> http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article353831.ece
Aren't there copyright issues wth posting an entire article here? Why not just a summary and a link?
> Massive protest in LA over anti-immigration proposals
>
> .... hundreds of thousands
> of ... demonstrators of all races thronged the
> downtown streets to demand justice and legal
> recognition for the country's 12 million undocumented
> immigrant workers.
"undocumented immigrant workers"? Why not just say "illegal immigrants"?
> LA's mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, the son of Mexican
> immigrants and a former labour activist, told the
> crowd: "We cannot criminalise people who are working,
> people who are contributing to our economy and
> contributing to the nation."
I'm inclined to agree with that.
But I'm in China and I can tell you there are an awful lot of potential immigrants here, to any Western country, or Japan or Singapore.
Many are not too choosy about the method. I've had several marriage proposals, and not because I'm so handsome or charming; they just wanted the visa. Some even offerred to pay me. When a pretty 30-ish woman offers that to a fairly ordinary man of 50-odd, she's got to want the visa fairly badly!
There are enough potential immigrants to scare me. I'm from Canada and my guess is that the number of potential immigrants either in China or in the Indian subcontinent exceeds our current population.
There's also a very profitable business in smuggling them and the smugglers are generally slimy exploitive creeps who need to be stopped. A few years back a bunch of illegal immigrants suffocated in a container between Amstedam and London. Last year, one group of smugglers were caught by the Taiwan Coast Guard as they attempted to deliver a boatload of farm girls from Fujian on the mainland to Taipei's brothels. They threw the women overboard and some died.
My guess would be that those smuggling Latins into the US are more-or-less as bad as Fujian's "snakehead" gangs. Does anyone know?
> end the cat-and-mouse games at the border that have
> led to 3,500 migrant deaths from exposure to the
> punishing desert climate in the past 12 years.
Whose fault is that? My first guess would be smugglers planning poorly and/or just driving off and leaving their clients to die.
-- Sandy Harris Zhuhai, Guangdong, China