May 18, 2008

Two views of Postville

The Washington Post sees the Postville raid as more evidence that the government should stop picking on poor, hard-working undocumented workers.

Craig Nelsen of ProjectUSA, however, says there is much more to the story.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you read that WAPO article, the first few grafs give the Post party line. Why bother these poor workers, just trying to make a living? Why destroy this idyllic Iowa small town, saved by this meatpacking plant? Who are the immigrants hurting anyway? Then we find out about the overcrowded schools, the missing fingers, the drug lab, the environmental violations, the management which breaks every law on the books, according to the union organizer. Other than all that, everything's fine in Postville.

Anonymous said...

Ah, but since they're Hasidic, they qualify as a minority-run business, right?

Anonymous said...

So, if I understand the nature of the scam, the lawyers and the companies split the revenue from the snakeheads (a portion I'm sure, but they add up) for each visa applied for. They can switch to another immigrant in the middle.

That, along with depressing wages, artificially, is how the scam works.

Thanks Steve. I was wondering how the money was flowing. This makes it easy to understand. It's all a scam.

The employer pretends he's going to employ an immigrant, but doesn't, and the immigrant pays $30K to work for a few months at substandard wages, then split for elsewhere.

Anonymous said...

Let me add, there is ample space here to exploit this in political terms. A party or organization aimed at pointing out this scam and stopping it, would make a lot of headway.

Once people understand the nature of the scam, it's hard to argue "Let's perpetrate an ongoing scam against Americans."

Anonymous said...

Julie L. Myers, assistant homeland security secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said that to the contrary, the agency has seldom been so aggressive, including opening criminal investigations of company officials

Of course the "executives" they send to jail are lowly middle managers, too. When they raided a fairly small Utah company of 100-200 employees called Universal Industrial Sales, they sent the hiring manager to jail but the owner and CEO didn't get charged - as if he had no idea what was going on.

We need a Sarbanes-Oxley for immigration enforcement - if caught employing illegals, they should be criminally liable, whether they knew or not.

And last month, the company lost a federal appellate court battle over whether it could ignore a vote by workers at its Brooklyn distribution center to unionize, on grounds that those in favor were illegal immigrants and not entitled to federal labor protections.

What's interesting is how bold these employers have gotten, as in the above quote. They are literally going to the court and staright out telling the court that their employees are illegal immigrants. "Why these workers can't unionize - they're illegals!"

Anonymous said...

Dang, I guess the price is going to go up on those kosher hot dogs at Safeway.

Anonymous said...

Let's not forget that during the raid a meth lab was found inside the plant.

Anonymous said...

The thing that pisses me off above all else is our State Department. They give tourist visas to people who intend to work here and never leave all the time, while rejecting millions of tourists who don't want to stay. They're wildly incompetent.

It's fairly difficult to keep Mexicans from getting in the country, especially without walls, etc, but it's not so hard to keep people who plan on flying here out.

Anonymous said...

poor richard,

Could you point me to this "Anglo-
Saxon Protestant" tradition of sharp practice and tribalism? Is it to be found in the writings of that wiley old skinflint Charles Dickens? Horatio Alger? Or maybe in Twayne, Masters or Sandburg?

And while you're at it, you can source the plainspoken, what-you-see-is-what-you-get business culture of the Levant, southern Italy, eastern Europe, et al.

Doug.

Anonymous said...

Despite the stereotypes, "finance" and all that was invented by the English and the Dutch. The Jewish Wall Streeters are latecomers who finally got in because of their knack for kabbalistic abstract thinking. Greedthink is a WASP thing, as shown by the abundance of financial jargon floating around this comment board.

-poor Richard


Yes, modern finance was largely a "Dutch" thing, but it arose in the 16th century following the arrival of a large number of Sephardic Jewish refugees from Spain. To diminish their role in its development does them a disservice.

Greedthink is universal. Calling it a WASP thing is ridiculous.

Anonymous said...

Doug: You mention Twain sarcastically, but at least two of Twain's works (Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) have the idea of Americans as peculiarly money-loving as a pretty major theme.

I'm not saying that this stereotype was true, but it was a widespread perception among both Americans and non-Americans throughout the nineteenth century. It was sometimes cast in negative terms as greed and sometimes in positive terms as entrepreneurship, but few disputed it. Obviously Jews were few in the U.S. at the time.

In most European nations, the prestigious form of wealth was in land the aristocracy were not supposed to soil themselves with trade, but in the U.S., except to some extent in the South, these prejudices had vanished by 1830 at the latest. Read Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution, or good old Tocqueville for that matter.

Anonymous said...

A few points:

1) "Julie L. Myers, assistant homeland security secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)" This is the daughter of the former Joint Chiefs Chairman, Air Force General Richard Myers. She's also in her mid-thirties, if memory serves. A classic case of nepotism (but not, I assume of deficient "in-group morality", since she's a WASP).

2) Slaughterhouses, including plenty of non-kosher ones, have been frequent employers of illegal immigrants.

3) The Bush administration has, belatedly, started to crack down on the large-scale employment of illegals at slaughterhouses and other business. Since we all know that Bush is a fan of illegal immigration, Mickey Kaus has speculated that the intent of this crackdown is to show everyone how we won't be able to get along without illegals.

4) If the abuses alleged at this Hasidic-run slaughterhouse are true, than these Hasidim have violated their own religious law. The two key points of kosher slaughtering are that it be done in a humane way, and in a way that is safe for human consumption (e.g., it's not kosher to slaughter and eat sick animals, for example).

- Fred

Anonymous said...

poor richard,

"Could you point me to this "Anglo-
Saxon Protestant" tradition of sharp practice and tribalism? Is it to be found in the writings of that wiley old skinflint Charles Dickens? Horatio Alger? Or maybe in Twayne, Masters or Sandburg?"

"And while you're at it, you can source the plainspoken, what-you-see-is-what-you-get business culture of the Levant, southern Italy, eastern Europe, et al."

I said what I meant and I meant what I said. That greedthink and money as an ethical barometer were invented by Typical White People with no need for help from good old Shylock. The English and Dutch started their imperial fortunes as pirates ripping off Spanish trade in the Caribbean and Atlantic. And the Vikings before them were not much different. It is what it is.

Wall Street was and is heavily heavily WASPy types, and these are the types who have thrown our American economy and culture in the dumpster in search of quick profit$$$. Thomas Jefferson warned against them, but nobody listened.

Last time I checked, Dick Cheney and his buddies who are currently shafting US tax payers for "cost plus" compensation in Iraq are not from Levant, southern Italy, eastern Europe, et al. They are just good old boys, out havin' sum fun.

Funny how the racial dimension of things is so keenly observed when it comes to Jews, Blacks, whoever, but suddenly race becomes invisible when it's WASPs. Fair is fair, and true is true. Truth never cuts just one way.

Anonymous said...

It's fairly difficult to keep Mexicans from getting in the country, especially without walls, etc, but it's not so hard to keep people who plan on flying here out.

I think the difficulty is exaggerated. How the hell do the naysayers know, FFS? It isn't as if we've tried!

Set up draconian penalties for employers who hire illegal aliens. Put the burden of proof (WRT intent and whether deliberate) on the employer, exactly the way they do with "diversity" and AA. Add a modicum of enforcement so employing illegals becomes a "going out of business" lotto. Watch the incentive for border-jumping dry up, and the illegals leave.

Anonymous said...

Most of the scumbags breaking laws to get illegals in this country are white breads.

Heh, nothing quite so original, refreshing, and edgy as a post by someone willing to throw around ethnic slurs in reference to whites (only?).

Anonymous said...

"Heh, nothing quite so original, refreshing, and edgy as a post by someone willing to throw around ethnic slurs in reference to whites (only?)."

Long live Thomas Jefferson. Long live Andrew Jackson. Long live the Constitution of the United States of America. To hell with Wall Street gambling with our nation's fortunes in their chamber pot of a city.

How about that?

Anonymous said...

The idea of Hasidic businesses qualifying as "minority-run" wouldn't make sense unless the Amish are also considered a minority.
The Amish have the same attitude as the Hasidim toward secular education, modern clothing and intermarriage with outsiders.
The difference is this, I think: the Amish stay out of politics, and there are no Anabaptist or German-American equivalents of the ADL or AIPAC to lobby on their behalf.
As for the Hasidim in Postville, here is my two cents: I don't believe in Jewish conspiracies to control banks, Hollywood, the weather, etc. Yet I know that the behavior of these dirtbags(and the fact that they seem to have escaped charges so far)have given more ammunition to the people who peddle such nonsense (some of whom regularly comment here.)