Those who knowingly hire illegal aliens are as guilty as the illegals themselves. That's why I fully support moves like this.

Seven executives and managers at IFCO, a Houston-based pallet company, were charged Friday with conspiring between 2003 and 2006 to harbor illegal immigrants.

In April 2006, immigration agents raided 40 IFCO pallet plants in 26 states and detained 1,182 undocumented workers. Two of the seven officials charged Friday were Spring residents Christopher Tiesman, 40, the senior vice president of finance and accounting; and Kenneth Gines Jr., 51, controller for pallet services.

Tiesman and Gines, along with two other top-level IFCO executives, are charged “in a related conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration by submitting false payroll-related information to those agencies, and to facilitate the misuse of Social Security numbers by IFCO employees,” said a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Albany, N.Y.

Bock'em, Danno!

Posted by: Greg at 10:35 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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One of the ongoing talking points of the Left is that those of us who seek to have our borders secured and our immigration laws respected are simply hate-mongers who hold Hispanics (especially Mexicans) in contempt. That we may have a reasonable basis for our positions is simply unfathomable to them. Perhaps they need to consider some of the information in this New York Times article and ask themselves whose position, theirs or ours, makes more sense.

Juárez and El Paso are divided only by the narrow Rio Grande and a couple of border checkpoints that have done little over the years to stop the steady back and forth of trade and family visits.

The two cities are so close that the mayor of El Paso can look out his office window to view downtown Juárez.

But in other ways the two cities are worlds apart these days.

El Paso still enjoys its status as one of the safest cities in the United States, while Juárez, a city of 1.5 million that has always been rough, has become a battleground for drug cartels. More than 1,550 people were killed there in drug wars last year.

Worse, other violent crimes — carjacking, extortion, armed robbery — have surged as the beleaguered authorities struggle to respond to daily gun battles.

“It’s strange to be the third-safest city in the United States right next to a war zone,” said Mayor John Cook of El Paso, as he gazed at the ramshackle neighborhoods of Juárez.

The reality is that Mexico is a troubled country today. It is completely dysfunctional. Failure to appropriately secure our border can only result in those problems crossing that border and infiltrating our own cities. We have seen some of this with gangs like the Central American MS-13 gang – do we need the ongoing epidemic of abductions and murders to take root in the United States before the supporters of open borders admit that there may be bona fide reasons of public safety at the heart of the positions taken by those of us?

Posted by: Greg at 02:42 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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This is a proposal that only the most hard-core advocate of open borders could argue with. We need to deport those who, after having already disregarded our nation's immigration laws, turn around and break our criminal laws as well.

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire wants illegal immigrants serving time in state jails deported, a move intended to save the state more than $9 million in the next two-year budget.

The deportation proposal is modeled after a program in Arizona that has saved the state more than $18.5 million since 2005, said Eldon Vail, Secretary of the state Department of Corrections.

"It's not an ideal choice, if revenue was there, I'd say have them do their time," Vail said. "Is justice better served? It's a tough question to wrestle with when you don't have resources."

New York and Arizona are already working with ICE to do this. Other states ought to consider it.

But more to the point, we need to start getting rid of those who have so little respect for America's laws that they cross our border illegally. After all, every illegal immigrant is a law-breaker, and therefore an undesirable alien.

Posted by: Greg at 04:40 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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