I don’t know if Janet Murguia would call this media malpractice–at least the headline follows the rule that victim is an immigrant, the criminal never. And in fact, John Ernest Guerrero Jr., 6′3″, 350 lbs, pictured, is probably a native-born American citizen, like George Washington or Paul Revere.

Cops: Illegal immigrants held captive in Port Chester; captor threatens to cut off their fingers

By Leslie Korngold
The Journal News • March 31, 2008

PORT CHESTER - A Texas man was arraigned today after police said he transported illegal immigrants from Texas, held five of them in a Port Chester apartment and threatened to cut off their fingers with pruning shears if they didn’t ante up more money.

John Ernest Guerrero Jr., 22, of Pearland, a 6-foot 3, 350-pound man, was arrested by seven officers after the captives escaped an attic apartment in which they were being held without food, police said. Police are seeking a second and possibly a third captor.
Two men from Brazil were found on Poningo Street Saturday afternoon, allegedly after escaping from the apartment in 123 Haseco Ave., a triplex Victorian-style building. They alleged they had been held there four or five days after being transported there by two men in a white Chevrolet after they crossed the Mexican border into Texas.

Police said the men -ages 30 and 50 - were uninjured despite not having eaten and having been involved in a fight with their captors that resulted in their escape. The struggle came, police said, after one captor held a small wire cutter to the pinky of one man Saturday and demanded $2,000 more than the $10,000 they had each paid to get into the United States.[More]

This is the kind of thing you expect to happen in the Rio Grande Valley–but Port Chester, NY, is in the Lower Hudson Valley. It’s now 46 percent Hispanic.

The U.S. government has trillions of dollars and can hire all sorts of smart people and buy all sorts of high-tech equipment. But there’s no substitute for common sense.

A recent Christian Science Monitor article by Daniel B. Wood announces the astounding discovery that taller fences work better. It’s entitled “Where U.S.-Mexico border fence is tall, border crossings fall.“.

Here are some earth-shattering excerpts:

US border patrol agent Michael Bernacke guns his SUV down the wide desert-sand road that lines the US-Mexican border through urban San Luis, Ariz. To his right stands a steel wall, 20 feet high and reinforced by cement-filled steel piping. To his left another tall fence of steel mesh. Ten yards beyond, a shorter cyclone fence is topped with jagged concertina wire. Visible to the north, through the gauze of fencing are the homes and businesses of this growing Southwest suburbia of 22,000 people. “This wall works,” says Mr. Bernacke. “A lot of people have the misconception that it is a waste of time and money, but the numbers of apprehensions show that it works.”

The triple-and double-layered fence here in Yuma is the kind of barrier that US lawmakers – and most Americans – imagined when the Secure Fence Act was enacted in 2006.

However,

Only a fraction of the new barriers resemble anything like the images of formidable fencing – the Berlin Wall or the bleak monolith that divides Israel and the West Bank – envisioned by the initial proposal. Most of the new fencing is not a double wall, but a combination of regular vehicle blocks and pedestrian barriers that range from metal mesh and chain link to traditional picket fences.

Here’s more perspective from the agent on the ground:

Bernacke, the patrol agent, says that since the triple fence was finished in October, there has been a 72 percent decline in illegal migrant apprehensions in the 120-mile swath of the US-Mexican border known as the Yuma sector. Eight hundred people used to be apprehended trying to cross the border here every day. Now, agents catch 50 people or fewer daily. The 1.5-mile strip of triple fencing that cuts through suburban San Luis is the most impenetrable, says Bernacke. That’s because the three walls are separated here by a 75-yard “no man’s land” – a flat, sandy corridor punctuated by pole-topped lighting, cameras, radio systems, and radar units, where unauthorized migrants can be chased down by border agents.

Of course, securing the border is more than a technical problem. We have the technology to secure the whole border, but what our leaders lack is the will to get it done.

This is from Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Con blog:

How to stop Muslim rage

Simple, according to Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey: for starters, Westerners should stop exercising their right to free speech, and should stop welcoming Muslims who want to convert to Christianity. It appears to Dickey, Muslims are children who cannot be expected to behave like adults when confronted with something non-violent that they find offensive or challenging.

There’s more, but I noticed something in this passage:

It does not require one to endorse the Danish cartoons, the threatened provocations of Geert Wilders, or the conversion of Magdi Allam to Catholicism (”self-hating,” Dickey calls him) to recognize that hotheaded Muslims ought to be told to grow up.

Self-hating? The column by Christopher Dickey [Send him mail] is pretty bad, but here’s the passage I was wondering about:

The most problematic event of late, however, was Pope Benedict’s decision to baptize the Egyptian journalist Magdi Allam in Saint Peter’s on the night before Easter, thus converting a famously self-hating Muslim into a self-loving Christian in the most high-profile setting possible. Perhaps Benedict really thought, as the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano opined, that the baptism was just a papal “gesture” to emphasize “in a gentle and clear way religious freedom.” But I am not prepared to believe for a second, as some around the Vatican have hinted this week, that the Holy Father did not know who Allam was or how provocative this act would appear to Muslim scholars, including and especially those who are trying to foster interfaith dialogue.

Ever since 2006, when Benedict cited a medieval Christian emperor talking about Islam as “evil and inhuman,” and the usual Muslim rabble-rousers whipped up the usual Muslim riots, more responsible members of the world’s Islamic community have hoped to restore calm and reason. And now this. “The whole spectacle, with its choreography, persona and messages provokes genuine questions about the motives, intentions and plans of some of the pope’s advisers on Islam,” said a statement issued by Aref Ali Nayed, a spokesman for 138 Muslim scholars who established the Catholic-Muslim Forum for dialogue with Rome earlier this month.
[Christian Rage and Muslim Moderation | Despite recent provocations against Islam in the West, many Muslims seem weary of the same old tit for tat. Mar 27, 2008

I blogged about “self-hatred” some time ago, writing

I’ve always felt that anyone accused of being self-hating for refusing to toe the left-wing line (Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly) should simply look the critics in the eye and say, “I don’t hate me. I hate you.”

It’s obvious that Magdi Allam doesn’t hate himself–he hates Islam, and his conversion to Christianity is his way of saying he’s been wrong all these years to be a Muslim. And of course, like most Christian converts, he’s drawn not so much by hatred of himself, but by the love of Christ. Allam said he felt “great joy” at his conversion. I see that some Vatican bureaucrat felt it necessary to issue the following statement distancing the Vatican from Allam’s political opinions:

When Pope Benedict XVI welcomed into the Catholic Church a Muslim-born journalist often critical of Islam, it was not a sign that the pope accepts everything the journalist believes, said the Vatican spokesman
CNS STORY: Vatican spokesman: Muslim convert has right to express his own ideas Catholic News Service, March 27, 2008

No, of course it’s not. It’s supposed to be a sign that the convert accepts everything that the Pope believes. It’s also considered to be a sign that the convert wants to go Heaven, rather than Hell. Does Dickey think the Pope should have let Allam go to Hell to avoid “provoking” Muslims?

Mickey Kaus has the item, but with no permalink (one permalink per item, please) so you have to scroll up from here to find it.

Crop Rot Watch: Tom Bevan on a Pennsylvania tomato grower who’s giving up because (he says) Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform! “No one will harvest tomatoes in 90 degree weather except immigrant labor,” says the farmer, Keith Eckel, who says he paid an average of $16.59 an hour. He also seems to agree that many of the documents immigrant workers showed farmers like him were fraudulent. … But note that no tomatoes are rotting in the fields in this story. Eckel has just decided to plant another, less labor-intensive crop: “45 acres of sweet corn, and 1,200 acres of corn for grain.” Is this a tragedy, or a surprisingly painless transition away from a business that used illegal labor to a business that uses legal labor? We will buy fewer Pennsylvania tomatoes and more Pennsylvania corn. So? … P.S.: Bevan questions whether Eckel really couldn’t get non-immigrant Pennsylvanians to pick his crops for such a relatively high wage. I suspect the answer is he could, but that the (largely illegal) immigrant workers would be much better at it than the non-immgrant workers. … That could be one dirty little secret of the immigration debate: It’s not that employers can’t get legal workers. It’s that at any given wage they’d prefer the non-legal workers, and not only for the familiar disreputable reasons (e.g., that illegals live in fear and are therefore more docile). … 1:04 A.M.

Of course, the really interesting thing is that we’re seeing a Crop Rot Fever story in March–I don’t know what the temperature is in California, but in Pennsylvania at this time of year, not only do crops not rot in the fields, a pound of hamburger left outside wouldn’t rot in the fields–you’d have to defrost it before you could have lunch

Suppose the shoe was on the other foot? In this hilarious video a bunch of white collar professionals are begging to be hired by a Latino boss. Just a thought: I’m probably living on less money than an average day laborer, and I work just as hard.

If you enjoy my newsletter, and think it’s something of value, and you think the immense hours that I put into it are worth something, how about donating to the cause?

The BBC writes:

London has become Europe’s TB capital because primary care trusts are failing to adopt measures drawn up four years ago, MPs and health campaigners say.

Just 55% of PCTs in England routinely screen new immigrants, according to a poll by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis.

One PCT with a very high TB rate had even scrapped its screening programme.

It has always struck me as strange that movements of livestock are much more intensely regulated than movements of people–even though movements of people have much bigger potential health effects.

Lately I have received lots of emails from people who say that the USCIS is going to finally crack down on bodyshops. As the theory goes, Indian owned bodyshops routinely file multiple H-1B applications for the same worker in order to game the H-1B lottery at the end of the fiscal year. I’m not sure why Indian bodyshops get most of the blame for this type of behavior–perhaps it’s just another one of those urban legends. The truth is that there are thousands of U.S. owned companies that hire H-1Bs and they are just as unscrupulous, and another misunderstood fact is that many Indian owned bodyshops are opposed to allowing multiple filings because they feel they lose out to the big ones like Tata or Infosys:
,

Apex software body Nasscom welcomed the move to streamline the H1B visa process, saying it would eliminate unnecessary malpractices by fly-by-night operators that deny opportunity to genuine applicants.[The Hindu Business Line : US bars multiple H-1B filings for same worker, March 21, 2008]

Well, folks, the theory that bodyshops routinely game the system may be true, and it may be true that lots of other shady operators are doing the same, but this rule isn’t going to stop the practice and here are three reasons why:

1) The number of multiple filings that are detected by the USCIS are very low–which implies that it either almost never happens or that it’s rarely detected. Several news articles about this rule reported that last year there were about 500 multiple filings. I didn’t believe the number was that low, so I called the USCIS and verified it for myself. The representative I talked to said that this regulation was not put into place because of scientific evidence that multiple filings were a major problem — it was done just as an administrative gesture to make sure the playing field was evened out. All of this means that despite the media buzz you see about this, the new regulation from the USCIS accomplishes nothing.

2) Bodyshops won’t get caught, even if they do file multiple applications. That’s because the automated scanners that are used to enter H-1B petitions can easily be spoofed by merely specifying trivial differences in the job title; like for instance they could say they need a “Java Programmer” and a “Java Web Programmer, and to make it even more difficult to detect they could list starting salaries that are a dollar or two different. Those may seem like two different positions to the USCIS computer but they are one and the same to the employer. Another obvious way to spoof the scanners would be to specify the same job title in two different cities where the company is located because nobody tracks where H-1Bs go after they enter the U.S.

3) Last year the USCIS cutoff for filings was for about 150,000 petitions. If this rule had been in affect last year, only 0.3% of the filings would have been rejected. Such a minuscule number of rejections won’t even be noticed since employers are standing in line to scarf up any visas that become available. Go to this web page[PDF] for more specifics on the number of petitions in 2007.

So, what is the worst thing that could happen to a company that is caught violating the regulation? They will lose the filing fee of $1,300, which is a mere slap on the wrist. A penalty that light is unlikely to deter those that wish to game the system, especially considering they would be very unlucky to get caught.

• USCIS Announces Interim Rule on H-1B Visas
• H-1B visas let foreigners with valued skills come to the U.S. to work. Last year, 133,000 applications were submitted.
• USCIS Will Prohibit Multiple H-1B Filings By One Employer for a Single Foreign National
• U.S. worried that high H-1B demand may tempt some to ‘game’ visa lottery

“There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.” Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HP). January 7, 2004

On March 7 Carly Fiorina joined the Republican National Committee as Victory Chairman. A week later Meg Whitman, the outgoing CEO of Ebay, became McCain’s campaign co-chair.

Talk about stacking the deck! A recent Youtube video shows both McCain and Meg Whitman voicing their support for more H-1B visas. Meg Whitman said, “I’m a huge fan of increasing H-1B visas”, while McCain said, “I support increases in H-1B visas

The second article below contains an excerpted interview with Fiorina.

• Whitman joins Fiorina on McCain presidential campaign trail By Mary Anne Ostrom and John Boudreau, San Jose Mercury News, March 15, 2008
• McCain Embraces Tech Executives For White House Push - TechCrunch Interviews Carly Fiorina Michael Arrington, March 17 2008

The new Attorney General Michael Mukasey spoke at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club recently and had some serious remarks about the danger facing the country.

In Michael Mukasey, President Bush finally seems to have an Attorney General worthy of the current moment. In Nancy Pelosi’s hometown this week, the former judge who once tried terror cases told the Commonwealth Club audience that even he had no idea of the extent of the threat.

Speaking of what he hears in his national security briefings, Mr. Mukasey said, “It is way beyond – way beyond anything that I knew or believed. So, if I was picked for the level of my knowledge . . . that was a massive piece of false advertising.” [...]

The AG also addressed why immunity from lawsuits is vital for the telecom companies that cooperated with the surveillance after 9/11. “Forget the liability” the phone companies face, Mr. Mukasey said. “We face the prospect of disclosure in open court of what they did, which is to say the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence against foreign targets.” Al Qaeda would love that. The cynics will call this “fear-mongering,” but most Americans will want to make sure we don’t miss the next terror call.
[One Missed Call, Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2008]

For another chilling warning about the terrorist threat, see the 5-minute Youtube clip of former Speaker Gingrich answering a question about the future struggle against Islam: Newt Gingrich on Islamic Terrorism. He is “deeply worried” that his young grandchildren face a more dangerous future than boomers did during the Cold War. He believes it is quite likely that America will lose a city to nuclear terrorism if the war against jihad is not won. Here’s a quote from that clip:

“Tony Blair said it very well. The people who did the London subway bombings spoke English, were British citizens, lived in British housing and had jobs. And had decided because of their relationships that they were engaged in a war against the very country that had given them freedom, prosperity and safety.”

The bombers in the July 2005 attacks were the children of immigrants, who grew up in British communities and did not assimilate to western values, but instead became enemies of their neighbors.

Some cultures are simply incompatible. The West and Islam can never live together because Muslims despise our society and the hard-won liberties we treasure: free speech, representative government under law, individual rights and gender equality. Continuing to welcome them as immigrants is madness–a kumbaya fantasy that severely endangers our safety.

This story, via Tim Blair, is the sort of thing that’s always good to hear:

Police: Teen makes mistake of trying to rob former U.S. Marine - San Jose Mercury News

Bay City News Service
Article Launched: 03/27/2008 10:39:20 AM PDT

SANTA ROSA - A boy in his mid-teens learned Wednesday afternoon that it is not a good idea to try to rob a former U.S. Marine at knifepoint, even if the former Marine is 84 years old, police said today.

Santa Rosa police Sgt. Steve Bair said that’s what happened around 2 p.m. in the 1600 block of Fourth Street. The elderly man was walking with a grocery bag in each arm when the boy approached him with a large knife, Bair said.

The boy said, “Old man, give me your wallet or I’ll cut you,” Bair said. The man told the boy he was a former Marine who fought in three wars and had been threatened with knives and bayonets, Bair said.

The man then put his bags on the ground and told the boy that if he stepped closer he would be sorry. When the boy stepped closer, the man kicked him in the groin, knocking him to the sidewalk, Bair said. The ex-Marine picked up his grocery bags and walked home, leaving the boy doubled over, Bair said.

The man reported the attempted robbery to police 45 minutes later.

Bair said the teen is described only as 15 or 16 years old. Anyone with information is asked to call the Police Department.

The teen is “described only as 15 or 16 years old?” I realize that the unnamed ex-Marine is 84, but if he can see well enough to kick him in the groin, he can see well enough to see if he’s white, black, Hispanic, or Asian. It’s the first thing that people notice, sometimes before they notice if they’re talking to a man or a woman, and it’s the primary means of identification for policeman looking for a suspect. Chalk up another one for the AP Stylebook.

More here–with different details of his age and service, but still no details of the teenager.