News that makes us laugh, cry, or both

[Juton]

The immigration situation in the US is retarded, but it's retarded by design. A lot of large (and small) companies just love having access to illegal immigrant labour. For instance Tyson's meat packaging employs thousand(s) of illegal workers, thay have a back room deal with the INS to allow them to deport 14 a week, in return the INS ignores the other thousand(s).

I hate to say this about the human condition, but I think most border crossers are doing it for jobs, not liberty or safety. If the US made their laws punish those who use illegal labour then the jobs for them would dry up and the immigrants would stop coming.

[Psychic Robot]

This is just another way of saying he wants to put brown people in ovens

You just went full retard.

Oh look, PR is defending Nazis again.

Yes, because telling illegal immigrants to GTFO is the same as killing Jews.

[Crissa]

I mean, like an apartment in Phoenix during 125F weather without water isn't equatable to an oven. :P

-Crissa

[Psychic Robot]

It is comparable to an oven when you're not being a raging retard and trying to conflate "sweltering heat" to "gas 'em and ash 'em."

[Crissa]

...Besides, my point was the lack of recourse under the law.

-Crissa

[Psychic Robot]

You know what's a great website? TVTropes.

[Clutch9800]

...Besides, my point was the lack of recourse under the law.

There are some who say that illegal immigrants are criminals, ergo, they should have no recourse under law.

That of course is silly, but there are a lot of people who believe it.

Clutch

[Prak]

The immigration situation in the US is retarded, but it's retarded by design. A lot of large (and small) companies just love having access to illegal immigrant labour. For instance Tyson's meat packaging employs thousand(s) of illegal workers, thay have a back room deal with the INS to allow them to deport 14 a week, in return the INS ignores the other thousand(s).

I hate to say this about the human condition, but I think most border crossers are doing it for jobs, not liberty or safety. If the US made their laws punish those who use illegal labour then the jobs for them would dry up and the immigrants would stop coming.

yeah, jobs, and so they can send money to their families that are still in mexico, sometimes so said families can come over legally and safely

Personally, I think some one needs to enstate some kind of system that provides would be immigrants with well-paying, legal jobs, so they can just come legally.

[cthulhu]

I don't think either one of those countries is worth one drop of American blood.

Afghanistan has the largest deposits of Lithium in the world. There are also massive iron deposits and other mineral wealth in the country that have been untapped.

Afghanistan is a weak, unstable country with very little technology.

I think we all know how this ends.

There is more than enough lithum in stable second order providers (like Australia!) to meet predicted future demand.

No-one gives a shit about Afghanistan's large lithium deposits. And if they did, the almost as large deposits in Boliva might be more interesting.

[Clutch9800]

Personally, I think some one needs to enstate some kind of system that provides would be immigrants with well-paying, legal jobs, so they can just come legally.

Are you on crack? The unemployment rate in the United States is almost 10%.

That's a super idea, let's give "would be immigrants" well paying jobs.

Count to ten before you post.

Clutch

[Koumei]

Force companies to hire more people rather than cut it down to the bare minimum workers needed (and the workers, stretched out as they are, getting less productive over time) just to save a little money for their third helicopter with on-board cocaine habit?

Have the government directly hire people to do really basic shit ("clean these streets", "mow this public grass", "you build this wall, you tear it down, then you rebuild it") at decent wages, thus resulting in people actually finding work, deciding it pays better than being unemployed, getting shit on their resume as well, and even making the right wing happy* because there are less "sponges on the dole" and "those lazy fucks are out there earning a living, making the place nicer for me to look at."

Or ban prisons from producing things for sale. Shit, suddenly things aren't being made by actual slave labour, sounds like you could employ a whole lot of people for that.

Wait, I'm being a crazy communist now. You're right, just cut their utilities so they die, that way they'll stop invading the US and mugging people for their jobs, stealing the employment out of their hands.

*as if anything will make them happy.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Personally, I think some one needs to enstate some kind of system that provides would be immigrants with well-paying, legal jobs, so they can just come legally.

Are you on crack? The unemployment rate in the United States is almost 10%.

That's a super idea, let's give "would be immigrants" well paying jobs.

Count to ten before you post.

Clutch

Over 10% actually.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I think what the esteemed Mr. Anima was getting at is that the system shouldn't be set up to hinder legal immigration while encouraging illegal immigration. His solution wasn't the best (let's face it, none of us are really in a position to write good policy), but the concept has merit.

[Juton]

Personally, I think some one needs to enstate some kind of system that provides would be immigrants with well-paying, legal jobs, so they can just come legally.

Are you on crack? The unemployment rate in the United States is almost 10%.

That's a super idea, let's give "would be immigrants" well paying jobs.

Count to ten before you post.

Clutch

You wish the unemployment rate was only 10%

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/le ... -rate.aspx

If you don't like this link you can find others, basically the US (and others I'm sure) have been cooking the books wrt unemployment for a long time. If you add in underemployment, like people with degrees in electrical engineering working at Denny's the number gets even higher.

@Prak_Anima

They already have that, it's called a H1_B visa and it's for technical workers to come to the US and bring their in-demand technical skills with them. Why don't we something like this for the average Mexican? Well all they can really provide is untrained labour, you have a glut of that already. Employers are interested in getting that labour cheaper so that's (one of the reasons) why your immigration looks the way it does.

Even if the average unemployed American would work as hard as a Mexican (various anecdotes say this is not the case) the Americans can't legally compete with the foreign labour because they will work for less and under worse conditions, and they will be to afraid to pursue legal avenues of recourse against an employer.

[Prak]

I wonder if landscaping would count as an in demand technical skill.

and, given that I'm on unemployment, I only bypassed that because I wasn't thinking about it at the moment. I was trying to come up with some kind of actual solution to immigration.

Hell, if they started staffing the cafeterias and such in government buildings with trained people, rather than outsourcing to Aramark or whatever, who staffs them with people who don't know what the fuck they're doing beyond "put meat on bread, put cheese on meat, put bread on cheese, wrap in taste affecting plastic" I'd be happy, it'd mean I'd have more avenues for getting into the industry I'm trying to.

(Hell, i'd be happy if my fucking school would do that...)

[Count Arioch the 28th]

In the people's defense, Aramark actively stops people from improving things. I had several recipes for things that I used during my stint with the company, and the little jerk that was one of my bosses decided to sneak behind me and drown everything with seasoning salt to make it inedible and tell the person in charge of the building that I didn't season food.

[Psychic Robot]

Personally, I think some one needs to enstate some kind of system that provides would be immigrants with well-paying, legal jobs, so they can just come legally.

/facepalm

Force companies to hire more people rather than cut it down to the bare minimum workers needed (and the workers, stretched out as they are, getting less productive over time) just to save a little money for their third helicopter with on-board cocaine habit?

/facepalm

21-year-old finally gradimates.

Tatiana Reina wanted to graduate in the worst way -- and she did.

The 21-year-old was enrolled at Lafayette HS in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, for six years with a dismal record marked by truancy and failing grades. She faked her own graduation in 2007, donning a cap and gown and sneaking into the receiving line. Faced with "aging out" of the school system this year, she got a last chance and still didn't bother going to class.

"She was a no-show all year," a school insider said. Regulations call for at least 90 percent attendance to be promoted or to graduate.

But that didn't stop the principal, Jacqueline Boswell, from granting Reina a diploma.

In June, Reina showed up for the last five days and was given some health and chemistry assignments in the guidance office, school staffers said. "She sat at a computer and Googled her answers," a worker said.

Finally, teachers were pressured into giving Reina -- and a half-dozen other failing students -- minimally passing grades of 65, the equivalent of a "D," to get the credits needed to graduate, sources told The Post.

"They're giving out diplomas like it's a lemonade stand," one disgusted staffer said.

The city Department of Education referred The Post's findings to its Office of Special Investigation, said spokesman Danny Kanner.

What happened at Lafayette HS, one of five city high schools that closed their doors for the last time last week, is not a fluke, critics say.

"This is happening all over the city, especially at closing schools," said Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters. "If you're a principal or a teacher and your chances of getting another job depend on how many kids you successfully graduate, the vast majority will give these kids credit, whether they deserve it not,"

That's exactly what a Lafayette teacher did, describing "coercion" by an assistant principal.

"I was told to consider raising a failing grade because the principal might not give me a favorable recommendation," said the distraught teacher, who admitted changing a final grade of 55 to 65.

The teacher also said Principal Boswell brought the student's mother into the classroom and then asked if the kid's grade would be changed. Boswell refused to speak to The Post.

Reina first entered Lafayette in June 2004. Four years later, her credits fell short. But she bought a cap and gown and "snuck into the line" to walk on stage. A staffer noticed, but told the announcer to call out her name so as not to "make a scene." Reina, like the others, was handed a piece of paper with instructions to pick up her diploma later.

Still enrolled at Lafayette in 2008, Reina flunked everything but Spanish, earning a single credit and then another in summer school, records show. She then enrolled in Borough of Manhattan Community College, a CUNY campus, but got kicked out when officials finally got her high-school transcript.

So she returned to Lafayette last year. On Jan. 12, a school day, she was arrested for buying goods at Bloomingdale's at Roosevelt Field, LI, with $400 in fake traveler's checks; the felony charge is pending.

She failed everything until the second term, when she snagged the last two required credits.

"I got my diploma!" she said last week, but didn't want to comment further.

Asked about her atrocious attendance, she explained, "There wasn't no problem. I just didn't go."

[Crissa]

...Besides, my point was the lack of recourse under the law.

There are some who say that illegal immigrants are criminals, ergo, they should have no recourse under law.

That of course is silly, but there are a lot of people who believe it.

Especially since, without recourse, you end up violating the rights of alot of citizens instead.

Strangely, proponents of such laws don't seem to care that other people get caught up in these dragnets. From citizens, to legal immigrants, to people here only technically illegally - between semesters at school, overstaying a visa, documents lost by the INS...

Hence just getting to the bottom line: They don't care that their laws inconvenience brown people.

-Crissa

The H1B is basically as good as hiring an illegal: They can't demand or organize or change jobs without having to risk being deported.

[mean_liar]

Legal immigration into the US sucks - it's expensive, it's difficult, it requires either a lawyer (making it even more expensive) or a good command of bureaucrat-ese, and the willingness to re-submit various middling forms to the half-dozen agencies that require them after their call-in help centers give you incorrect advice. The documentation is piss-poor, appears to have not been vetted past a technical writer, has no standardization, and needs to be submitted to various subagencies of the Dept of Homeland Security and Dept of State, none of which talk to each other.

This is in contrast to the Canadian process, in which I sent a very large and thorough package (with accompanying document checklist) to one clearing house location (which then divvied it out among their subagencies).

Meanwhile, illegal immigration has nothing to do with that. Who needs more poor, uneducated people? It undercuts America's poorest citizens. Illegal immigrants need to GTFO and Americans need to get used to the idea of actually paying for what things are worth.


EDIT - I'm serious about getting bad advice from the call-in centers. They fucked us over a few times, but the last straw was when we had some advice about travel and documentation and, thinking we could measure "correctness of advice" by calling in about our one question multiple times and receiving nearly identical answers each time, carried through that advice which ultimately saw my pregnant wife and infant son prevented from legally returning to the US for three months until they basically begged a border station's commanding officer for his compassionate exercised leniency until he granted it.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

My GF knows a guy that's a doctor that was trying his damnedest to legally emigrate to the US. The guy who was his caseworker specifically said that his file was too long and he wasn't even going to read it. For 5 years. Then said that since he didn't have a job he couldn't move forward (i.e., if he wasn't illegally working since he wasn't legally allowed to work in the US until the crap was done with.)

He finally got his green card a couple months ago.

[Cynic]

See, I still don't know why doctors want to emigrate to the States. You emigrate here and then have to do your studies almost all over again. I had an uncle who was an army psychiatrist with 15 papers and over 20 years of experience with the Indian army. He came over here and had to redo all of that and redo his residency. Sure if you stick out the extra couple of years, the benefit can (not will but can) be golden but it isn't an assured outcome and it is too hefty an initial investment.

[Username17]

See, I still don't know why doctors want to emigrate to the States.

Because you have an average take-home salary that is more than twice that of Finland, more than six times that of Czech Republic, and more than nine times that of Cambodia. People will do a lot for an extra sixty thousand dollars a year after taxes. Fuck, there are Hindu doctors who go work in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for periods of time, even though it is nominally a death sentence to be Hindu there. The pay is good, and if you save up some money, you can do very well for your family down the line.

-Username17

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Because you have an average take-home salary that is more than twice that of Finland, more than six times that of Czech Republic, and more than nine times that of Cambodia.

This. The gentleman in question comes from a country where the Per Capita Income is around $4,800. And he avoided having to retake everything by simply becoming a doctor in America; he was previously holding a student visa that had expired. Which makes the resistance to his green card status even more puzzling.

I think a lot of people lose sight of one thing here: America does an awful lot of things ass-backwards, and the average American is too stupid to accept that. But if you're talented, make the right connections, and are lucky enough to not get your feet kicked out from under you repeatedly, you can live as a God and be richer than most people's wildest dreams.

It's not LIKELY to happen to anyone who isn't lucky enough to come from a wealth upbringing, because America is still classist as all fuck. But it is remotely possible.

[Josh_Kablack]

This headline is funny in its obviousness

But the implication of The Partnership for a Drug Free America, Johnson and Johnson police state moving to more aggressively target teenagers bothers me.

[mean_liar]

Ah, youth. Don't forget the potassium pills to prevent cramping.

[Crissa]

Strangely, no one seems to care about 15 year olds who die at events with, say, alcohol in their system. Or any other number of things. I can count the number of teens who died with E in them on my fingers. I can't count the number who died to alcohol last weekend on my fingers.

The number of kids who've died with E in them at raves is seriously a rounding error on the number of people who just up and die because they forgot to drink water when going to the beach on a sunny day.

-Crissa