Lemkin

No One Could Have Predicted →

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

[…]

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

The results of that investigation have now been released. According to survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.

Apparently the market-based solution involves pressing 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers into service. That ought to do it.
Next solution: Children ought to be allowed to “help out” and we can just let the market will decide if such labors are safe enough.

"Whatever else is true, watching billionaire Meg Whitman attack her undocumented maid through spokespeople is ugly"

— Glenn Greenwald composes a sentence I hadn’t anticipated. Politics of the Rich and Famous.

"People who talk about our “materialistic society” and about getting back to “spiritual values” strike me as having a right sense of indignation and a poor sense of analysis. The delusion of our society is not so much its materialism as its faux spiritualism, its desire to make a heaven on earth, not as a place free of needless suffering and full of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls “collective joy,” but as one in which the elect live everlastingly and communicate telepathically while flying in disembodied splendor above the heads of the Mexicans mowing the lawn."

— Garret Keizer in Harper’s

"It’s up to Republicans to decide if they agree with this strategy. Do they want an issue or do they want us to get it done quickly?"

— Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Statements like this boggle the mind. Welcome back from Mars, Jim, how has the weather been on The Red Planet? Much rain since your arrival there in the early-70s?

"All the social and national elements of the civilized world are represented in the new land, their peculiar characteristics are to be blended together by the all-assimilating power of freedom. This is the origin of the American nationality, which did not spring from one family, one tribe, one country, but incorporates the vigorous elements of all civilized nations on earth."

— Carl Schurz, German immigrant and Republican leader, speaking in 1859; he became a leading backer of the 14th Amendment. (via EJ Dionne)

"[M]y children don’t look Hispanic."

— Brian Sandoval, Nevada gubernatorial candidate, responding to a question about “how he would feel if his children were stopped in the street and asked for their papers.”
God Bless America.

No One Could Have Expected →

Are you trying to tell me that immigrants spend money?

In a 2008 study, she found that Arizona immigrants contributed $29 billion annually to the state economy, representing about 8% of its activity.

When immigrants leave, Gans said, “stores experience dramatic drops in sales. Apartment owners who rent to immigrants have high vacancy rates and risk losing their buildings. Legal workers or renters or consumers don’t generally step in quickly enough to prevent these businesses from experiencing real additional hardship.”

At 43rd and Thomas, such short-term economic perils are no abstraction.

“If people don’t come here, I don’t make money and I don’t pay taxes,” Katchi said.

[…]

merchants say the repercussions are clear — not just in how it’s prompted many families to leave the state, but scared others enough to curtail their regular activities.

“The economy’s already bad, but on top of it [SB 1070] is like a bullet in the head to us,” said Osameh Odeh, 35, whose Eden Wear clothing store was empty one recent afternoon. “People don’t come out of their houses anymore.”

Odeh has laid off workers and doesn’t pay his utility bills until the day they come due. He’s not sure he can stay open and notes that the effect spreads well beyond the rough-and-tumble streets of Maryvale. A resident of the middle-class suburb of Gilbert, Odeh has cut back his purchases at home.

South of the Border →

Very fine piece on the foolishness of our current immigration debate:

Two days earlier, Senator John McCain, of Arizona, in a floor speech defending his state’s newly passed law requiring local officers to investigate individuals’ immigration status, described “an unsecured border between Arizona and Mexico, which has led to violence, the worst I have ever seen.” He went on to cite numbers for illegal immigrants apprehended last year “that stagger.”

In fact those numbers are surprising: they are sharply down, according to the Border Patrol—by more than sixty per cent since 2000, to five hundred and fifty thousand apprehensions last year, the lowest figure in thirty-five years. Illegal immigration, although hard to measure, has clearly been declining. The southern border, far from being “unsecured,” is in better shape than it has been for years—better managed and less porous. It has been the beneficiary of security-budget increases since September 11th, which have helped slow the pace of illegal entries, if not as dramatically as the economic crash did. Violent crime, though rising in Mexico, has fallen this side of the border: in Southwestern border counties it has dropped more than thirty per cent in the past two decades. It’s down in Senator McCain’s Arizona. According to F.B.I. statistics, the four safest big cities in the United States—San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin—are all in border states.

"You know, God gave us rights. Our Founding Fathers recognized that. It’s in our Declaration. It’s the foundational document of America. And God made all nations on Earth and decided when and where each nation would be. And that’s out of the book of Acts; it’s in other places. So, we can’t be a nation if [we] don’t have a border, and if we grant amnesty, we can’t define it as a border any longer, or ourselves as a nation any longer."

— Steve King (R, Iowa), setting a new bar for the most batshit insane thing I’ve seen uttered by a public official. It’s been a while since I read the book of Acts, but I’m pretty sure the United States of America and 54’40 or fight figured nowhere in it. Must’ve been towards the back.

Take Our Jobs →

Agriculture in the United States is dependent on an immigrant workforce. Three-quarters of all crop workers working in American agriculture were born outside the United States. According to government statistics, since the late 1990s, at least 50% of the crop workers have not been authorized to work legally in the United States.

We are a nation in denial about our food supply. As a result the UFW has initiated the “Take Our Jobs” campaign.

Farm workers are ready to train citizens and legal residents who wish to replace them in the field, we will use our knowledge and staff to help connect the unemployed with farm employers. Just fill out the form to the right and continue on to the request for job application.

There you go, Tea Klan. All yours, and training is included. We can also put you to work building Rand Paul’s underground electric fence.