Thursday, November 8, 2012




Arpaio wins reelection as Maricopa County's Sheriff

U.S. Illegal immigration number one enemy won reelection Tuesday. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio obtained the electorate’s preference and will commence a sixth term amid a trail of law suits and accusations of power abuse.

Accused of racial profiling and of targeting Latino’s in his enforcement of SB 1070, on election night, Arpaio offered an olive branch to this community.

"I'd like to get closer to the Latino community, if that could ever happen to try to explain what we do and get better relationships," Arpaio said to the press in Arizona. Although, he warned: "I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing."

Arpaio was challenged by Democrat Paul Penzone and independent Mike Stauffer. The two retired officers have accused the self-proclaimed “Toughest Sheriff in America,” of focusing in operations that brings him the focus of the media and of ignoring the law enforcement duties he was hired for.

“Our sheriff needs to be transparent, he needs to treat everyone with dignity and respect,” a defeated Penzone said, according to The Arizona Republic. “People in this community are going to be watching. They’re going to be holding him accountable.”

Latino organizations challenged Arpaio’s win Tuesday night, saying 400,000 provisional ballots haven’t been counted.

“There are almost half a million people whose votes haven’t been counted,” said Tomas Robles, deputy field director for Promise Arizona in Action.

Latinos with “Adios Arpaio” and “Joe’s Got To Go,” also claimed that voters faced issues at the polls, as waiting in long lines and being turned away because their names were not on the registered voters list. Many were also given provisional ballots, which could take at least a week to count.

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Immigration and the British elite

It is asserted that immigration is vital to the economy—indeed, The Economist magazine recently claimed that the Cameron government was foolishly restricting immigration that would benefit the economy. It is difficult to understand such claims when immigration is still running at an extremely high level, against the background of a situation where the UK has no immigration controls at all on the 500m or so citizens of the EU, and a lax policy on “family unification” for many millions of people in Africa and Asia. I think we can interpret The Economist’s ramping of its anti-British agenda as just another example of an élite group that sees itself as more enlightened than the British population by virtue of its support for cultural change, which is what The Economist would really like to see.

Take unskilled labour, for instance. We are drowning in it. There are many millions of unskilled people in this country living on social security. It may be that they don’t wish to take up employment, or that employers don’t wish to pay a living wage, or that employers don’t wish to take on the feckless long-term jobless—or, most probably, a combination of all these factors. But that does not mean that it is a sensible national policy to allow the millions on unemployment and “disability” benefits to remain out of work.

We don’t need any unskilled immigrants into the UK. I’m sure employers like the way that immigration helps to keep low-end wages down, but this is a case of privatising the gains of foolish policies like immigration and nationalising the costs: the benefits bill has to be paid for the millions who are maintained on social security, and immigration encourages crime and increases the expenditure associated with multiculturalism, costs that have to be borne by the public. From the point of view of a care home seeking people who will work for the minimum wage, the immigration of Filipinos may be a good idea. But from the point of view of the UK economy as a whole, it is not, and if the care home can’t entice people from the dole queues to work in care homes, they should raise the offered wage.

(The financing of long-term care is another, interesting topic: I do not support public provision, especially when the old person in receipt of care has expensive property assets, as this is purely done in order to prevent the sale of his property and allow his heirs to inherit the property, but this is another issue. In general, family members should meet the bill of their parents’ nursing care, or invite their parents into their homes and care for them themselves.)

Do we need mass immigration of graduates? I mean the sort of graduates with general university degrees that are not specifically geared to employment. We are also drowning in graduates, with around half of young people going to unversity and many graduates taking up work stacking shelves in supermarkets.

Consequently, there is no valid argument that such immigration should be welcomed either. There is a class of qualified workers, such as doctors and nurses, whose qualifications are more specific than a general university education, and where lacunae in the workforce may have be filled from abroad. If so, we should aim to find such workers in European economies, or from other states that are culturally similar to us.

However, once again, we need to ask why there are such lacunae in the workforce when so much money is spent on higher education. Maybe there are too many people studying for media studies degrees, and not enough people studying medicine. A correct educational policy would ensure that these workers with highly job-specific qualifications did not need to be hired from abroad either, and we should aim to rejig the higher education system in such a way as to eliminate the need for such immigrants within ten years.

This leaves us with only one category of employment that may genuinely need to be filled by immigrants: truly highly qualified staff of a kind that is hard to replicate or replace. I mean, for example, international footballers, or investment bankers, or CEOs of FTSE companies. This is a very high category of skilled personnel where the people cannot really be replaced by anyone else doing the same job. However, the numbers involved are tiny. You could require such immigrants to be given jobs earning £200,000 a year at a minimum (or, say, eight times the UK average wage on an ongoing basis). Our national policy should therefore be to prevent any immigration from people filling jobs earning less than £200,000 a year.

Although deceitful articles in The Economist claim that the UK needs immigrants, it only really needs the very final category of immigrants—and I would argue that even they should apply for five-yearly visas and should not be allowed to become naturalised citizens, being required to return home when their visas run out. This is, after all, the policy in countries like China.

Immigration has pushed up our benefits bill; added to the general population and required spending on schools and hospitals to cope with a growing population; added to crime and required greater spending on the police, the courts, prisons and insurance; added to business costs through anti-discrimination policies and their related tribunals; taken up our social housing and pushed up property prices for the native population; and created a cultural backdrop that is fractious and negative, where immigrants and their descendants constantly allege the British are maltreating them.

Isn’t it clear that immigration isn’t a policy designed to promote economic growth either? The House of Lords determined in a report (The Economic Impact of Immigration) that immigration did not promote economic growth (it had “little or no impact”—see page 24 of the report), and yet it is constantly asserted that this is the case, as the authorities try to pretend that a policy they favour for political and cultural reasons is really a necessity, for economic reasons.

It is rather disconcerting that the Establishment has the propaganda resources to assert these lies—if they wish to have these policies for political reasons, let them make their arguments in political terms—as most people are unsure of whether they are really true or not. I would close down The Economist magazine if I were in power, simply due to the rag’s constant mendacious propaganda in favour of an unfree, bureaucratically-dominated economy and society.

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