illegal immigrants – praag.org

EU wants military intervention to curb migration

The European Union’s (EU) Chief Diplomat, Frederica Mogherini briefed the United Nations Security Council on migrants.

The EU is considering a draft resolution that would authorise EU military intervention to curb the illicit trafficking of persons that has already cost almost 2000 lives lost at sea this year alone.

The EU indicated its first priority was to prevent further loss of lives as sea.

As the Security Council mulls the parameters of military intervention off the coast of Libya in the Mediterranean, concerns about what will happen to migrants found in illegal boats.

Chaos in Libya, which has two opposing governments and various armed militias in the country, has allowed organised networks a foothold to traffic persons off its coast.

The country’s internationally recognised government has objected to the EU proposals which include ‘the use of all necessary means to seize and dispose’ of vessels used in trafficking.

Russia has also said such proposals might go too far as the shape the military action might take remains unclear.

Police round up 200 illegals in Joburg

South African police have arrested 198 illegal immigrants in a raid in Johannesburg, according to officials.

The arrests came after a spate of xenophobic attacks by local mobs which targeted immigrant workers from Zimbabwe, Malawi and other African countries.

The unrest has left at least seven people dead in the past month. Police and soldiers arrested 212 people in Lenasia township south of Johannesburg on Thursday, including 14 South African citizens.

Unlicensed firearms, other weapons and marijuana were seized in the raid.

Millions of African migrants work in South Africa, many of them illegally.

The Limpopo provincial government has ruled out xenophobia in an incident where shops belonging to foreign nationals were looted and set alight on Wednesday.

This came after members of the public in Thabazimbi looted four Pakistani shops on Monday before midnight and again on Tuesday, resulting in the arrest of 13 people.

“As the provincial government of Limpopo we do not believe the looting and burning of the shops belonging to foreign nationals were part of xenophobic attacks,” said spokesperson Phuti Seloba on Wednesday.

“We know and believe that these are just criminal elements. We have since called the police to act and have sent the MEC for Community Safety and Security Mapula Mokaba-Phukwana to talk to the public. They are now calm.”

Mugabe defends Zuma

President Jacob Zuma was defended from an unexpected quarter on Wednesday, when visiting Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe urged the South African media to “stop tarnishing him”.

“You can tarnish me – I don’t care,” he said at a media conference after he had met Zuma for official talks on his first state visit to South Africa since 1994.

“We are Africans. We don’t tarnish our leaders,” he said, adding that while political opponents could have disagreements, they should support national unity.

Though Mugabe sniped at his old enemies such as former British prime minister Tony Blair and Western governments more generally, he also showed flashes of surprising humility.

He and his ministers had exchanged some very harsh words when Zuma was trying to mediate an agreement between Mugabe’s Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) a few years ago. But on Wednesday he was full of praise for Zuma, congratulating him for his government’s efforts to resolve the recent political dispute in Lesotho and for its peacekeeping work in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

He also thanked Pretoria for its tolerance of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants, “as our people have really offended… by jumping the border and disturbing your social systems.”

He said this problem had been discussed in the talks on Wednesday, “and we said we must find ways of controlling the movement of people which have not been sanctioned”.

And he referred to South Africa as Zimbabwe’s “elder brother” economically, appealing to it to help Zimbabwe add value to its extensive natural resources.

South Africa rolled out the red carpet for Mugabe, receiving him with full honours on only his second state visit, and raising diplomatic relations to the highest level.

In his long and rambling speech at the media conference, Mugabe also ironically thanked South African journalists for giving him so much publicity “as a real dictator”.

But he insisted that he wasn’t such a dictator after all, citing the way he had let his old enemy, the late Ian Smith, who was the prime minister of the former Rhodesia, keep not only his own farm, but also his father’s farm.

Source: IFS

Bribes get illegal immigrants into SA

A Zimbabwean who says he bribed police officers at the Beit bridge border post to let him into the country, says corruption is hampering the South African government’s efforts to prevent foreigners from entering the country illegally.

The Minister of Home Affairs has recently announced the December 31 cut-off date for Zimbabweans to apply for a special three year permit.

Police holding cells in Musina are full of illegal Zimbabweans while others allegedly manage to go through the border gates by bribing border officials.

Musina police spokesperson Dakalo Ramagwede says they are waiting for the immigration officers to process deportation papers for the arrested nationals to be sent back home.

“We are arresting but the problem is that now our cells are full, but they do not allow us to stop arresting. The problem is the immigration process, it takes too long so they have to wait. The cells are full and the people are complaining. We are doing our best to take them home.”

The Zimbabwean, who admits he was one of them and wishes to remain anonymous says, “Every time you pass the border you have to pay something, if you don’t have money you don’t pass.”

Traffickers make $3 on ship with illegal immigrants

Traffickers made some $3m from 359 illegal migrants found abandoned on a cargo ship in the Mediterranean, the Italian police said.

The Ezadeen was towed into the Italian port of Corigliano Calabro after being found by coast guards on Friday.

It is the second such case involving a freighter in a week.

Both ships reportedly started in Turkey, in a change from the Libyan route usually favoured by gangs.

The police chief of Cosenza province, Luigi Liguori, said each migrant had paid between $4,000 and $8,000 to board the ship.

Officers say that the smugglers wore hoods and locked the migrants in the ship’s hold before apparently abandoning ship on a lifeboat.

Last year it is estimated that nearly 3,500 refugees died trying to cross the Mediterranean while another 200,000 were rescued.

Italian Red Cross volunteers were on hand to offer assistance The Ezadeen, an ageing Sierra Leone-flagged ship originally used to transport cattle, was spotted on Thursday evening and arrived in port in Italy on Friday night.

In the earlier case, Italian coastguards boarded a ship, the Blue Sky M, carrying 796 migrants on Tuesday. Finding it without a crew, they steered it into the south Italian port of Gallipoli.

The smugglers’ new tactic appears to be simple and effective: point a cargo ship towards Italy and let the coastguard do the rest.

Illegal migration to the EU has been fuelled by government grants and the promise of easy money.

“Smugglers are finding new routes to Europe and are employing new methods in order to exploit desperate people,” Dimitris Avramopoulos, the EU’s commissioner for migration said, promising to present a “comprehensive approach on migration”.

‘US to become third world nation with immigrant influx’

People would flee a country that’s got … drug cartels, bribes, ignore the law

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, warns that the United States will become a third world nation if the federal government does not enforce its immigration laws.

Speaking to “The Sean Hannity Show,” the Republican lawmaker said the country will be destroyed if the U.S. continues to allow thousands of immigrants to cross the border illegally.

“You’ve got to follow the law. You cannot bring hundreds of thousands of people in this country without destroying the country,” Gohmert told Hannity. “Then there’s no place that people can dream about coming.”

Gohmert stated that it’s the government’s job to defend the U.S. “against anybody that would overwhelm the country and bring it down.”

“It’s always been such an irony, though, that people would flee a country that’s got … drug cartels, people that ignore the law, or bribe people to look the other way,” Gohmert said. “So they don’t have jobs there so they come to the United States because we’ve mostly been a nation of laws where the rule of law matters. But then once they are here, they say now we want you to ignore the rule of law, which ironically is like the country they came from.”

Source: CBS

Illegal immigrants pour into US

In recent weeks, a tide of young, unaccompanied minors crossing the Texas border illegally has pushed the US immigration system to its breaking point. Unable to cope with the volume of children crossing the border without their parents, immigration authorities have had to find emergency solutions, such as housing thousands in a San Antonio Air Force base, a California Navy base, and a makeshift detention center in Nogales, Ariz.

The Associated Press reported that the Nogales warehouse was running out of supplies.

The Obama administration has linked the trend to unrest in Central American countries, but Republican critics say an executive action that the president took in 2012 is to blame, calling the situation “an administration-made disaster.”

President Obama delayed rolling out new deportation reforms in late May partly because did didn’t want to further anger Republicans who accuse him of unconstitutionally bypassing Congress to set immigration policy. Now, if he proceeds, he will have to fend off fresh claims that the very policies he has set have pushed the country into crisis.

At issue is Mr. Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which in 2012 allowed some undocumented immigrants who came to America as minors to defer deportation for two years. Last week, the administration announced guidelines for how these immigrants could defer deportation for a further two years.

DACA would not apply to anyone coming across the border today. Only undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as minors before June 15, 2007, are eligible. But to Republican critics, DACA created the opportunity for misinformation and confusion.

“Word has gotten out around the world about President Obama’s lax immigration enforcement policies and it has encouraged more individuals to come to the United States illegally,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R) of Virginia, a key broker in immigration reform efforts on Capitol Hill, in a statement last week.

The numbers are stark.

During the decade preceding fiscal year 2012, the federal government agency tasked with caring for unaccompanied minors who cross the border illegally dealt with an average of 7,000 to 8,000 cases a year, according to a Department of Health and Human Services fact sheet. In fiscal year 2011, the number was 6,560.

The following year, however, the number jumped to 13,625. This fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2014, federal officials are estimating that the number could be 80,000, according to an internal memo cited by The New York Times.

Source: DC Decoder

British drop vans with ‘racist’ signs telling immigrants to leave

A plan to use vans as mobile billboards telling illegal immigrants to leave is being dropped, British Home Secretary Teresa May said Tuesday.

The signs advising illegal immigrants to go home were criticized by both the Labor Party and the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives’ partner in the coalition, The Independent reported. May conceded a 10,000 pound ($16,000) pilot project was disappointing, although she disputed the Labor Party’s charge that only one person decided to leave as a result of the campaign.

“Politicians should be willing to step up to the plate and say when they think something actually hasn’t been as good an idea, and I think they were too blunt an instrument,” May said.

Complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority that the signs were both inaccurate and racist. The authority did not find racism but said the arrest statistics on the signs were inaccurate. – Breitbart

Anti-immigrant mass riot rocks Moscow

Moscow police detained some 380 people during the mass rioting in a southern district of the city. A mixed crowd of nationalists and locals attacked a warehouse run by natives of the Caucasus, blaming a migrant for the fatal stabbing of a local.

Authorities lifted the emergency plan codenamed “Volcano” after midnight, several hours after public order had been restored. The plan, put into effect in the afternoon, involved sending scores of riot police to the scene of the clashes, and placing police officers across the city on high alert.

By midnight the streets were practically deserted, except for police officers and a couple of bystanders discussing the day’s events. Meanwhile the 380 detained during the unrest were being interrogated in a criminal case over hooliganism – thus far as witnesses, police said.

Residents of the Biryulyovo district in southern Moscow took to the streets following the fatal stabbing of Egor Shcherbakov, a Muscovite, earlier in the week. Late on Thursday evening, when Shcherbakov and his girlfriend were on their way home, the young couple were attacked by an unidentified man who stabbed Shcherbakov with a knife.

Shcherbakov’s girlfriend described the attacker as a male native of the Caucasus and said that he had assaulted her boyfriend after trying to harass her.

On Saturday a group of about 40 people gathered for a protest in the area, urging the police to find and punish the attacker. They demanded that the district’s police chief resign, and that a local vegetable warehouse, where many migrants work, be closed.

The locals also lashed at the the authorities, accusing them of covering the wave of migrant crime and the illegal immigration in the area. The protest was followed by an unsanctioned rally on Sunday, which turned violent as hundreds of angry protesters attacked a shopping mall – attempting to set it on fire and breaking windows. A group of people among the crowd reportedly broke into stores, ransacking them and looting goods.

Ethnic tensions in Moscow have been high on politicians’ agenda in recent months, with the issue of illegal migration a key theme in the city’s mayoral election last month. Some 3 million migrants from former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus are estimated to live in the city, many working in low-paid jobs in food markets without legal residency permits.

The city’s ethnic dividing lines are also overlaid with religious ones, as the Russian Orthodox majority is challenged in many neighborhoods by a growing Muslim population – both from Russia’s North Caucasus and from outside Russia’s borders.

Meanwhile, authorities in Moscow’s Southern Administrative district have decided to set up an operation headquarters to counter illegal migration. The body – comprised of police, federal migration service representatives and voluntary people’s guard – will gather daily. The new foundation will focus on identifying flats rented to illegal migrants, patrolling streets and organizing sweeps on reports from citizens, the prefecture’s press service told Interfax.

Egor’s girlfriend said she was against such protests, since she did not want “interethnic conflicts” to be inflamed. “I know this crime won’t remain unpunished,” she told Moskva 24 TV channel.

According to statistics announced in spring by the Federal Migration Service, there are over 3 million illegal immigrants in Russia and 11 million legal visitors. However, unofficial estimates put the number of illegal immigrants at 10-12 million. – RT

Native American confronts ‘anti-illegal immigration’

A Native American man criticized protesters at an Arizona rally against illegal immigration, calling them the real “illegals” for invading his country and killing Native Americans when Europeans first settled on US soil.

“You’re all f*cking illegal. You’re all illegal,” the Native American man yelled at the protesters, who had gathered in Tucson, Arizona to demonstrate their opposition to illegal immigration by Central and South Americans. “We didn’t invite none of you here. We’re the only native Americans here.”

Some have applauded the man for pointing out the protesters’ hypocrisy, who at one point immigrated to the US themselves or are descendants of immigrants. The Native American man, who was pushing his baby through town in a stroller, staged his own protest when he came across the rally.

“Get on with your bogus arguments. We’re the only legal ones here,” he yelled.

One protester was caught standing near the angry Native American and became the target of his criticism. The man was carrying a small American flag and a sign that read, “We should have put that sign up when you sons-of-bitches came.”

Pointing towards the American flag held by the protester, the Native American said that it “represents blood spilled by Native Americans, protecting this land from the invaders.”

“You don’t want to hear the God damn truth!” he yelled. “Get on, bitch! All the Native Americans you killed, you plant your houses here. That’s the truth.”

With Arizona’s proximity to the Mexican border, it has long been a hub for anti-immigration protests and initiatives. The state passed the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” in 2010, which is a strict anti-illegal immigration measure that has stimulated significant controversy. The law made it a misdemeanor crime for an “alien” to be in the state of Arizona without carrying registration documents. It also allows law enforcement officers to stop any individual that they suspect of being an illegal immigrant, thereby promoting racial profiling. It also imposes heavy penalties on those involved in sheltering or hiring unregistered aliens.

The law’s controversial provisions were blocked by the US Department of Justice, but the Supreme Court in 2012 ruled to uphold the “show me your papers” provision allowing law enforcement to stop anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant.

But the Native American man who staged his own protest at the rally considers it hypocritical for Americans to criticize others for immigrating into the US when everyone but Native Americans at one point did so themselves.

“That’s what [the American] flag stands for – all the Native Americans you killed to plant your houses here,” he said. “That’s the truth.” – RT

Chasing non-white votes

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he would honor temporary work permits for young illegal immigrants who were allowed to stay in the U.S. because of a decision by President Barack Obama.

Romney told The Denver Post, in an interview appearing in Tuesday’s edition, that people who are able to earn the two-year visas to stay and work wouldn’t see them revoked under a Romney administration.

“The people who have received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a two-year visa, should expect that the visa would continue to be valid. I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased,” Romney told the Post, promising to put a comprehensive immigration reform plan into place before those visas expire.

In June, Obama issued a new policy that allows some young illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to avoid deportation. Romney criticized Obama for circumventing Congress to make the change a few months before the presidential election.

During the Republican presidential primary, Romney said he would veto legislation to provide a path to citizenship for some of the young people who benefited from Obama’s new policy.

The Denver Post interview comes as Romney and Obama are fighting a heated battle for Colorado, whose significant Hispanic population could determine which candidate receives the state’s nine electoral votes.