A Day Without Illegal Immigrants (NSFW)

Posted by Richard on

Yesterday, close to a million illegal immigrants and their supporters took to the streets in New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago, San Jose, Atlanta, Denver, and countless other cities to rally together to protest proposed immigration laws — Congress passed immigration reform in December that makes illegal immigration a felony and calls for building 700 miles of security fence along the US-Mexico border.

About 7.2 million illegal immigrants hold jobs in the United States, making up 4.9 percent of the overall labor force, according to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C. To accommodate this large potential constituent base, in response to the protests, the Senate is considering a proposal that would allow illegal immigrants to obtain legal status (and eventually citizenship) by working for six years, paying a fine, undergoing a background check, and learning English.

I am not on the fence on this issue, nor do I wish to provide an unbiased report in this case: send them all home (forcibly, if necessary), build a wall, and stop them from streaming over the borders. Use the vastly overpopulated prison system to replace the lost labor (instead of letting inmates watch cable TV and pump iron at my expense).

The only impact felt personally yesterday was that the neighborhood car wash was closed in support of the rally, thereby permanently losing my custom. The car wash is an impediment to traffic and safety on the busy street corner anyway, and it is environmentally unfriendly thanks to the copious amounts of chemicals that are leaked all over the streets and sidewalks.

Photo © iStockPhoto.com / A. K. Nicholas

When you have an illiterate, undocumented work force, all sorts of abuses by employers can take place. When you allow people to violate the law — either illegal alien workers, or the employers of such aliens — they will take advantage of it, or be taken advantage of. If we must suffer through having the car wash here in the first place, send in the INS, deport the illegal immigrants, and let legal high school and college students take over scrubbing cars.

The illegal immigrant cheerleaders at a topless car wash in Los Angeles, California, have frequently complained of incidents of harrassment and bullying of employees, workers being paid only in tips, hazardous working conditions, and a lack of break time.

That’s what happens when you’re an illegal immigrant worker illegally employed by someone who thrives on exploiting illegal workers.

Not that all such workers be topless or nude, but private, indoor, law-abiding topless car washes can provide lucrative income for young women without a college degree. There’s a big difference between a monthly welfare check and the $700 to $1,500 women can earn at a topless car wash in a week. A field reporter for Columbus Alive, Melissa Starker (not pictured), said that while it wasn’t an experience she’d choose to relive, there “was something safe about the physical barrier of glass and metal between washer and client.”

Author’s note: Anyone else find it amusing that the reporter’s last name is a British slang term for being “stark naked“? I wouldn’t make this stuff up even if I could.

Others I know personally share the same sentiment; I spoke with an immigrant last week about yesterday’s pending demonstration. Yuri immigrated legally from the Ukraine; after ten years of red tape and bureaucracy, he was finally granted US citizenship. Having millions of immigrants who are breaking the law by just being here and who have the gall to protest for free amnesty, angers him — he feels it cheapens the sacrifice he gave to have these whiners jump in line in front of everyone else who is choosing to follow the legal route.

Another immigrant, this one from New Zealand, expressed the same opinions as the Ukranian mentioned above. Also, Peter felt that cracking down on employers who are hiring illegal workers is a major part of the solution to the problem. Eliminate or at least significantly reduce the number of companies willing to pay illegal workers and the issue self-resolves.

A coalition of Hispanic-American groups held a news conference to stress that the protesters did not represent all Hispanics. Retired Col. Albert F. Rodriguez, a war veteran, said he understands the contribution immigrants have made to the United States, “but the difference is that we and millions of others like us did it legally. We’re all here today to tell all those illegal protesters, ‘You do not speak for me.'”

These rallies were perfect opportunities missed by the government to round up millions of illegal immigrants and kick them out on their åssës. Nobody with a functioning brain could possibly argue that someone who breaks the law to enter the country illegally should have any legal rights here whatsoever. And nobody with any notion of social justice and integrity would support a populace that, through their organized walk-out, sends the loud and clear message, “I’m here in the United States illegally, choosing to break the law. I’m here in the United States to work and not pay taxes. I’m here in the United States to get a free education at your expense. I’m here in the United States and I expect you to pay for my medical expenses. And I’m showing my support for my fellow lawbreakers by choosing to skip work, to skip school, and encouraging others to do the same!”

In the end, my stance is simple:

  • If you are a legal immigrant, welcome! Stay, contribute, assimilate.
  • If you are in immigrant here illegally, you are not welcome! Go home!
  • If you want to come back, do it through legal means — and I will welcome you back into the United States with open arms…

[This message was also sent electronically in part to Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, Senator Barbara Boxer, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.]

Geocaching Plague

Posted by Richard on

It’s been almost eighteen months since I’ve seriously geocached, although surprisingly I am still ranked in the top 1000 of all cachers worldwide (#991 as of last week). The main reasons I put the “sport” on hold all centered around the local community; the mega-cachers were arrogant about their influence in the game, the quality of the caches plummeted with regard to size and location, and the ridiculous proliferation of geocaches made creating anything new or innovative almost impossible since every decent location was already taken by micro- or nano-caches.

While I have just started to get back into the fray and find a few and cannot yet speak to today’s cache quality, I can unequivocally say that micros (cache containers around the size of a film canister or smaller) are still unfortunately all the rage, and the density of hidden caches is higher than ever.

Even though I had been in hiatus, every day — almost without fail — my custom software continued to accumulate data about local geocaches under the assumption that I would eventually pick up the game again. Occasionally, I would load the data into my GPS and Palm Pilot, maybe find one or two caches, and then hang them up again for a few months. Each time I did that, I saved the tracks and waypoints. I happened to look a little closer this month at the results.

Cache Proliferation

Each of the above four images represents a map of what I have coined “cache forests” — a group of at least five geocaches that exist within a half-mile radius of each other. The leftmost image is taken from data eighteen months old; the high-density forests, or clumps of caches, were found mainly in large regional parks. A year ago, as you can see in the second image, those large rural parks became even more populated and smaller urban parks were also beginning to see some saturation. Six months ago, the geocaching world seemed to go crazy and the heart of the high-tech region of Silicon Valley exploded with geocaches. Today it is even worse, as the fourth image shows the main high-tech center of California completely smothered in caches.

Microcaches

Today, 37% of the cache forests consist of micros, surprisingly almost the exact same percentage seen a year and a half ago. The biggest problem with micros is that the only people who actually like finding them are those who have been caching a long time and are striving to have the biggest number of finds, i.e. the mega-cachers, and it is through their poor examples that relative newcomers make the same mistake of hiding micro-caches. I have yet to find a geocaching newbie or kid who likes them; they are more likely to express dismay or disgust at finding such. These annoyingly small caches are rarely in an interesting location, and they rarely contain anything larger than a minute log sheet — nothing to capture the attention or delight of a young child.

The folks at Groundspeak, the commercial entity behind the geocaching.com website, need to crack down and enforce the rules and guidelines they set in place. It is not acceptable to place caches less than 528 feet apart for any reason; two caches I found today where in the same park, 338 feet part. For that matter, it is not acceptable to place geocaches every 500 feet along a road or trail. It is not acceptable to place a micro- or nano-cache in a place where a standard-sized cache could be placed instead. Parking lot and parking garage caches should be abolished. If a geocache must be magnetized to something to conceal it, if it cannot hold a travel bug, or if a standard pen or pencil won’t fit — the cache is too small.

Stop Aid to California Salmon Fisheries

Posted by Richard on

Hundreds of salmon fisherman demonstrated on the Oregon coast earlier this week, calling for immediate federal disaster relief. A decrease in spawning by the Klamath River salmon — which resulted in lower populations than mandated by federal fisheries managers — led to the virtual shut down of commercial salmon fishing along the Oregon and California coasts. Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio (no relation to Laverne) likened the salmon fishermen as “farmers of the sea”, calling for Congressional support of aid packages.

This is not a disaster! I doubt DeFazio really believes these aid packages are necessary; he’s probably smart enough to realize that the forces of economics are actively dictating that some of these fishers should seek financial gains elsewhere, not relying on a dying or currently severely impaired industry. Unfortunately, the rabid pursuit of future local votes has clouded his (and other equally blind politicians’) judgment.

When the dotcom bust of Silicon Valley took its biggest toll from 2001 through 2003, you didn’t see groups of out-of-work software developers staging rallies in support of free federal aid. Your professional life and its successes and failure are all about the gamble of personal decisions: if you choose to be a software developer and live in the Silicon Valley, expect to be laid off and jobless during downturns; if you’re a farmer in the mid-West, expect economic hardships because of poor crop yields, insect plagues, or an oversaturation of the market; and if you’re a salmon fisherman, expect that fishing will be extremely limited in years after river waters have been diverted and dammed for drinking water and irrigation.

It’s not like this was a surprise. NOAA has projected for the past three years that wild chinook salmon from the Klamath River would return to spawn in numbers below minimums set by federal fisheries managers. The Klamath has been beset for years with problems over allocating scarce water between farms and fish, poor water quality and poor fish habitat. Four dams block salmon from 300 miles of river. And now there’s a shortage of wild salmon? Go figure…

The coastal salmon “farmers of the sea” absolutely should not be subsidized, which is what the requested aid packages really represent. Neither should land farmers. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that taxpayers shelled out an expected $26 billion in direct agricultural subsidies in fiscal year 2005. It is only the richest farmers that get subsidies anyway, and thanks to the current abuses in the system, now every farmer facing a mild economic disaster assume they have a divine right to free aid. Take, for instance, Riceland Foods in Stuttgart, Arkansas, the largest single recipient of farm welfare. In 2003, it received $68.9 million in subsidies for producing rice, soybeans, wheat, and corn — more than all the farmers in Rhode Island, Hawaii, Alaska, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada, and New Jersey combined!

New Zealand and Australia are doing the right thing and are setting an example the United States should follow. After eliminating subsidies, some farms have gone out of business as expected, but many others have changed their operations to meet other consumer demands. The result has been not a massive downsizing of the industries but a surge of innovation, productivity, and output.

Instead of demonstrating for free federal money, suck it up, stop whinging about how your family has been fishers for some arbitrary number of generations, and just find something else to do.