Lots of interesting stuff in the WSJ the last couple of days, as noted back here and here.
Today, I was struck by this piece about 22,000 immigrants who have been deeply disappointed by finding out that they did NOT win the annual green card lottery — even the though the U.S. gummint had previously told them that they HAD won. Seems there was a glitch.
There were some pretty heart-wrenching anecdotes. But the one that grabbed my attention was the one about the young woman pictured above. An excerpt:
Anna Demidchik, a 27-year-old second-year law student at Hofstra University studying immigration law, says she has entered the green-card lottery every year since 2007. She admits that she didn’t put a lot of faith in the process, so she was surprised to hear that she had won.
Born in Kazakhstan, she won a scholarship in high school to spend a year in rural South Carolina. She later studied Chinese in Russia and then enrolled in a business program in the U.S. before entering law school.
Sitting in her favorite seat in the Hofstra Law School’s student lounge, she says that after hearing she had won the lottery, she called her parents in Novosibirsk, Russia. They put their apartment up for sale so that she could take out her one-quarter share of the money—worth about $20,000—and show U.S. authorities that she would have cash to support herself in the U.S.
On May 13, her brother told her to check the Internet because the results had been invalidated. Fidgeting and clutching an 8-ounce water bottle, she said at that moment she was in the middle of final exams so “I couldn’t let myself go. But once the finals were over I spent the whole day crying.”…
The story doesn’t say where in “rural South Carolina” she spent that year. But that detail, together with her photo, caused me to have this thought: As frustrating as her situation is, there is one immigration woe she should not have. If she returned to South Carolina, she probably wouldn’t have any trouble with the new law that Nikki Haley is set to sign on Monday.
OK, technically she could be subjected to it, but it seems doubtful. I mean, if all the immigrants, legal and otherwise, in South Carolina looked like Ms. Demidchik, we wouldn’t have a new Arizona-style bill for the gov to sign.
And that’s not a reference to her beauty. It’s a reference to another sense of the word “fair.”
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Did you mean “if all the immigrants were capable of attending law school and speaking Chinese and following all the basic laws” we wouldn’t have a new Arizona-style bill for the gov to sign? Or are you still going to play the race card every chance you get?
She followed the rules. Illegal immigrants who sneak in, lie, and commit repeated criminal acts are completely different — no matter how many times you try to convince us we’re just racists.
And your old pal John McCain got into a little trouble last week, didn’t he? Seems like when he said that illegals were responsible for the wildfires in Arizona, he ended up having to clarify that he REALLY didn’t mean exactly what he said. What he said he MEANT to say was that illegals start many wildfires, just maybe not the current one.
As old John said in his commercials last year (when he was scared he might lose), “Build the dang fence!”
Doug, you’ll also notice that this lady, whose skills indicate that she could be a real asset to this country, still doesn’t have a green card.
“Rural SC” is a conceit; it conveys to everyone else in the country that what is meant is bottom of the barrel. The implication here is that she was so desperate to come to America that she was willing to enroll in a school with little promise of an education beyond the experience of being “in America.” Rural SC means nearly the whole state to most Americans. Its a gratuitous tag line, a double entendre.
In that light, the idea of walling off the state from “illegal” immigration is a laughable one. We should instead be pleased that people from elsewhere want to live, work and raise their children here in SC. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be hurdles to overcome to do this, just not walls that assault the very idea of an open and free society. South Carolina has held itself back long enough with walls and divisions already. It’s long past time to move beyond such reactionary nonsense and embrace a future of promise.
@karen
So? There is a process and a quota. She didn’t make the cut. Our system cannot handle unlimited immigration just as it certainly can’t handle unlimited illegal immigration of people who are on the bottom rung of the economic ladder and require more resources than they put in. It’s unsustainable.
@mark
What hurdles do you think should exist? Legal entry? Speaking English? Paying taxes? Registering cars? Having insurance?
Illegals enter South Carolina to do labor at below market rates without benefits. The jobs will disappear if the employers have to pay benefits and social security.
Too bad you weren’t there to explain it to her when she spent the whole day crying.
You realize, Doug, that on most issues, you’d be railing about the incompetent government agency that raised all these people’s hopes — and in a couple of cases, caused their families considerable upset and expense — only to dash them. It’s a bit surprising to hear you take a “so what?” attitude toward what happened to these folks.
And no, Doug, I don’t think you’re a racist. I’ve explained this before. You actually DO get indignant over being being in this country without the proper paperwork.
But most people are not like you. And we would NEVER have reached the critical political mass necessary to take us to the extreme of turning SC cops into caricatures from a WWII movie, demanding “Deine Papieren, bitte!” from foreign-looking people, if the Mexicans and Central Americans here didn’t LOOK so foreign to white folks in this country. No way.
I just watched Frozen River, with Melissa Leo–a hard-scrabble white woman, desperately trying to buy a double-wide for her kids, teams up with a Mohawk woman who lives in a borrowed travel trailer to smuggle illegals across from Canada. There’s a great scene, right after Melissa has been told she can’t go full time at the dollar store, where Melissa wonders how bad it must be if they all want to come to where she lives.
We certainly need to make it easy for all those well-educated graduates to stay here and grow our economy. Now they are *required* to go home after graduating, unless they get a temporary extension. That’s just nuts!
(and, Doug, The Edge is a really good film — although Mamet’s trademark “natural” dialogue–where everyone says something and then either repeats it or asks it reflexively is not the way many people I know talk–it isn’t the way many people i know talk, is it the way people I know talk?)
Show me where in the law where it says papers can be demanded without an initial stop for other unlawful activity. If a driver cannot produce a drivers license and insurance paperwork as we all would have to do, it is not a big deal to also require some evidence of legal status?
And aren’t you the guy who always votes for intrusive big brother behavior since people who are innocent have nothing to hide? How is this different? Stopped by a cop for doing something wrong, just show your value drivers license. No big deal for Americans.
As for the government screwing up, what else is new? Happens all the time.
Value = valid
Seriously, I would donate $100 to the charity of your choice if you would allow us to delete or edit our own comments.
And do you put all the legislators who voted for the bill in the same racist category or are they even worse – doing the work of unseen racists demanding persecution of “brown people”?
This isn’t about race. It’s about illegal activity.
Brad, my guess is that a well dressed someone with blond hair and blue eyes could walk about speaking nothing but German (or Swedish, for that matter) without having the police immediately ask for his/her papers. And if this person could speak English at all, I suspect that they never would.
Brad’s version of how a traffic stop for an illegal immigrant should proceed:
Officer: “License and registration, please”
Driver: “Yo no tengo”
Officer: “Buenos dias, vaya con dios amigo!”
Driver: “Muchas gracias.”
Officer: “No hay de que…”
Doug says: “Illegals enter South Carolina to do labor at below market rates without benefits. The jobs will disappear if the employers have to pay benefits and social security.”
I don’t believe that people will decide to do without roofs and vegetables if they have to pay a bit more. We need a legal guest worker system that is fair for both existing American workers and immigrant workers. A system that gives us cheap goods by cheating workers of fair pay and safe working conditions is a rotten system, whether those workers are here or in China.
@karen
Read the law. Police will be asking for papers only when the person is stopped for another issue. This is very similar to the issue related to showing your id if you want to vote. People invent these hypothetical worst case scenarios in order to prevent basic law enforcement and immigration enforcement from being implemented.
Last year a woman was killed on I20 in Columbia in an accident caused by an illegal immigrant female driver. She shouldn’t have been in the country, shouldn’t have been driving a car, and should have been deported immediately following the accident.
I don’t think she has been yet… and I wouldn’t be surprised if she is still driving.
@lynn
“I don’t believe that people will decide to do without roofs and vegetables if they have to pay a bit more”
Really? Is that how it works? When prices rise, people buy the same amount of the product? Very few items have inelastic demand response to supply.
Guest worker programs are fine with me. Enter legally, work legally, pay taxes, no problem. That’s the correct path to citizenship as opposed to “enter illegally, get fake identification, drive illegally, don’t pay all taxes, work for below market wages, demand amnesty”.
Until the laws are changed, we should enforce them.
Yes. That woman should have been deported. But Doug, I have also seen (as been riding, cold sober, in the car with another person who was equally sopber) a policeman literally manufacture a reason to stop a person. And no, that person wasn’t illegal, she just looked like she might be an immigrant. As it was, I was able to corroborate that the alleged problem did not exist. Do all police do this sort of thing? No. Do a substantial number? I think so. I don’t know if the illegal alien woman in the case you talk about was at fault or not, but plenty of people get killed in accidents caused by native born citizens, so let’s not get poor driving habits into it. In the particular case you are talking about, the police had good reason to ask for her license and registration, and if she could not produce such, they had good cause to ask for her green card (or whatever legal documentation she had). If she had been able to produce her license and registration, I don’t think they’d have had cause to check further. And I have no desire to have police use failure to use seat belt, failure to signal a lane change, or similar unprovable (unless video taped) causes as an opportunity to check for immigration documentation.
@ Doug– I would say that demand for roofs and basic food ARE fairly inelastic–you gotta have ’em. You might postpone a new roof for a while, but sooner or later, you have to spring for it. Vegetables and fruits–there are substitutes, but ultimately, most people aren’t going to substitute Froot Loops for peaches.
@Kathryn
If wages need to be increased for peach pickers by 30% to cover benefits, there will be a direct increase in the cost of peaches. And fewer peaches will be purchased. It’s basic economics.
As for roofs – ask some local builders what the demand is like for new construction. And ask them if they are willing to pay benefits for the their roofers.
I find it amazing that people can think that if you raise the cost of producing something, that there will be little impact downstream from purchasers. Gasoline, maybe… but even that necessity sees people changing buying habits when the price reaches a certain point.
@Karen
So now it’s a “substansial number” of racist policeman combined with a majority racist population in cahoots with racist politicians who are just trying to persecute people who are hear illegally. Ok.
The woman was at fault. I had one fact wrong – it wasn’t a woman who was killed, it was a firefighter working in the median.
“The woman charged in connection with a weekend crash that killed a Columbia firefighter is living in the United States illegally and was taken into custody at her house Tuesday morning by federal immigration officials.
“She acknowledged that she was not in this country legally,” said S.C. Highway Patrol Col. Kenny Lancaster.
“Federal officers from ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) went to her house before she left for work,” he said.
The woman, Neida Ortega, 34, of Sumter was to be taken to Charlotte for deportation proceedings, Lancaster said.
Police say Ortega caused the Saturday afternoon accident that resulted in the death of Chance Zobel, 23, a Columbia firefighter. At the time, Zobel was helping other firefighters put out a brush fire in the median of Interstate 20, near the Clemson Road exit, northeast of the city.
Troopers charged Ortega with driving without a valid U.S. license and going too fast for conditions. She was held overnight in the Alvin Glenn Detention Center in Richland County and released on bond Sunday.
She did have a license, but it was from Mexico, said Lancaster. “She said she had lived here 10 years.”
It was unclear Tuesday whether any of the other six people in the van were arrested; some of them are related to Ortega. ICE officials, who earlier Tuesday had pledged to give out more information about the case, could not be reached for comment later Tuesday afternoon.”
@Kathryn
And don’t you want to give police the authority to question youths in Five Points if the “look” under 18? You can’t target one group based on how they look, can you?
You certainly can target groups based on how they look–you just can’t do it based on ethnic classifications.
Since there’s no reason for anyone under 18 to be in Five Points after 11 PM and precious little for anyone under 21–stopping people who look under 18 isn’t an undue burden.
How do you determine if someone looks illegal? Karen’s right–you aren’t going to stop the tall blondes….
and
“If wages need to be increased for peach pickers by 30% to cover benefits, there will be a direct increase in the cost of peaches. And fewer peaches will be purchased. It’s basic economics. ”
Growers do not always pass along costs, and whether or not fewer are purchased when the price goes up depends on the elasticity of demand. THAT’S basic economics…
I’m not going to buy fewer peaches just because they cost $1 more a pound–maybe not even $2 a pound, and I bet if you stopped five people going into the grocery store, they couldn’t tell you the price of peaches.
Isn’t there a problem with no summer jobs available for high school students this year? How many unemployed people would be willing to take on a temporary job for $10-$12/hr.?
“Brad, my guess is that a well dressed someone with blond hair and blue eyes could walk about speaking nothing but German (or Swedish, for that matter) without having the police immediately ask for his/her papers”
Hey I resemble that… except for the foreign language piece.
Do we have a problem with undocumented Germans and Scandanavians in this country?
@Steven–how would we know? Nobody’s checking them.
There is a “problem” with undocumented Irish young women in Massachusetts–they take nanny jobs from residents (who are usually of-color)–but you don’t hear much about it outside the Boston area….
Not sure there’s a “problem” here, really…
Sure and you won’t hear me complaining… about the colleens, that is.
Srsly, Brad, though–if you were a poor black or Hispanic woman in Boston who couldn’t find work as a nanny because the rich folk preferred a lissome lass with fair skin, you might…
Nobody has addressed the basic question: where in the law does it allow police officers to stop anyone for “looking” illegal? It has to be in conjunction with another reason for stopping them. That’s the way the law works now – and yes, there are rogue cops who use the “broken taillight” excuse. You can’t fix that.
@Kathryn
Can a young person refuse to supply documentation proving his age in your curfew scenario? I would love to see the lawsuits that come about as a result of harrassing an 18 year old who is standing in Five Points.
Prosecute criminals. Those eight kids who beat up the one kid should be punished to the full extent of the law. We need to implement policies that remove privileges from these kids so they have consequences – no drivers license, no participation in school athletic teams, mandatory labor… whatever it takes to convince them that any act of violence upon another person is unacceptable.
Come on Doug let’s get real. The police abuse their authority all the time. Why give them one more excuse to do so.
@bud
“all the time”
What does that mean? I don’t disagree there are bad cops but it’s not pervasive. The bad cops don’t need a law to harass people.
Also, I’m trying to determine what rights an illegal immigrant has? Are they protected in any way by the U.S. Constitution?
Since the folks from Mexico who pick our veggies and roof our houses don’t currently have rights why don’t we pass a law to give them constitutional rights? That would simplify everything. We could have the cheap labor without all the guilt. Seems like a win-win for everyone. Why are we wasting so much time on this silly issue (both on Brad’s blog and in the various legislative bodies)? As a former libertarian I believe all folks should be given the freedom to earn a living as they please without the interference of the nanny state telling businesses and individuals what to do. Just because someone was born in another part of the world shouldn’t change that dynamic.
@bud
Then why have borders? Why don’t we just call ourselves the United States of the World?
It’s easier to sneak into the U.S. than to legally enter Mexico.
The attorneys for the City today told us at the council work session that there is no ability to require someone to provide ID, but that if you have PC for detaining someone as looking under 17, you can do so.
I’m inferring from that that PC creates a rebuttable presumption that someone is under 17, and the burden switches to that person to prove otherwise. As always, whether the cop in fact had probable cause is subject to judicial review….same as DUI stops, etc.
As someone who looked over 12 at age 6 and over 18 at age 12, my parents learned to bring ID for me to get me to events and attractions at the reduced rate for kids. This may be the reverse.
@bud – How would they get constitutional rights, aren’t those reserved for US citizens? What your wanting is more like diplomatic immunity.
These people are here illegally, as in not supposed to be here… do you give rights to people who break into our house or squat on your property? Giving them anything is rewarding them for being here. If they want to be here, let them go through the proper channels and have work visas and green cards.
Steven, you say that like it’s easy. Like the process for admitting people legally here from Mexico wasn’t a choked-up, inadequate mess. Or as if the process for getting a green card weren’t quite literally a lottery.
This is not a question of “if you work hard enough” or “if you’re deserving enough,” you get the needed credentials. It’s tough, and there’s luck involved, near as I can tell.
And Kathryn — when I was a kid, I always had to prove I was as old as I was. Opposite problem. I didn’t even begin to look my age until I was 30, at least. Now, when it doesn’t do me any good, I look older than I am…
In a span of just 18 months I went from getting carded at Publix to needing reading glasses.
I think the cops in Five Points will be able to do a better job identifying those who are under 17; it’s not that hard. I do hope that they actually follow through and start ticketing the parents of the kids they return home after midnight from Five Points. But running the kids through Family Court seems like not the best of ideas, for a whole host of reasons.
Everybody has some constitutional rights, regardless of immigration status, Steven. How much varies with immigration status–permanent residents more than temporary, I believe (due process in particular),but everyone has some.
Mark, et al. — I just posted a report (written by Kathryn) about the curfew. Check it out.
It shouldn’t be “easy”. If you want to become a citizen of this country bad enough, you should be willing to work for it, not just get rubber stamped “taxpayer”.
Publix cards everyone–more power to them!–my 81 year old mom got carded..although you look very young, Marko!
Everyone is a libertarian until their own personal issue is at stake. Seems like the nanny state concerns only apply when some billionare might have to pay a few more pennies in taxes. When it comes to some dark skinned person who wants to make an honest buck then all of a sudden it’s ok to turn the power of the government loose. And now doubt the funding for this enforcement effort will be unlimited.