The 'crumbs' under the table have disappeared......NOT A GOOD SIGN FOR US EITHER........

http://www.dailygazette.com

Quoted Text

Goin’ south
As job opportunities dry up, migrant workers head home
BY ELLIOT SPAGAT The Associated Press

    SAN DIEGO
    After struggling just to pay his $300 monthly rent and send money to his wife and two children back in Honduras, Dionisio Urbina has given up. The day laborer is saving for a one-way plane ticket home.
    “I lost hope about finding work,” the 54-year-old illegal immigrant said outside a Home Depot store as he entered his fourth straight week without a job. “I’m homesick. It’s best to leave.”
    Thousands of Latin American immigrants both legal and illegal are going back home as the economic crisis in the U.S. causes jobs to dry up in the construction, landscaping and restaurant industries.
    The flow of immigrants back across the border tends to be cyclical, with many people going back home for the Christmas holidays. But some authorities say they are seeing a bigger-than-usual reverseimmigration effect this year.
    Mexico City’s municipal government predicts between 20,000 and 30,000 immigrants above the usual number will return from the U.S. in the next few months because they cannot find work.
    Mexican consulates in California and Chicago report that around 4,000 more Mexican immigrants than usual have already left for Mexico City because of the economic crisis.
    There are other signs the U.S. is no longer the magnet it was a few years ago, when the economy was thriving and the housing boom produced plenty of work:
    Fewer immigrants are getting caught crossing U.S. borders illegally. The Border Patrol said it made 723,825 apprehensions in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, down 18 percent from last year and down 39 percent from nearly 1.2 million in 2005.
    Immigrants are sending less money home. Remittances by Mexicans living in the United States registered their biggest drop in August since record-keeping began 12 years ago. Mexico’s central bank said they fell 12 percent from August 2007.
    With an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., the number returning home is relatively small.
    The vast majority of Mexican immigrants who have lived in the U.S. a few years will stay put because the job prospects are far worse back home and they have family in this country, said Wayne Cornelius, director of the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Comparative Immigration Studies.
    “They would be condemning themselves to a lower standard of living,” Cornelius said.
    Karina Corona, who came to the U.S. on a fake passport in 1995, is struggling to make ends meet but said she won’t go home to Culiacan, Mexico, because there is no work there and her hometown is a hotbed of drug violence.
    The single mother had to quit a second job as a seamstress to care for her children, leaving her to live on about $1,500 a month as a delicatessen cashier. She stopped taking graphic design classes at a San Diego community college and fell behind on rent. But Mexico “would be even worse than here,” said Corona, 34. “We’re going to stick it out.”
    At a day laborer site in Laguna Beach, south of Los Angeles, Juan Pacheco, 48, said he planned to return to Oaxaca, Mexico, in January, about two years after he came north to work construction. On an earlier stint in the U.S., he sent home $200 a week to his wife and children and bought a house in Mexico, where his family grows corn and beans.
BARELY MAKING IT
    Pacheco has worked only one or two days a week in the past year, barely enough for food and the $200 monthly rent. His voice cracks when he talks about phone calls to his 5-year-old daughter.
    “She says she doesn’t remember me, that she wants me to go home so she can meet me,” he said.
    Ramon Lopez has lived north of the border for 36 years, working in hotels and restaurants. But he recently returned to Mexico with his wife and mother-in-law because he could not find work or pay his bills.
    “I had my lows, I had my highs, but ultimately, things have become critical,” he said in Tijuana. “There’s too much pressure for the rent, for food, for transportation.”


Above, day laborers crowd the sidewalk outside a Home Depot store in San Diego, hoping to catch a job.
Left, Dionisio Urbina, an undocumented laborer from Honduras, waits at a labor pickup site in San Diego, hoping to land a day job. He says he is saving money to return home because of the lack of work in the slumping U.S. economy.
LENNY IGNELZI/ THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

all those jobs folks were lining up for too.....well, I guess those wallstreet gurus will be in line too......they like to travel south for vacations....maybe they
are included in the numbers too??????

See?  I guess that the Democrats ARE working on the illegal immigration issues.

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A system's fatal flaws
Thousands of inmates admit they're in the U.S. illegally, but even those convicted of violent crimes are often released right back onto Houston's streets
By SUSAN CARROLL
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Nov. 16, 2008, 7:33AM

Mayra Beltran Chronicle
Inmates are interviewed by jailers in the booking office at the Harris County Jail, where officers maintain a database of inmates who tell jailers during booking that they are in the U.S. illegally.

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About this series
This three-day Houston Chronicle investigation examines how scores of illegal immigrants cycle through local jails and fall through the cracks of immigration enforcement.

Day 1: Revolving Door
Illegal immigrants, including convicted child molesters, drug dealers and suspected murderers, avoid deportation after being arrested in Harris County.


Photo gallery: Immigrant criminals fall through cracks Thousands in U.S. illegally released in Houston In killing blamed on immigrant, woman's kin want answers Possible solutions for immigrant inmate screenings Pedro Edgardo Alvarez: Avoiding deportation Getting Booked: A look at Harris County’s intake process Sending them back Illegal immigrants on probation The Timoteo Rios case Suspected illegal immigrants in jails Day 2: Breaking Bond
Dozens of suspected criminals, who told jailers they were in the country illegally, are freed on bond, later abscond and are accused of more crimes.

Day 3: Second Chances
Illegal immigrants convicted of crimes from prostitution to sexual abuse avoid prison time by being sentenced to probation.

Case studies
Some Harris County Jail inmates who said they were in the country illegally were ordered deported decades ago, but never left. The worst escalated to commit more serious crimes. Their court files hold stories of squandered second chances. See where they are now. Federal immigration officials allowed scores of violent criminals — some ordered deported decades ago — to walk away from Harris County Jail despite the inmates' admission to local authorities that they were in the country illegally, a Houston Chronicle investigation found.

A review of thousands of criminal and immigration records shows that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials didn't file the paperwork to detain roughly 75 percent of the more than 3,500 inmates who told jailers during the booking process that they were in the U.S. illegally.

Although most of the inmates released from custody were accused of minor crimes, hundreds of convicted felons — including child molesters, rapists and drug dealers — also managed to avoid deportation after serving time in Harris County's jails, according to the Chronicle review, which was based on documents filed over a period of eight months starting in June 2007, the earliest immigration records available.

Other key findings in the investigation include:

•In 177 cases reviewed by the Chronicle, inmates who were released from jail after admitting to being in the country illegally later were charged with additional crimes. More than half of those charges were felonies, including aggravated sexual assault of a child and capital murder.
•About 11 percent of the 3,500 inmates in the review had three or more prior convictions in Harris County. Many had repeatedly cycled through the system despite a history of violence and, in some cases, outstanding deportation orders.

The investigation found that the federal government's system to identify and deport illegal immigrants in Harris County Jail is overwhelmed and understaffed. Gaps in the system have allowed some convicted criminals to avoid detection by immigration officials despite being previously deported. The problems are national in scope, fueled by a shortage of money and manpower.

In reaction to the Chronicle's findings, U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, said ICE needs more resources to target immigrants convicted of crimes.

"There's no question about it," Poe said. "Criminals from foreign countries who get caught after committing a crime and prosecuted should go to the top of the list of people we deport."

ICE removed 107,000 convicted criminals from the U.S. in the 2008 fiscal year, which ended in September. But during the same time frame, ICE sent home more than two times as many illegal immigrants without criminal records, prompting criticism from some members of Congress.

Kenneth Landgrebe, ICE's field office director for detention and removal in Houston, said officials are doing the best they can with the resources they have. ICE trained nine Harris County jailers this summer through a federal program that empowers local law enforcement to act as immigration agents.

The Houston ICE office set a record by removing 8,226 illegal immigrants with criminal records from Southeast Texas last year, an increase of about 7.5 percent from fiscal 2007.

"No agency has enough law enforcement officers to do the job the way they'd like," Landgrebe said. "If you look at law enforcement in general — at Houston or New York City or Los Angeles police — do they apprehend every criminal that commits a crime? No. Do they arrest every person that speeds in a traffic zone? No.

"We have to prioritize what we handle," Landgrebe said.

So how do we 'track' them??? the only way to determine if they belong here legally or not is to have the 'legals' have ID too.....we cant go around
demanding 'papers'----that's what Hitler and the SS did.......

soooooo......WHAT do we do and where do we spend our hard earned lettuce picking $$/taxes.......

we need 'transparency'.....I mean really, all those US companies that function overseas are kind of like illegal aliens....they get all the US bennies without
the 'fees'.......