'Special Order 40’ on Trial

NRO ^ | 21 apr 08 | Jack Dunphy

[rellimpank]

Los Angeles debates the treatment of illegal immigrants.

Sometimes a solitary tragedy can weave all the tangled threads of a far-ranging debate into a sharply focused picture, one that only the willfully blind can claim not to see. Here in Los Angeles, one such tragedy has been the murder of Jamiel Shaw, 17, a high-school student and star athlete who was shot to death on March 2 of this year.

Pedro Espinoza, a 19-year-old gang member, has been charged with Shaw’s murder. More than 100 people have been murdered in Los Angeles so far this year, and if this was all you knew about the crime you might not attach any more significance to Shaw’s death than you would to any of the others in which one young man killed another. So common are such crimes that they are seldom noted in the media. But Jamiel Shaw’s death is notable not only for its inherent tragedy of extinguished promise, but even more so for its illustration of the government’s abject failure to perform its most basic function: protecting the innocent from predators such as Pedro Espinoza.

[Haddit]

Had Jamiel Shaw’s murderer not been exposed as an illegal alien this would just go down as another murder. So seldom do you hear the immigration status of criminals you would have to assume SO40 is there to protect the illegals at the cost to citizens.

[AuntB]

This couldn’t be part of the problem could it?

50 percent of LA workforce are immigrants

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/04/21/50_percent_of_la_workforce_are_immigrants/3251/

Published: April 21, 2008 at 12:48 AM

LOS ANGELES, April 21 (UPI) — Los Angeles is at the leading edge of a U.S. demographic trend, with half of its workforce immigrants, many of them unskilled and speaking little English.

As baby boomers retire, the same pattern will emerge across the country, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. Demographers estimate that by 2025 most of the growth in the workforce will be from immigrants.

Ernesto Cortes Jr., Southwest regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, said Los Angeles is at a crossroads.

“The question is: Are we going to be a 21st century city with shared prosperity, or a Third World city with an elite group on top and the majority at poverty or near poverty wages?” he asked. “Right now we’re headed toward becoming a Third World city. But we can change that.”

The Migration Policy Institute used U.S. Census data to determine that one-third of immigrants have not graduated from high school and 60 percent do not speak English fluently.

Cortes, with former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros and others, is to participate in a conference this week at the University of Southern California on how to train and integrate immigrant workers.

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/04/21/50_percent_of_la_workforce_are_immigrants/3251/

[HiJinx]

SO 40 Ping!

[norton]

This thing is wrong on so many levels, and right on only one:

The author is correct in stating that government is not protecting the populace.

He is wrong in not pointing out the errors in the cited allegation that "50% of workers in LA are ..."
Yes, LA has a pot load of legal immigrants in the work force - good for LA.
Yes, LA has a pot load of illegal aliens swelling the labor force, but at the bottom end or as hidden workers in otherwise legitimate immigrant owned businesses - not good for the USA.
Yes, the illegals speak little or no English and generally do no WANT to speak English.

Fine, now let's look at the problems;
Legitimate immigrants help to make the country better than it may have been yesterday - new blood if nothing else.
Lower skilled jobs are not highly desired but they are necessary and they are stepping stones - ask the clerk at Wall-mart.
Importing unskilled aliens, with little desire or demand to assimilate, who are paid substantially under the table, and who believe that they are getting something back from the gringos who stole "their" land, is head banging stupid.
Refusing to draw a line between legal and illegal, desired and undesirable, immigration is pretty close to treason.