Eideard

Hundreds greeting Salah on his release from an Israeli prison
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The Home Office’s hi-tech passenger data centre sent an alert to Terminal 1 at Heathrow about the impending arrival of Raed Salah, a “preacher of hate” who had been barred from the country by order of Theresa May, the Home Secretary.

However, he was on a plane heading for Terminal 5, a UK Border Agency source said. The mistake meant the immigration officer who checked his passport was not fully aware of the passenger’s significance and waved him through…

“There were a series of cock-ups in terms of getting information to the front-line,” said the UKBA source…

The Home Office has launched an investigation into how Salah was able to enter the country despite a travel ban, but last night refused to offer a “running commentary” on the inquiry.

Mrs May is likely to face tough questioning on the bungle when she appears before the Commons’ Home Affairs Select Committee on Tuesday.

The National Border Targeting Centre opened 15 months ago as part of the Home Office’s “e-Borders” scheme, which is behind schedule after the IT company hired to deliver the project had its contract terminated.

The Wythenshawe centre receives “passenger name record” information, which airlines flying into Britain are required by law to provide, and analyses the data in a bid to spot terrorist suspects, known criminals and illegal immigrants.

Salah was banned from Britain on the grounds that he holds hard-line anti-Semitic views. However, the UKBA mistake meant he was able to enter the country on June 25.

He delivered speeches in London and Leicester in the early part of last week and was later due to speak on the Israeli-Palestine conflict at the House of Commons at the invitation of three Labour MPs.

He was detained at 11pm on Tuesday and is now believed to have been deported.

Phew! Sounds to me as if the Brits are living up to all the standards established by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. From inept programming to boundless fear.

Cristina and Monica

An immigration judge has agreed to delay the deportation of a Queens woman until the legal status of the Defense of Marriage Act becomes clearer.

Monica Alcota faced return to Argentina even though she’s married to an American citizen, Cristina Ojeda – because the feds don’t give immigration benefits to gay couples.

President Obama announced last month that the White House won’t defend the 1996 law that bars recognition of same-sex marriages. That gave Ojeda and Alcota new hope that Alcota, who overstayed a tourist visa, might be approved to stay in the U.S.

Judge Terry Bain put a hold on her deportation order while the couple waits to see if the Defense of Marriage Act is overturned and their green card application goes through.

“She could have said no,” Ojeda said. “But instead she gave us time…”

“I was very pleased that both the judge and the government attorney treated the issue with seriousness and respect,” said their lawyer, Lavi Soloway. “I think it was a demonstration of respect for Monica and Cristina and their marriage. They were kind and generous about it.”

Phew. Most sensible folks await the end of DOMA and other crap laws designed to prevent civil rights.

Meanwhile, our best wishes to Monica and Cristina.

John Woods for The New York Times

As waves of immigrants from the developing world remade Canada a decade ago, the famously friendly people of Manitoba could not contain their pique.

What irked them was not the Babel of tongues, the billions spent on health care and social services, or the explosion of ethnic identities. The rub was the newcomers’ preference for “M.T.V.” — Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver — over the humble prairie province north of North Dakota, which coveted workers and population growth.

Demanding “our fair share,” Manitobans did something hard to imagine in American politics, where concern over illegal immigrants dominates public debate and states seek more power to keep them out. In Canada, which has little illegal immigration, Manitoba won new power to bring foreigners in, handpicking ethnic and occupational groups judged most likely to stay.

This experiment in designer immigration has made Winnipeg a hub of parka-clad diversity — a blue-collar town that gripes about the cold in Punjabi and Tagalog — and has defied the anti-immigrant backlash seen in much of the world.

Rancorous debates over immigration have erupted from Australia to Sweden, but there is no such thing in Canada as an anti-immigrant politician. Few nations take more immigrants per capita, and perhaps none with less fuss…

“When I took this portfolio, I expected some of the backlash that’s occurred in other parts of the world,” said Jennifer Howard, Manitoba’s minister of immigration. “But I have yet to have people come up to me and say, ‘I want fewer immigrants.’ I hear, ‘How can we bring in more?’ ”…

Relative to its population, Canada takes more than twice as many legal immigrants as the United States. Why no hullabaloo..?

French and English from the start, Canada also has a more accommodating political culture — one that accepts more pluribus and demands less unum. That American complaint — “Why do I have to press 1 for English?” — baffles a country with a minister of multiculturalism…

The Manitoba program, started in 1998 at employers’ behest, has grown rapidly under both liberal and conservative governments. While the federal system favors those with college degrees, Manitoba takes the semi-skilled, like truck drivers, and focuses on people with local relatives in the hopes that they will stay. The newcomers can bring spouses and children and get a path to citizenship.

RTFA. Lots of details – about good sense, building a strong economy, solid education and health care, friendliness.

You remember those qualities don’t you?

17th naturalization ceremony in Iraq for those serving in the U.S. Armed Forces

The US Congress is poised to vote this week on a bill that offers more than 2 million young illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, a move that will re-open the toxic debate on the issue ahead of the November mid-term elections…

The bill is being introduced by the Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid, and is facing widespread opposition from Republicans.

The Democratic party sees it as a no-lose situation. If the Republicans vote against, the Democrats hope this will cement their position as the party of the Latinos… NSS.

The bill would allow young illegal immigrants to become citizens if they have completed a university or college education or served two years in the military.

Barack Obama promised during this presidential run that he would introduce legislation to provide the estimated 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants, most of them Latinos, with a route to citizenship but has so far failed to deliver. This measure, even if the chances of passage appear at this stage to be slim, would go part way towards achieving that…

The Pentagon, struggling to maintain levels of recruitment in the face of troop demands in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, is among the backers of the bill.

In a tactical device by the Democrats, the bill has been tacked on to legislation approving defence spending for next year, making it harder for the Republicans to obstruct it. If the defence spending approval is held up the Pentagon will have to seek emergency funding elsewhere…

The proposed measure leaves the Republicans in a bind. If Republicans vote against the measure it will help the Democrats portray them as anti-immigration in the run-up to the elections in November in which a host of Senate and House seats and governorships will be at stake.

Some smart politics by the Dems. For a change. They could have been pushing the Republicans like this for months.

Fits perfectly with the bigotry of the teabaggers, too. As the assorted Tea Party factions continue to gain strength within the Republican Party, their nativist bigotry forces the opportunist Old Guard to move further to the right.

Nada Alkhaddar and her son in their Chicago apartment

Nada Alkhaddar spends her days at the Muslim Women Resource Center helping refugees and immigrants deal with government and commercial bureaucracies that can make life in the United States seem about as easy as computing the Alternative Minimum Tax…

Despite her skills at navigating the obstacles immigrants face, Ms. Alkhaddar cannot seem to help the person closest to her and her three children — her husband, Ahmed Alrais — who is trying to get a green card.

Mr. Alrais came to the United States in the spring of 2008 after his life had been threatened for working as an interpreter for the United States Army in Iraq. Unable to find a job during the recession and without a green card, he returned in February to the country he had fled to work again for the Army through a private contractor.

Federal officials at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, will not give Mr. Alrais credit for the time he has spent on a United States military base overseas so he can fulfill an American residency requirement to get the green card. His application was denied in November.

Mr. Alrais, 51, struggles to understand a system that would have given him a green card if he had stayed in the United States for the full year without a job, instead of working with American forces in Iraq…

Fred Tsao, policy director at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said Mr. Alrais’s ordeal to secure a green card was “crazy.”

“To go back and face the dangers while serving this country and then be denied a green card seems really unfair,” Mr. Tsao said. “It’s an awful deterrence to making a contribution to the country that took you in. Something is terribly wrong here.”

RTFA. There is nothing here that will surprise many of you.

In light of the service these people have given and continue to give to the U.S. Military and people in need – you might expect the slightest crack of sunlight and warmth to reach the icy hearts of bureaucrats. Unaccustomed though they may be to using their heads for anything other than supporting a hat with earflaps.

A Singapore cancer patient was held for four hours by immigration officials in the United States when they could not detect his fingerprints — which had apparently disappeared because of a drug he was taking.

The incident, highlighted in the Annals of Oncology, was reported by the patient’s doctor, Tan Eng Huat, who advised cancer patients taking this drug to carry a doctor’s letter when traveling to the United States.

The drug, capecitabine, is commonly used to treat cancers in the head and neck, breast, stomach and colorectum.

One side-effect is chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet and the skin can peel, bleed and develop ulcers or blisters — or what is known as hand-foot syndrome.

“This can give rise to eradication of fingerprints with time,” explained Tan.

“He was detained at the airport customs for four hours because the immigration officers could not detect his fingerprints. He was allowed to enter after the custom officers were satisfied that he was not a security threat.”

We may have changed out the White House and a small piece of Congress for people with brains, education and integrity – but, Homeland Insecurity hasn’t changed a jot.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Obama administration is naming a former Justice Department official, Alan Bersin, to tackle drug-related violence and illegal immigration problems plaguing the U.S. border with Mexico.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is expected to make the announcement during a visit to El Paso, Texas. Outsiders have dubbed the post a “border czar.”

“Right now our goals are two-fold. No. 1 is to prevent people at the border from entering this country illegally and No. 2 is to play a part in assisting the Mexican government in its crackdown on the drug cartels,” the source said. “That will be the primary function of this new position.”

The announcement is scheduled to take place one day before President Barack Obama is to embark on a trip to Mexico, where issues of drug violence south of the U.S. border are expected to be at the top of the agenda…

Bersin was criticized by some immigrant groups for his role in Operation Gatekeeper, a federal government operation to crack down on illegal immigration along the westernmost portion of the U.S.-Mexico border. The program was a success at reducing uncontrolled immigration through that area, but immigrants and human smugglers shifted to the east. Some blame the program for increases in immigrant deaths in the desert and on highways.

People committing self-destructive acts is a measure of their stupidity and ignorance. It has little or nothing to do with law enforcement.

Starting today, travelers visiting the United States under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) risk being detained at airports and sent home if they don’t comply with new U.S. immigration rules.

The introduction of the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) means visitors from 27 VWP countries — including most of Western Europe, New Zealand, Japan and Australia — must now register their details online at least three days before departure.

ESTA — which came into effect today — replaces the written green I-94 form and allows travelers under the VWP to enter the U.S. without a visa and stay for up to 90 days.

The measure is designed to tighten security and make it harder for terrorists who are citizens of the participating countries to easily obtain entry to the U.S…

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has assured travelers that the system can handle last-minute and emergency requests. Well, then we haven’t a thing to worry about. Right?

Travelers are advised that ESTA does not guarantee entry into the United States. The final decision rests with the immigration official at the port of entry.

I really like that last bit. You’re still in the hands of small-time individual pettifoggery.

A company accused of encouraging hundreds to illegally enter the United States and then hiring them using fake Social Security numbers has agreed to pay the largest settlement ever in a workplace immigration bust.

IFCO Systems North America, a pallet and crate company, will pay a $20.7 million settlement, which includes $18.1 million in fines and $2.6 million for overtime violations, the Department of Justice said.

In early 2006, immigration officials raided 45 IFCO sites, arresting almost 1,200 low-level workers. Federal officials also charged several managers, accusing them of using “as a business model the systematic violation of United States law.”

To date, nine IFCO managers and employees have pleaded guilty to criminal conduct, the Justice Department said. Four managers are awaiting trial on felony charges and the investigation is continuing, it said.

IFCO records suggests that as many as 6,000 illegal immigrants worked at company plants from 2003 to 2006, the Justice Department said.

As usual, the point avoided by prosecutors and the press is that undocumentados are essentially used as scabs to cut the wages of native-born workers. Typically, wages are reduced 40% or more below existing wages.

A British court has struck down immigration restrictions placed on Gurkha veterans who served in the country’s armed forces, handing a significant victory to a group that has served Britain for nearly 200 years.

The High Court ordered the government to draw up a new immigration policy for the Nepalese soldiers, who demanded the repeal of regulations that bar some of them from settling in Britain.

“This court has struck that policy down as being completely unlawful, and has ordered the government to draw up a new policy as soon as possible that takes in account the long and distinguished service of these men,” attorney David Enright said.

Gurkha soldiers outside the court broke into cheers, played bagpipes and waved green flags emblazoned with two crossed kukri — bent Nepalese knives the Gurkhas adopted as their standard.

Mercenaries recruited from the Himalayan hills, the Gurkhas served Britain starting in 1815, through the conflagrations of the 20th century and into the 21st, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Class society in Britain – especially regarding former servants and colonial subjects – has the stink of racism about it. Ordinary people do their best to overcome that. But, the stuffed shirts who make the rules never care to bend to honor and justice.