Oh NO!

Men with Asian tastes, the latest victims of tighter immigration restrictions in Canada:

Facing a shortage of foreign exotic dancers, a group representing 53 of Ontario's strip club owners is turning to immigration consultants to find a loophole in the rules governing foreign workers.

The Adult Entertainment Association of Canada is looking for alternative, legal, ways to hire foreign-born strippers and dancers. One way might be to use foreign student visas since foreign students can now work for 20 hours a week in any job, said the group's executive director Tim Labrinos.

Story here.

The Anti-Lou Dobbs Lobby Continues Its Work to Put Lou In His Grave

What would Lou Dobbs have to say about this?

In a classroom at a private school in Annapolis, migrant worker Gerardo Reyes-Chavez addressed students who were about the age he was when he first began to work, asking whether they would leave Annapolis to labor in a foreign country.[...]

Reyes-Chavez, a 30-year-old native of Mexico and a member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group fighting for the rights of migrant workers, spoke to students in grades 7 through 12 last week as part of the Key School's in-depth study of migrant farm laborers.

Students assumed roles in a hypothetical agricultural cooperative to learn about the marketplace. Another assignment had them on their hands and knees outside, harvesting clover with strict instructions to clear dirt from the stems. The exercises were supported by more traditional study that involved reading and writing about migrant workers.

The lesson seems pretty stupid to me, but it has two qualities that keep me from criticizing it too much. The school is private, not public, and it aggravates the hell out of the far-right, immigration restrictionists.

Verify This

An article in today's USA Today notes the growing opposition to the section of the immigration reform bill that would require every American to get the permission of the federal government before they could work. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, as long as this provision is in the immigration bill members of Congress should vote against the whole bill.

The immigration bill that the Senate is now debating, as well as a bipartisan measure that has been introduced in the House, both contain provisions that will require every person in the country who applies for a job — no matter where they were born and whether or not they are citizens — to demonstrate they are eligible to work in the USA.

[...]

When the Senate returns after its week-long Memorial Day recess, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., among others, will try to change the employer-verification requirements. Obama is worried about possible intrusions on Americans' privacy. Other critics warn that the system could result in nightmarish bureaucratic glitch for U.S. citizens.

[...]

In testimony this year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Randy Johnson said there are 140 million Americans in the workforce. "Even with a 1% error rate," he warned, "you're talking about disqualifying a million Americans from their livelihood."

Fueling skepticism about the program: a December 2006 report by the Social Security Administration's inspector general estimating a 4% error rate in the files that would be used to determine American's ability to work.

Of course, removing this provision would likely doom the whole immigration proposal. Republicans are adamant that it stay in. They're willing to march America down the road to serfdom and put millions of U.S. citizens into a Kafkaesque system in order to sleep better at night knowing something is being done to prevent illegal immigrants from working. Their hatred of brown people far outweighs their love for the Constitution.

Oppose the Immigration Compromise

I'm all for letting more immigrants into our country and legalizing the ones that are already here, but not at the expense of turning America into a police state. 18,000 more gun-toting federal agents on the border. Hundreds of miles of barbwire fences. Surveillance cameras. Unmanned spy drones. And an electronic employee-verification system that will for the first time in American history require Americans to get permission from a federal agency before they are "allowed" to work. That's what the compromise immigration legislation worked out by Congressional leaders in both parties would give us. No thanks. I'd rather have the largely unregulated, market-driven system we have now.

More here, here, here, and here.

What a President Tancredo Has in Store for America

Sigh. I would have some comfort that this isn't happening in America, but I know I'm going to read about it happening in some redneck town. It's the logical next step after mandating English-only.

ROME (Reuters) - The local government in Treviso has ordered the northern Italian city's Chinese restaurants to remove red lanterns from their windows because they look too "oriental."
[...]

"It's spoiling the appearance of the city," the head of the council's town planning department, Sergio Marton, told Corriere della Sera daily.

"The Chinese put up all sorts of stuff: lanterns, lions, dragons, there's even one (establishment) that did its whole front in oriental style." Treviso, just outside Venice in the north-eastern Veneto region, is run by the populist, anti-immigrant Northern League.

[...]

"Treviso is a city of Veneto and Padania, it's certainly not an oriental city," deputy mayor Giancarlo Gentilini said, justifying the order to take down the lanterns within 10 days. The order states that the three restaurants in question had made no formal request to the council to put up their lanterns.

"From now on we'll be making regular checks and after the lanterns we'll be looking at all the other decorations around the entrances of the oriental restaurants," Marton warned.

Underground Illegal Immigrant Dentistry

Meet Ernesto Estrado, libertarian hero.

Authorities have arrested an illegal immigrant on charges that he ran an unlicensed dental practice out of his home in Carrollton. Ernesto Estrado is accused of performing procedures on hundreds of illegal immigrants who were too afraid to go to a licensed dentist.

The man reportedly used pliers, box cutters and etching blades he bought at a hardware store to pull teeth, fill cavities and create dentures. Investigators searched his home and found prescription painkillers, hypodermic needles and a ledger that detailed cash payments from more than 100 people.

Sounds painful, but how bad could it be if so many customers in a tight-knit community frequented Estrado's practice? Not nearly half as bad as choosing between a toothache and deportation.

What's the Yiddish Word for Rubbing Salt in Someone's Wounds?

We reported last week that it's been confirmed that Anne Frank's father tried desperately to get her and her family out of The Netherlands and into the U.S., but was turned back by the Lou Dobbs Ron Paul immigration barriers of the time. Now New York Democrat Steve Israel wants to make her a U.S. citizen. Yeah, that totally makes up for our country letting her and millions of others die.

"The best way we can honor Anne Frank in death is to give her what her father sought for her in life," Israel said.

[...]

Bernd Elias, a German cousin of Anne Frank, living in Switzerland told The New York Times: "I cannot see the point. She saw herself as Dutch."

Another cousin living in San Diego, Edith Gordon, said: "It doesn't seem right to me somehow, when we didn't let her into the country."

Not right in deed.

Ron Paul on Douche Bag Lou Dobbs' Show, Minus the Douche Bag

He's right-on on Iraq, a total dumbass on immigration.

Immigrants = Good for Them, Good for Us

Just got through watching a few excellent YouTube videos featuring Philippe Legrain, author of the new Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them.

The title is pretty self-explanatory. Suffice to say that if Lou Dobbs could read, he would read something else than Immigrants.

Legrain, a former correspondent for The Economist, amongst other gigs, blogs at his own site and at The Guardian's Comment is Free.

Tyler Cowen calls Immigrants "the single best non-technical defense of a liberal immigration policy". Johann Norberg says, "Our understanding of globalisation was incomplete. This book makes it whole."

That was good enough for me. Fittingly, my copy of Immigrants is immigrating from Amazon.ca -- since it's not yet available at Amazon.com -- and set me back about $24 US.