Importing Disease

TB Cases Increase Among Immigrants

When talking to residents about tuberculosis, the staff of the Fairfax County [VA] Health Department speaks 32 languages. In Arlington County, health officials advertise tuberculosis tests on foreign language radio shows. In most Northern Virginia schools, students who have been overseas for five months or more must be screened for TB. These efforts have become necessary, public health officials say, because tuberculosis cases are rising in Northern Virginia and more than 90% of those who have the disease are foreign- born residents. Northern Virginia's TB rate is rising at a time when state and national levels have plummeted to record lows.

Mark Andrew Dwyer

Idiot's guide to illegal immigration

It's amazing what some people have come to believe in order to support an amnesty for illegal immigrants, open borders policy, and similar absurd ideas. -- THEY BELIEVE: THAT massive illegal immigration makes America prosper and its economy boom, just like the waving of the trees makes the wind blow. -- THAT illegal immigrants had to leave their native countries because, being low-skilled and uneducated workers, they were too much of a burden for their native countries' economies, and that illegal immigrants with their hard work attitude and entrepreneurial talents deserve the credit for the recent boom of American economy. -- More....

Great Inagua, Bahamas

Scores of "boat people" repatriated in unruly incident last Tuesday

"Boat people" continue trying to sneak from their impoverished homelands into Florida - and continue getting caught. -- Last Tuesday was no exception - as the Coast Guard repatriated to Haiti 88 Haitian "boat people" who had been captured in an unruly mass arrest four days earlier. -- The "boat people" were first sighted by the crew of the USCG cutter Forward while patrolling near the Bahamas - when the 65- foot sailboat the "boat people" were on was about 20 miles west of Great Inagua. -- When the cutter pulled alongside the sailboat, several of the "boat people" asked to be removed from the sailboat - which then had about 30 "boat people" on deck and 60 more below decks.

Enforcement

Enforcement U.S. strategy sends would-be migrants into hostile terrain

A death trap has been created to control the border between the United States and Mexico. Almost 1,500 would- be migrants have died along the Southwest border of the United States since the Border Patrol launched its strategy in 1994 of pushing them out of urban areas into some of the country's most punishing climates and terrain. Immigration authorities also say arrests have decreased along every segment of the U.S.- Mexico border during the last six months. Beefed- up border enforcement is cited, but the 24% drop in arrests - compared to the same period last year - is the first time arrests have declined in number since Operation Gatekeeper began seven years ago.

San Diego

Kids caught in middle in border smuggling

Twelve- year- old María Guadalupe Galarza stood in line at the San Ysidro border pedestrian checkpoint alongside the smuggler her mother had hired to take her to L.A. María shuffled forward nervously, repeating to herself the fake name the matronly smuggler had given her. But when a U.S. immigration agent asked María her name, she froze. The agent pulled her aside, abruptly ending the girl's 1,000- mile journey north. Family ties extend beyond borders, and smugglers are capitalizing on this emotional tug to spirit thousands of children illegally into the United States from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Salt Lake City

Gang Problem on Rise in Rural Utah, Police Say

The effectiveness of urban police forces in stifling gang problems in big cities is leading to an unwanted phenomenon: Rural gangs are on the rise. Utah's rural police forces are seeing a spike in graffiti, violence and other crimes associated with gangs from Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. Most rural agencies are only now beginning to make plans to stop the gang activity. Joan Liquin, who has worked as the Logan-Cache County Gang Project coordinator since 1998, said gang members try to take advantage of rural police officers' relative inexperience with the gang culture. They also go out to the country where they believe it is easier to make and distribute drugs, such as methamphetamines, Liquin said.

More from Gregory Rodriguez

150 Years Later, Latinos Finally Hit the Mainstream

While Latinos have been an integral part of the American cultural landscape since the mid-19th century, only now are they beginning to gain the broad social acceptance other groups experienced within a few generations of arriving in America. Massive contemporary Latin American immigration, combined with the emergence of a Latino middle class, have forced both political and commercial marketers to rethink their approach to a group on the verge of becoming the nation's largest minority. At the same time, an unprecedented array of political and pop cultural figures have helped normalize the image of Latinos in the mainstream imagination.

Georgia Colonists

The Latino network

For more than 200 years, immigrants have followed friends and relatives to specific neighborhoods in the United States. One person comes here, finds a job and encourages others to follow. It's a pattern that sprinkled the Midwest with German and Swedish settlements and created Chinese enclaves in Los Angeles and New York. Now the tradition is unfolding in metro Atlanta. Latino immigrants are clustering in apartment buildings and mobile home parks in places such as Canton, Cumming, Duluth, East Point, Forest Park, Marietta, Norcross and Smyrna. About 210,600 moved to metro Atlanta in the 1990s, the U.S. Census Bureau says, to take jobs created by the 1996 Summer Olympics, the building boom around Atlanta and a hunger for workers in poultry plants.

L.A. Times Puff Piece on MEChA Menace

Villaraigosa Sets a Post-Ethnic Standard for L.A.

Rather than being hindered by his ethnicity, the leading Latino mayoral candidate was in part lifted by a growing sense that it's time for a Mexican American to lead L.A. Far from igniting the ethnic political revolution that campus activists dreamed of a generation ago, former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa sailed to the top of a 15- member field by tapping into a feeling of historic inevitability arising from demographic evolution. Villaraigosa is not the beacon of L.A.'s ethnic metamorphosis as much as he is a product of it. -- But while history and ethno- symbolism worked in his favor in the primary, Villaraigosa earned every bit of his commanding first-place finish. [Also see this e-mail about the writer of this trash.]

Destructive Mexican Onslaught

Illegal aliens swelling U.S. Southwest populations

Phoenix - Poor illegal immigrants [aliens] are moving to the U.S. Southwest in record numbers. Here in Maricopa County, which is larger in area than each of seven states, new census figures show that from 1990 to 2000, the Hispanic population swelled by 108%, a rate fueled by a rising flow of illegal immigration as well as higher- than- average birth rates and migration from other states. The county now has 3.07 million people, of whom 763,000 are Hispanic. Officials estimate that about a third of the 1.3 million Hispanics now living in Arizona, roughly 400,000 people, entered the country illegally.

Out-Of-Control Migration

Latinos flex muscles in L.A. race

Latino turnout hit a new high in a Los Angeles mayor's race Tuesday, signaling a new age in the city's politics, analysts say. Latinos cast about 20 percent of the approximately 480,000 ballots, a dramatic increase over the 8 percent they cast in the 1993 mayor's race, according to the Los Angeles Times exit poll. "It is a new political age in Los Angeles where the alliances of old are not playing out any longer," Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, said. "The demographic shift has been so great in the last five to 10 years that the old formulas will no longer resonate."

Glenn Spencer to the Washington Post

Illegals Boost Tax Coffers by Millions

Illegal aliens from Mexico earn very little. Many who file income tax returns probably do so to benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit whereby they receive a tax refund up to $3,000 even though they paid no taxes. IRS rules allow Mexican illegal aliens to claim dependents living in Mexico. In Bordering on Chaos, Oppenheimer observed, "Since as far as historians can remember, double-talk and deceit had been part of Mexico's national character." Cheating on taxes is not unknown in Mexico. -- The suggestion that illegal aliens from Mexico pay more in taxes than they use in services is absurd. They cost American taxpayers billions of dollars.

Washington Post

Illegals Boost Tax Coffers by Millions

As the tax season draws to a close Monday, many undocumented workers [illegals] like Silvia are paying into public coffers. Largely overlooked in the political furor over the costs of illegal immigration, such workers appear to be paying billions of dollars a year in income, property and sales taxes. The government does not pursue the tax paper trail to illegal immigrants [aliens], both because of privacy laws and a desire that everyone pay his or her taxes. But evidence of their contributions is popping up all over: from tax-preparation sessions in the Washington area to the Social Security Administration, which has been stymied by a mysterious, bulging file of contributions it can't trace.