL job description.) The position must be in direct support of a professional in one of the sciences. The position must primarily include activity consistent with the support of a science professional. (This is from NAFTA Appendix 1603.D.1, footnote 5.) The technician who assists the engineer in the lab to design and develop a new technology may qualify as a scientific technician, but the mechanic who repairs and maintains that same technology after its built and used in everyday life, is not a scientific technician. From AILA InfoNet Doc. No. 08022774 (posted Feb. 27, 2008).”

At first glance even the text of the NAFTA agreement would seem to prohibit mechanics from using TN visas. NAFTA has a list of professionals that can get a TN visa in “Chapter Sixteen: Temporary Entry for Business Persons.” The professional titles are extensive and each one is defined. Scientific Technician/Technologist is defined as follows:

“Possession of (a) theoretical knowledge of any of the following disciplines: agricultural sciences, astronomy, biology, chemistry, engineering, forestry, geology, geophysics, meteorology or physics; and (b) the ability to solve practical problems in any of those disciplines, or the ability to apply principles of any of those disciplines to basic or applied research.”

Footnote 5: “A business person in this category must be seeking temporary entry to work in direct support of professionals in agricultural sciences, astronomy, biology, chemistry, engineering, forestry, geology, geophysics, meteorology or physics.”

It’s difficult to see how NAFTA would allow aircraft mechanics to get the designation of “Scientific Technician”, but that’s exactly what SAA did. So, how did they get away with it? As usimmigrationblog describes the situation:

the Scientific Technician / Technologist and Management Consultant categories are prone to abuse by ineligible applicants and are therefore scrutinized more heavily by the CBP officers.

Of course that leads to the next question: what is a CBP officer? In short, they are border patrol agents who get promoted to officers. Most importantly — THEY ARE NOT LABOR EXPERTS! Look at it this way — CBP officers have spent most of their careers risking their lives to enforce border laws, and to catch illegal aliens, so it’s just not realistic to expect them to be able to be able to split hairs over highly technical job descriptions — even if they have received several hours of training on how to do so. If you have any doubt about the difficulty go to Chapter Sixteen and see if you could do it.

So, the loophole isn’t in the NAFTA agreement as much as the implementation, which in turn a result of intentional lack of enforcement and review by the United States government. Keep in mind that the pressure is on the CBP officer to approve the visa, and if he/she denies it the refusal could be construed as a violation of NAFTA, and at the very least they may be subject to review by their bosses. Under the circumstances a CBP officer would be masochistic to deny the TN visa.

To show just how difficult it could be for CBP officers, just consider that flight engineers and mechanics are often mentioned together. Take this job description from a career website:

Before a flight, the flight engineer inspects the outside of the plane to make sure there are no fluid leaks and that tires are inflated properly. If any problems are found, the engineer calls in mechanics to repair the plane.

Based on that description, the CBP officer should approve visas for airline mechanics. Your eyes are probably glazed over by now with NAFTA legalese, but go back to “Footnote 5″ of the NAFTA text and you will understand why a CBP officer might choose to approve the visa. In this case a TN visa could be justified for airplane mechanics. In order to deny this type of visa would require a very in-depth knowledge of the airline industry. It’s quite unlikely that many CBP officers have this expertise.

There is no way the Mexican mechanics are as good as the Americans they replaced, but they probably are a lot cheaper. We need only three words to describe what the result of this type of corporate globalism means: CRASH, BURN, and DIE!

Please excuse me for evil thoughts, but if an airplane crashes because of those substandard Mexican mechanics, my wish is that all of the architects of NAFTA chartered the plane so that they could go to a WTO meeting or a DOHA negotiation.

People who forwarded this are appalled at the murder of a Sikh convenience store clerk in Gary, Indiana, in an armed robbery, and also appalled at the behavior of the customers:

June 16, 2009
Store Clerk Murdered; Customers Keep Shopping
Reporting
Pamela Jones
GARY, Ind. (CBS) –

A 26-year-old convenience store clerk was shot and killed in broad daylight in Gary, Ind., and police say witnesses stood by and did nothing. CBS 2’s Pamela Jones reports there are critical clues that may help crack the case.

Police say one of the four men caught on surveillance video bursting into the clerk’s booth at the convenience store was about to commit murder. The video shows a man in red run up an aisle and kick in the door to the booth. Within seconds, the clerk, Gurjeet Singh, was shot in the neck.

“It was senseless. And really all homicides are senseless but what we gather from this, there was very little resistance,” said Gary Police Department Commander Anthony Titus. “It didn’t have to end the way it did.”

But Titus says what’s even more senseless is the apparent inaction of bystanders standing near the front door almost the whole time.

Police say there were several customers walking around the store after the crime. But only one called 911 for help.

When asked what he finds most disturbing about the surveillance footage, Titus said, “The fact that people went in and out of the store and didn’t call police. There is a man laying there. Nobody thinks to dial 911 or check to see if he’s OK or anything.”

I’m still appalled at the reporting. The video shows that the suspects were all black. (So is Commander Titus and Pamela Jones, the reporter.) Probably the callous shoppers were black, too. But here’s how the robbers are described in the story:

Investigators say two suspects were dressed in black shirts, like one man on the tape who looks to be holding a gun. The other two had red shirts. Police think they were driving a burgundy compact car.

The only thing you can gather from this is the presumption that everyone in Gary, Indiana is black, so they don’t have to say. In fact, Gary is about 84 percent black. This is partly due to the closure of the steel mills, partly due to white flight. As a result, parts of Gary look like a ghost town. And police, as is usual in these cases, aren’t getting a lot of cooperation from “the local community.”

Police want to talk to people who saw the four men at the mini-mart on 15th and Grant just before 5:20 p.m. Sunday.

At a news conference on Wednesday, community organizers demanded Gary police offer a reward for information about the case. They said the people of Gary needed financial incentive to come forward.

Right.  But the other point is that this looks like a classic hate crime. Three men of one race burst into a store and shoot  a man of another race dead. Meanwhile, people apparently of the same race as the shooter ignore the crime, don’t call the police, don’t render first aid, won’t cooperate with the investigation, and continue shopping. The hatred of African-Americans for convenience store owners is well known, and there’s even been “hate rhetoric” about it, not only from rappers like Ice Cube, but from Andrew Young, who was Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to the UN.

So where are the headlines? Where are the calls for new laws for the prevention of rap music and editorials blaming  Andrew Young? Don’t hold your breath.

The Rev. Ted Pike’s invaluable E-alert service (sign up at the top of this website) says this evening that the

Senate leadership has abandoned, at least for now, attempts to fast forward the federal hate bill to vote in the Senate as an amendment. A hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled for 10 a.m. EDT, Thursday, June 25. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, who recently came out strongly in favor of the hate bill, is the only witness yet listed at the SJC’s website (http://judiciary.senate.gov/).

KENNEDY ABANDONS HATE BILL AMENDMENT! SENATE JUDICIARY WILL HOLD HEARINGS
By Rev. Ted Pike
18 June 09

Dropping the plan to smuggle the bill through is a positive, but Pike points out that the Senate Judiciary Republicans did a feeble job of opposing this legislation in the last Congress. He supplies their contact details.

In an interesting development, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has denounced the legislation

While the title of MSHCPA suggests that it will apply only to “hate crimes,” the actual criminal prohibitions contained in it do not require that the defendant be inspired by hatred or ill will in order to convict. It is sufficient if he acts “because of” someone’s actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. Consider:

*Rapists are seldom indifferent to the gender of their victims. They are virtually always chosen “because of” their gender…

One of the members of the Commission has posted the letter on National Review’s blog The Corner. This appears to be NRO’s only recent coverage of the issue. Unsurprisingly, the Neoconservatives over there aren’t interested.

The Left has responded to the prospect of being denied the promised privileges with screams of rage, sometimes revealing useful information (see the end of Who Could Vote for Hate? Why, the Fundamentalists and the GOP Right Wing, of Course. By Christine Bowman BuzzFlash.com 06/18/09)

Generally MSM coverage remains extremely slight. A measure of the situation is that one of the best discussions Google turns up is from The Edmond Sun from Oklahoma: Edmond pastor rallies faithful Mark Schlachtenhaufen June 12 2009

Paul Blair, pastor of Edmond’s Fairview Baptist Church, founder of Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ, said he has heard stories about how hate crime legislation has turned some speech into “thought crimes” in other countries where it has been implemented.

Blair cites the case of Swedish pastor Ake Green who was sentenced to one month in jail for showing “disrespect” against homosexuals by preaching a Bible-based sermon about homosexuality.

He also cites the case of a Canadian pastor who wrote a letter to the editor denouncing homosexuality as immoral and dangerous, calling into question gay rights curricula permeating the province’s educational system.

In 2008, the pastor, Stephen Boissoin, was found guilty by a provincial panel of having exposed homosexuals to “hatred and contempt” by publishing a letter to the editor warning against the dangers to the social order of homosexual activism.

The pastor was banned for life from preaching sermons critical of homosexuality, ordered to pay $7,000 in fines and commanded to personally apologize by public statement in the local newspaper

The stakes here are extremely high. If the bill - which as Buzzflash.com puts it

would provide for grants to help state and local communities combat violent crimes committed by juveniles, train law enforcement officers or assist in investigations and prosecutions

passes, we can expect a surge of activity by ambitious fashion-conscious law enforcement officials which will soon transform the thing into a monstrous engine of political repression. If it fails, it will, like the defeats of the Bush Amnesty efforts, be an immense grass roots triumph and a possibly lethal blow to the reputation of the Obama Congress.

As I asked yesterday, where are NumbersUSA, FAIR and CIS? Do they want the Immigration debate shut down?

Clayton Cramer describes this as being like “a really bad Monty Python skit”

He writes

The British police were given sweeping new powers to deal with terrorism a while back–including the ability to stop people in certain designated areas without probable cause for search. The problem was that because the left runs British policing, they apparently decided that it would be unfair to disproportionately stop people based on racial profiling.

Of course, the impetus for this was the London Bombings, which were committed by UK-born Muslims who looked like Muslims. But the police aren’t concentrating  on anyone who looks like he might  commit terrorism:

Terror law used to stop thousands ‘just to balance racial statistics’

• Watchdog says officers misuse terror law
• Home secretary to issue new guidance

Alan Travis, The Guardian, June 172009
Thousands of people are being stopped and searched by the police under their counter-­terrorism powers – simply to ­provide a racial balance in official statistics, the government’s official anti-terror law watchdog has revealed.

Lord Carlile said in his annual report that he had “ample anecdotal evidence” of it happening, adding that such a practice was “totally wrong” and constituted an invasion of civil liberties.

“I can well understand the concerns of the police that they should be free from allegations of prejudice,” he said. “But it is not a good use of precious resources if they waste them on self-evidently unmerited searches.”

He said there was little or no evidence that the use of section 44 stop and search powers by the police could prevent an act of terrorism..

..
Examples of poor use of section 44 abounded. “I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest ­possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop.”

He later said that while the police should not discriminate racially, it was equally important that they should not balance the statistics.
“If, for example, 50 blonde women are stopped who fall nowhere near any intelligence-led terrorism profile, it’s a gross invasion of the civil liberties of those 50 blonde women. [More]

When it comes to racial preferences, Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor are ideological twins, although most Americans don’t realize it yet. Unlike the master politician, however, Sotomayor tends to rub people the wrong way. Still, the Republican Senators are highly unlikely to be able to stop Sotomayor. And it’s not clear that they should want to, since once on the Court, the mediocre and abrasive Sotomayor is unlikely to evolve into a William Brennan-like master backstage manipulator of the other Justices.

Still, a lengthy hearing over Sotomayor would be the best opportunity for the GOP to begin the process of enlightening the public that Obama isn’t the post-racial President that David Axelrod has spun him as. Clearly, the New Haven firefighter reverse discrimination case of Ricci v. DeStefano should be central to the hearings.

Yet, old-fashioned chivalry and post-modern sensitivity both dictate that a bunch of white male conservative Senators like Jeff Sessions can’t be seen asking too many probing questions of a lady / minority. The GOP needs a bad guy to pound in these hearings, but Judge Sotomayor isn’t a guy.

So, the GOP Senators should subpoena a witness on the Ricci v. DeStefano case. They should subpeona and then roast alive on the witness stand the defendant, beady-eyed New Haven mayor John DeStefano (seen here), who engineered cheating Ricci and company out of their promotions. This will associate DeStefano’s petty political machinations to please his main black supporter to Sotomayor, Obama, and racial preference supporters in general.

For examples of the kind of questions they could flail DeStefano with, just refer to the Supreme Court’s oral questioning in the case. For example, Mayor DeStefano’s city attorney claimed that the city had strong evidence for discarding the test as invalid after finding out the results by race. But Justice Samuel Alito pointed out the preposterousness of that claim in a scalding rhetorical question:

“[The city] chose the company that framed the test, and then as soon as it saw the results, it decided it wasn’t going to go forward with the promotions. The company offered to validate the test. The City refused to pay for that, even though that was part of its contract with the company. And all it has is this testimony by a competitor, Mr. Hornick, who said—who hadn’t seen the test, and he said, I could do a better test—you should make the promotions based on this, but I could give you—I could draw up a better test, and by the way, here’s my business card if you want to hire me in the future.

“How’s that a strong basis in the evidence?”

This could be fun.<

Tracking the Totalitarian Left’s effort to sneak through the Hate Crime Bill is difficult, even with the wonderful Google Alert system.

The Rev. Ted Pike’s indispensible email alert service (sign up at the top of this site) reports today that the Democratic Senate leadership flinched from loading it onto the innocent (if statist) Tourism Bill S. 1023

Good; because the intention to repress criticism of immigration under the auspices of this type of legislation is so blatant it has even appeared in the MSM.

Immigration Debate Tied to Rise in Hate Crimes By Spencer Hsu The Washington Post Wednesday June 17 2008 reports:

U.S. civil rights leaders said yesterday that an increase in hate crimes committed in recent years against Hispanics and people perceived to be immigrants “correlates closely” to the nation’s increasingly contentious debate over immigration…
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund issued a report that faulted anti-immigrant rhetoric in the media and mobilization of extremist groups on the Internet.

(VDARE.com note: we hope the internet reference means us)

the tone of discourse over comprehensive immigration reform needs to be changed, needs to be civil and sane,” said Michael Lieberman, Washington counsel for the Anti-Defamation League.

“civilized and sane” -AKA weak and ineffective. Talking about which, where are the plutocrats of the Immigration Reform movement? As I noted on Tuesday, NumbersUSA, although geared up for lobbying, seems to be ducking the issue. Neither is there anything on the FAIR website (although this wonkish note from last year is useful). And while Mark Krikorian of the CIS is quoted in the Washington Post article cited above saying correctly (and bravely )

the LCCREF report was “another salvo against free speech by the pro-amnesty coalition . . . to delegitimize any critic of mass immigration.”

there is nothing on the CIS site either – despite their recent Steinlight experience.

Why not? Can they be indifferent to the possibility of being shut down? Is this a cause - or just a job?

After some effort, I have concluded only CIS deigns to allow the public to actually contact them from their web site. For this, VDARE.com salutes them.

Sob stories with lawyers–oh my!

This ploy is another escalation of the emotion-fraught amnesty tour, led by Rep Luis Gutierrez who prowled the whole country giving speeches at churches, preaching the open-borders message. A big part of the road show was tearful kiddies giving testimony of their sadness because of dad’s deportation (or even just the fear that someone in the family might be deported someday).

MIAMI (AP)–Ronald Soza celebrated his 10th birthday Wednesday with cake and a serenade by more than 100 other children and their parents.

His own family: absent. His mother was recently deported back to Nicaragua. His father rarely ventures out in public in fear of a similar fate. Now Soza and the other children–all U.S. citizens whose parents face deportation–are demanding a say in the immigration debate.

They are suing President Barack Obama, asking a court to halt the deportations of their parents until Congress overhauls U.S. immigration laws.

The children, who gathered Wednesday at the Miami nonprofit American Fraternity to draw attention to their cause, say their constitutional rights are being violated because they will likely have to leave the country if their parents are forced to go.

Some children said their families didn’t have enough money to pay for school supplies because the breadwinning parent had been deported, and some are at risk of losing their homes. They also say they are suffering psychological and physical hardship.

“My grades went from A’s to C’s when my mom had to leave,” said Ronald.

Nearby, 5-year-old Sara Bedoya Sanchez comforted her sister Salome, 3, who played with a paper sign pinned to her chest reading “Don’t Leave me alone.” [More than 100 kids sue over parents' deportations, By Laura Wides-Munoz, AP,June 17, 2009 ]

The auto industry journalist Eric Peters raises the above interesting question on his website Eric Peters Autos:

Before the 1980s, in most states, you could legally drive without insurance - and many people did. Understandably. Insurance is expensive and if you think about it, you rarely need it. Maybe never. Why pay several hundred dollars a year (thousands, over a period of ten or twenty years) to some insurance company when the odds are very highly favorable, if you’re not irresponsible or inept, that you will never be involved in anything worse than a minor fender bender? A fender bender which you could easily just pay for out of pocket - if you hadn’t forked over all that money to the insurance company.

Today, we are pretty much forced to buy insurance, whether we think it’s a good investment or not - and whether we’re good drivers or terrible ones.

The worst part of this is because we’re all forced to buy insurance, insurance costs a fortune. We are captive “customers” whose only choice is Company A or Company B - no third option to just say “no thanks” to both of them. That virtually eliminates any real pressure to tamp down costs, because, well, what are you gonna do?

Insurance companies today are as much a cartel as Big Oil - only worse, because Big Oil, at least, does give us the option of riding a bicycle or moving close to the train station and walking. You don’t have to buy gas.

But you do have to buy insurance.

Again, why?

Eric Peters’ answer:

the unlicensed, uninsured and often drunk as a loon illegal alien. It is a huge problem in states all over the country that have been flooded with Third World peasants who do not share the American hyper-caution about alcohol consumption and driving or respect for “the law” (remember: they are here illegally) and who often drive $800 rolling wrecks that should have gone on to better things (like recycled beer cans) years ago.

So, Captain Corona, high as a July sun, breezes through a red and plows right into your brand-new $50,000 BMW in his $800 hooptie. And he has no driver’s license, let alone insurance - or more than the $5.73 change he’s got in his wallet after splitting that $20 for the 12-pack he just drank before creaming you.

Of course, Brenda Walker has documented this phenomenon compellingly. But Peters makes a connection that hadn’t really occurred to me:

The government, naturally, won’t do a thing about him. But it’ll make sure you pay through the nose to have top-flight coverage that takes the presence of him into account. Cost of doing business - charged directly to us.

I like this because it’s another example of the phenomenon I wrote about last year: “Immigration Is The Viagra Of The State”–A Libertarian Case Against Immigration.

But you just can’t get the Libertarian Establishment to think about the problem. There is absolutely no mention of immigration in the Cato Institute’s premier educational event, scheduled for late July, “Economic Crisis, War, And The Rise of the State“. It looks very worthy, yawn — but stuck in the 1970s.

Tell Cato (Ed Crane, Lider Maximo) to wake up. (Contact link over in left column of Cato site)

Everybody has an opinion on Obama’s proposal for revamping financial regulation. I’ve been busy so I have no idea what’s in the plan, so I don’t have an opinion.

But, let me make one guess: I bet there’s not a single word in the proposal — nor, I presume, has there been a single word in all the commentary on the proposal — about moderating the anti-redlining push for more mortgage lending to minorities with poor creditworthiness that was so central to the Sand State subprime mortgage meltdown that set off the financial crisis.

After all, how can anybody talk about reforming this when nobody will even talk about the fact that the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database shows that 77% of subprime home purchase mortgage dollars in California in 2006 went to minorities?

Update: Well, I was wrong. The White House White Paper talks about the new Consumer Finance Protection Agency intensifying the push for more lending to minorities:

The Agency should enforce fair lending laws and the Community Reinvestment Act and otherwise seek to ensure that underserved consumers and communities have access to prudent financial services, lending, and investment.

(more…)

Here’s a strikingly detailed explanation of the U.S. Naval Academy’s racial quota system for admissions by an English prof at Annapolis who serves on the school’s Admissions Board. It’s rare for an insider to spill the beans about how quotas work this explicitly.

The Cost of a Diverse Naval Academy
Annapolis Capital
By BRUCE FLEMING

Published 06/14/09

The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead announced in Annapolis recently that “diversity is the number one priority” at the Naval Academy. …

The stunning revelation last week was that the Naval Academy had an incoming class that was “more diverse” than ever before: 35 percent minority.

Sounds good, only this comes with a huge price tag. It’s taxpayers who bankroll the military. Yet nobody has asked us if we’re willing to pay this price. Instead we’re being told there is no price to pay at all. If you believe that, you probably also believe in the Tooth Fairy.

A “diverse” class does not mean the Naval Academy recruits violinists, or older students (they can’t be 23 on Induction Day), or gay people (who are thrown out) or foreign students (other than the dozen or so sent by client governments).

It means applicants checked a box on their application that says they are Hispanic, African American, Native American, and now, since my time on the Admissions Board of the Academy, where I’ve taught for 22 years, Asians.

(more…)