In Naples, Mafia guns down six African immigrants

Mafia strike under nose of paratroopers

By Guy Dinmore

Financial Times, October 14 2008

Even Italy’s crack Folgore paratroopers could not save 60-year-old Stanislao Cantelli from the Mafia.

Mr Cantelli was playing cards in a social club on the busy high street of Casal di Principe – a satellite town and stronghold of the Camorra gangs – when someone walked in and fired 18 bullets.

Paratroopers were 200 metres away. By the time the police arrived, the killer and all witnesses had fled. Shops were closing their shutters.

Police say Mr Cantelli, a retired cheese factory worker, paid the price for being the uncle of Luigi Diana, a Mafia “pentito” or turncoat whose information had led to the arrest of members of the Casalesi clan.

Two weeks earlier, suspected Casalesi hitmen gunned down six African immigrants in Castelvolturno, a derelict zone north of Naples trying to reinvent itself with a coastal golf course.

A turf war over narcotics or golf, or simply a cocaine-driven demonstration of power by the mob?

Police are not sure. Frightened immigrants held a violent protest in response, accusing the state of abandoning them and Italians of racism.

The government’s decision to deploy the army has been cautiously welcomed by Italians as a sign that the state is trying to impose an authority that has been absent for years. Critics say it is just for show.

Letting some of them in

The Economist, Oct 2nd 2008

The European Union’s immigration pact offers a promise of tighter controls but may have little real effect

IMMIGRATION has Europe in a pickle. With ageing populations and low birth rates, the European Union needs more people. But EU countries are already taking in plenty of foreigners (see chart), and many struggle to integrate. Popular resentment of immigration is increasing, and may rise further as economies slow and unemployment climbs. Meanwhile hundreds of illegal migrants risk life and limb on leaky boats to get to Europe every week.

France’s Nicolas Sarkozy has made immigration a centrepiece of the French EU presidency. As interior minister he took a hard line on immigration, which helped win him votes in the 2007 presidential election. The new “pact” on immigration and asylum, due to be adopted by an EU summit in mid-October, is his idea.

Its main justification is that, given free movement of people around the EU, different national policies no longer make sense, especially in the passport-free Schengen area. The pact suggests common approaches: immigration should be more selective (a “blue card” modelled on America’s green card will try to lure highly skilled migrants); and illegal immigration should be tightly controlled, with more returns and beefed-up border controls.

Mr. McCain on Immigration

Word

John McCain believes America’s immigration system is broken. He is committed to a two-step process to reform.

“we’ve got to secure the borders first“, secondly…

Implement an electronic employment verification system

Identify and aggressively prosecute employers that continue to hire illegal immigrant.

implement temporary worker programs that will reflect the labor needs of the United States

• Reform caps for H-1B visa program to rise and fall in response to market conditions.  Reduce bureaucracy and waiting times
• Implement a usable, market based system for low-skilled workers to enter the United States in an orderly fashion
• Offer a limited number of green cards to reflect the small number of workers that may wish to remain in the United States permanently

Reality

Mr. McCain has sided with the pro-amnesty, open-borders crowd.

Mr. Obama on Immigration

Word

“We have to finally bring the 12 million undocumented out of the shadows. We should require them to pay a fine, learn English, abide by the law, and go to the back of the line for citizenship – behind those who came here legally. But we cannot – and should not – deport 12 million people”

“Employers should not get away with willfully hiring people unauthorized to work here”

“I do not support the reduction of family based visas in order to create a new points based system”

“Secure borders through “additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry”

“Driving lincenses should be available to people regardless of immigration status”

“Illegal immigrants should be given a path to legal residency”

Would increase the cap on low-skilled employment based green cards and high-skilled H-1B visas

“We must invest in education programs to help immigrants learn English”

Reality

Voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006

Voted for comprehensive immigration reform

Read Obama’s response to The Sanctuary Survey.

Good neighbours make fences

America is building a border barrier that is both too tight and not tight enough

FOR the past four years Steve Johnston has been dropping food, water and socks in the Sonoran desert. They are intended for illegal immigrants, who have often been walking for three or four days. Demand has never been greater. Recently Mr Johnston left 80 gallons of water beside a popular trail, and returned the next day to find all but eight gallons gone. He has encountered 40-strong groups walking in broad daylight. It is, oddly, proof that America’s growing border fence is having an effect on illegal immigration.

The reason so many immigrants are tramping through Mr Johnston’s neighbourhood can be found 12 miles to the south-west. Around Sasabe, steel cylinders have been sunk into the desert to create an imposing fence. That has blocked a popular migration route and driven people east. No More Deaths, a humanitarian group, has drawn up a map of migration routes based on how much water and food disappears. It looks like a leaf skeleton—a pattern of interlocking lines snaking north through the desert, then east to just above a checkpoint. From there, immigrants are driven to Tucson and Phoenix, whence they travel to wherever there are jobs.

By the end of this year the American government is supposed to have erected 670 miles of fencing along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Roughly half of the barrier is designed to stop everything bigger than a jackrabbit; the other half will let people through but stop vehicles. It is just part of a drive, stepped up in the past two years, to clamp down on illegal immigration and drug-smuggling. The Border Patrol is swelling from fewer than 6,000 officers in 1996 to more than 18,000 by next year. Unmanned watchtowers bristling with cameras and heat sensors are being developed. Finally, checks at proper border crossings are becoming more rigorous.

U.S. Should Import More Skilled Workers

by Will Wilkinson – research fellow at the Cato Institute, July 16, 2008.

If you’re a highly-skilled worker, America needs you. But if you’ve got a foreign passport, we probably won’t let you in.

The U.S. issues only 65,000 H-1B visas for skilled workers each year and that’s not very many. Senators McCain and Obama have both said they would support raising the cap. They acknowledge we need more skilled workers, and they’re right. Yes, it would be good for innovation and growth and it would bring down the prices of goods created by skilled workers, but here’s another reason you might not have thought of: Wage inequality.

Increases in wage inequality over the past few decades is primarily a story of the supply and demand of skilled labor together with the effects of technological innovation. Wage increases tend to track improvements in the productivity of labor and gains in productivity tend to be driven by innovations that help workers do more in less time. But in recent decades, technical innovation has increased the productivity of more highly-educated workers faster than it has for less-educated workers. These growing inequalities in productivity have helped create growing inequalities in wages.

But that’s not the whole story. The American system of higher education produces skilled workers too slowly to keep up with the demand. This scarcity in the supply bids up the wages of the well-educated even more, further widening the wage gap. If we raised visa quotas on skilled labor, that would help bring supply in line with demand and reduce the wage gap between more and less skilled workers.

These days, almost everybody but their beneficiaries think agricultural subsidies are a lousy idea. They benefit a few already relatively wealthy American farmers and agribusiness firms to the detriment of poor farmers around the world. But H-1B visa restrictions are subsidies that benefit relatively rich domestic workers over their poorer foreign peers, and so it turns out many of us liberal-minded college grads are enjoying our own protectionist boost.

In this case, it seems the moral outrage is… well, we seem to be keeping it to ourselves.

Towns Rethink Laws Against Illegal Immigrants

New York Times, September 26, 2007

RIVERSIDE, N.J., Sept. 25 — A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Angelina Guedes has owned a hair and nail salon in Riverside, N.J., for two years. It was nearly empty on a recent afternoon.

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.

Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.

So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.

Simulation of Air Traffic Worldwide

US Border Patrol

Fewer People Entering U.S. Illegally, Report Says

New York Times, October 2, 2008

A report released Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Center indicates that fewer people are trying to enter the United States illegally and that there has been no growth over the last year in the number of illegal immigrants living here.

The Pew center report, which is based on census data, showed that for the first time in nearly a decade, the number of people entering the country illegally was lower than the number arriving through legal channels.

Experts said the loss of low-wage jobs in the American economy, combined with intensified enforcement at the border and at workplaces across the country, had caused those who might be considering an illegal border crossing to think twice before risking what has become an increasingly dangerous journey. The result has been a significant reversal after a decade of rapid growth in illegal immigration.

Central banks from Mexico to Brazil have projected the biggest declines in remittances from the United States in more than 10 years.

The Pew report found that illegal immigration to the United States had dropped to about 500,000 annually since 2005 from an average yearly rate of 800,000 from 2000 to 2004. Since 2000, the average number of legal immigrants entering the United States each year has remained steady at about 600,000 to 700,000.