MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING THE NATION FLOODED WITH “CHEAP” ILLEGAL LABOR. THE VERY FACT THAT EVEN WITH A NATION UNDER 20% UNEMPLOYMENT THE LA RAZA DEMS ARE WORKING FOR AMNESTY SHOULD DEMONSTRATE THAT THESE POLITICIANS HAVE, WILL AND WOULD SELL US OUT JUST LIKE THEY DID TO THE BANKSTERS!
WHY DOES OBAMA REFER TO THE “HOMELAND SECURITY” AGENCY AS THE “HOMELAND SECURITY – PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP” amnesty program even has he take border guards OFF our open and undefended borders with NARCOmex. If you thought there was any “security” in this county, read the below article.
latimes.com
COLUMN ONE
A modern tale of meatpacking and immigrants
Grand Island, Neb., has long been a revolving door of immigrants, from Vietnamese and Bosnians to Latinos and Sudanese. But with Somali Muslims came a whole new set of conflicts.
By Kate Linthicum
January 28, 2010
Reporting from Grand Island, Neb.
Hawa Farah was living in Minneapolis three years ago making $8 an hour at a bakery when her fiance, Hussein Hussein, got a call about good jobs that paid better.
So the couple, like many Somali immigrants who follow work around the country, headed 600 miles southwest to Nebraska, state slogan: "The Good Life."
They settled in Grand Island, a blue-collar railroad town on the flat Midwestern prairie. They got married and brightened their worn apartment with plastic flowers and colorful rugs. Hussein, 33, began working the early shift on the "kill" side of the local meatpacking plant. Farah, 24, took a job on the "fabrication" side, trimming fat from brisket.
The promise of better pay was true enough.
But the good life would prove elusive. The young couple didn't know the plant's history and what it would mean for them.
A magnet for immigrants
It was still dark when dozens of federal agents, guns drawn, swept into the gray, windowless buildings at Swift & Co. just before Christmas 2006.
They were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents taking part in a six-state sting, and they had warrants to search for undocumented workers.
Like most of the nation's slaughterhouses, the Grand Island plant had always been a revolving door for immigrants.
Meatpacking is hard, dangerous work; the Department of Labor says it results in more injuries than any other trade. But it doesn't require workers to speak English, and in Grand Island it pays a starting wage of $12.25 an hour.
(HANDING JOBS TO ILLEGALS! 47% OF THE JOBS IN LOS ANGELES ARE HELD BY ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS)
Ads placed in immigrant newspapers across the country had drawn war refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1970s and from Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s.
Most made some money and moved on.
(TURNING THE MEX OCCUPATION INTO A MEX TIJUANA DUMPSTER – IT’S A PROVEN METHOD OF GETTING RID OF THOSE ENGLISH SPEAKING AMERICANS!)
But many Latino immigrants, who started arriving in large numbers in the 1980s, stayed. They launched Spanish-language radio programs, founded churches, set up taco trucks. And unlike earlier immigrants who were legal refugees recognized by the U.S. government, many Latinos had crossed the border illegally.
When immigration agents came to town in 2006, Latinos comprised up to 11% of Grand Island's 45,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
On the day of the raid, agents detained more than 200 of the plant's 2,500 workers. Another 200 Latinos from the evening shift, apparently fearful of deportation, promptly quit.
In town the raid triggered an eruption of resentment.
(MEXICANS ARE NOT HERE TO BECOME AMERICANS. THEY COME AS OCCUPIERS WITH THE NOTION AMERICA IS REALLY THE NORTHERN TERRITORY OF MEXICO. THEY REFUSE TO SPEAK ENGLISH, DEMAND SPANISH ONLY EVERYWHERE, HAVE MEX FLAGS PLASTERED EVERYWHERE, AND CAUSE A SURGE IN CRIME)
When Latinos marched in protest afterward, some townspeople lined the streets with a counter-demonstration, holding signs that read, "Go back to Mexico, wetbacks." The local newspaper was filled with venomous letters to the editor decrying Latino immigration.
(ATTRITION WORKS! ENFORCE LAWS AGAINST HIRING ILLEGALS AND THEY HEAD BACK HOME. HOWEVER, THE LA RAZA DEMS AND OBAMA HAVE REFUSED TO ENFORCE THE LAWS, SABOTAGE E-VERIFY, AND SIGNAL TO MEXICO, THERE’S GOOD PICKENS HERE IN GRINGOLAND. COME ON ALL YOU POOR, ILLITERATE, CRIMINAL AND PREGNANT, A GRINGO JOB AND GRINGO PAID WELFARE AWAITS!)
(MEXICANS ARE RACIST. THE LA RAZA “THE RACE” PARTY IS BENT ON MEXICAN SUPREMACY. THE MEXICAN’S CONTEMPT FOR AMERICANS, OUR LANGUAGE, FLAG, AND CULTURE IS EVER APPARENT TO ANYONE THAT HAS HAD CONTACT WITH AN ILLEGAL – IT’S NO WONDER THEY ARE RESENTED!)
"A lot of people don't like the Latinos, they just don't," said Jeff Fulton, a Grand Island native who has worked at the plant for 25 years. Latinos faced more discrimination than previous immigrants because they had put down roots, he said. One only had to drive down 4th Street, past La Solomera Guatemalan import store and El Tazumal Mexican restaurant, to see their influence.
"There has been more bigotry," Fulton said, "because there has just been more and more and more of them."
The emotions unleashed by the raid would soon find a new target -- Sudanese and Somalis attracted by the promise of work at the meatpacking plant.
The new immigrants, who had been granted refugee status because of strife in their homelands, posed new challenges to the status quo in Grand Island.
They were black, and some were Muslim.
A new kind of different
During each shift, at sundown, Farah asks her supervisor if she can put down her knives and go to the bathroom. Sometimes, if there are enough other trimmers to cover for her, the boss says yes.
Farah stands at the sink in the company locker room, away from the drone of the factory floor. She washes her hands, her face, her arms and her feet, turns northeast to face Mecca and begins to pray.
When the Somalis began arriving in 2007, supervisors learned that some of the more devout workers prayed five times a day, and that the sundown prayer fell before the plant's regularly scheduled 15-minute break. For the most part, they looked the other way.
That changed in 2008, during Ramadan, when virtually all the Muslim workers began leaving the assembly line en masse to pray. Even Muslims who are not particularly religious often make an effort to pray during the holy month.
Co-workers complained that they had to pick up the slack. Management told the Somalis they couldn't pray because the plant, one of the largest in the country, couldn't afford to stop the machines. Five hundred Muslim workers, infuriated, walked off the job.
Most came back after Swift & Co. agreed to accommodate them by changing break times.
But other workers protested that the Muslims had gotten preferential treatment, an idea fueled by a story published in a local Spanish-language newspaper that falsely claimed the Somalis had gotten a pay raise. Fights broke out in the lunch room. Hundreds of Latinos -- joined by the Sudanese, who are mostly Christian -- walked off the job.
Major conflict at the plant let up when Ramadan ended. But tensions in town mounted like never before.
At the Autumn Woods apartments on the southeast side of town, police were called several times a day to respond to stabbings, shootings and disputes.
A war was building between the Somalis, who lived on one side of the complex, and the Sudanese, who lived on the other side.
"It's chaotic anarchy," Police Chief Steve Lamken said recently.
In late August 2009, a Sudanese man was shot in the head at the apartment complex. Police arrested three Somalis in connection with the killing. Officer Robert Winton blamed the fighting on the Africans' violent homelands. "They're at war in their countries and they bring it here," he said.
(WHENEVER THE MEXICANS OCCUPY, SO DO MEXICAN GANGS. THE F.B.I SAYS THERE ARE NOW 800.000 MEXICAN GANG MEMBERS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!)
Violent crimes in Grand Island have risen in the last two years and the community, surrounded by cornfields, now faces a gang problem.
Fidencio Sandoval and his wife, Herminda, two meatpacking workers who were born in Mexico but are now U.S. citizens, worry about the violence.
They moved here in 1997, bought a house on a quiet street lined with sycamore and maple trees, and paid it off 10 years later.
"When I first came I thought this is a nice, quiet town, this may be a nice place to retire," Fidencio said. "But the way it's going now, I'm not sure."
Mayor Margaret Hornady said she frequently heard complaints about the changes recent immigrants had wrought.
"People say, 'Mayor, close down Swift, kick 'em out of town. All of our problems would be gone,' " she said.
Hornady said she had been "unsettled" by the presence of Somali women wearing head scarves. "It is startling," she said. "It's not what we're used to."
Just weeks after what she now terms "the Ramadan fiasco," Hornady made comments in the local and national media that the town's Somali leaders found offensive. As a peace offering, she issued an open invitation to all Somali women to attend a luncheon at her City Hall office.
She bought roses, ordered cucumber sandwiches and brought in her mother's silver tea service. Twelve men and six women showed up. Hornady was offended.
The event proved to her that the Somalis think life in Grand Island "is not good enough," Hornady said. "Well, it's what we've got."
She said it would take time for Grand Island to adjust to its immigrants, and vice-versa.
Attempting to integrate
There have been some attempts to foster unity in town.
Several groups offer free English classes and the city-funded Multicultural Coalition -- headed by a Latino woman who once worked at the plant -- helps connect new immigrants with social services.
The school district, where 15 years ago 90% of students were white and today 50% are, has reached out to immigrants to get their children enrolled.
But some Somalis decided Grand Island was no longer the place for them. After the Ramadan dispute, hundreds left town. Many moved to Lexington, an hour away, where the Tyson chicken plant pays less but is known for being more accommodating to Muslims.
Hawa Farah and Hussein Hussein aren't sure if they'll leave.
Last year, Ramadan did not trigger major conflict at the Grand Island plant, in large part because the Somalis had made arrangements with management beforehand.
Still, Farah and Hussein say they are frustrated by how co-workers treat them.
"They humiliate us like we are children," Farah said.
Farah said she her husband must keep working in order to support their families in Africa. "When we came here, it was not to relax," she said. Meanwhile, the company, which has since changed its name to JBS USA, has been grasping for employees once again.
Early last year, a man in Cuba named Jose Viol got a call from a friend in Miami.
The friend said recruiters from a meatpacking plant in Nebraska were looking for laborers. They would pay for three days of work what Viol could make all year in Cuba.
So he and his girlfriend got on a boat, fled Cuba for Mexico and crossed into the United States at the Texas border. They were granted refugee status and made their way to Miami, where they met up with other Cubans heading for Grand Island.
Seven hundred of them arrived in town last spring.
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An American Sees and Speaks!
The Illegals of Today, vs Those of Yesterday
re2:Writing to Hector Becerra & all those Misfits (Spanish News are t (Pico Rivera)
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Date: 2010-01-23, 10:14PM PST
Reply To This Post
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Ya lo creo! You hit the nail on the head! There's a world of difference between the Mexican-Americans of the past who obeyed our nation's immigration laws, and the "illegales" of today!
My family came to USA from Zacatecas around 1950. At that time, immigrants (From all countries!) had to promise that they would not seek any form of public assistance, and that their relatives in United States would support them if they could not find jobs. All of us learned english and became citizens as soon as possible.
Two of my uncles went into the army during the Korean war so they could become citizens faster. Yes, we enountered prejudice, as did other groups, but that did not stop us us from working hard, going to school and college, and getting ahead in life. Our family includes teachers, law enforcement, small business owners, lawyers, contractors, and so on. Sure, we have a few lemons, but what family does not?
Fast forward to 2010: The illegals come here from Mexico. They have an anchor baby, which becomes a citizen. The baby gets medicaid, and WIC vouchers. The proud parents ("Gurrones", if you ask me) get section eight housing, welfare, and food stamps. If an American who has worked for many years loses his job, or his job is sent overseas, he is told: "Sell your house, you make too much for these benefits."
What is wrong with this picture? Why does anybody think that California in bankrupt?
With the economic problems the USA has, you can forget about amnesty - it's not going to happen! Amnesty is as dead as Obama's medical plan! What the Spanish TV and newspapapers need to do is to tell the "illegales" to go back to Mexico, and apply to come here legally, just as the Mexican immigrants did in the forties, fifties, and sixties!
(Another chicano "up to here" with illegal "immigrants!")
Nuestro Estados Unidos: "Lealdad hasta la muerte!" (Our United States: Loylaty until death!)
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I know what you mean.I'm Chicano and i noticed even by watching the Spanish News and how this Bandits confused the Latinos,specially the Immigrants.by always bringing up the Hope of Immigration Reform and That Obama about to help them and More Government aid to them.The Spanish media NEVER Initiate for Latinos to get out of the idea of Government and Make it Happen.Is like Latinos just need Government Aid in Everything.Again this Government Was Never found in the ideas of Government taking care of you.People have this False Hope.Instead of the Spanish Media telling em to go back where they came from and to PROPERLY ADDRESS THEIR IMMIGRATION ISSUE AND PROPERLY GO THROUGH THE DUE-PROCESS OF THEIR STATUS.This people(media) just create more of what we see the problems of Today and how they are Brainwashing Immigrants so they could scream out:"RACIST!".........just example of Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona.A Man that following, and executing the written laws of Immigration is getting No Back-up from any Politician that are Responsible and the Ones that wrote the Fuckin' LAWS to begin with,Not Democratic or Republican politician is backing this Man,by being helping him to Enforced the Laws that were written and also the Spanish Media gets on the WAGON and call him out Racist! for him doing his Job.Why Latinos always claim:"Oh they are doing nothing,there just here to work and make an Honest Living".....Hello!,we have LAWS about Illegal Immigration.Why is it hard for People to Understand??.The Spanish Media is the problem and i think somebody needs to regulate it because i could understand the language and this people(media) never correct what the Illegals doing wrong but embrace them to be Unlawful.Spanish Media is the Problem.
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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Why the new jobs go to immigrants
By David R. Francis
Wall Street cheered and stock prices rose when the US Labor Department announced last Friday that employers had expanded their payrolls by 262,000 positions in February.
But it wasn't entirely good news. The statisticians also indicated that the share of the adult population holding jobs had slipped slightly from January to 62.3 percent. That's now two full percentage points below the level in the brief recession that began in March 2001.
Why the apparent contradiction? Reasons abound: population growth, rising retirements. But one factor that gets little attention is immigration.
In the past four years, the number of immigrants into the US, legal and illegal, has closely matched the number of new jobs. That suggests newcomers have, in effect, snapped up all of the new jobs.
"There has been no net job gain for natives," says Andrew Sum, an economist at Northeastern University.
In the US, President Bush calls for giving millions of illegal immigrants a kind of guest-worker status as a legal path to US citizenship. So far, no specific legislation to implement his suggestion has been put before Congress.
Meanwhile, US border patrols spend millions of dollars a year trying to keep illegals out. And yet, they keep coming, evidently little discouraged by recession or the 9/11 attacks. In the past four years alone, the number of immigrants ran some 2.5 million to 3 million, of which about half were illegal.
They come for jobs, of course. And the Bush administration makes barely any effort to enforce current law. In 2003, a total of 13 employers were fined for hiring undocumented employees.
In fact, neither Republicans nor Democrats have promoted enforcement of immigration law prohibiting the hiring of illegal immigrants, says Mr. Sum, head of Northeastern's Center for Labor Market Studies.
What employers really want in many cases by hiring immigrants is to hold down wage costs, experts say.
ARTICLE:
MOST MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS IN NEW STUDY GAVE UP JOBS TO TAKE THEIR CHANCES IN U.S.
By NINA BERNSTEIN New York Times
A report about the work lives of recent Mexican immigrants in seven cities across the United States suggests that they typically traded jobs in Mexico for the prospect of work here, despite serious bouts of unemployment, job instability and poor wages.
The report, released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, was based on surveys of nearly 5,000 Mexicans, most of them here illegally.
Those surveyed were seeking identity documents at Mexican consulates in New York, Atlanta and Raleigh, N.C., where recent arrivals have gravitated toward construction, hotel and restaurant jobs, and in Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Fresno, Calif., where they have been more likely to work in agriculture and manufacturing.
Unlike the stereotype of jobless Mexicans heading north, most of the immigrants had been employed in Mexico, the report found.
Once in the United States, they soon found that their illegal status was no barrier to being hired here. And though the jobs they landed, typically with help from relatives, were often unstable and their median earnings only $300 a week, that was enough to keep drawing newcomers because wages here far exceeded those in Mexico.
"We're getting a peek at a segment of the U.S. labor force that is large, that is growing by illegal migration, and that is bringing an entirely new set of issues into the U.S. labor market," said Rakesh Kochhar, associate director for research at the Pew Hispanic Center and author of the study.
The report suggested that policies intended to reduce migration pressures by improving the Mexican economy would have to look beyond employment to wages and perceptions of opportunity.
The survey found that the most recent to arrive were more likely to have worked in construction or commerce, rather than agriculture, in Mexico. Only 5 percent had been unemployed there; they were "drawn not from the fringes, but from the heart of Mexico's labor force," the report said.
After a difficult transition in their first six months in the United States about 15 percent of the respondents said they did not work during that time the rate of unemployment plummeted, to an average of 5 percent.
But in one of the most striking findings, 38 percent reported an unemployment spell lasting a month or more in the previous year, regardless of their location, legal status or length of time in the United States.
"These are workers with no safety net," Mr. Kochhar said. "The long run implication is a generation of workers without health or pension benefits, without any meaningful asset accumulation."
On the other hand, Mr. Kochhar and Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, said the flexibility of this work force was a boon to certain industries like home construction, an important part of the nation's economic growth since the last recession.
Among respondents to the survey, those who settled in Atlanta and Dallas were the best off, with 56 percent in each city receiving a weekly wage higher than the $300 a week median. The worst off were in Fresno, where more than half of the survey respondents worked in agriculture and 60 percent reported earning less than $300 a week. The lowest wages were reported by women, people who spoke little or no English, and those without identification.
To some scholars of immigration, the report underlines the lack of incentives for employers to turn to a guest worker program like the one proposed by President Bush because their needs are met cheaply by illegal workers and all without paperwork or long term commitment.
Guest workers might instead appeal to corporations like Wal Mart, the scholars said, where service jobs are now the target of union organizing drives.
"You can't plausibly argue that immigrant dominated sectors have a labor shortage," said Robert Courtney Smith, a sociologist and author of "Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants." Instead, he said, the report and evidence of falling wages among Mexican immigrants over time point to an oversupply of vulnerable workers competing with each other.
But Brendan Flanagan, a spokesman for the National Restaurant Association, which supports a guest worker program, disagreed. "In many places it is difficult to fill jobs with domestic workers," Mr. Flanagan said. "We've seen a simple lack of applicants, regardless of what wage is offered."
Although the survey, conducted from July 2004 to January 2005, was not random or weighted to represent all Mexican immigrants, it offers a close look at a usually elusive population.
Those surveyed were not questioned directly about their immigration status, but they were asked whether they had any photo identification issued by a government agency in the United States. Slightly more than half over all, and 75 percent in New York, said they did not.
The migration is part of a historic restructuring of the Mexican economy comparable to America's industrial revolution, said Kathleen Newland, director of the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization based in Washington.
The institute released its own report on Tuesday, arguing that border enforcement efforts have failed. Workplace enforcement, which has been neglected, would be a crucial part of making a guest worker program successful.
For now, Mexicans keep arriving illegally.
"It doesn't matter if it's winter," said Ricardo Cortes, 23, a construction worker waiting for a friend outside the Mexican consulate in New York on Tuesday. "People are still coming because there's no money over there."
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