Actually the one that gets me most is PetSmart. Our dog has a sensitive stomach and so we have to feed him a special diet. What's we've found is for his wet food, Blue Buffalo Herring and Sweet Potato works well (yes, we know how dyke-y we are) and the only place we've found that carries it is PetSmart. Petco doesn't. That's going to be inconvenient, everything else we can live with. Pretty much anything I'm likely to buy for my car, I can do in the auto section of Fred Meyers and everything else I take it to my mechanic ('cuz computers, I do. Science, I do. Give me a bunsen burner, some chemicals, a microscope or telescope, I'm your girl. There is NO way I'm working on my car myself. I presume precision German engineering is just a polite way of saying "no, this isn't a 64 1/2 Mustang that you can go mucking about in so keep your non-grubby mitts out of the engine compartment!") and I'd hate to take it to the Audi dealer and have the mechanic say "Ummm, you DO realize that you broke your car, right?"


cheers
Aj

warning: pet-moment to follow.

( today i was told that the beasts have run out of their special low fat, duck jerky-strips, again (so that i can buy them while i'm out today).

once i compared the for-*human*-consumption, frozen chicken breast to the cost of the low-fat jerky treats and the treats cost TWICE as much as the "human" food.

i want a dyke-y award!! /derail. )

I am sure if I were an illegal in korea they would pull me over on my rickshaw pretty quickly tho!
Sometimes it is just geography.....land borders on the USA are mexico and canada....the border areas more likeley to have...illegal immigrants....
water borders i.e. flordia which is close to cuba, haiti, dominican republic, more likely to see infulux of illegals from...

We have laws, we have immigration laws,,,they need to be followed by all,,not just a few.
Dont like the law work to change it,,,not ignore it!

Aj, I loved your concise history of this country. I do, however, have one small issue. It's going to take me at least the rest of the day to wipe from my mind the picture it has formed of you in a Mr. Peabody costume.

While I agree with you 100% that this is indeed about race, I do not agree that we should stop all immigration to make that point.

I have a difficult time telling anyone they can't come here because it is the direct fault of the USA that they would even want to come here. I don't agree with geopolitical boundaries...if that makes sense.

It is a small detail I know.

I just wish there were another way to prove how racist this all is.


Do we want to be like Korea? is that what you are saying? Becasue I do not want to be anything like especially North Korea.

I don't agree that we should have these immigration laws, and yes, I would very much like to see the laws we have changed. :)

Until then, I think we need to look to the constitution for guidance, just beacsue something is a law does not mean it is constitutional and should remain a law.

If we are going by that rationale....let's look at how many states have anti gay related laws, for example Sodomy laws.

Dean:

I'm curious. How would they know you're an illegal? How would an American illegal alien in Korea look differently than an American soldier off duty and off-post in Korea? It seems to me (and I might be wrong although I can't recall my sister talking about being randomly stopped and one of my colleagues actually was over in Seoul as recently as two years ago courtesy the US Army) that you would look like a soldier on leave. Now, I'm talking about South Korea which is, (more or less--recently more than less), a democracy. You are certainly correct that in North Korea you would be pulled over very quickly. Of course, in North Korea if you didn't praise the Great Leader on cue you would also be 'detained'. Which Korea are you suggesting we emulate, South Korea (which didn't have an election that could be called free and fair until the 1990's) or North Korea?

Secondly, I'm curious if you think that a *KOREAN* citizen (and here I’m talking about South Korea) would expect to be pulled over because they *might* be Japanese or Han Chinese? I am willing to bet that if a SK police officer, pulled over a Korean citizen, and asked for her papers because she *might* be Japanese, there would be words exchanged. It might go hard on that officer (there is no love lost between the Koreans and the Japanese).

I think you are missing a very salient point here:

someone who is of Hispanic descent, whose family is descended from the Mestizo who were in the region long before your ancestors thought about coming here, is going to be phenotypically indistinguishable from someone who just came over the border last week. The issue is that *citizens*--not people in the US undocumented but citizens--whose genes have never been more than 200 miles north or south of the Mexico/US border in the last 8,000 years are going to be caught up in this. THEY will be stopped.

Now, perhaps because it is vanishingly improbable to ever be *you* or someone you are genetically related to you are sanguine about this. But if *I* were from a family whose bloodline has trod the soil in Arizona since around the end of the last ice age were stopped and asked to prove that I was a citizen of these United States, I would take issue with that. I would probably want to say something along the lines of "really? You have got to be kidding me! I'm a citizen as was my mother before me as was her mother before her. Hell the last one of my ancestors who *wasn't* a citizen woke up one day and found out that she no longer lived in Mexico but was now in a country called the United States and she didn't move an inch! My ancestors didn't cross the border, the border crossed my ancestors!"

But perhaps, that's just me. Perhaps I have a certain sympathy for this because of an experience I had when I was younger.

the law is unjust, i don't plan on blindly following ANY kind of law that's based in racism and bigotry.

further, i'm not showing my papers to anyone to prove i belong here. fuck that, as a US-american citizen i'm protected from that kind of policing.

and do they even USE rickshaws in korea?

Wouldn't it make MORE sense to go after the employers? I mean most people who come here do so for the work. It seems to me that this is almost *all* a demand-side problem. Would you support, for instance, a law that said that if you are an employer and you hire someone without proper documentation that you WILL lose your business? If not, why not? Because if that happened then the flow of people coming here would dry up real fast.

It seems to me that nations have choices how to handle immigration.

We can be a nation that welcomes people and makes a space for immigrants. In that case, we're going to have some folks who try to get in by hook or by crook and we should have some means of dealing with that (I say go after the employers, thus removing the incentive).

We can be a nation that makes it *dangerous* to try to get into the country except by an official point of entry (and given the topography of the area, that isn't as difficult as it might seem).

We can be a nation that makes it *uncomfortable* to be an immigrant here, in which case most sane people will stay where they are unless it's really, really, horrific.

Now, I'm all for strategy number one. It seems that the country is interested in experimenting with strategy number 3 and parts of strategy number 2 (on an ad hoc, vigilante basis). Now, if we're going to go with strategy number 2 then let's go all the way. I have some very interesting ideas about how to make certain that no one EVER tries to cross the border by land ever again. Of course, even as I've thought about those ideas I have also thought that that bites both ways. I might have cause to want to get out of the United States if it were to become sufficiently hostile to non-white people. (Not out of the realm of possibility by any stretch) And I wouldn't want to have to run the gauntlet of what I think would be a near airtight border.

Now I just need someone to be my "boy Sherman' and I'm all set! June is already making me a Mr. Peabody mask. :)

oy vey
 

apoco...my
example of korea was simply in reference to how easily i would be spoted in korea as a foreigner.................... I am 6'2" and weigh 320 pounds...and i have blue eyes!!!

Not everything is predicated on race....
I am sorry due to geography a larger number of illegal hispanic immagrants reside in arizona then in Schenectedy NY. I do beleive it has more to dow ith georgraphy than with race

Additionally,
Likme I said there are immigration laws, do I want the borders sealed up,,no..however, leaving one country in poverty to enter another one in slavery is not good for anyone.
especially the humans involved. it hurts the individual it hurts the country left and the country entered.

I do not know what the solution is, I do know however if the Immigration service spent more time, enforcing the working documents laws, and less time playing masked crusaders at the borders...there would be less problems.

THE USA is a "super power" well was,,,personally I think people immigrating here are foolish, what does the USA produce domestically that is so important to human survival?
Majority of the food comes from outside the USa
the CORN BELT furnishes the USA with high processed high caloric non nutritious muck and tons of Beef for our burgers....and usa farmers are starving while con-agra makes more $$ then we have good ol USA Tobacco and good ol USA Alcoholic beverages.....most everything else is imported

today for breakfast i had: a banana from peru, blueberries from chile, an apple from..somewhere....a tomato from israel spring mix salad greens from mexico, salmon from the carribean farms, drank my fiji water, and will get all cozy in my egyptian cotton sheets, while i watch my tv made in china, work on my laptop that was made in japan, and drink a small sip of ice wine from canada.

Right now a bunch of yahoos are upset that illegal immigrants are ruining the finances of "real americans" truth is if it were not for the illegal americans taking jobs that the "real americans" did not want until the financial crises.....country would have gone to hell in a handbasket a whole lot sooner.

solution:
change the laws
open the borders in both directions....get an agreement with countries for a open exchange program....and have a ball.
Let everyone become legal,,let everyone become an american citizen,,eve4ryone pays taxes....non american citizens and citizens alike..of course this will require a national identification system,,,and all the liberals and conservatives and libertarians alike will be screaming about privacy issues...

cant satisfy everyone ever.....

peace

Great question and, as it turns out, they don't (except as, perhaps, tourist traps). But ya know, they're Asians it's all "most honorable so-and-so..." and "Confucius say..." and coolies and...and....and...what's the word I'm looking for here....umm, stereophonic, no...stereo-headphones, no...stereotypes! That's it! Stereotypes! (Not you)

Rickshaws were a Japanese invention which was imported to China in the late 19th century. As far as I was able to find out in my cursory hunting around, they were never popular in Korea, certainly never an integral part of the culture, and after WWII I would imagine that they wouldn't be popular *at all* given that they were from Japan.

By the way, the word comes from Jinrikisha which is Japanese for 'human-powered vehicle'.

I have to ask.

Korea, sometimes North, has been used as an example so many times in this thread.

Why Korea?

I am not getting it.

Can someone explain why ever we would want to be like Korea, the Soviet Union or East Germany (the DDR)???

I am not trying to be dense, I try to be well read and keep up with politics, diplomacy and history, but somehow in all that I seemed to have missed why we keep using these countries of examples for the US to follow.

Norway, Finland, heck...Canada even, I get. North Korea, I do not get.

I have this weird MASH meets James Bond meets Fiddler on the Roof meets Stalag 17 meets Southpark thing going on in my head now. :blink:

They have the bike version in London. You know, around China Town.

That still doesn't address the core issue, Dean. How do you tell an American citizen whose ancestors were in what is now Arizona when your ancestors were still eking out a living in Northern Europe and dodging the European lion from someone who crossed the border last week? Because, quite honestly, without doing genetic testing I wouldn't be able to do it to be perfectly honest. I certainly couldn't do it by sight. (And even genetic testing would only be mostly reliable because there's so much cross fertilization across the border and the border hasn't been there long enough for the two populations to have diverged significantly. 150 years in human genetics is hardly any time at all!)

Cheers
Aj

I have this weird mental picture of Social Studies class when some of us older ones were in high school where maybe some of us learned the names of the countries then went home and watched James Bond and this is how we think life outside the USA is?

OK OK, now it is making sense, but just you, not the other mentions of Korea and East Germany and places where people with accents ask for "papers".

Totally agree we can't satisfy everyone.

Totally agree if someone wants to be here make them a citizen! and no, I don't mean terrorists.

Thank you :)

Back to Nazi Germany of we start doing genetic testing.

Completely objective.
 

I keep seeing "taking jobs Americans do not want".
If there were no "illegal" immigrants to take these jobs - do you think wages would finally be livable?

I'm curious to see the answers.

Here's the thing, Dean. Given this country's history (see my earlier post) why on Earth should ANY person of color in this nation believe that this *isn't* about race? I'll tell you this; if I were a Japanese American whose parents or grandparents were born in an internment camp, I'd have one eye on the exits. If I were a Japanese American who had *been* in an internment camp, I'd *definitely* be eying the exits! Because I would start thinking, "seems to me I've heard these notes before..." Now, it may turn out that the notes just *sound* like that same old song from back in the day but are actually totally different music once the song really gets going. The problem is, if it IS that golden oldie by the time you figure it out, it's too late.

Perhaps this isn't about race (that's within the realm of possibility) but given our history it is not unreasonable for non-white people to suspect that it *is* about race. Nothing at all unreasonable about that.

Here's the thing. This law seems innocuous, right? The other directive that has come down from the Arizona Department of Education that stipulates:

The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.

Full article link

Also seems innocuous enough. Both can make a lot of sense to people if they want it to. Here's the thing, there's a set of historical laws, laws from another country to be certain but of historical import never-the-less, that taken on their face ALSO seemed innocuous. Taken in isolation, no particular provision of the Nuremberg Laws or any of the other laws that were passed *seem* so horrible. The thing is to a student of history these things look more and more disturbing taken as a package.

So today, you can be stopped for 'breathing while Hispanic'. Tomorrow you can lose your job for "teaching with an accent". The day after that the 14th Amendment is repealed (yes, there are people talking about repealing or amending the 14th so that it no longer covers everyone born in this country). Then a week later you can lose your job as a teacher for 'teaching while Hispanic'. And sometime down the road, you can be arrested for BEING Hispanic.

Is that where we are heading? Only time and history will tell. The thing is, if a time traveler went back to Berlin circa 1934 with a copy of Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and, perhaps, Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" and tried to warn people, I'm willing to bet that you would barely be able to find 1 German in 1000 (including German Jews) who would have thought that the books were anything more than elaborate fictions done in very poor taste.

Again, I'm not saying America circa 2010 is Germany circa 1933. I AM saying that there is cause for concern. These things rarely happen all at once. They take a path. That path is well worn and the trail is clear for anyone willing to read history without fear but with concern. Step one is always find a scapegoat. Step two is begin to isolate that group from the population--first by laws and sanction, only later comes the physical isolation.

Cheers
Aj

Almost certainly yes.

No, I do not.

Capitalism is based on someone working for below a livable wage.

If it's about geography, then they've moved Maryland since the last time I looked at a map. Ohio, too.

State Delegate Pat McDonough, a Republican from Maryland, wants his state to pass a version of Arizona's law for the same reason, ABC2 News in Baltimore reports.
"When people come across that border, they're not going to go to Arizona anymore. They're coming here," McDonough said. linkyloo

"that border"? Seriously?

Maybe I am not seeing this right beacsue I usualy agree with you both.

Would you explain how this would work?

Are you saying if we made all the people who are here and not citizens into citizens then no one would work for less than a livable wage?

Ir that of we allowed no immigration and kicked out everyone who does not have papers then we would all make a livable wage?

How would this work?

Would we still be Capitalist then?

Define "livable wage", please. It's certainly not minimum wage.

And then there is the banning of ethnic studies... make no mistake - this is about race.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_558731.html

Arizona's next motto "All White, All Republican".

For me it is enough to keep a family of four housed, clothed and fed with full insurance and benefits, federal and state taxes, and 5% to save. :)

Way over minimum wage.

Except for the people who will lose their jobs becasue of the boycott and not be able to afford to leave.

These will likely be people who make minumum wage.

True. That's the frustrating part of the boycott, it hurts so many people. Legislators who actually had the best interest of their constituents at heart would see how badly this is going to hurt everyone and be working this weekend on new language to reverse the bill. The AZ legislators have instead taken all of the feedback as an excuse to crank out even more racist bills. Hence my thought for the next motto. Keep in mind that I tend to think of a motto as something that an entity strives or envisions itself to be.

Actually, here's how I see this playing out;

For those jobs that are *not* portable--i.e. those requiring physical presence--the presence of labor willing to work at below-market-rate wages AND who are vulnerable to exploitation because they are afraid of approaching the legal system puts downward pressure on wages in those fields. So if we made it unprofitable for companies to hire undocumented workers (and that would be my preferred approach, get at the problem from the demand side, not the supply side) then that would do two things.

1) It would put upward pressure on the job market. The work would still need to be done, someone would have to do it, so now there would either be a guest-worker program (which we could stipulate *requires* employers to play by Federal and state labor laws) or employers would hire US citizens to do the job.

2) It would eliminate the incentive to get into the US by hook or by crook. Right now, if you are from a border area where there is little to no work and you can, by going north a couple of hundred miles, find work where you would make, in a week, more than you could have made in a month back home you have a pretty powerful incentive to get into the country up north. There would *still* be migration but now there would be no real good reason to route around the immigration process since there's no work here.

(The idea that people come to the United States to live fat and happy upon the endless bounty that is our paltry social safety net is risible.)

The reason why employers *pay* a below-market wage (and here I mean livable) is because they can get away with it. I'm going to use a tale of two lesbians jobs to illustrate my point.

I work for a mid-sized software company. My wife works for a mid-sized cell phone company catering to older people (a competitor of Jitterbug). We are paid fairly well, our benefits are very good and we have a great deal of flexibility--it is nothing for me to say, for instance, that I'm going to finish up the afternoon at home, leave at lunch and then telecommute. When we have a snowpocalypse (where we get snow then ice then snow and then more ice) Portland shuts down. With my company, we just telecommute until the roads clear. My wife has to go in. My wife is seriously underpaid and has to operate under a truly odious set of rules violation of any of which could get one fired very quickly. There ARE things that could get us walked out the door, but handing Tylenol to a co-worker with a headache isn't one of them! Now, we both answer the phone for a living. The difference is that my job requires a pretty diverse and intense skill-set while my wife's job requires the ability to have a good phone manner, the ability to write grammatical sentences and sort of generalized customer service skills.

By any objective measure my wife and her co-workers are abused at work. They are treated, at best, like unruly children and her bosses behave in a way that almost says "we DARE you to quit". They know that they can pull someone off the street and train them to their standards and have them on the phones in a week. My employer dare NOT treat us that way. It is in their best interests to keep us happy. Why? Because on any one of our product groups it takes *at least* six months before you're up to speed and a year before you are truly crossing the threshold of self-reliance (meaning that you can solve most of your user-issues on your own except for the weird stuff). It takes two years before you can reasonably say that you can handle all but the weirdest problems on your own. So if we all walked out the door, they would be seriously hurt for at least six months and more likely two or more years. Since support contracts on *ONE* product alone (the product I support) accounts for 40% of company revenue (those aren't new sales, that's just companies buying support on software they already own) they have a serious incentive NOT to make us miserable lest we leave.

So the tighter the pool of labor is, the better it is for workers. The tighter the pool of jobs, the worse it is for workers.

(cont)

Yeah, I agree.

It's crazy. This Governor was not elected by the people and says God is telling her to do these things.

Maybe the Legislators don't quite know what to do with that, except try to save their political careers.

OK, I knew you had a plan! and so far I like it!

I learned about this dynamic during the 90's when I got into the computer industry. By 1996 or 1997, things in Silicon Valley were so tilted in favor of labor that we were getting paid *mad* money. Folks were getting jobs as system admins who were barely qualified to do technical support. We had our pick of jobs. I turned down two jobs that paid pretty decent--one was at a law firm I had consulted at in between jobs. They offered me a full-time position as their IT director and told me what they were willing to pay. I *literally* laughed at them and told them that there was no way I would take that responsibility on for anything less than 75K and only that because I had only worked in the field 4 years at that point. I walked out of that office, went a few blocks down the street to a start-up did one interview and had a job offer on my cell phone before I had got back home. The other job was at a large manufacturer of telecommunications equipment. They were ready to pay my moving costs, increase my pay to within spitting distance of six figures but I turned it down because I hate L.A. I had my choice of jobs, what did I need Qualcomm for? I didn't because it was 1998.

Then the bubble burst. That happened right after I moved to Portland. When I moved up here, the start-up moved me up here, was paying me a very, very handsome salary AND had given me 5,000 shares pre-IPO stock. We were going to be TiVo before TiVo was released. Then we didn't get our last round of funding. I went from making 70K in 2000 to 13K in 2001. I ended up working in a call center in 2003 making money I hadn't made since before I got into high tech. Had my skill set gone out of fashion? No. I kept my Linux skills as sharp as ever so I would be ready to plug-and-play into any job that came along. It was simply that, in Oregon, my skills weren't worth that much until 2005 when I got the job I hold now.

I bring this up not to boast but to simply illustrate the difference between a labor market that favors employers (where wages are depressed and employees are treated like crap) and a labor market that favors employees (where wages rise, or at least hold steady, and employees are treated as having some value). I do not blame undocumented immigrants for depressing wages any more than I blame people in India for creating a slight downward pressure on wages in my industry (or in the industry--biomedical research--that I'm moving into). I blame *employers*.

So what I'm saying is that if we make it unprofitable for employers to do two things, which I'll detail in a minute, then employees will do better.

1) I think that US tax law should be changed in the following way. If you want to be considered an American corporation, then at least 75% of your work force MUST be in the United States with those jobs held by US nationals. Your headquarters MUST be in the United States as well. You are free to move your headquarters off-shore, you are free to hire mostly non-US citizens abroad. However, if you do so you are now a *foreign* corporation. You will be taxed as a *foreign* corporation and your products are now *imports* and will be levied as such. That way, the government isn't telling anyone how to run their corporation. There's just clear consequences for moving your operations offshore--one of which is that you are no longer an American corporation.

2) The aforementioned rules re: hiring undocumented workers. What I would like to see are fines that draconian. I mean you hire a *single* undocumented worker you will lose your profits for the year. Each incident after the first costs you another year's profits. Make it *hurt*. Put fear into the hearts of employers. They won't hire undocumented workers.

Both will have a positive, upward force on wages.

Cheers
Aj

this reminds me
 

Did any else hear the "This American Life" Episode that was the story of GM's Partnership with Toyota back in the 80's. Fascinating, and oh so enlightening. I suggest you search for it if this episode is still available.

Long story short, and leaving out many points made in the story, the Toyota workers in Japan were allowed at any time to pull a yellow cord and stop the entire production line. It could be for anything, from a loose bolt to a major part failure. When the worker pulled the cord, the manager of the plant would rush over to find out what was wrong, taking in every word that the worker said - even writing down suggestions for new tools or other innovations that might fix not only this one problem but future problems.

The result: Quality

GM on the other hand was a production machine and the people there were simply another tool, not there for their minds. There was no yellow cord to pull. In fact any stop of the production line would result in a yelling at from the boss, and possibly losing your job.

The result: Quantity.

Lots and lots of cars ended up sitting in the lot at the end of the production line because they could not even be driven onto the truck for delivery to the dealer.

I once asked a friend visiting from Japan what she thought was the biggest difference between American Society and Japanese Society and her answer was: Everyone in America tries to be an individual, everyone in Japan wants to be part of society.

I think America has a lot to learn from other cultures. In our defense we are a very young country and hopefully we will grow to be a decent adult country. One that cares about being part of society. One that sees the weakest and most vulnerable among us as people to protect and care for rather than to step over or walk around on our way to our individual goals.

Interested in showing your solidarity? http://stickerobot.com/human/

No. I am not saying this bill is a conspiracy. The arrangement of using non federal institutions to house 'undocumented persons' has been in play in AZ since at least 2000 when I worked for the Sheriff's department in a northern county. It does offset the costs for jails. What I am saying is that the benefit of these revenues obviously can help the budget on an escalated level.
Therefore, SB1070 could have favor by some radical politicians responsible for increasing the state funds. The federal funds, of course, come from the national taxpayers. I don't know if other states have this arrangement for housing undocumented persons. I am pretty sure they do.

I've been listening to a number of conservative officials and pundits discuss the need for this legislation, and they all focus on the drug smuggling being done on the ranches along the border and always mention the rancher who was killed.

I don't categorize people moving back and forth across the border with drugs and guns as undocumented individuals; they're gun runners and drug smugglers. It seems to me that this law is aimed squarely not at the smugglers but rather at the people who have crossed the border to stay in this country for weeks/months/years and are by and large seeking out work that pays better than what they can find in Mexico or Central America.

So tell me, please, because no one on TV will ask this question. How will demanding papers from people in non-border regions of AZ reduce the problem of drugs and guns being smuggled back and forth over the border?