You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:

[varnyard]

You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:
Boy, am I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraqwar and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again
until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.
Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.

verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare &social services by the American taxpayers.
Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html

9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United Stateshave a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border; also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National Policy Institute, "estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period."
Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin.
Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States."
Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml

The total cost is a whopping $338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. Are we THAT stupid?

 

[varnyard]

I need to change #10:

10. The illegal aliens in the United Stateshave a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white and black non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

 

[KelliH]

We're doomed.

 

[Roy Munson]

You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much?

Yep, I do. And the items in your list are costing us too much as well. Our foreign AND domestic policies are going to destroy this country.

 

[Chameleon Company]

Bobby,
Good info, and also a lot of stuff that many politicians don't want us to worry about. Hopefully the illegal alien debate will get more traction soon enough, and hopefully in this election. Its one where John Q. Public gets it before the politicians do. One thought that always has jumped to the tip of my tongue in the last couple of years as the illegal alien debate has finally gotten some attention is what I learned in Boy Scouts. It sure ain't rocket science, but in listening to our politicians, you'd think it was. In first aid, step number one is "Stop The Bleeding". Nothing that comes after it matters if you don't do it first. It translates to "Build the Fence". In the meantime, if you didn't see it, but one of the states (CA I think) revoked the sponsorship of the Minutemen to a section of hghway just inside our southern border to keep the highway clean. You know, the signs that said "This section of highway kept clean by the MINUTEMEN". Great sign to have near the border. Well, seems the local politicians thought it might be too offensive to the illegal aliens coming in ! Wish I was making this up, but the Minutemen signs are down now. I can appreciate both sides of the argument on amnesty, etc. But its time to STOP THE BLEEDING, and which ever politician grabs that first will get good mileage.

 

[critical bill]

Just when my lawn and shrubs are starting to look great you guys want to go ahead and ruin it for me.

 

[The BoidSmith]

The dilemma faced by a little town in Iowa in 2006.

News Immigration Battle Splitting Locals in Iowa By NATHANIEL POPPER June 23, 2006
POSTVILLE, Iowa — This rural town's reservoir of neighborly good will has been drained in recent weeks by an increasingly personal debate about the immigrants lining up for work at the local slaughterhouse — the nation's largest kosher meatpacking plant.
At a packed town council meeting June 12, seven local clergy members, including a rabbi, issued a statement that denounces members of the town council for making critical comments about the Mexicans, Guatemalans and Jews who work at the slaughterhouse.
A few weeks earlier, the council's most vocal anti-immigrant member, Jeff Reinhardt, wrote in the local paper that the town's Hispanics have "a lack of respect for our laws and culture which contributes to unwed mothers, trash in the streets, unpaid bills, drugs, forgery, and other crimes." He also criticized what he described as the isolated ways of Postville's Hasidic Jews.
The town of Postville was upended and remade by the arrival of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim who came to town in 1989 to open AgriProcessors. Just as the dust was settling from their arrival, Hispanic workers began showing up to look for jobs. In total, over the past decade, 500 to 1,000 have come — almost doubling the town's population and significantly altering its ethnic mix.
While this dose of diversity seemed to be going down smoothly for a number of years — after a number of initial clashes — last fall's council elections saw four of five seats go to candidates, including Reinhardt, who were openly critical of the town's changing face. Since then, the council has scaled back relations with AgriProcessors. It also has cut funding for the local visitors center that had worked with the Hispanic immigrants.
But the story in Postville is more complex than the old archetype of the locals turning against the newcomers. In Postville, there are a number of old-timers who love the new worldliness of Postville and have found themselves at odds with locals who want the good old days back.
In the latest sign of that divide, one of Postville's biggest cheerleaders for diversity, public works director Gary Simmons, announced his resignation and departure from town, pointing to the "bigoted statements" of the town council. He departed just as the county sheriff began an investigation into phone taps at city hall, which Simmons had discovered a few weeks earlier.
"You see that there is an effort to turn back the clocks here, and that is troubling," Simmons said from his old office in the petite city hall. "We're opening back up our wounds that had been closed."
A few weeks before Simmons's move, the director of the town's visitors center — an affable lifelong Postvillean named Nina Taylor — announced that she would be packing up and moving to nearby Decorah because of the soured climate in town. From her office behind the town's gift shop, where glass figurines of rabbis stood in display cases, Taylor had organized tours of Postville for Iowans from towns with no Mexican or kosher restaurants.
"We told the story about the good effects of diversity," Taylor said. "I'm going to miss it drastically."
Taylor's departure also spells the end of an event that is one of the most visible annual signs of Postville's diversity, the Taste of Postville. For the past eight years, Taylor has organized the local summer event where the town's ethnic groups set up stands with falafel and enchiladas on Greene St. Without a visitors center, the August event had to be canceled this year. The other big community event, Agricultural Days, was also canceled this year because of the divide between city council and civic leaders.
Even with the cancellations, the diverse fringes of this farm town are never far from sight. On Saturdays, the one day that the slaughterhouse is closed, the streets are filled with Jews walking to synagogue and with Mexicans standing in line to send remittance checks back home. The main intersection in town is dominated by Sabor Latino, a Mexican grocery and restaurant where the best tacos in northern Iowa are prepared.
But Postville's chief of police, Mike Halse, said there are other, less heartwarming signs of the newcomers. Because many of the immigrants are undocumented, they are unable to get a driver's license or car insurance. There have been a number of instances when drivers simply have left town without a trace after being involved in an accident.
More upsetting, according to the town's mayor, Bob Penrod, was that before his administration, many Hispanics "never mowed their lawns — they just let garbage pile up. We're trying to get the policies reinforced so we have a cleaner town."
For his part, Reinhardt believes the town's primary problem is that AgriProcessors has hired immigrants at "the lowest possible rates," driving down wages in the area.
"Once people stop taking advantage of illegal immigrants, then everything will get better," he said.
Postville has a history of conflict revolving around AgriProcessors and the new faces it has brought to town. The book "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America," follows the battles in the 1990s, when AgriProcessors resisted a proposal by the town council to annex the land on which AgriProcessors sits (the measure ended up passing).
The editor of the Postville Herald Leader said that last week's town council meeting about diversity was the largest and most emotional since those earlier debates about annexation.
There is still a great deal of self-segregation in the area. Most Hispanics live in a few large apartment buildings and trailer parks on the edges of town. But since the annexation debates, there have been major strides toward ethnic cooperation. One of the major opponents of AgriProcessors during the annexation debate has now become one of its biggest supporters on city council. And in 2001, the owner of the local mattress store, Aaron Goldsmith, became the first Jewish member of the council.
"We were on the positive, up and up, for a long time," said Goldsmith, who gave up his post in 2003 because he felt the town no longer needed his services. "To me, an honest view will see that in Postville's case the water has risen for everyone."
The benefits of the newcomers are evident in the Postville school district, which recently constructed a new auditorium and track with state grants. Most other nearby school districts in rural Iowa — where the population is aging — have had to merge schools, but not Postville. The children of immigrants have helped stabilize the school's population. In addition, the growing multilingual population has allowed the school to win more than $2 million in grants over the past three years. With some of that funding, the school will start a program this fall to ensure that every student is bilingual by eighth grade.
"Without the immigrants, we wouldn't even have a school to write grants for," said David Strudthoff, the school's superintendent.
When it comes to crime in town, there was a spike in the mid 1990s, with the number of arrests jumping to 28 in 1998 from seven in 1992. But in the past three years there actually has been a decline, with the number of arrests dropping to 12. There also has been as a drop in the incidents of disorderly conduct.
Simmons, the public works director who just resigned from his post, recently established a committee that gave local Hispanics and town officials a chance to sit down and talk about their expectations and disappointments with each other.
All of which raises the question of why the fury has bubbled up now. Townspeople on all sides of the fence say it is only a coincidence that the town's
confrontation is coming at the same time that the national debate on immigration has become so hostile.
Stephen Bloom, the author of the book "Postville," believes that the current tensions have less to do with the immigrants and more to do with the Jewish owners of AgriProcessors. Bloom said that residents have longstanding concerns about AgriProcessors and its workers, but they were afraid that public criticism might drive the company — the town's economic engine — to leave. Now, he said, it is clear that the plant is here to stay, so people are speaking out.
"People on the council feel empowered to say things they only whispered in the past," Bloom said.
Indeed, the new town council members said they were motivated to run for office because they believed that the old town council had grown too close to AgriProcessors, taking paid trips to New York and Europe on the company.
But in a town of this size, there is also the matter of personal politics. For instance, the current mayor, Penrod, was director of public works before Gary Simmons, and Simmons says that Penrod has been pushing to take back his old job.
Simmons said that when he first came to his job, seven years ago, he found that the telephones had been set up with recording devices, which he subsequently disconnected. A few weeks ago, Simmons told the Forward, he discovered that the phones throughout city hall had been wired. The Allamakee County sheriff is currently investigating the matter.
Whatever the investigation turns up, the battles over the town's future will continue in council meetings until at least the next local elections. But the school superintendent is hopeful that calm will return.
"Right now in our city, our pendulum has swung as far right as you can get," Strudthoff said. "The citizens will pull the pendulum back."

Events this past Monday:

WEST DES MOINES — A federal immigration raid at a kosher meatpacking plant in northeast Iowa was the largest such operation in U.S. history, with nearly 400 people arrested, federal officials said Tuesday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said at least 390 people were arrested on immigration charges as part of a raid Monday morning at Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville. The plant had about 900 workers before the raid.

Most of the 314 men and 76 women arrested are from Guatemala and Mexico, but some were from Ukraine and Israel.

"Based on the number of ... arrests, this is the largest single site operation of its kind ever in the United States," said ICE spokesman Tim Counts.

The raid followed a months-long investigation into Agriprocessors, the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world.

ICE officials would not comment on whether company officials could face criminal charges. Telephone messages left with Agriprocessors on Tuesday were not returned.

Of those initially arrested, officials said 56 were released on humanitarian grounds, typically because their arrest would leave a child with no custodian. A handful were released because of medical conditions.

Men were being held at temporary housing at the National Cattle Congress Fairgrounds in Waterloo, where they are expected to be processed by Wednesday night and moved to other locations by Thursday. Women are being held at the Hardin County jail.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa condemned the raids in a statement Tuesday.

"It appears that detainees are not receiving adequate time to meet with their lawyers, and that defense attorneys are being overwhelmed by requests to represent far more clients than is advisable — or perhaps even ethical," said Ben Stone, the group's president. "We are concerned that the sheer size of this raid is likely to result in numerous violations of the U.S. Constitution, which protects the due process rights of all persons in this country."

Counts said those arrested had and would have adequate time to meet with their attorneys.

Everyone arrested Monday has been charged with immigration violations. So far 20 of them also have been arrested on a variety of criminal charges, including aggravated identity theft and false use of Social Security numbers, said Bob Teig, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office.

Those facing criminal charges began appearing Tuesday afternoon in a makeshift federal court at the Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, said U.S. Attorney Matt M. Dummermuth.

Anyone detained on a criminal charge will be placed in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. People charged only with immigration violations will remain in ICE custody before going through removal proceedings, including a hearing before an immigration judge. Those hearings will take place throughout the country, Counts said, depending on space.

According to a search warrant application and affadavit dated May 9, federal officials relied on a variety of sources, including former employees and at least one undercover source who wore a wire and became an employee of the plant at ICE's request.

According to the search warrant application, the undercover source said that some employees were paid with cash, and that those workers wore specially colored work hats to denote their status. Other employees were paid with checks that did not bear Agriprocessors' name.

Sources in the warrant application also said they saw what appeared to be underage workers at the plant.

According to the company's Web site, Agriprocessors was founded in 1987 by the Rubashkim family. The company's kosher and non-kosher products are found in many national supermarket chains.

A very interesting project for sociologists. Time will tell what will be of this rural town.

 

[varnyard]

Dan, I know what you think, but you need to look at the much higher crime rate. Good old COPS on TV show the true story. They ruin their country, so what the hell, give them an invite to ruin ours. Yea, COPS are not about trailer trash any longer, we upgraded to the ones that do not belong here.

Anyone that really wants to see the harm done needs to take a trip to Miami, that is what this whole country will look like before long. And it is not like it once was, you better not go to bed and leave your doors unlocked now. You will get yourself killed for a ten dollar crack rock.

 

[The BoidSmith]

I hear you Bobby. Migration to urban areas is an undeniable fact and those that don't want to work hard and want to make a quick buck move to the city. But the reality in rural america is quite different and so is the quality of the people we have working here.

 

[varnyard]

I hear you Bobby. Migration to urban areas is an undeniable fact and those that don't want to work hard and want to make a quick buck move to the city. But the reality in rural america is quite different and so is the quality of the people we have working here.

So rural America has nothing to worry about? And the crime rate does not rise at all? All of these that broke the law by coming here like they have, just stop breaking the law after they take over our rural America? Nice dream, but no to all of the above.

 

[shed'n my skin]

I think at the rate things are going the economy and everything is going to get so bad the immigrants will decide to stay in Mexico because it's easier to find a job there. Problem solved.

 

[Cat_72]

I hear you Bobby. Migration to urban areas is an undeniable fact and those that don't want to work hard and want to make a quick buck move to the city. But the reality in rural america is quite different and so is the quality of the people we have working here.

I'm not sure exactly what direction you were reaching with the statement about the "quality" of people we have in rural america, but being not very far from Postville, I can tell you a few things first-hand.

Postville is an itty-bitty town. We have ridden thru there many times on our Harley (it is on a backroad on the way to one of our favorite Harley shops)....but I would NOT step foot there after dark. The same goes for a couple of other towns around here. The crime rate HAS gone up a good deal in the past few years, right along with the large immigrant influx.

I also work in a factory setting (albeit in my office, mostly) but I see enough of what goes on out on the floor to be bothered. We've recently had to hire more security staff, and can't keep a lot of the newer non-minority hires, because they are purposely intimidated by many members of the minority employees. We've had people threatened with knives, people coming into the plant and attacking other employees....and all of this has for the most part blossomed in the last couple of years....again, coinciding with the large immigrant influx here.

I can tell you for a fact that there are employees here who can't remember what the name on their employee ID says....ask them their name, they'll give you one name, then glance at their badge and correct themselves....we've also had accidents caused by employees not able to understand safety warnings in English....and they refuse to learn English.

I could pick out a specific few legal immigrant workers here that are super people. They work hard, are friendly, and are positive contributors to society. They send money home to Mexico or Cuba (we have a lot of Cuban folk here) so their distant families can live better. They do their best to communicate and learn English, and in turn when I ask them, they help me understand some of their language, and teach me how to say to help out certain employees that may be new here, and are just picking up on some of the terminology. But those good folks seem few and far between anymore.

But for the most part......what they are bringing to the rural areas, at least around here, is well short of being anything positive.

 

[tranquill]

Many Israeli officials argued against the Iraqi war. Like Shoher here: http://samsonblinded.org/blog/iraq