Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Newt Gingrich: "Abolish Bilingual Education"

Cynthetiq · 04-06-2007, 11:15 AM

[QUOTE=willravel]Do you understand the concept of civil disobedience? You break the law peacefully in order to bring about change. That means no one who acts in civil disobedience is under he umbrella of the law. You're just splitting hairs because this is a law you seem to like. If it were a sit in to end segregation, I'm sure you'd be behind it. [quote]
Funny because I don't think we'd sit on the same side of that either. See, I don't agree that Program housing on campuses for self segregation is a good thing. I don't think that colleges should have seperate graduation ceremonies in spanish, german, tagalog, chinese.

I'm sure you recall this happening in the early 90s:

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LINK
In growing numbers, ships from mainland China are sailing toward America, their holds packed with a frightened and seasick human cargo destined mostly for labor in the restaurants and sweatshops of New York's Chinatown.

Five ships carrying a total of about 600 people have been discovered since January and as many as nine more are being monitored now as they head for Los Angeles, said Bruce J. Nicholl, an official at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington.

The new tactic represents a major expansion of the far-flung smuggling networks that for years have brought small groups of Chinese laborers to the United States through Canada and Central America.

International Chinese crime syndicates, many with roots in ancient secret societies called triads or tongs, have begun to add their resources and muscle to the enterprise of human smuggling, Mr. Nicholl said.

The immigration service is barely keeping pace, and even in cases where immigrants are caught here they often are released pending hearings, or for lack of detention centers, and simply disappear into an underworld of forced labor, drug dealing and crime.

"This is kind of 19th-century stuff now where the tongs are not just shipping illegals but trafficking in people as human slaves," said Peter Kwong, a professor of political science at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury.

For a price of $25,000 to $30,000, part of which goes to bribe Chinese officials, poor farmers and laborers from southern China are following earlier immigrants in search of prosperity in America. And like their predecessors who helped build the nation's railroads, most are destined for years of servitude as they labor to pay off the cost of their passage.

"Most of them end up in pretty squalid conditions as indentured servants in restaurants and packing houses and garment factories," said Mr. Nicholl, who is the immigration service's expert on Chinese smuggling. Others "can end up actually enslaved to the triads as prostitutes or enforcers or drug runners or pickpockets."

He said as many as 25,000 Chinese have entered the country illegally, mostly smuggled in by air, in the last three years; the ocean routes appeared to have been put into operation about a year ago.

Most of the new immigrants come from Fujian, a southern coastal Chinese province with a history of migration and human smuggling, and most are headed for the Fujianese enclave of New York's Chinatown, he said. Kidnapped and Beaten

There, Mr. Kwong said, they are subject to exploitation and to a growing wave of violence by the syndicates enforcing the repayment of their debts with torture, kidnapping and sometimes murder.

"Mostly they are handcuffed within an apartment and severely beaten with anything from claw hammers to sticks," said Lieut. Joseph Pollini of the New York City Police Department. "They are told they have to pay $10,000 or $15,000 above their original fee, and a lot of drastic things take place."

Just today, he said, the last of eight men was convicted of kidnapping in the first such incident to have been uncovered, in November 1990. Since then, arrests have been made in seven similar kidnappings.

Partly because of the violence surrounding the smuggling operations, the department is forming a new unit to deal with Asian organized crime.

"The tragic thing is that these illegals are so desperate to get money that they are willing to work at any price," Mr. Kwong said. "So the situation in Chinatown is that wages are getting lower and lower."

A Fujianese service economy has sprung up in New York, including "travel agencies" that help coordinate contacts and payoffs to the smugglers.

"I heard of one woman on East Broadway who emptied her village, which was about 2,000 people," Mr. Kwong said, "and she was not the only one doing that."

The Fujianese are known as tough and hard-working, he said, and those who have paid off their debts after several years of labor are beginning to enjoy the rewards of their rough passage by opening Chinese takeout restaurants, mainly in poor areas of New York City. Dreams of Success

Dreams of such success inspired the 84 men packed for 50 days into the fetid hold of the 150-foot Taiwan-registered trawler Jinn Yin No. 1, which was seized off the California coast last month.

"It was my goal and my dream to come to the United States," said G. Ling, a 22-year-old student who comes from a family of truck drivers and who is now being held at an immigration service detention center in Long Beach pending a hearing on his status. "But we suffered so much: so crowded, so cold in the ship, not enough food, no water to drink, no place to wash."

C. Chen, 31, a professional diver who, like Mr. Ling, declined to give his full name, said the terrified passengers wept, prayed and vomited as the rusting boat, with its crew of seven, struggled through a typhoon and survived two fires.

He said many people from his grandparents' village near the Fujianese city of Fuzhou had come to America and prospered and that some of these had returned home for visits, tempting others to follow with stories of prosperity.

"Since the day I was born I wanted to come to America," Mr. Chen said, speaking through an interpreter. "We wanted to apply to the United States government to come the legal way, but too many people want to come. With so many people in China how long would it take us? The rest of our lives?"

In 1990, the most recent year for which figures are available, 31,800 people succeeded in immigrating legally to the United States from mainland China, putting that country in sixth place as a source of legal immigration.

Gu Kechen, a 21-year-old carpenter, said he had made a $2,500 down payment in China and that relatives in New York had guaranteed the balance of his $25,000 passage. "I don't know how I will pay them back," he said. "The important thing was to get to America."

Though they are now subject to deportation, the men under detention here still stand a chance of completing their journey to New York. Many will be released on bond either because of overcrowding at detention centers or because they apply for political asylum, officials and immigration lawyers said. When that happens, the chances are that they will simply disappear.

The results are hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for the traffickers, who operate what Mr. Nicholl called "the most sophisticated and largest and most expensive smuggling operation that exists in the world today."

As of last year, he said, "We have identified as many as 30 different smuggling routes coming into the United States."

People who cannot pay the full price for passage, Mr. Kwong said, sometimes travel as couriers on a drug-smuggling run from Fujian through Burma and Thailand, with stops in Latin America.

"Every time we get a handle on what they are doing and how they are doing it, things change," Mr. Nicholl said. When the first shipload was captured off Los Angeles last September with 118 smuggled passengers, he said, "We were sort of in a state of shock."

"In 1990, the most recent year for which figures are available, 31,800 people succeeded in immigrating legally to the United States from mainland China, putting that country in sixth place as a source of legal immigration."

So what about the Chinese you are not speaking up for them. If you are saying that it's good for Mexicans, then it's good for Chinese, Somalians, Nigerians, Ethopians, et. al.

I'm sorry that there isn't enough for everyone, that is just a fact.

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Do you have any friends that work in the INS, FBI, or police forces on the boarder of Mexico? It's easy to sit at your computer and assume that correlation doesn't imply causation, but the fact of the matter is that any border cop, be they on the US or Mexico side, will corroborate my conclusions. Why don't you give them a call?

I'm asking you to back up your statement. You asking me to look it up or phone them makes it laughable. So far it's hearsay. So far that number still looks like you pulled it outta your ass.

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I don't see the al Quaeda and other illegal organizations that resort to terrorism operating in Mexico, I do in the Philippines. I see drug lords, but they get a shitload more money from the US than they do from Mexico.

I'm sorry WTF does terrorism have to do with this? I'm showing that governements in impoverished nation CAN asisst their people to get them to overseas jobs and helps them get them legally. You can't even say, "You know the MEXICAN government could learn from this."

You toss in terrorism???? Nowhere in ANTHING I've posted or linked to mentions terrorism. Yet the mention of Philippines and suddenly terrorism and al Qaeda come into play? If you searched history you'd find that Islam in the Philippines predates al Qaeda. You'd also should know that "Filipino Muslims form 5% of the country's population, while the rest of the general population are mostly Roman Catholic (84%) and Protestant (8%)." And the Filipino Muslims only occupy the areas closest to Indonesia/Malaysia which are Islamic nationstates. Manila where the Office of Overseas Workers is located, is Roman Catholic. But I guess, you are allowed to generalize and make blanket statements and others not.