Trump's Alarming Ignorance About Foreign Aid

With threats to close the U.S./Mexican border - something that will cause possible severe economic damage to the USA and cause severe adverse impacts on U.S. border cities - and his cutting off of all foreign aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Donald Trump has shown his near total ignorance on the issue of foreign aid which more often than not is driven not by U.S. generosity  but instead by the benefits the USA derives. No doubt his ignorance embracing, knuckle dragging base loves that Trump is "punishing" "those people" and is too ignorant to grasp that Trump's actions will only make matters worse and harm U.S. interests.  A piece by former Republican Michael Gerson looks at the stupidity and self-inflicted harm that Trump's petulant ignorance will bring to American interests.  Here are excerpts:

There are times when President Trump manages to be so wrong — so empirically groundless, so logically fallacious, so stridently uninformed — that it seems like a form of parody. But more often than not, this reflects an authentic and alarming ignorance. The mask of a barroom political crank turns out to be the face of the president of the United States.

Such appears to be the case in Trump’s recent threat to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — countries known as the Northern Triangle of Central America — as punishment for their failure to stem migrant flows to the United States.

To make this action a rational one, Trump must imagine that foreign aid is nothing more than cash loaded onto cargo planes and dropped on the presidential compounds of corrupt rulers as reward for subservience to U.S. interests. So he wants to cancel the deliveries until they do what we wish.

The reality of foreign assistance is very different. It is seldom given directly to foreign governments. The work is often contracted to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that work in partnership with locals. And it is generally designed to improve conditions within foreign countries that can give rise to global threats.

This role is obvious, say, in fighting infectious diseases. It is better to deal with an Ebola outbreak as close as possible to the source, rather than waiting for the threat to arrive in Georgia or Kansas. But this is equally true when it comes to a flow of refugees.

Consider an example in Guatemala. More than a decade ago, a remarkable institution called International Justice Mission (IJM) — an NGO dedicated to the fight against modern forms of slavery — began working with local authorities to improve the prosecution of child sexual assault. This partnership improved the capacities of police, prosecutors and courts, while making the whole system less traumatizing for survivors. As a result of the initiative — supported by a grant from the State Department — successful prosecutions in Guatemala have increased by 300 percent, imposing real consequences on predators.

Imagine you had a child and lived in a country where children were raped with impunity. Wouldn’t a dangerous trek north to the United States make more sense? But this program and others like it are threatened by [Trump’s] the president’s aid cutoff. In the real world of U.S. interests, we need more of these efforts to reduce the supply side of illegal migration. And the supply side of sexual trafficking. And of criminal gangs. And of the drug trade. And of illegal arms dealing. And of radicalism and terrorism.

One of the main drivers of illegal migration has been the collapse of criminal-justice systems in Central America. And it reflects a global problem. . . . . Roughly a third of people in the world live in relatively just and stable criminal-justice systems. Another third live under the protection of private security forces — a system that turns security into a luxury good. (In Guatemala, for example, there are seven times more people involved in providing private security than public security.) And a third of people live without the effective protection of the law, experiencing what Haugen calls “everyday violence” from corrupt and exploitative officials.

If U.S. policy does not address the functional collapse of criminal-justice systems in places such as the Northern Triangle, it is not seriously addressing the problem of illegal migration. Yet the IJM program in Guatemala and similar efforts are the kind of spending now being threatened by the president’s announcement. This means that U.S. policy has become self-destructive to U.S. interests.

[T]he lack of justice leading to everyday violence has become a global problem, with consequences that spill up on many shores, including our own. It is a matter deserving policy creativity rather than Trump’s public threats.

It would make far more sense to double assistance for these programs — designed to support local reformers, not to impose American solutions — than to end them. But an absence of vision is one cost of ignorance.

How the Mafia Helped Donald Trump

Personally, I have always found Donald Trump to be an unsavory individual and ethically and morally challenged.  And when it comes to truth and veracity, these are unknown concepts for Trump - which is perhaps why the evangelical Christians and "professional Christian" crowd are swarming to him, given that they suffer from a similar love of lying to further their own agendas.  Now, Politico has a very lengthy piece about Trump's Madia ties and dealings that is a MUST READ.  After reading the piece, I find it inconceivable that anyone with morals and a sense of decency could vote for Trump.  The man likely ought to be in prison, but seemingly money has saved his egomaniac ass on too many occasions.  Here are lengthy highlights (make sure you read the entire piece since excerpting it adequately was difficult):

In his signature book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump boasted that when he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City, he persuaded the state attorney general to limit the investigation of his background to six months. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a year. Trump argued that he was “clean as a whistle”—young enough that he hadn’t had time to get into any sort of trouble. He got the sped-up background check, and eventually got the casino license. But Trump was not clean as a whistle. Beginning three years earlier, he’d hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano. That story eventually came out in a federal investigation, which also concluded that in a construction industry saturated with mob influence, the Trump Plaza apartment building most likely benefited from connections to racketeering. Trump also failed to disclose that he was under investigation by a grand jury directed by the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, who wanted to learn how Trump obtained an option to buy the Penn Central railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan.

I’ve covered Donald Trump off and on for 27 years, and in that time I’ve encountered multiple threads linking Trump to organized crime. Some of Trump’s unsavory connections have been followed by investigators and substantiated in court; some haven’t. And some of those links have continued until recent years, though when confronted with evidence of such associations, Trump has often claimed a faulty memory. In an April 27 phone call to respond to my questions for this story, Trump told me he did not recall many of the events recounted in this article and they “were a long time ago.” He also said that I had “sometimes been fair, sometimes not” in writing about him, adding “if I don’t like what you write, I’ll sue you.”

No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers. This is part of the Donald Trump story that few know. As Barrett wrote in his book, Trump didn’t just do business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn, in a meeting recounted by a Cohn staffer who told Barrett she was present. This came at a time when other developers in New York were pleading with the FBI to free them of mob control of the concrete business. From the public record and published accounts like that one, it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.

Now that he’s running for president, I pulled together what’s known – piecing together the long history of federal filings, court records, biographical anecdotes, and research from my and Barrett’s files. What emerges is a pattern of business dealings with mob figures—not only local figures, but even the son of a reputed Russian mob boss whom Trump had at his side at a gala Trump hotel opening, but has since claimed under oath he barely knows.
 Neither Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Hope Hicks, nor Jason Greenblatt, the executive vice president and chief legal officer at the Trump Organization, responded to several emailed requests for comment on the issues raised in this article.

Here, as close as we can get to the truth, is what really happened.

After graduating in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania, a rich young man from the outer boroughs of New York City sought his fortune on the island of Manhattan. Within a few years Donald J. Trump had made friends with the city’s most notorious fixer, lawyer Roy Cohn, who had become famous as lead counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Among other things Cohn was now a mob consigliere, with clients including “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, the most powerful Mafia group in New York, and Paul Castellano, head of what was said to be the second largest family, the Gambinos.

This business connection proved useful when Trump began work on what would become Trump Tower, the 58-story highrise where he still lives when he’s not at his Florida estate.

FBI agents subpoenaed Trump in 1980 to ask about his dealing with John Cody, a Teamsters official described by law enforcement as a very close associate of the Gambino crime family. The FBI believed that Cody previously had obtained free apartments from other developers. FBI agents suspected that Cody, who controlled the flow of concrete trucks, might get a free Trump Tower apartment. Trump denied it. But a female friend of Cody’s, a woman with no job who attributed her lavish lifestyle to the kindness of friends, bought three Trump Tower apartments right beneath the triplex where Donald lived with his wife Ivana. Cody stayed there on occasion and invested $500,000 in the units. Trump, Barrett reported, helped the woman get a $3 million mortgage without filling out a loan application or showing financials.

In the summer of 1982 Cody, then under indictment, ordered a citywide strike—but the concrete work continued at Trump Tower. After Cody was convicted of racketeering, imprisoned and lost control of the union, Trump sued the woman for $250,000 for alteration work. She countersued for $20 million and in court papers accused Trump of taking kickbacks from contractors, asserting this could “be the basis of a criminal proceeding requiring an attorney general’s investigation” into Trump. Trump then quickly settled, paying the woman a half-million dollars.

There were other irregularities in Trump’s first big construction project. In 1979, when Trump hired a demolition contractor to take down the Bonwit Teller department store to make way for Trump Tower, he hired as many as 200 non-union men to work alongside about 15 members of the House Wreckers Union Local 95. The non-union workers were mostly illegal Polish immigrants paid $4 to $6 per hour with no benefits, far below the union contract. At least some of them did not use power tools but sledgehammers, working 12 hours a day or more and often seven days a week. Known as the “Polish brigade,” many didn’t wear hard hats. Many slept on the construction site.
 Normally the use of nonunion workers at a union job site would have guaranteed a picket line. Not at this site, however. Work proceeded because the Genovese family principally controlled the union; this was demonstrated by extensive testimony, documents and convictions in federal trials, as well as a later report by the New York State Organized Crime Task Force.

In 1991, a federal judge, Charles E. Stewart Jr., ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to violate a fiduciary duty, or duty of loyalty, to the workers and their union and that the “breach involved fraud and the Trump defendants knowingly participated in his breach.” The judge did not find Trump’s testimony to be sufficiently credible and set damages at $325,000. The case was later settled by negotiation, and the agreement was reportedly sealed.

In 1986, three years after Trump Tower opened, Roy Cohn was disbarred for attempting to steal from a client, lying and other conduct that an appellate court found “particularly reprehensible.”  Trump testified that Cohn, who was dying from AIDS, was a man of good character who should keep his license to practice law.

This was not the only time Trump went to bat publicly for a criminal. He has also spoken up for Shapiro and Sullivan. And then there was the case of Joseph Weichselbaum, an embezzler who ran Trump’s personal helicopter service and ferried his most valued clientele.

The facts above come from court records, interviews and other documents in my own files and those generously made available by Barrett, who was the first journalist to take a serious investigative look at Trump. Our files show Trump connected in various deals to many other mobsters and wise guys.

There was, for example, Felix Sater, a senior Trump advisor and son of a reputed Russian mobster, whom Trump kept on long after he was convicted in a mob-connected stock swindle. And there was Bob Libutti, a racehorse swindler who was quite possibly Trump’s biggest customer at the casino tables at the time. Libutti told me and others about arrangements that went beyond the “comps”—free hotel rooms and services, for example—that casinos can legally give to high-rollers.

Some of the dealings came at a remove. In Atlantic City, Trump built on property where mobsters controlled parts of the adjoining land needed for parking. He paid $1.1 million for about a 5,000-square-foot lot that had been bought five years earlier for just $195,000. The sellers were Salvy Testa and Frank Narducci Jr., a pair of hitmen for Atlantic City mob boss Nicky Scarfo who were known as the Young Executioners. For several adjoining acres, Trump ignored the principal owner of record and instead negotiated directly in a deal that also likely ended up benefiting the Scarfo mob. Trump arranged a 98-year lease deal with Sullivan, the FBI informant and labor fixer, and Ken Shapiro, described in government reports as Scarfo’s “investment banker.” Eventually the lease was converted into a sale after the Division of Gaming Enforcement objected to Sullivan and Shapiro being Trump’s landlords.

Trump later boasted in a sworn affidavit in a civil case that he made the deals himself, his “unique contribution” making the land deals possible. In formal hearings Trump later defended Sullivan and Shapiro as “well thought of.” Casino regulators thought otherwise, and banned Sullivan and Shapiro from the casino industry. But the Casino Control Commission was never asked to look into FBI reports that Trump was involved, via Shapiro, in the payoffs at the time of the land deals that resulted in Mayor Michael Mathews going to prison

Even after he got his license, Trump continued to have relationships that should have prompted inquiries. For example, he made a deal to have Cadillacs dolled up with fancy interiors and exteriors beginning in 1988, marketing them as Trump Golden Series and Trump Executive Series limousines. The modifications were made at the Dillinger Coach Works, which was owned by a pair of convicted felons, convicted extortionist Jack Schwartz and convicted thief John Staluppi, who was so close to mobsters that he was invited to the wedding of a mob capo’s daughter. 

“Why’d Donald do it?” Barrett said when I put the question to him. “Because he saw these mob guys as pathways to money, and Donald is all about money.”

From a $400 million tax giveaway on his first big project, to getting a casino license, to collecting fees for putting his name on everything from bottled water and buildings to neckties and steaks, Trump’s life has been dedicated to the next big score. Through Cohn, Trump made choices that—gratuitously, it appears—resulted in his first known business dealings with mob-controlled companies and unions, a pattern that continued long after Cohn died. 

What Trump has to say about the reasons for his long, close and wide-ranging dealings with organized crime figures, with the role of mobsters in cheating Trump Tower workers, his dealings with Felix Sater and Trump’s seeming leniency for Weichselbaum, are questions that voters deserve full answers about before casting their ballots.

The GOP Answer: Suffer the Children

Candidly, I get nauseated hearing Republicans claim to be the protectors of "Christian values" and traditional morality.  Particularly, since of the policies of today's GOP are the antithesis of the Gospel message.  If the GOP supports any biblical values, it seems to be the values of the Pharisees so condemned by Jesus.  The hypocrisy is indeed stunning.  Nowhere does this disconnect make itself more obvious than in the GOP's approach to children.  If one is not born into a white, native born, preferably far right Christian family, the GOP approach is to kick you into the gutter.  This holds true in the GOP's approach to children who came to this country illegally through no fault of their own.  A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP's foul approach to such children.  Here are excerpts:

[T]here are some difficult issues in immigration policy. I like to say that if you don’t feel conflicted about these issues, there’s something wrong with you. But one thing you shouldn’t feel conflicted about is the proposition that we should offer decent treatment to children who are already here — and are already Americans in every sense that matters. And that’s what Mr. Obama’s initiative is about.

Who are we talking about? First, there are more than a million young people in this country who came — yes, illegally — as children and have lived here ever since. Second, there are large numbers of children who were born here — which makes them U.S. citizens, with all the same rights you and I have — but whose parents came illegally, and are legally subject to being deported.

What should we do about these people and their families? There are some forces in our political life who want us to bring out the iron fist — to seek out and deport young residents who weren’t born here but have never known another home, to seek out and deport the undocumented parents of American children and force those children either to go into exile or to fend for themselves.

The real question, then, is how we’re going to treat them. Will we continue our current regime of malign neglect, denying them ordinary rights and leaving them under the constant threat of deportation? Or will we treat them as the fellow Americans they already are?

The truth is that sheer self-interest says that we should do the humane thing. Today’s immigrant children are tomorrow’s workers, taxpayers and neighbors. Condemning them to life in the shadows means that they will have less stable home lives than they should, be denied the opportunity to acquire skills and education, contribute less to the economy, and play a less positive role in society. Failure to act is just self-destructive.

But speaking for myself, I don’t care that much about the money, or even the social aspects. What really matters, or should matter, is the humanity.

My parents were able to have the lives they did because America, despite all the prejudices of the time, was willing to treat them as people. Offering the same kind of treatment to today’s immigrant children is the practical course of action, but it’s also, crucially, the right thing to do. So let’s applaud the president for doing it.

I increasingly find it difficult to be civil to some Republicans when they launch into their anti-immigrant, anti-minority harangues.  I typically bite my tongue at first and then call them out as hypocrites and modern day Pharisees  and force them to admit they are really motivated by greed, hatred, and bigotry.  They claim to cling to "Christian values" and "family values" yet their actions speak volumes, none of it good.

Quote of the Day - An Anti-Immigrant Bigot's View on a Teen Suicide

Some time ago I wrote about the sad suicide death of Joaquin Luna (pictured at right) who was only 18 years old. Luna was the child of illegal immigrants and feared that he'd be deported and never achieve his dreams. Today a comment was left on the blog by a "Jack Reylan" that in my opinion shows the moral sickness of the far right in this country. While I tried to better identify the author of the comment, I was met with a circular set of links that never allowed me to clearly identify the author. I did find a number of knuckle dragging comments attributed to the same individual on a number of blogs. I did not publish the comment outright because I did not want to be thought to subscribe to the sickness of the comment. However, it is important in my view that people see the truly ugly face and mindset of the far right in this country. Here's the comment left in connection with the tragic suicide death of an 18 year old:

I will not deny that foreign students can be bright, but faculty exaggerate their brilliance because foreign students are servile in doing work and favors for faculty and not demanding that professors actually earn their tuition keep. Moreover, faculty like that foreign students are either afraid, complicit or morally ambivalent about the immoral behavior of professors. In many cases they are more likely to share the professors' anti-Americanism than American students.

Actually, I had to correct a couple of spelling errors in the comment. I guess that's typical of the bigoted and ignorant far right elements in this country. What truly strikes me the most - and disgusts me the most - is the utter inability of the comment author to see any shred of shared humanity with Joaquin Luna or any other illegal immigrants or their children. If anyone is a threat to America, it's not Luna and those like him who seek to achieve the American Dream, but rather it's the "Jack Reylan's" in this country. Reylan - or whatever his/her real name may be - make me truly ashamed to be an American. And, if there is a God and a Hell, I suspect that it's folks like "Reylan" who have reserved seats.

Michele Bachmann's False Religiosity

I've note many times the hypocrisy of the Christian Right which wraps itself in the Bible, pretends to worship Christ but then utterly ignores the Gospel message and defines itself bu the hatred and discord which are the true hallmarks of the those who constantly proclaim their religiosity. Indeed, these "Christians" - using the term very loosely based on the behavior - make the Pharisees so roundly condemned by Christ in the Gospels look like pretty nice guys in comparison. The hypocrisy of these false Christians is enough to make one vomit - and want to avoid being defined within the Christian moniker at all costs. Michael Gerson has a column in the Washington Post that looks at Michele Bachmann's feigned religiosity and f*cked up sense of morality. The piece is 100% on target, but the condemnation applies to most of the so-called Christian Right that claims to honor Christ yet preaches a message of hate. Here are highlights:

[A]t a campaign stop in Iowa, Bachmann was asked by a Latino college student what she would do to help the children of undocumented immigrants. The presidential candidate responded: “Their parents are the ones who brought them here. . . . They did not have the legal right to come to the United States. We do not owe people who broke our laws to come into the country. We don’t owe them anything.”

Bachmann is not just making a political point but a moral argument. She asserts that children — who have committed no crime themselves — should be denied assistance because of the legal status of their parents. Her point is made without qualification. It doesn’t matter whether the children of illegal immigrants are hungry or sick. This standard rules out everything from emergency room treatment to elementary school education to prenatal care for the unborn. Bachmann’s pro-life convictions, evidently, only apply to children covered by a green card.

It is difficult to determine what tradition of moral reasoning Bachmann is drawing upon. Her argument seems to involve a mix of extreme nationalism and utilitarian lifeboat ethics. Christian morality, in contrast, affirms that human worth is intrinsic and universal. Men and women are created in God’s image, which is equally present in every tribe, race and nationality. Governments have a responsibility to honor human dignity in the application of law, even when it comes to noncitizens. Children, along with others who are particularly vulnerable, have a particularly urgent claim to care and protection.

Nations have the right to control their borders and enforce their laws. But when it comes to human beings — and especially when it comes to children — it is never permissible to say, “We don’t owe them anything.”

Bachmann’s candidacy represents a digression in the quality and seriousness of evangelical political engagement. . . . . the warnings found in Matthew 25, where Christianity’s founder defines the proper Christian attitude toward the hungry, the sick, the prisoner and the stranger. “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these,” he said, “you did not do for me.”

Bachmann holds her faith deeply and understands its political implications poorly. Her campaign is increasingly discrediting to causes — including the pro-life cause — she seeks to serve.

Personally, I believe that the only thing Bachmann truly seeks to serve is herself and her delusional ambition. Like so many of her kindred hypocrites, she wears her supposed Christianity on her sleeve yet preaches a message totally at odds with the true Gospel message. Bachmann is but a symptom of the sickness within conservative Christianity and today's Republican Party.

DREAM Act Dies at Hands of GOP and a Few "Blue Dogs"

While many of has been celebrating the Senate vote yesterday on DADT, another vote that took place gives cause for sadness. The DREAM Act, which would provided a route to citizenship for those in the country not under their own volition, went down to defeat in the Senate at the hands of the GOP and some "conservative" - read bigoted - Democrats. While Congressional Democrats and Obama (to what extent, I don't know) pulled DADT repeal out of the fire at the 11th hour, the same was not true with the DREAM Act. And advocates of the immigration reform bill are blaming Obama for a flawed strategy - as if that's any surprise given the ineptitude Obama displayed with DADT repeal and other LGBT issues that have gone nowhere. While there are many excuses for why the DREAM Act failed, the ultimate reason in my view is unvarnished anti-Hispanic racism. And as too often the case, many of the worse racists are the self-styled "family values" organizations who only support white, heterosexual headed families. These "godly Christians" continue to shock and sicken my by their inability to recognize the common humanity of others. The Act's failure to pass - even though it had 55 votes - also demonstrates how broken the U. S. Senate has become. Here are highlights from the Washington Post:
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Whenever Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and other immigrant-rights advocates asked President Obama how a Democratic administration could preside over the greatest number of deportations in any two-year period in the nation's history, Obama's answer was always the same. . . . . the president told them, . . . stepped-up enforcement was the only way to buy credibility with Republicans and generate bipartisan support for an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws.
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On Saturday, that strategy was in ruins after Senate Democrats could muster only 55 votes in support of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a measure that would have created a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Under Senate rules, Democrats needed 60 votes to overcome Republican opposition to the bill. The House of Representatives had passed the measure this month, 216 to 198.
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Virtually no one thinks immigration overhaul is possible in the next two years, given the views of many members of the incoming Republican majority in the House. Now many immigrant-rights supporters are second-guessing Obama's efforts to woo Republicans by ramping up deportations.
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"It is a strategy which has borne no fruits whatsoever," Gutierrez said. "This administration has unilaterally led the march on enforcement, yet the other side has not given one modicum of compromise."
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[T]he Obama administration miscalculated conservative antipathy on the subject of immigration, said a senior Democratic Hill staffer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the issue. Even as the administration stepped up deportations, conservatives charged Obama with being too soft on the country's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. "Short of marching these people naked over the border at the point of a bayonet, there is no such thing as being tough enough" for those who want to target illegal immigrants, the staffer said.
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Ali Noorani, who heads the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant-rights group, said that Obama faces a dilemma going forward. Republicans would now cry foul if the administration eased up on deportations, he said. But Latinos are losing patience with a strategy that has led to pain without gain for their communities.
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"The administration is in a pickle of epic proportions," Noorani said. "They are going to feel incredible pressure in the House to increase enforcement, and the record shows they will continue to increase enforcement of a broken immigration system. On the other hand, candidate Obama will need those same Latinos, Asians and other immigrant voters to come out for him in record numbers. How do they square that circle?"
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Once again, in his quest to kiss the asses of GOP bigots Obama has failed those who put him in office. It's a pattern that is all to familiar, yet the man never seems to learn.

Short on Local Workers, Resorts Look Overseas

For all the noise and hot air coming from the GOP and its unloving Christianist allies about illegal aliens in the USA, the sad fact is that there is a huge demand for workers to take low paying, non-living wage jobs that American workers either will not take or do not want because of the low pay and lack of benefits. But for this constant allure of jobs that - while poor by American standards - pay better than those in their home countries, people would not run the risk of illegal entry into the USA. Locally, with the huge number of workers that are required for the summer tourism season, many local hoteliers now look overseas to get summer workers as described in this Virginian Pilot article. Not surprisingly, (1) some unscrupulous employers frequently take advantage of the summer employees and (2) often the summer workers do not want to go back to their home countries and the potential for them remaining illegally in the country is present. Here are some story highlights:

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In mid-January, David Finwall took a whirlwind tour through Bulgaria, Turkey, Russia and Ukraine to find college students to work at the Oceanfront. By the end of the two-week trip, he had hired about 250 foreign students to spend this summer working for Gold Key/PHR Hotels & Resorts, one of the city's largest hotel owners. Pursuing careers such as computer science and economics at home, they would come to Hampton Roads to cook food, carry luggage and clean toilets.

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The students come to the United States on J-1 visas through the Exchange Visitor Program, which Congress created in 1961 to enhance cultural understanding between nations. In recent years, it has morphed into a major source of labor for many employers, particularly those in the hospitality industry. . . . Busch Gardens Europe, one of the region's first employers to embrace J-1, brought in 96 students to work for the Williamsburg amusement park in 1998. This year, it expects 663.

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Critics charge that the program has little oversight and contributes to illegal immigration. "We don't have people to do these jobs," Finwall said, citing low regional unemployment. "U.S. college students do not want to come and make beds and clean toilets for $7.75 an hour." The foreign students typically earn the same hourly wage as their U.S. colleagues - around $7 or $8 an hour for most of the jobs. Employers don't provide health insurance - nor Medicare or Social Security - for J-1 workers, which saves some money. They must adhere to minimum-wage and workplace safety laws and pay unemployment.

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Unhappy students may not change prearranged employment without their sponsor's permission. Some leave their jobs anyway, violating the visa terms. If caught by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, those students could face immediate deportation and be denied future entry into this country. That also goes for students who fail to return home after four months. Those who want to stay in the States are required to go home first and apply for a different visa, though some do hire lawyers while they're here to adjust their status.

Leave it to the Christianists: How Sanctuary Became A Dirty Word

I came across a blog debate on the Washington Post blog site (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/community/groups/index.html?plckForumPage=ForumDiscussion&plckDiscussionId=Cat%3aa70e3396-6663-4a8d-ba19-e44939d3c44fForum%3a7cceb09e-a8ae-44b4-b7af-92605cbce240Discussion%3aacd79f33-2063-403e-ba9d-83a542c80528) and it poses a very interesting issue: how those who claim to be the most Christian among political presidential candidates seek to be the most heartless and ruthless in their treatment of illegal aliens. Do not misunderstand me. I am not supporting or advocating for illegal immigration - I merely oppose alleged Christians acting harshly and cruelly towards often hapless illegal immigrants who end up being depicted as something less than fully human. In my view, this is but one example of how Christianity is being perverted into something horrible by the wingnut Christianists. Here are some telling quotes:

Does anyone find it ironic many ostensibly religious candidates are vying with one another to prove how meanly they can treat illegal immigrants?

The concept of offering sanctuary to criminals, or to people accused of a crime, is an ancient one and exists in nearly every culture. In biblical Israel, it was forbidden to kill a “manslayer”—or accused manslayer—within certain cities of refuge. Throughout the Middle Ages, seeking sanctuary in a church was a tactic more commonly used by people whose crimes consisted of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time—for example, behind the constantly shifting battle lines of endless wars between city-states and political factions. The “crime” of being an illegal immigrant seems to me to resemble the crime of being caught behind battle lines more than it does conventional criminality. Most of these people are guilty of nothing more than being poor and desperate for work. Why is it now socially and politically acceptable to talk about people who come here to work—illegally, to be sure—as if they were murderers, rapists and thieves?