During the April 24 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage stated: "Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico."*

[snip]

"[C]ould this be a terrorist attack through Mexico? Could our dear friends in the radical Islamic countries have concocted this virus..."

[snip]

"How do you protect yourself? What can you do? I'll tell you what I'm going to do, and I don't give a damn if you don't like what I'm going to say. I'm going to have no contact anywhere with an illegal alien, and that starts in the restaurants."

During the April 27 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Neal Boortz asked: "[W]hat better way to sneak a virus into this country than give it to Mexicans? Right? I mean, one out of every 10 people born in Mexico is already living up here, and the rest are trying to get here... ."

In an April 25 blog post... syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin suggested that the outbreak was due to the United States' "uncontrolled immigration... 9/11 didn't convince the open-borders zealots to put down their race cards and confront reality. Maybe the threat of their sons or daughters contracting a deadly virus spread from south of the border to their Manhattan prep schools* will."

Secretary Janet Napolitano also said border agents have been directed to begin passive surveillance of travelers from affected countries, with instructions to isolate anyone who appears actively ill with suspected influenza.

American citizens tend to impose their own standards of housekeeping and "cleanliness" on immigrants and judge them deficient. Nayan Shah, for example, posits that Americans considered San Francisco’s Chinatown dirty, overcrowded, and unacceptable. From there, Chinese were cast as health hazards, rife with disease and in need of police and medical supervision. Taking this cue, some African Americans in San Francisco complained that, “on the streets of the Chinese section of town… one could find filth actually personified and the stench which arises and penetrates the olfactory nerves is something perfectly horrible.”

Mexican immigrants, too, became a perceived threat to American health and hygiene. According to Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna, the porosity of the border worried U.S. health officials in the early twentieth century. In response to a typhus epidemic in Mexico’s interior in 1915, the U.S. Public Health Service quarantined Mexican immigrants and treated them as if they were “vermin-infested.” Along the border, Mexican immigrants were subjected to invasive, humiliating examinations before they were "certified" disease free. That quarantine extended until the late 1930s, long after the epidemic had passed, a testament to the American perception of Mexicans as infectious germ carriers.***

In between the disparate uses and meanings of "immigrant" and "ex-pat" (expatriate) falls everything that underlines the racism, classism, and xenophobia of the immigration debate in America.

White, (relatively) wealthy, and English-speaking immigrants are ex-pats, with intramural rugby leagues and dues-drawing pub clubs and summer festivals set to the distant trill of bagpipes.

Non-white, poor, and non-natively English-speaking immigrants are just immigrants.

Ex-pats are presumed to have come to America after a revelation that their countries, in which any white person would be happy to live, are nonetheless not as good as America.

Immigrants are presumed to have come to America because their countries are shit-holes.

Ex-pats are romantic and adventurous, with wonderful accents and charming slang.

Immigrants are dirty and desperate, with the nefarious intent of getting their stupid language on all our signs.

On Nov. 18, [Eileen] Bernstein was discussing the conditions under which African captives were taken to America in slave ships. She bound the two students' hands and feet with tape and had them crawl under a desk to simulate the experience.

The future of Pilgrim’s Pride in El Dorado continues to hang in the balance, and a vote by members of a local labor union this week added even more uncertainty to the continued operation of the facility and the economic forecast of El Dorado and South Arkansas.

Members of the union soundly rejected concessions that were offered by the company in an effort to improve quality and productivity at the El Dorado poultry processing plant and stave off full closure of the facility.

The union reportedly cast a 5-1 vote on Wednesday, and company officials and community leaders met the action with a resounding expression of disappointment.

The closing of Pilgrim’s Pride would devastate an already sluggish local economy with a loss of more than 1,600 jobs and hundreds of contracts for growers in Union and surrounding counties and northern Louisiana.
(snip)
Dumas said he believes the vote will prompt “some serious downsizing” of Pilgrim’s El Dorado facility, and he offered a bleak outlook on the results of a very likely shutdown.

Ray Atkinson, director of corporate affairs for Pilgrim’s Pride, said all of the community’s efforts will be taken into consideration in future evaluations of the performance of the El Dorado facility and decisions about its future in Union County.

Unfortunately, so will the local union’s vote, which Atkinson called a “setback.”

“I was hopeful that the company and union officials had explained to union members how important this was, not only for them, but for the community,” [Mayor Mike] Dumas said.

"[M]any of those (Pilgrim’s Pride) workers are unskilled, so there’s nowhere to go."

Fifteen years after Brown, school boards in the Western District of Louisiana are still unwilling to face up to the prerequisites to effective desegregation. These prerequisites are the transitionary short steps which must be taken now and the planning for the long steps that must be taken to effect lock-stock-and-barrel desegregation. More than two years after Jefferson this Court is still not able to get the message through to these school boards that the standard for determining the effectiveness of a desegregation plan is an objective one: Does it work?

We do not abdicate our judicial role to statistics. But when figures speak we must listen. It is abundantly clear that freedom of choice, as presently constituted and operating in the Western District school districts before us, does not offer the 'real prospect' contemplated by Green, and 'cannot be accepted as a sufficient step to 'effectuate a transition' to a unitary system.'
(snip)
We are urged by appellants to order on a plenary basis for all these school districts that the district court must reject freedom of choice as an acceptable ingredient of any desegregation plan. Unquestionably as now constituted, administered and operating in these districts freedom of choice is not effectual.

We have gone above and beyond in our efforts toward minority recruitment. We have a board level minority committee that is charged with that very thing, to make sure that we are doing more than everyone else in actively recruiting minorities.

The Honorable Judge Robbie James

As residents of Union Parish, we, the undersigned, are deeply concerned about the adverse affect D'Arbonne Woods Charter School will have on Union Parish public schools and the future of our children and communities.

Given that the school would be free from many laws and regulations governing public schools and has a not-so-clear admission policy, and the known history of Rocky Branch's racial disparity in education--Eric Cleveland v. Union Parish School Board--we strongly feel D'Arbonne Woods Charter School, located in Rocky Branch, would undo all efforts put forth by BESE to guarantee racial balance in our schools and academic equality for all students.

We furthermore feel those precious dollars taken from existing schools to support D'Arbonne Woods Charter School would cause additional financial hemorrhaging to those already suffering schools and communities.

We believe a quality education is every child's inheritance, but that it does not have to come at such a large cost to children and communities.

We are encouraged you will rule on what is just, true and fair for a secure future for our children and their future.

Repsectfully,

Union Parish Residents, Parents, Educators, Students, and Community Leaders

1. Elimination of paid rest periods. Employees currently have two 10-minute and one 45-minute break, for which they are paid. They are being asked to agree to two 30-minute non-paid rest periods.
2. Holiday Pay. Employees currently are paid double-time if they work on a holiday. They are being asked to accept time-and-a-half instead.
3. Insurance Costs. Currently, Employee insurance contribution is 20 percent of total cost. On 1 January 2009, that would go up to 25 percent.
   

Of 52 current and former Latino workers at House of Raeford who spoke to the Observer about their legal status, 42 said they were in the country illegally.

Company officials say they hire mostly Latino workers but don't knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

But five current and former House of Raeford supervisors and human resource administrators, including two who were involved in hiring, said some of the company's managers know they employ undocumented workers.

"If immigration came and looked at our files, they'd take half the plant," said Caitlyn Davis, a former Greenville, S.C., plant human resources employee.

Former Greenville supervisors said the plant prefers undocumented workers because they are less likely to question working conditions for fear of losing their jobs or being deported.(emphasis mine)

[A]fter a year on the job, Julio Gordo, a manager at Peco Foods, called Esteban into his office. (To protect his identity, Julio Gordo is a pseudonym.) According to Esteban, Gordo told him that the Social Security Administration had notified Peco Foods that Esteban’s Social Security Number had repeated as a number for another worker.
At first, Esteban feared he would be fired by the plant and deported for document fraud — a fate not uncommon among undocumented workers. “Gordo told me he could have the cops here in five minutes if I didn’t cooperate with him,” Esteban confided to me later.

After Gordo allegedly threatened to deport Esteban, he reassured him that he could stay on at the plant if he could get a new ID and Social Security Number. Esteban knew this would be difficult; fake documents cost hundreds of dollars and were sold by only a handful of people in southern Mississippi on the black market. Furthermore, Esteban knew he would run the risk of being fired or deported if he bought a new Social Security Number, since he would be admitting his old one was false. Even with a new I.D., his seniority — including the two raises he had received for a year’s work — would be revoked. Esteban would be starting over from scratch.

Then, according to Esteban, Gordo told him he was willing to do him a “favor”: Esteban could buy a new Social Security Card from Gordo for $700. This was a favor Gordo had done for many other Mexicans in the same situation, he claimed.

In the 1990s, poultry companies in Mississippi and throughout the American South began to heavily recruit Latin American immigrants, most of them undocumented, to work in the poultry plants. A decade later, there are now large immigrant communities in poultry towns all over the South, and the immigrants find themselves in an extremely vulnerable situation, where they are frequent victims of abuse by employers, police officers, landlords, neighbors and even other immigrants.