There's no place like home

From the Daily News:

I was 10 years old when I crossed over the border into Arizona with my parents in 2005.

We moved to Jackson Heights. My parents, Roberta and Salvador Alarcon, left my younger brother with my grandparents in Veracruz.

In New York, my mother worked at a Laundromat and my dad got a job in construction. He built and demolished houses in Manhattan and Queens. His boss exploited him. My father worked for 12 to 14 hours a day for $80. He had no idea you could sue for lost wages. He was always afraid of being deported.

In 2011, the family was forced to move from a two-bedroom apartment to a one-bedroom. At one point, my father injured his ankle. He was afraid to go to a hospital. In 2012, my grandmother passed away from cancer. My parents decided to go back.

My parents now have a small store in the town. My father is now working on farming and my mother is taking care of the store.

They are happy. But obviously, it’s not the same. Over here, they had cell phones and money to go to restaurants once a month. Now, they don’t have the money and have to work harder to get those things.

I don't understand how they had money for cell phones and restaurants with mom working off the books at a laundromat and dad raking in $80/day. Sounds like Mexico was a better option. And in fact, more Mexicans are returning than arriving these days.

Chinese come to US illegally thru Mexico

From the NY Post:

The signs at the Texas border offer a glimpse of the enormity of the problem of unaccompanied minors trying to sneak into the US.

The instructions are printed in English and Spanish, of course — but also, surprisingly, they’re instructions for help are also in Chinese.

Hundreds of Chinese teens are slipping into the US a year, immigration groups say, mostly through Central America and Cuba.

They make their way to New York City, typically on buses, where they are farmed out across the country to work in Chinese restaurants.

Illegal immigration status led to 22-year old cold case

From the NY Times:

Before she came to be known as Baby Hope, Anjelica Castillo lived with seven people in the Queens apartment where she was killed. None of them spoke up when she vanished one summer day.

Neither did her parents, who never reported the girl missing, nor did at least two of her sisters, who spoke of it to each other but not to the authorities.

Several factors may have contributed to the family’s reluctance to speak up. Many were living in the United States illegally, according to two other law enforcement officials, and were likely fearful of coming forward. One of the officials said that after the killing, Ms. Juarez-Ramirez and Mr. Juarez told others living in the apartment on 30th Avenue in Astoria that “Anjelica is not coming home” and that they should not ask questions. Investigators believe the pair might have succeeded in keeping them quiet because of the immigration status of those living there.

Sex traffickers busted

From NBC New York:

Federal agents raided four brothels in New York and arrested 13 people in an alleged sex trafficking and prostitution ring dating back to 2008, prosecutors announced Tuesday.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said the suspects exploited dozens of women, trafficking some from Mexico to New York, to force them to work as sex slaves.

NBC 4 New York cameras captured the raid on one of the brothels in Yonkers Tuesday. Search warrants were also executed at brothels in Queens, Poughkeepsie and Newburgh.

The criminal complaint alleges the suspects lured women to the U.S. by engaging them in romantic relationships and promising a better life in New York. Once they arrived, the victims were forced to work as prostitutes under "abhorrent conditions," often subject to abuse and threatened with harm to them and their family members

In a typical day, a Mexican sex trafficking victim in New York had sexual intercourse with 20 to 30 customers, with each customer usually paying about $30 to $35 for 15 minutes of sex, according to authorities.

Of that money, half typically went to either the driver who took the victim to the client or to the residential brothel where the woman worked. The other half went to the victim, who was then typically forced to turn over all the money to the trafficker.

Grocer not exactly green

From DNA Info:

This green grocer has some Corona residents seeing red.

A produce wholesaler in the neighborhood is making life a nightmare for some — from refrigerated trucks spewing toxic exhaust, to workers making sexual comments and even threatening residents with "connections with Mexican gangs," a $10 million lawsuit claims.

The papers, filed in Queens Supreme Court earlier this month, also accuses the city and the NYPD of failing to respond to a "tidal wave of complaints" from residents about Moreno Produce, at 97-03 43rd Ave., in recent years.

Chief among the allegations is that trucks from the company, also known as Nuevo Mexico Lindo Su Abarrotera Central Corp., are being allowed to idle for "hours at a time...sending toxic pollutants into neighboring residential homes."
He said the trucks are also causing sleepless nights for residents, a problem that has been getting worse over the past two years.
According to the suit, which also names the city and the NYPD as defendants, trucks from the company block traffic, "forcing school buses and emergency vehicles to change their routes," and occasionally damage their vehicles.
Aside from the trucks, residents also have to contend with forklifts, which are used on the sidewalks and streets "in a recklessly dangerous manner," the suit says.

Moreno is also "allowing its employees to make rude, abusive and sexually suggestive comments and even...indicating that they have connections with Mexican gangs, when faced with complaints from the neighborhood," the complaint says.

Bakery worker and pal busted making forged IDs

From the Daily News:

A Brooklyn bakery worker who sold cakes and pastries also ran a half-baked side business that offered forged ID cards, prosecutors charged Thursday.

Jose Mateo Castro, 56, who worked at Las Conchitas Bakery in Sunset Park, was recently indicted, along with Leonel Escamiilo, 43, who is accused of producing the phony IDs out of his basement. Authorities said they sold a bogus green card and Social Security card to an informant.

"According to the agents at Homeland Security, these documents looked so authentic that an ordinary lay person could not detect them to be phony," said Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. The feds were tipped off about a forged-ID-selling baker in summer 2011. A subsequent yearlong probe involved surveillance from cars and a helicopter, Hynes said.

The two suspects, who are being held on bail, face seven years in prison if convicted, followed by deportation to their native Mexico.

City wants more Mexican tourists

From Crains:

After the estimated number of Mexicans visiting the city nearly doubled in six years, tourism arm NYC & Co. is ramping up its presence in Mexico City, part of its series of far-flung tourism offices.

"We want to be visible and make sure we're top of mind" to Mexican travelers, NYC & Co. President George Fertitta said.

The agency has had a representative in the Mexican capital, but the new office represents a significant boost in New York's efforts to market its attractions there.

The new office won't cater to travelers themselves. Instead, it's meant to help forge closer relationships with Mexican tour operators, travel media, airlines and others who steer where tourists go—"to be able to have day-to-day contact," Mr. Fertitta said.

An estimated 376,000 Mexican travelers took in New York last year, up from 192,000 in 2005.

And how many Mexican travelers did NYC take in permanently?

Ridgewood-dwelling murderous illegal alien fled to Mexico

From Metro:

The suspect in the fatal stabbing of a youth soccer coach near Union Square left a note saying he was "sorry" before fleeing the county, police commissioner Raymond Kelly said Thursday.

Orlando Orea, 32, paid cash for a one-way airline ticket to Mexico City and flew out of John F. Kennedy airport Tuesday, just hours before investigators identified him as the knife-wielding man caught on surveillance camera attacking Michael Jones, 25, on a 14th Street sidewalk before dawn on Sunday.

A search warrant of Jones' apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, turned up a note that referenced the attack, Kelly said.

Investigators have said that Orea was in an argument in a nearby bar before the attack, and may have mistaken Jones for one of the people who intervened to break up the altercation. Jones was never in the bar and didn't know Orea.

Orea was able to board a plane leaving JFK just hours before police identified him and put him on the federal "no fly."

Investigators know which village in Mexico Orea is from, Kelly said Thursday. New York investigators are preparing to travel there to assist in the manhunt, and are also working with Interpol, Mexican authorities, and the U.S. State Department to try to track down the fugitive.

Orea, who used several aliases and was in the county illegally, is expected to be indicted for the homicide.

And we wanted to opt out of Secure Communities?

Prostitution pipeline leads back to Mexico

From the Daily News:

In this small Mexican town that sends sex slaves to New York, little boys dream of growing up to be pimps.

Gaudy gabled houses that rise above gated walls are proof of the profits to be made from funneling “delivery girls” to Roosevelt Ave. in Queens.

It’s a family business, and through the decades, the pimps have perfected methods to coerce women into sexual slavery using romance, lies and the threat of violence. Over the last 20 years they have branched out of Latin America, sending sex workers to New York and other U.S. cities, experts said.

Each family sends its youngest and most handsome men across Mexico to pose as salesmen with nice clothes and fancy cars, Munoz Berruecos said.

They woo rural women waiting at bus stops or taking Sunday strolls in the park. Once the women are seduced, they are coerced into prostitution.

The women are held inside the Tenancingo “security houses” — where some say they were repeatedly raped. If they have children, the kids are kept in the town for leverage after they are dispatched to red-light districts.

Some go to Mexico City. Many end up in Queens, where johns can order them for delivery by calling numbers advertised on cards, key chains or bottle openers, authorities say.

What those little cards really represent

From the Daily News:

A Mexican man pleaded guilty in Brooklyn to working for the family business — an international sex trafficking ring that goes back generations.

Angel Cortez Granados, 25, admitted Friday he wooed a woman and brought her to the U.S. as his “girlfriend” only to enslave her as a Queens prostitute traveling from john to john in a livery cab.

“I threatened her, telling her that she was alone in this country, that nobody would help her, so that she would work as a prostitute,” Granados told Federal Judge Cheryl Pollak.

He said he warned the victim, identified only as Esperanza, that he would call the cops if she didn’t follow orders.

“Since she didn’t have any papers, (I was) scaring her with the possibility of going to jail,” he said.

Six other members of the Los Granados ring have been charged in New York, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Pamela Chen.

The pimps often partner with livery drivers based out of Roosevelt Ave. in Jackson Heights, Queens, where promoters hand out cards and even bottle openers advertising sexy girls for “delivery,” she said.

5-year old illegal sent home to mom

From the Daily News:

Angelica Mota filed suit last year seeking custody of little Elena under the Child Abduction Remedies Act of the Hague Convention.

The child was born in 2006 to Mota and her husband Jose Luis Rivera Castillo who later entered the U.S. illegally and settled in Queens where he works as a custodian at a private school.

The couple hatched a plan for Mota and their daughter to join him in Corona, Queens in 2010 - she handed Elena off to smugglers that he had paid in advance at the border in Nogales, Arizona.

Several days later Mota was nabbed by the feds when she tried to cross with another relative and was deported in August 2010, according to court papers.

Castillo was raising the child with his new girlfriend with whom he recently had a baby boy, and had stopped sending financial support to his wife.

Castillo's lawyer argued that the couple had made a joint decision that Elena should be raised in the U.S. because it would be a better life for her.

But the judge ruled that Mota had proved her case that the child's removal to a new country was conditional upon her mother joining her.

Children of illegals remain uneducated

The next time someone argues that illegals should remain in the country because they work hard and their kids succeed, please show them this NY Times article:

About 41 percent of all Mexicans between ages 16 and 19 in the city have dropped out of school, according to census data.

No other major immigrant group has a dropout rate higher than 20 percent, and the overall rate for the city is less than 9 percent, the statistics show.

This crisis endures at the college level. Among Mexican immigrants 19 to 23 who do not have a college degree, only 6 percent are enrolled. That is a fraction of the rates among other major immigrant groups and the native-born population.

Moreover, these rates are significantly worse than those of the broader Mexican immigrant population in the United States.

The problem is especially unsettling because Mexicans are the fastest-growing major immigrant group in the city, officially numbering about 183,200, according to the Census Bureau, up from about 33,600 in 1990. Experts say the actual figure is far larger, given high levels of illegal immigration.

...educators and advocates say that unless these efforts are sustained, and even intensified, the city may have a large Mexican underclass for generations.

These problems extend throughout the swelling Mexican immigrant diaspora in the New York region. They have also afflicted the population of second-generation Mexican-Americans: While educational achievement is far higher among American-born children with Mexican ancestry, it still lags behind the rates of most other foreign-born and native-born groups, according to census data, which was analyzed by Andrew A. Beveridge and Susan Weber-Stoger, demographers at Queens College.

Syndi Cortes, 19, one of five children of Mexican immigrants in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, said she dropped out after getting pregnant at 16. She had already been cutting most of her classes, she said, and so had most of her Mexican and Mexican-American friends.

Last year, she tried to resume school, but her mother, who was working long days as a housecleaner, was opposed to day care and forced her to drop out again to look after her baby.

We are encouraging and protecting millions of illegal immigrants from countries that do not value education, view a woman's role as that of a baby factory, and live off the backs of taxpayers, while prohibiting people from better-educated countries, who are practically guaranteed success stories, from setting foot into the States. This is yet another Ponzi scheme that is costing Americans and legal immigrants big time.

Furthermore, the reason many of these folks can't learn English is not because they don't want to, it's because they never learned to read and write in their own language. When mom and dad pulled you out of school in 3rd grade so you could help them work, you don't have time for book learning. In turn, you can't help your own kids when it's their time to learn and don't feel the need to encourage them to study hard because it wasn't a priority where you came from. It's a sad situation, but one we can't and shouldn't be responsible for trying to fix.

Let's also realize that legalization means a guaranteed minimum wage. Which means the incentive for employers to hire illegals has been removed. This sets up a situation where they are now directly competing with Americans for retail and other low-level jobs rather than just the "jobs Americans won't do" like farm labor and slaughterhouse duties.

Damned if I know what the answer is, but neither amnesty nor the status quo are it.

Shocking news: illegal aliens can be really dangerous!

From AOL News:

Lost in the rhetoric about illegal immigration are new reports that Mexican drug cartels have moved into the United States, gaining a major foothold here that may be the start of a permanent expansion onto this side of the border. They're even growing marijuana in our national parks, one expert says.

Mexico's cartel families and their associates have moved into cities in the southwestern U.S. as part of their ongoing drug selling and distribution operations, according to an alert from the U.S. Justice Department's Drug Intelligence Center, first reported April 11 by Mexican media.

Roberta Jacobson, deputy secretary of state for Mexico and Canada, said on April 12 that Mexican drug cartels are now operating in 230 American cities. Drug trafficking "is not a crisis that affects only the border," Jacobson said. ""It's a crisis in our cities across the country."

The Los Angeles Times reported this week about a member of Mexico's powerful Sinaloa cartel who operated a cocaine operation in South Carolina and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The report said there are similar rings run by cartel members living and working in Seattle, Minneapolis and Anchorage, Alaska.

The new warnings coincide with the discovery of mass graves in the state of Tamaulipas, just south of Texas, with at least 116 bodies in them earlier this week, and a discovery late Wednesday of 26 bodies in a mass grave in Durango.

The Mexican government says the Los Zetas drug cartel is responsible for the Tamaulipas murders. So far, about 35,000 people have died in the Mexican drug wars since 2006.

The cartel-related violence is spreading to the U.S., law enforcement officials say. And it all starts at the border.

Mexicans having a hard time

From the NY Times:

About 43 percent of all Mexican immigrant households are overcrowded, compared with an average of 15 percent of all immigrant households and 9 percent of households in the general population, according to the report, titled “Housing the City of Immigrants.” The study also finds that about 35 percent of Mexican households spend more than half their income on rent, compared with 26 percent of all immigrant households and 24 percent of all households combined.

The report suggests that the relatively poor housing experience of many Mexicans is a function in part of the population’s newness to New York and their low income levels.

Those immigrant groups that have been in the city for a longer period of time tend to have better access to subsidized and public housing, the report said. In addition, Mexicans, particularly men who have immigrated alone to the United States for work, will crowd apartments to save money, especially if they live in neighborhoods where affordable housing is scarce, scholars say.

Among its other intriguing observations, the report noted that while home ownership rose from one generation to the next — to 44 percent of all second-generation immigrant households from 31 percent of first-generation households — the increase was even sharper among low-income immigrants, rising to 34 percent among second-generation households from 17 percent among first-generation households.

While the authors did not suggest a reason for this difference, David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative at the Fiscal Policy Institute, said it could partly reflect the fact that some low-income immigrants were “pushed prematurely into home ownership by predatory lending.”

Is Bloomberg really ok with this?

From the NY Times:

Night and day, the heavy front door rarely stops swinging. Men and women pass one another at the entrance of a four-story building on 21st Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, on their way out to work, or back in for a few hours of sleep between shifts. They are line cooks, construction laborers, deliverymen, deli workers, housecleaners and gardeners.

A dozen of the building’s 16 apartments are occupied by Mexicans, and most of those have two families per unit, sometimes more. Except for a few women caring for small children, all the adults — about 50 — are employed. Most work long hours, six days a week, for minimum wage or less. Some have two jobs.

The building is a microcosm of Mexican industriousness in New York City. And there are hundreds of others like it, bastions of low-wage work, crowding and hope.

That success, though, has a flip side. One reason Mexicans have found work in such numbers, experts say, is that many are illegal immigrants, and less likely to report workplace abuses to the authorities for fear of deportation.

“Illegal immigrants are very convenient,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. “Employers are quite interested in employing people who are willing to work and to overlook some labor laws.”

Several tenants in the Bensonhurst building said they had held jobs that paid less than the minimum wage. The tenants, who asked that their last names be withheld because they feared being fired or deported, said they had never been paid overtime compensation, were routinely handed the least desirable tasks and were sometimes forced to work on their one free day.

We must look the other way when we discover people living in overcrowded, unsafe conditions who are being abused at work because to do something about this would be anti-immigrant and racist. This is the Bizarro World we live in. And Lord knows, Americans and legal immigrants don't want to be line cooks, construction laborers, deliverymen, deli workers, house cleaners or gardeners, especially in this economy and with unemployment at 10% in some places.

It's funny, but after Fresh Direct was raided and forced to hire people who were here legally, they didn't collapse.

Green card scam targeted Mexicans

NEW YORK (AP/1010 WINS) -- Prosecutors say a New York City woman posed as a lawyer and made phony promises to get green cards for Mexican immigrants.

Teresa Nora Martinez is being held on $5,000 bond after her arraignment Monday on scheming to defraud and other charges. Her lawyer's name wasn't immediately available, and no telephone number can be found for her home.

The Manhattan district attorney's office says the 39-year-old Martinez took $12,000 from three Mexican immigrants. Prosecutors say she told two she was an immigration lawyer and told the third she worked with lawyers.

Prosecutors say the immigrants eventually discovered she didn't have a law license and demanded she give their money back, but she refused.

Result of a porous border

From the Village Voice:

On April 27, Janet Napolitano pronounced that the border separating the United States from the Republic of Mexico is more secure than ever.

Napolitano sounded convinced, even though she also has spoken of Mexico's 6,000 drug-related murders in 2009 alone, more than twice the total in 2008.

But Napolitano's words rang hollow to those who live at or near the border in Cochise County, a beautiful, sparsely populated expanse in southeast Arizona.

They live at ground zero in the United States for the smuggling from Mexico of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin — and human beings.

(The U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector was responsible for almost half of all illegal aliens arrested and marijuana seized along the nation's borders during fiscal 2009, which ended September 30. Try to imagine 1.2 million pounds of pot, an all-time record for any sector. The zone includes Cochise County and covers 262 miles of border).

Most people in this fabled county — home to Tombstone (the shootout at the OK Corral), Fort Huachuaca (a major U.S. Army base), funky border towns (Douglas and Naco), and almost unimaginably open spaces — agree on this:

The executive and legislative branches of the federal government have set up Cochise County for disaster by not coming up with a border policy to effectively handle what's known as "illegal immigration."

In the early 1990s, the feds tightened the leaky border around San Diego and El Paso with mega-operations called Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line, respectively.

The result was a monumental funneling of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens from the steep mountains and unforgiving deserts of northern Mexico into southern Arizona.

Before then, Cochise County was not a prime point of entry for illegal aliens (the Tucson sector accounted for only 9 percent of the U.S. Border Patrol's arrests in 1993).

Then, as now, drug smugglers pretty much had free rein, with law enforcement seemingly always a step behind most of the criminals.

With the redirection of the migrants came dire ramifications, including death for untold hapless migrants ill-equipped to negotiate the desert and mountain trails in brutal summers and cold winters.

The influx also has upended the lives of many on this side of the border, especially American citizens who live anywhere in the southern portion of Cochise County.

Some of them simply are hungry and desperate. But others are of a more malevolent bent, committing robberies, burglaries, and other crimes against Americans in remote spots like Portal, Apache, and Palominas.

Why we need troops on the border

From Fox News:

The Department of Homeland Security is alerting Texas authorities to be on the lookout for a suspected member of the Somalia-based Al Shabaab terrorist group who might be attempting to travel to the U.S. through Mexico, a security expert who has seen the memo tells FOXNews.com.

The warning follows an indictment unsealed this month in Texas federal court that accuses a Somali man in Texas of running a “large-scale smuggling enterprise” responsible for bringing hundreds of Somalis from Brazil through South America and eventually across the Mexican border. Many of the illegal immigrants, who court records say were given fake IDs, are alleged to have ties to other now-defunct Somalian terror organizations that have merged with active organizations like Al Shabaab, al-Barakat and Al-Ittihad Al-Islami.

In 2008, the U.S. government designated Al Shabaab a terrorist organization. Al Shabaab has said its priority is to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, on Somalia; the group has aligned itself with Al Qaeda and has made statements about its intent to harm the United States.

In recent years, American Somalis have been recruited by Al Shabaab to travel to Somalia, where they are often radicalized by more extremist or operational anti-American terror groups, which Al Shabaab supports. The recruiters coming through the Mexican border are the ones who could be the most dangerous, according to law enforcement officials.

Security experts tell FOXNews.com that the influx of hundreds of Somalis over the U.S. border who allegedly have ties to suspected terror cells is evidence of a porous and unsecured border being exploited by groups intent on wrecking deadly havoc on American soil.

Here's more from CNN.

National Guard being deployed to the border

From Fox News:

President Obama told Senate Republicans Tuesday that he's read the controversial Arizona immigration law and is concerned it would allow for discrimination -- but is planning to deploy up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to allay security concerns.

An administration official confirmed to Fox News that Obama plans to request $500 million for "enhanced border protection and law enforcement" and deploy the National Guard troops as needed.

The official said the National Guard would be used to "provide intelligence; surveillance and reconnaissance support; intelligence analysis; immediate support to counternarcotics enforcement; and training capacity until Customs and Border Patrol can recruit and train additional officers and agents to serve on the border."

From Fox 5:

Bloomberg says countries that welcome immigrants prosper.

He says the U.S. has had some "disgraceful" and "stupid periods" in which it tried to close its borders.

Added Bloomberg: "Fortunately, sanity prevailed."

Wow, talk about twisting the truth! We aren't trying to stop immigration. We are trying to prevent a breach of security in a post-9/11 world. Remember 9/11? It was the event that made you mayor. We were thinking of making you president at one time, too, but fortunately, sanity prevailed.

More details released in Flushing rape

From the Daily News:

The young woman was returning from grocery shopping in downtown Flushing around 9:30 p.m. Saturday when a drunken Queens man smashed her in the head with a pipe and dragged her into an alley, authorities said.

Once inside the alley along 41st Road, Carlos Salazar Cruz, 28, removed the woman's clothing from the waist down and raped her with the pipe, according to court papers.

Two months ago, the young woman, who dreamed of becoming a lawyer, traveled from her native China on a student visa. She moved in with a distant uncle in Flushing.

"She was working in a nail salon, saving up money. She was going to start attending school," said Assemblywoman Grace Meng (D-Flushing). "She had good grades in China. That's why her parents wanted her to come and expand her horizons."

Now, the woman who once dreamed of a better future is in the intensive care unit at New York Hospital Queens. She suffered a fractured skull, bleeding on the brain and trauma to her vaginal area.

Meng said she and Rep. Gary Ackerman (R-Bayside) are working to expedite a visa for the woman's mother. Cops collared Cruz a few blocks from the crime scene after a witness, who saw him drag the woman into the alley and then emerge alone - called 911. Police later recovered the pipe about a block from the alley.

Cruz, who did not have a criminal record, emigrated from Mexico two years ago and found work at a Manhattan fish market.

He was arraigned late Tuesday on a slew of charges, including a top count of attempted murder. Prosecutors vowed to upgrade charges if the woman is removed from life-support.

Cruz's family said he claims he blacked out drunk and doesn't remember the incident.