In a spate of recent cases across the country, American citizens have been confined in local jails after federal immigration agents, acting on flawed information from Department of Homeland Security databases, instructed the police to hold them for investigation and possible deportation.

Americans said their vehement protests that they were citizens went unheard by local police and jailers for days, with no communication with federal immigration agents to clarify the situation.

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The signs say “Immigrants Welcome” printed in English, Hmong and Spanish. The word “Welcome” also is handwritten in six languages: English, Hmong, Spanish, Norwegian, German and Arabic, by members of immigrant families in Wisconsin.

“We’ve heard a lot of angry anti-immigrant sentiment. We’re glad to be giving people an opportunity to express welcome and love to immigrants,” said Janet Parker, co-chairwoman of Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.

Well, they sound like hippies, but at least I can agree with the message. I like immigrants and I’m glad that they see the United States as a good place to live and work. We must be doing something right.

Then I read down a bit further:

Parker said her group supports the work of immigrant rights groups like the Workers’ Rights Center and Immigrant Workers’ Union in Madison and Voces de la Frontera in Milwaukee.

“We see the war in Iraq as intrinsically tied to the war against immigrants,” Parker said. “At the core, they are both about racism.”

Ah, no. No, no, no. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with racism. Anyone who sincerely holds that opinion has tapioca between their ears. Also, Voces de la Frontera is a bit of an unsavory group.

As reported earlier members of Voces de la Frontera violated the home of State Senator Cathy Stepp last night shouting and attempting to intimidate her into signing driver license legislation for illegal immigrants.

I took the following from their website:

Description of Agency/Activities: Voces de la Frontera is a low-wage and immigrant worker’s center that opened in Nov. 2001. The center was created to respond to the immediate problems low-wage immigrant workers face. The center provides a legal clinic where workers can obtain free legal advice about labor and civil rights, as well as ongoing English language and citizenship classes. The agency provides classes to train workers and other immigrants about discrimination, OSHA regulations, labor laws, worker’s compensation, legalization and work visas, and more day-to-day topics such as how to obtain a driver’s license, how to buy a house, and how to fill out taxes and open bank accounts. Ongoing campaigns include legalization and access to higher education for immigrant students.

Notice any trend there? All kinds of training on how to get government cash and sue people, nothing on job training or English language courses or fitting into society.

Don’t expect to find one of those yard signs in my lawn. Not if buying the sign means supporting groups like Voces de la Frontera.

All the Republicans needed to do was push for an “enforcement only” immigration bill. Refuse to do anything about our mess of immigration laws until the border had been locked down tight. “No changes without fences!” was their rallying cry. Republicans like John Kyle and John McCain, who tried to push for a comprehensive bill, were demonized and ostracized.

The strategy failed miserably. Instead of turning out the vote for the GOP, it destroyed whatever inroads the GOP had previously made with Latino voters. Richard Nadler, of America’s Majority, recently completed an in-depth study of how the Republicans’ position on immigration affected Latino voters. The results aren’t pretty.

Nadler wrote about his results in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

Undocumented Latinos constitute 3.8% of the American work force. But these 5.6 million workers are a mere fraction of the 17.3 million Latino citizens 18 years or older. Of these, 4.4 million are themselves foreign born.

In my recent study for the Americas Majority Foundation entitled “Border Wars: The Impact of Immigration on the Latino Vote,” I document not what Hispanics opined, but how they actually voted, given a clear choice between advocates of “enforcement first” and comprehensive immigration reform. The results, based on returns from 145 heavily Hispanic precincts and over 100,000 tabulated votes, indicate this: Immigration policies that induce mass fear among illegal residents will induce mass anger among the legal residents who share their heritage.

In these three races, Republicans’ vote share in heavily Latino precincts dropped 22 percentage points.

What does this mean nationwide? Republicans’ presidential Hispanic vote share increased to 40% in 2004 from 21% in 1996. In 2004, Latinos comprised 6% of the electorate, but 8.1% of the voter-qualified citizenry. With the partisan margin shrinking, the incentive for major Hispanic registration efforts by either party was scant.

That changed in 2006, when the GOP’s Hispanic vote share declined by 10%. And, as we have seen, the drop was twice as precipitous where Republicans disavowed comprehensive immigration reform. With the huge wedge in vote share that “enforcement-only” opened, the cost-effectiveness of voter-registration efforts improved dramatically — for Democrats.

Great work guys. Can we finally put to rest the idea that slamming shut the border and demonizing entire racial groups is a good way to win elections? Can we finally start working on a way to fix the entire immigration process rather than pretending that a border fence is the only thing missing?

In Gonzalez’s case, his wife, Mildred, came to the United States with her mother in 1989 when she was 5 years old. They were granted political asylum because of their status as war refugees from Guatemala.

In September 2000, Mildred’s mother applied for legalization and included her daughter in that application. Her mother was granted legal status in July 2004, according to Gonzalez.

However, six weeks earlier, Gonzalez and Mildred got married, canceling Mildred’s ability to apply for legal status through her mother because she was no longer an unmarried daughter under the age of 21. As a result, her legal status still remains in jeopardy.

A judge in June granted her a one-year extension to remain in the United States. If her legal status does not change by June 8, 2008, she will have 60 days to voluntarily leave the country or face deportation.

Why do we still have an immigration system that’s more interested in kicking Mildred out of the country than in welcoming her into the country? Why did it take four years for her mother to be legalized? Will it take another four years for her to legalized?

Eduardo is serving this country, putting his life on the line. Are we really going to reward him by kicking his wife back to Guatemala — a country she hasn’t lived in for 17 years — and making her go through “the line” for the next 4-10 years? Do we really want to send the world a message saying “Stay Out! America for Americans Only!”

It sure looks to me like that’s what we’re doing. And we don’t have to. All we need to do is change immigration law. The law should treat relatives of the military as though we actually value the sacrifice that the military makes. That law should provide an easy, relatively painless process to enter the country — not the labyrinthian mess that we have now. Why is doing the right thing so hard?

Finally, comments like this are hardly helpful.

That’s just fine, according to Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which lobbies for tougher laws on illegal immigration.

“What you’re talking about is amnesty for illegal immigrants who have a relative in the armed forces, and that’s just outrageous,” he said. “What we’re talking about here is letting lawbreakers get away with their actions just because they have a relative in the military. … There’s no justification for that kind of policy.”

Lawbreakers? Mildred isn’t a lawbreaker. She immigrated and was granted asylum because her homeland was tearing itself apart. She spent her entire life her. She wants to spend the rest of her life her. And you’re calling her a lawbreaker?

Give me a break.

A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in [Riverside, NJ, a] faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.

The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Here’s the town’s former mayor, on the law:

“The business district is fairly vacant now, but it’s not the legitimate businesses that are gone,” he said. “It’s all the ones that were supporting the illegal immigrants, or, as I like to call them, the criminal aliens.”

Or, as I like to call them, taxpayers and the backbone of the local economy.

It’s a nice theory. But that’s all it is. The law of unintended consequences applies even to immigration policy. Rather than accepting a loss of Mexican field hands, farmers are being to move their fields to Mexico.

Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.

Farming since he was a teenager, Mr. Scaroni, 50, built a $50-million business growing lettuce and broccoli in California’s Imperial Valley, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexicans and many probably in the United States illegally.

But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.

“I’m as American red-blood as it gets,” Mr. Scaroni said, “but I’m tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue.”

Oops.

A Long Line for a Shorter Wait at the Supermarket. A search for higher customer satisfaction (and higher profits) led Whole Foods to revamp their checkout lines.

Lines can also hurt retailers. Starbucks spooked investors last summer when it said long lines for its cold beverages scared off customers. Wal-Mart, too, has said that slow checkouts have turned off many.

And they are easily turned off. Research has shown that consumers routinely perceive the wait to be far longer than it actually is.

Whole Foods executives spent months drawing up designs for a new line system in New York that would be unlike anything in their suburban stores, where shoppers form one line in front of each register.

The result is one of the fastest grocery store lines in the city. An admittedly unscientific survey by this reporter found that at peak shopping times — Sunday, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. — a line at Whole Foods checked out a person every 4.5 seconds, compared with 19.6 seconds for a line at Trader Joe’s.

Put Kieran on a poster. A student in Saskatchewan, Canada learned that independent learning is a quick route to the principal’s office.

King, who is in Grade 10 at a high school in tiny Wawota, Sask., started researching marijuana after he and his fellow students were given an audiovisual presentation about drugs earlier in the year. The presentation, from his entirely believable description, was typical of its kind: short on background facts and long on horror stories.

On May 30, Kieran, who is described as “research-obsessed” by his mother, was chatting with friends around the school lunch table and telling them about what he’d discovered, largely from scholarly and government sources. He argued that marijuana carries a near-zero risk of overdose, that it has been approved by Health Canada for medical use and that it kills an infinitesimal fraction of the people that alcohol and tobacco do every week — claims so uncontroversial you’d have to be high on something much stronger than pot to dispute them.

But one of the students who’d witnessed the conversation apparently finked to the warden. (From this day forward I’m going to avoid the use of the term “principal.” If schools are going to be run like prisons, let’s adopt the appropriate lingo.) Boss bull Susan Wilson ordered Kieran to stop talking about marijuana on school premises — even though he had been outside the classroom, where school officials have to meet a justifiably high standard before interfering with a student’s freedom of speech — and later she called his mother to warn her that “promoting drug use” would not be tolerated. According to the education director of the school division, she was also told “if there were any drugs brought into the school, the police could be involved.”

Next up, robots may make arguments over illegal immigrants moot. Farms Fund Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers

Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.

The robotic work has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, and pushed forward by the uncertainty surrounding the migrant labor force. Farmers are “very, very nervous about the availability and cost of labor in the near future,” says Vision Robotics CEO Derek Morikawa.

Once again, we see an example of political uncertainty leading companies to make investments and decisions that they wouldn’t ordinarily make. Something to keep in mind anytime Congress starts debating something — the debate itself can affect the real world.

Finally, many men are so afraid of child molestation accusations that they’re no longer volunteering for any position that would put them near children. See Daily Pundit » Where Are The Big Brothers?.

The article sets out a number of possible reasons men don’t volunteer at Big Brothers-Big Sisters in greater numbers – but the fact that the rate at BB-BS is less than the overall average for volunteer-based organizations moves me to throw out an undiscussed possibility: men are afraid of having their lives destroyed by a false accusation, and fear the BB-BS will protect itself by throwing its resources behind the accuser.

In Arizona, almost 60 percent of grade school principals and nearly 90 percent of teachers are women. Six years ago, the majority of principals were men. Some schools have no men, meaning kids may not have a male teacher or principal until middle or high school. It’s the same picture nationally.

… Scottsdale’s Serna said the fear of being accused of inappropriate touching or abuse has made lots of educators uncomfortable. Many administrators and teachers leave the profession out of fear of lawsuits or false accusations.

The so-called Employment Eligibility Verification System would be established as part of a bill that senators began debating on Monday…

All employers — at least 7 million, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — would be required to verify identity documents provided by both existing employees and potential hires, the legislation says. The data, including Social Security numbers, would be provided to Homeland Security, on penalty of perjury, and the government databases would provide a work authorization confirmation within three business days.

Even parents who hire nannies might be covered. The language in the bill, called the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act, defines an employer as “any person or entity hiring, recruiting, or referring an individual for employment in the United States” and does not appear to explicitly exempt individuals or small businesses. (Its Senate sponsors did not immediately respond on Monday to queries on this point.)

Why is this considered a good idea? One screw-up by the government and American citizens will be legally barred from working. What kind of controls will there be on this database? How will you challenge a denial of your work authorization? How will you know that someone in Washington didn’t put you into the database out of sheer spite? This is a bad, bad, bad idea.

Secondly, Ed Morrissey relays the story of a sex slavery ring that exploited illegal immigrants.

The women came mostly from Mexico and Central America.

When they arrived in Minnesota, the women had their passports and other identifying documents taken away and they were forced into a world of prostitution. In one night, two women serviced more than 80 men in a south Minneapolis house.

Ed has a solution for this problem:

This is a horrific case, and one which points out the need for strong border control. The men conned the women into crossing the border, and then they took advantage of their illegal status to force them into prostitution.

Sure, these women were conned and controlled because they were not legally allowed to work or live in the United States. Preventing them from coming here at all would have prevented their enslavement. On the other hand, allowing them to enter legally would have also prevented their enslavement. Placing high barriers to immigration increases the chances that people will be “helped” across the border, then exploited. Placing low barriers to immigration allows people to come to the U.S. in search of a better life, without fear of future enslavement. Why are we so eager to choose the first path and not the second?

Hugh Hewitt has been reading through the bill and offering his criticisms. Specifically, the bill apparently has a gaping loophole that would allow almost any existing illegal immigrant to gain a Z-visa without a full background check. Furthermore, the bill seems to assume that the Federal government has no chance of completing background checks on 12 million illegals and starts the blame game early. Finally, the bill would impose a huge hidden tax on businesses hiring immigrants.

So far, not so good.

However, John McCain says that the loophole really isn’t a loophole.

I may or may not have further thoughts on this later. Mainly, I wanted to publish these resources for anyone that’s more interested in them than I am.

• Dafydd ab Hugh has an outline of what might be in the bill
• John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff don’t trust the bill.
• Fred Thompson doesn’t like the bill.
• Former Senator Bill Frist doesn’t like the bill.

On the other hand, I’m somewhat encouraged that these folks don’t like the bill:

• Hugh Hewitt really doesn’t like the bill. (Also, here, here and here. Like I said, he really doesn’t like the bill.)
• Michelle Malkin really doesn’t like the bill.

Finally, Ed Morrissey doesn’t really like the bill, but thinks it’s the best that the Republicans are going to get and is a tolerable compromise.

Me, I’m still thinking. I’ll let you know my feelings in a later post.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey defends the bill against Republican haters.