Immigration group looks to clear myths

WASHINGTON — In a response to anti-immigrant sentiment and an increase in hate crimes against Latinos, a Hispanic rights group launched an effort Thursday to debunk myths espoused by media talk shows and political campaigns.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund unveiled the "Truth in Immigration" campaign to rebut legal and factual inaccuracies about immigrants, particularly Latinos, in the United States.

"Right now the airwaves are dominated by a few that speak very negatively and falsely about immigrants and immigration," said John Trasviña, MALDEF president and general counsel.

Trasviña said the Web site — www.truthinimmigration.org, which will be updated several times a week — will provide scholarly studies and reasoned rebuttal.

The impetus for the campaign was a report released March 10 by the Southern Poverty Law Center that found a correlation between recent anti-immigrant rhetoric and an increase in hate crimes against Latinos.

That report, "The Year in Hate," said there were 888 hate crimes against Latinos in 2007, up from 844 in 2006 and 602 in 2005. It cited a separate FBI study showing a 35 percent increase in such crimes against Latinos from 2003 to 2006.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, identified in the report as a hate group, accused the civil rights organization of playing with hate crime numbers to serve its political purposes.

"The SPLC manipulates the data to reach deceitful conclusions, tosses the term 'hate group' at highly respected organizations like FAIR, and then mixes the two in an attempt to stop our national debate over immigration reform," FAIR President Dan Stein said after the report's release.

MALDEF, meanwhile, said the upcoming debate in Congress on border enforcement measures, as well as political campaigns this fall, could fuel anti-immigrant rhetoric and an increase in bigotry and violence against the Latino community.

"This comes at a time when we have legislation coming up in the House and the Senate that would take us backward on immigration, rather than forward," Trasviña said.

House Republicans are pressuring Democratic leaders for a vote on a bipartisan bill called the Secure America through Verification and Enforcement Act. The measure calls for an e-verification system for employers to check on the immigration status of workers, and would provide more Border Patrol agents to crack down on illegal immigration on the Southwest border.

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They pay taxes. Social Security would sink without them.

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Remittances to Mexico Exceed Investment as Source of Income
By Ginger Thompson
The New York Times -- MEXICO CITY

Nearly one Mexican in five regularly gets money from relatives employed in the United States, making Mexico the largest repository of such remittances in the world, according to a poll sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank.

The pollster, Sergio Bendixen, estimated that the payments help feed, house and educate at least a quarter of Mexico's 100 million people.

The poll was part of a report on Monday by the bank, which said money sent home by all Mexican immigrants would soar to $14.5 billion this year, exceeding tourism and direct foreign investment to become this country's second most important source of income. Oil remains No. 1.

Bendixen said the poll offered forceful evidence that remittances not only sustained this country's rural poor but had also become important to urban working-class households.

Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, estimated that annual remittances to Mexico and Central America could reach $25 billion by the end of the decade, a vast sum made of countless tiny payments by America's lowest paid workers.

" This is not necessarily something to celebrate," said Don Terry, manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund. "It means that the Mexican economy is not expanding, and so people have had to leave."

Indeed, in addition to showing a significant jump in remittances, the report opened a window onto the shifts in illegal immigration to the United States since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In the wake of the attacks, the United States almost immediately dispatched more staff members and machinery to bolster law enforcement operations on its border with Mexico, and it was believed that the heightened security would discourage immigrants from illegal crossing.

With fewer immigrants heading north, experts on both sides of the border predicted, remittances to Latin America would sharply decline. And the shrinking American economy was expected to force immigrants out of work, leaving them less money to send home.

Those forecasts, according to the Inter-American Development Bank and immigration experts, have proved wrong.

Let's make a proposal:

We're going to give five year guest worker visas to five million of the most qualified illegal immigrants. Four year guest worker visas to the four million next most qualified and on down to one year guest worker visas to one million of the minimally qualified. That's fifteen million guest worker visas in all, three quarters of what the race pimp lobby was supposedly asking for under McCain-Feinglod.

This is what we want in return:

No more Spanish language ballots. We need the money to select the best 15 million guest workers. American citizenship is required to vote anyway and (supposedly) you need to speak English to gain citizenship. So Spanish language ballots won't be necessary.
No more government services for illegal aliens except life-saving medical and deportation. There is a way to get legal now. Therefore, there should be no need to get these services as an illegal alien.
No more specials for Hispanics. Hispanic isn't a race anyway. It has no more right to it's own racial classification than Danes, Slovaks, Syrians or any other group which doesn't have their own little classification and affirmative action quota.
Preference points on the 15 million guest worker visas will be given to people who are (a)gainfully employed and pay taxes, (b)have clean criminal histories, (c)have used less than their share of government freebies, (d)learned our language, history and culture (a written exam-- in English-- being one way to establish the proper tiers), and (e)come from countries who demonstrate a cooperative attitude to America including non-encouragement of illegal immigration, willingness to extradite criminals and support for the United State in intenational affairs.

Everyone of the above requirements is reasonable, proper and similar to what any country with a sane immigration policy requires. And we're offering 15 million guest worker visas to sweeten the pot. Do you suppose MALDeF will go for it? Any of it? Nah, I didn't think so either.

What Crimes?

August 2007 Manuel De Jesus Gonzalez-Geronimo, a Guatemalan illegal alien, surrendered a day after killing two construction workers and seriously injuring two others in a hit-and-run accident in Montgomery County, Maryland. He told police he ran because he “was scared and didn’t have a license.” (Washington Post, August 15, 2007)
August 2007 Alejandro Bautista, who admitted to entering the United States illegally from Mexico, was sentenced to 6 year in prison for criminal sexual assault and aggravated criminal sexual abuse against two teenage brothers. (Chicago Tribune, August 14, 2007)
August 2007 Jose Carranza, a Peruvian illegal alien, was charged with the execution-style shooting of four teenagers, three of whom were killed. Carranza had been indicted twice earlier in the year for sexual assault on a child and for a bar fight. He was free on bond, and immigration authorities had not been contacted in his case. Another suspect in the shootings, Rodolfo Godinez, reportedly obtained legal U.S. residence in 2001 despite a lengthy arrest record. (AP news in Washington Times, August 14, 2007)
August 2007 Alejandro Rivera Gamboa and Gilberto Arellano Gamboa, Mexican illegal immigrants, were charged with killing a teenage girl from Texas visiting in Oregon. Rivera Gamboa, who was in possession of an Oregon state ID, card had been arrested four times in Oregon since 2000 for drunken driving. Immigration authorities said they had never been contacted by Oregon authorities. (Associated Press Texas news, August 10, 2007)
August 2007 Rocca Mejia Cinto, a 19-year old Mexican illegal immigrant was apprehended in Pennsylvania after fleeing from New York City where he is accused of “a senseless act of violence” in the unprovoked stabbing death of a 44-year old father of two. Authorities speculated that Mejia Cinto’s action was provoked by his involvement in gang warfare. (Standard Speaker [Pa.], August 9, 2007)
July 2007 Nilssen Torres Paredes, an Ecuadorian illegal immigrant, pleaded guilty in New York to manslaughter for the drunken driving accident that killed two people when he struck a car while speeding and driving the wrong way. He had illegally reentered the United States after being deported in 1997 after a conviction on weapons charges. (Newsday, July 31, 2007)
July 2007 David Raigoza Franco, a 34-year-old illegal immigrant, was charged with criminally negligent homicide and drunk driving for an accident that killed his 8-year old daughter. He was using false identification, but was identified through his fingerprints to have a criminal record and outstanding warrants for arrest including for probation violation. (KTVB.com 7/24/07 and KRTV News, 7/25/07)
July 2007 Gilberto Cruz, an illegal alien, was convicted of first-degree murder for the shotgun slaying of his former girlfriend in Colorado. He commented at his trial (as translated), “If I knew how to use the shotgun, she wouldn’t have died in the street, she would have been dead in the house.”
July 2007 A 24-year old Mexican man was arrested in Arizona for entering the country illegally. He had been convicted in 2006 of child molestation in Florida and deported earlier this year.
July 2007 Marcelo Mota, a Brazilian illegal immigrant, was arrested in New Jersey on charges of serial rape and sexual assault in cases in the Boston and New York City areas dating back to at least 2003 to which he has confessed. He arrived in 2001 on a visitor’s visa and stayed illegally. (The Boston Globe, July 17, 2007)
July 2007 Jose Valenzuela, a Mexican, was arrested in Ohio for having returned following his deportation for having been convicted in 1998 of “gross sexual imposition involving a juvenile girl.” (The Dayton Daily News, July 11, 2007

Now here’s a hate group!

Quote:
Behind the respectable front of the National Council of La Raza lies the
real agenda of the La Raza movement, the agenda that led to those thousands
of illegal immigrants in the streets of American cities, waving Mexican
flags, brazenly defying our laws, and demanding concessions.

Key among the secondary organizations is the radical racist group Movimiento
Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan
(MEChA), one of the most anti-American groups in the country, which has
permeated U.S. campuses since the 1960s, and continues its push to carve a
racist nation out of the American West.

One of America’s greatest strengths has always been taking in immigrants
from cultures around the world, and assimilating them into our country as
Americans. By being citizens of the U.S. we are Americans first, and only,
in our national loyalties.

This is totally opposed by MEChA for the hordes of illegal immigrants
pouring across our borders, to whom they say:

“Chicano is our identity; it defines who we are as people. It rejects the
notion that we...should assimilate into the Anglo-American melting
pot...Aztlan was the legendary homeland of the Aztecas ... It became
synonymous with the vast territories of the Southwest, brutally stolen from
a Mexican people marginalized and betrayed by the hostile custodians of the
Manifest Destiny.” (Statement on University of Oregon MEChA Website, Jan. 3,
2006)

MEChA isn’t at all shy about their goals, or their views of other races.
Their founding principles are contained in these words in “El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlan” (The Spiritual Plan for Aztlan):

“In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud
historical heritage but also of the brutal gringo invasion of our
territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land
of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their
birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare
that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our
inevitable destiny. ... Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water
the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. ... We
are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of
North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a
nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan. For La Raza todo.
Fuera de La Raza nada.”

That closing two-sentence motto is chilling to everyone who values equal
rights for all. It says: “For The Race everything. Outside The Race,
nothing.”

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