This entry has three parts. The first part deals with hate crimes legislation and tries to explore some angles to which many have paid not enough attention. In the second part I share with you two letters I have sent to The Hill and The Examiner on immigration. The letter sent to The Examiner is about gangs and immigration and is a response to a tactic Brad Botwin has used in the past: quote a criminal case in which illegal immigrants had participated and extrapolate it to the whole immigrant community even if he has to introduce gross assumptions as facts and distort official positions (Remember the letter where his protégée Al Eisner simply added his own words to a quote taken from the 9/11 Commission Report?). The third part is an answer to an Edwin Rubenstein’s paper which, trying to prove a relationship between illegal immigration and Earned Income Credit Tax fraud, reaches candid-camera levels of bizarreness. Here I identify the areas where fraud actually exist and propose some remedies. At the end, some photos from Aspca (http://www.aspca.org/) and the poll.
My next entry will be about health care and budgetary restrictions of the Obama administration.
"If Pres. Obama and Congress would stop allowing illegal aliens to fill an estimated 7 million service, manufacturing and construction jobs, a whole lot more Americans would have jobs in those fields."
Roy Beck, NumbersUSA (http://www.numbersusa.com/...)
23"Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. 25Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
26"The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.' 27The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28"But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarius. He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.
29"His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
30"But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. 31When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32"Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?' 34In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35"This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."
Matthew 18:23-35
"This got me thinking that maybe [Ralph] Reed’s hipster knowledge of popular culture had been a bit of camouflage, designed to lull the Baby-Boomer People reporter into letting his guard down."
Al Franken, ‘Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat idiot’, p. 258
"Today, as America’s preeminent nativist, Buchanan continues to spout this kind of racist and undemocratic piffle, to borrow a word from George Will. On restricting the immigration of Third World types, Buchanan made this point: "If we had to take a million immigrants in –say, Zulus- next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate?""
Al Franken, ‘Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat idiot’, p. 174
‘Once upon a time Brown was a place where a white man could go to class without having to look at little African American faces, or little yellow faces, or little brown faces, except when he went to take his meals. Things have been going downhill since the kitchen help moved into the classroom. Keep white supremacy alive!’
Anonymous
(Hate groups. Deborah Able. NJ, 2000. Chapter 6. Anonymous pamphlet littered at Brown University in 1990)
1. Additional notes on hate crimes
Recently Attorney General Eric Holder call for improving hate crimes legislation (http://www.usatoday.com/...) by including sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability as part of the criteria to define the protected groups, by not limiting the protection to situations in which the protected groups are exercising a federally protected activity, and, in general to stop "violence masquerading as political activism". He mentioned three recent publicly known cases, one of them the case of the murder of Dr. Tiller even though it doesn’t match the premises in the current hate crimes legislation or the premises in the Matthew Sheppard bill.
Immigrants and Hispanics have been particularly affected by this new wave of hate crimes. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund found in the economic downturn an important explanation as others have found that explanation in the election of the first black president.
This part seeks to develop some ideas about hate crimes legislation.
a) The first question is whether hate crimes legislation is justified or not. Several reasons have been given to justify hate crime legislation but, by far, the best reason is the one given by Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt (Hate Crimes Revisited. America’s war on those who are different. Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt. MA, 2002, Chapter 16):
"The hate crime offender actually commits an act of terrorism by sending a message to all members of his victim’s group. If successful, he reduces the immediate threat that he feels coming from those who are different."
What distinguishes hate crimes is that they affect not only the direct victim of the crime but also the group to which the victim belongs as the hate crime makes a statement: ‘the same could happen to any other member of the group if they get too uppity’.
Even the very conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist noted that hate crimes "inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest."
Donald Altschiller also notes that "such crimes may frighten and humiliate other members of the community." (Hate crimes. Donald Altschiller. California, 1999. Chapter 1)
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the American Psychological Association made a study, ‘The impact of Hate Crime Victimization’ (http://www.apa.org/...) to evaluate the mental health effect of hate crimes in the homosexual and bisexual community. The study found that "hate crimes based on sexual orientation appear to have more serious psychological effects on lesbians and gay men than do other crimes". The main effect was distress (including depression, stress, and anger, heightened sense of personal danger associated to their sexual identity, and effects lasting "for as long as 5 years after the victimization occurred" –compared to the about 2-year effects resulting from non-bias crime-related psychological problems), which happened in an already existent environment of harassment and discrimination. The study concludes that hate crimes directed against members of other groups may produce similar "heightened psychological distress because the incident represents a serious attack on a fundamental aspect of the victim's personal identity". Then the study recommends: "These findings indicate that hate crimes have a more serious impact on the victim than do other crimes. That impact may be qualitatively different from the aftermath of other crimes because it affects core aspects of the victim's identity and community affiliation. Thus, it is appropriate for legislation and public policy to treat hate crimes as a special case of criminal victimization, one that requires special strategies for prevention, prosecution, and victim services."
With respect to the aggressors, we can borrow the explanation John Demos has for witch-hunting and its several latter social manifestations [Demos finds interesting parallels between the witch-hunting of the XVI and XVII Centuries in Europe and America and the anti-Illuminati scare (1798-99), the anti-Masonry panic (1826-1840), the anti-Catholicism starting in the 1830s, the anti-radical (anarchist and socialist) scare of the 1880s, the Great Red Scare (1919-20), the McCarthyism (1950-54), and the child sex-abuse crisis (1983-1995). In all these cases, same kind an anxiety was projected on a scapegoated group from inside the group of the aggressors.
"In each case, the underlying social and psychological vectors included what clinicians call ‘projection’ or ‘externalization’ (attributing to others unwanted parts of oneself), plus a closely related urge toward purity, unity, and inner coherence. No less was true of witch-hunting."
(The enemy within. 2,000 years of witch-hunting in the western world. John Demos, NY, 2008. Chapter XI)
In the case of xenophobia and hate crimes, the anxieties are projected on a scapegoated group normally from a group different from the group of the aggressors.
b) The groups protected by hate crimes legislation are defined by race, color, religion, and nation of origin when engaging in a federally protected activity (18 U.S.C. § 245, law of 1969). At the federal level, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability are on hold until the Matthew Sheppard bill of 2007 gets enough supporters in the Senate. This same bill would eliminate the prerequisite that the victim be engaging in a federally protected activity. The Matthew Sheppard bill would also help local prosecutors with federal resources. In the Matthew Sheppard case the prosecution was expensive but did not count with the help of federal funds.
The expansion of the protected groups to homosexuals (gays and lesbians) has caused the opposition of the Christian Right (http://www.usatoday.com/...) under the pretext that they could be prosecuted for speaking against homosexuality. While the Liberty Council considers hate crimes legislation unconstitutional, the Family Research Center and the Alliance Defense Fund consider it irrelevant.
c) In the doctrine about hate crimes, the limits of free speech have been stated in repeatedly by the Supreme Court [In my entry Wallace Reborn (http://www.dailykos.com/...), I have made some notes on this issue]. The Matthew Sheppard bill of 2007 also makes explicit that the law should not restrict the freedoms of speech or association.
Nevertheless, it is not the outrageousness of the message what merits prosecution but whether it is appropriate "inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." (Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969)). In my previous entry advocating for a civil suit against O’Reilly and Terry and their employers, I mentioned several factors to support this proposal, among them the previous violent outcomes resulting from similar messages.
d) Nevertheless, we then find that most of these crimes are not committed by hate groups but by lone wolves inspired by these groups and sometimes the difficulty to establish a connection with specific hate groups has discouraged prosecutions limiting the reach of the law. So we propose that an amendment to the Matthew Sheppard bill expressly states that formal affiliation in a hate group is not necessary but sharing the violent ideas that these groups assemble in doctrines. Thus, a ‘lone wolf’, formally affiliated to one of these groups or not but sharing their violent message, a message that "is likely to incite or produce such action", would fit the condition of aggressor in the context of hate crime legislation.
How dangerous the message is can be evaluated at the light of factual precedents, how similar messages have led to violent outcomes in the past. In the case of the murder of Dr. Tiller, we have as precedents the murder of Dr. Gunn and even previous attempts to murder Tiller himself in the past.
What happens then if the lone wolf has not acquired his hate doctrine from a hate group? In the Baumhammers case, at the moment the engaged in a killing spree as a result of his anti-immigrant anxieties he was the only member of the ‘Free Market Party’ he had founded. There was a hate doctrine and his hate group was a hate group of one but the essential elements that qualify his murder spree as a hate crime are there. Whether a ‘lone wolf’ takes his ideological motivation from a group is not relevant point but the message itself, taken from a hate group or elaborated by the ‘lone wolf’ himself, case in which you have a group of one.
Deborah Able (Hate groups. Deborah Able. NJ, 2000. Chapter 3) notes that:
"Many observers who follow the activities of hate groups estimates that the number of people who formally belong to hate groups probably represent only 10 percent of the total number of people who read the literature published by the groups, log on to their Web sites, and share their beliefs."
e) An issue that is not properly a hate-crime issue but that is connected to it is affirmative action. Am I for affirmative action? Yes and no. I am for affirmative action as a very important tool to level the field between members of relatively advantaged groups and members of groups left behind. In a country that pretend to be based on character instead of caste, it is extremely important that social conditions of birth do not weight that much that almost determine the success or failure of that country. Nevertheless, continue basing affirmative action on race not only is unfair to the white poor but also makes vulnerable this important social tool to attacks by the Right. Basing affirmative action on socio-economic conditions instead of race would overwhelmingly benefit minorities, makes this institution less vulnerable to attacks by the Right and be more congruent with our juridical tradition [About a juridical tradition based on character instead of caste, you can see my entry ‘Immigration: The moral grounds to reform an immoral system’ (http://www.dailykos.com/...).
On this issue I find myself in almost complete agreement with jack Levin and jack McDevitt (Hate Crimes Revisited. America’s war on those who are different. Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt. MA, 2002, Chapter 16):
"Wherever possible, we need more programs and policies that help vulnerable groups without being specifically created for them. Rather than base all affirmative action policies solely on race or gender, we might develop programs and policies of affirmative action to reduce poverty –based, for example, on the neighborhood in which a person lives or the economic condition of a family.
Some colleges –Brown University, Northeastern University, University of Pennsylvania- have already directed their scholarship aid in this direction. In addition, they have sought to contribute the academic support needed –extra help through in-school mentoring as well as after-school and summer tutoring- in order to give underrepresented youngsters a real chance to compete for a place in an appropriate institution of higher learning."
To be in complete agreement with them, I would just prefer to base affirmative action on the economic condition of the family instead of the neighborhood where it lives. The other person who has shared this opinion is Barack Obama.
With respect to the second paragraph quoted from the excellent book by Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt, it shows a private initiative that should be complementary to a strong federal effort directed to improve inner-city and rural schools. Our real property-tax based funding of public education represents an anachronism we have to modify if we want to be serious about social mobility.
f) Even though Holder showed made allusion to the murder of Dr. Tiller when expressing his concern with the status of hate crime legislation. Nevertheless, this case is covered neither by the current hate crimes legislation nor but the Matthew Sheppard bill, which still doesn’t count with enough supporters in the Senate. So far, the only legislation protecting abortion services providers is the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (Public Law 103-259, 108 Stat. 694) de 1994, which basically prohibits the use of intimidation or physical force to prevent or discourage persons from gaining access to a abortion clinics. Let’s remember that Tiller was murdered during a religious service in his church.
Thus, abortion services providers or advocates aren’t protected by hate crimes legislation or even bills. Should they be?
The weakest objection would be that providing/advocating for abortion, different from race, ethnicity/nation of origin, gender, are not acquired conditions. Nevertheless, even though the prevalent position is that homosexuality or gender-identity aren’t acquired conditions, the issue is not closed in psychiatry and religion is also protected by hate crime legislation, even though a religious affiliation is a chosen condition.
The strongest criterion is whether the goal of the aggressors is assembled around a doctrine and seeks to generate terror among the community to which the victim belongs (in this case, abortion services providers/advocates) and, in the cases of Doctors Gunn and Tiller, we see that Operation Rescue or the Army of God meet this criterion. So it would be convenient, taking the Attorney General’s own words, to include this group, abortion services providers/advocates, among the protected groups of the Matthew Sheppard bill.
Including this option would require modifying the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 to include this case among to premises to increase penalties.
It is particularly upsetting that Operation Rescue pretends to buy the facilities where Dr. Tiller worked as a trophy. The best message the Obama administration could send to this hate group is making sure that that facility remains open, even if it has to temporarily buy it.
James Ridgeway notes this fact: that neither pro-choice nor pro-environment performers or advocates are protected by the current hate crimes legislation (Blood in the face. James Ridgeway. NY, 1995).
Nevertheless, environmentalist groups would meet the conditions to be victims of hate crimes if they were attacked by anti-immigrant hate groups. Ridgeway also notes the connections between both kinds of groups.
g) It’s important that the Department of Homeland Security continue supporting federal prosecutors with intelligence. From its report on Rightwing extremism (http://www.wnd.com/...) I extract the following quotes:
"Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration."
Here we must notice the case of the murderer of Dr. Tiller., Scott Roeder, who was a member of the Freemen militia and of Operation Rescue. Thus, the two groups distinguished by the Department of Homeland Security cannot be considered as excluding each other.
Additional quotes from the same report are:
"Over the past five years, various rightwing extremists, including militias and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point, and recruiting tool. Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent."
"DHS/I&A assesses that rightwing extremist groups’ frustration over a perceived lack of government action on illegal immigration has the potential to incite individuals or small groups toward violence. If such violence were to occur, it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets.
— (U//FOUO) DHS/I&A notes that prominent civil rights organizations have observed an increase in anti-Hispanic crimes over the past five years.
— (U) In April 2007, six militia members were arrested for various weapons and explosives violations. Open source reporting alleged that those arrested had discussed and conducted surveillance for a machinegun attack on Hispanics.
— (U) A militia member in Wyoming was arrested in February 2007 after communicating his plans to travel to the Mexican border to kill immigrants crossing into the United States."
Between NumbersUSA and Right-wing hate groups, the perspectives for immigrants are grim, especially because Hispanic leaders are reluctant to learn from their own failures of the last four years or from authentic leaders like Hector Perez Garcia.
2. Sharing with you two recent letters I have sent on immigration:
a) Letter to the Hill
"The Ling-Ling’s letter you published in your edition of July 1 is full of unsubstantiated conclusions:
- The Pew Hispanic Center has a sound paper on the correlation between illegal immigration and the domestic labor demand. Thus, it is not serious to invoke the boogeyman of infinite hordes of illegal immigrants coming to increase the domestic unemployment rate. If there is no expectation of jobs, and so of wages, why would they invest in coming here to stay unemployed? Who would pay the bills of those who remain unemployed? Actually many of those already here has already left as a result of the current recession, reducing the stock of illegal immigrants to 11 million.
- Our history is plagued with examples of using threatening magnified numbers of minorities to justify racism and xenophobia, from the Civil War, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the nativist legislation of 1921 and 1924, to the Jim Crow. NumbersUSA is an organization that, in a Malthusian line, is devoted to blame illegal immigrants, 5% of the population, for the problems of the whole population, what is simply absurd even in terms of those who are seriously worried about population growth.
- As the alienation to which the Italian and Irish communities were subjected by the nativists of the 1920s helped the development of the organized crime inside those communities, the alienation resulting from the current xenophobia could end up surrendering the Hispanic community to demagogues skilled in the Latin American styles of doing politics. Nowadays more than 90% of the resident visas are awarded depending basically on family or country of origin, the applicant’s caste of birth. The chance to achieve immigration reform based on good character is ours to take now so the Hispanic voters of whom Ling-Ling is so afraid do not mean any undesirable change of the mainstream when demographic trends make of Hispanics a powerful political force.
- Services provided to immigrants is a legitimate issue to debate when we actually seek answers instead of excuses. In example, if we achieve health care reform, we could require of them to take health insurance. We could require hours of volunteer work as a way their integration and their paying back to the community what they can’t through taxes."
b) Letter to The Examiner
"On Brad Botwin’s ‘Illegal immigration fuels gang violence’ and on Edgar Morales's letter about Casa de Maryland
Once again Botwin embarrass himself in his attempt for using isolated criminal cases to justify a massive diversion of resources to please his xenophobia. While I am for stiffer penalties for criminal aliens as part of immigration reform, it is absurd to reduce 11 million illegal immigrants to the 10 cases mentioned by Botwin or even the 1,759 gang-members caught nationwide in ICE’s Operation Community Shield. The FBI’s ‘National Gang Threat Assessment’ does not support Botwin claims either. Chief of Policy of Montgomery County, Thomas Manger, who warned about an increase of MS-13 and Latin Kings gang activities, said that he didn’t know how many Hispanic gang members were illegal, so such identification is only in Botwin’s mind. Similarly, Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar was for immigration reform because it would let him focus his resources in real threats. On the other hand, a big number of victims of gangs are Hispanics. Stigmatizing a community would silence those victims and surrender that community to those gangs as alienating immigrants surrendered the Irish and Italian communities to gangsters by the beginning of the XX Century.
Casa de Maryland doesn’t speak for me on immigration either but it’s absurd to reduce the pro-immigrant position to theirs. I am for immigration reform because I oppose the present system of castes in which the overwhelming majority of resident visas are awarded to those born in the right family or country, no matter their character; a system any American would consider abominable if applied to him or her."
[On the issue of this letter, you can also see the FBI’s National Gang Threat Assessment (http://www.fbi.gov/...)]
3) Ideas on Rubenstein’s curious paper on the relationship between illegal immigration and Earned Income Credit Fraud
On April 6, Kevin Mooney published in The Examiner an article ‘Illegal immigrants cashing in on federal tax credits, study shows" (The Examiner, April 6, 2009, p. 23). From his picture in the newspaper, Kevin Mooney looked like an arrogant Emperor Nero (or as like somebody urgently needing Pepto Bismol). The "study" on which Mooney based his article was Edwin S. Rubenstein’s ‘The Earned Income Tax Credit and Illegal Immigration – A study in fraud, abuse, and liberal activism’ (http://www.thesocialcontract.com/...).
Rubenstein says that the cost of this credit is more than $44 billion per year and that the number of returns claiming it is 23 million. Then he says that "more than one in four immigrant households received the EITC in 2000", and that "immigrants accounted for about 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2008 but receive an estimated 26 percent of EITC benefits—about $12 billion". He also says that since its inception in 1975, the credit has been expanded a number of times, most notably by Ronald Reagan in 1986, Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, and George W. Bush in 2001; that even though the EITC originated as an anti-poverty program, the number of the returns claiming EITC benefits has risen 25 times faster than the poverty population over the past two decades; and that the EITC benefits rise sharply with parenthood (poverty rates for families with children have risen faster than those for childless families since the credit was created).
Then he claims:
a) "The EITC program is dominated by fraud. Year after year about one-third of all EITC returns are based on illegal multiple returns, phony Social Security numbers, or claims of non-existent children or spouses. A disproportionate share of illegal alien households receives the benefit."
And,
"The EITC is the most illegal-immigrant friendly of poverty programs; illegal immigrants constitute a far larger share of the poverty population now."
Rubenstein do not distinguish the taxpayer from the tax preparer, who introduces the information in the return. Most immigrants who want to stay in the United States want their taxes being properly prepared but lack the knowledge to realize that what the tax preparer is doing is fraudulent or wrong.
On the other hand, Rubenstein do not substantiate his statement that "a disproportionate share of illegal alien households receives the benefit" beyond an unsubstantiated deduction that since most illegal immigrants are poor and the earned income credit is directed basically to the poor, illegal immigrants must be participating irregularly in the benefits of the credit. Actually illegal immigrants with children, here or abroad, could find easier to defraud in the Additional Child Tax Credit if they knew how but we cannot use an gross assumption as a premise to conclude that illegal immigrants are the protagonists of massive frauds of this credit without risking self-embarrassment.
b) "In effect, the EITC subsidizes employers who hire low-wage immigrants and reject equally qualified natives. No one should be surprised, therefore, that Walmart, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and most liberal activist groups are major EITC supporters."
Here Rubenstein seems to abandon its main target, illegal immigrants, as big companies like Walmart have tighter means to scrutinize documents, what leaves illegal immigrants out of the equation in most cases. Whether the earned income credit for legal immigrants (with respect to native born minorities) is a significant saving for these companies individually is something Rubenstein does not prove either. Somehow, though, Walmart has found more attractive to outsource more of its production than using this credit as a subsidy of their labor costs.
c) "Most receive it after filing income taxes. But some need the money immediately, and they can get it—for a price."
And,
"While the sub-prime story is well known, few are aware of the EITC’s role in introducing the poor to the culture of debt."
When Rubenstein begins to reach delirious levels is when he connects the rapid tax refunds for earn income credit. Only a small part of refunds are required through RALs or other ways of rapid refund because they are very expensive credits, especially for small refunds. For 2008, if you had more than one qualifying child, you could get up to $4,824 for the credit but if you didn’t have a qualifying child, you had to earn less than $12,880 to qualify for the credit and the most you could have gotten for the credit is $438 in case you were not filing as married filing jointly. Of course, Rubenstein does not give amounts to substantiate his statement about the role of the earned income credit in "introducing the poor to the culture of debt." In this part, we are assuming that, despite the title of his paper, Rubenstein is speaking about the general effects of the earned income credit and not the effects on illegal immigrants because in such a case, his statements would be simply ridiculous.
d) "President Obama’s stimulus package increased EITC payments by $600 for poor families with three or more children, while leaving the program’s perverse disincentives intact. This will merely exacerbate the credit’s bias against work and marriage.
Our take: The more Mr. Obama "changes" things, the more they remain the same."
Actually the credit depends on the earned income. Investment income like interest income could actually disqualify you for the credit (if not less than $2,950 in 2008).
The credit rewards more the number of qualifying children than marriage but from where does Rubenstein takes that the earned income credit must reward marriage beyond the small differences in the tables of the IRS Publication 596?
What I have seen in the state of Maryland, which, from what I have learnt from taxpayers coming from other states, is not very different from what happens in other states, is the following:
(i) The most recurrent cases of fraud do not happen in the Earned Income Credit but in the Schedule C, filed by the self-employed and sole-proprietor business owners. Here is frequent returns with number of deductible business miles not only false but also ridiculously absurd (as mileages grossly rounded to thousands – The mileage has to be an historical figure; not an estimation). In the case of refundable credits like the Additional Child Tax Credit, some returns irregularly show the bigger amounts of the Child Tax Credit. Some cases of fraud detected by the state of Maryland two years ago consisted in filing the state return with a false social security number but not filing the federal return to prevent the state from getting the feedback of the IRS and deny the state-level earned income credit. Actually non-existent dependent or spouses are a less frequent problem and most times are a result of the taxpayer not having at hand the name of the dependent or spouse as it has been declared in the social security card. Of course, many times the taxpayers, legal or not, are victims of tax preparers who tell them that they can declare dependents or spouses who are abroad, no matter who or where. In the case of illegal immigrants, the IRS requires notarized copy of the front page of the passport, what do not say whether the dependent or spouse is in the country or not. As the IRS enters in its system about 40% of the returns in paper, these frauds could pass undetected.
(ii) Had Rubenstein been more curious, he had realized that most immigrants do not prepare their own taxes with a Tax Cut and very few can realize what the tax preparer has declared in his return. Thus, based on my own experience, in most cases the fraud should be put on the head of the tax preparer instead of on the head of the taxpayer. Mostly, immigrants, legal or not, who want to stay in the United States expect the tax preparer to file their taxes properly as they don’t want unpleasant surprises when filing for citizenship or legalization, depending on the case. They have learned from friends and relatives applying for the 245(i) that the immigration authority considers honesty in their tax filing as a token of good character. On the other hand, immigrants who are not interested in staying in the United States, those who only seek to earn and save some money before returning to their countries of origin, usually do not care about the way their taxes have been prepared and their only interest is to get the maximum refund.
We also have to consider that most immigrants have not had the time, knowledge or curiosity to read/understand the IRS publications more relevant for their cases.
(iii) Most tax preparers who provide services to immigrants simply don’t care about the veracity of the tax return and many times file identical returns for the self-employed with preselected false information, abusing of the little sophistication of their clients who are honestly interested in a proper filing of their taxes. Worst, most of these tax preparers file the returns as self-prepared, not identifying themselves as the preparers of the return. This is the reason why the IRS’s initiative to require an exam mandatory or the state of Maryland’s initiative to require a course for tax preparers are correct but not aimed to the right target. Then the IRS, when it finds inconsistencies in the tax returns, go after the taxpayers, leaving fraudulent tax preparers free to swindle other taxpayers and to compete unfairly with tax preparers who identify themselves and risk significant fines for their work. What the IRS has to do is to focus its auditing effort in more geographically limited areas so the likelihood of auditing more than one return filed by these tax preparers is significant. These tax preparers do not identify themselves but follow similar patterns. Thus, if the taxpayer is willing to collaborate with the IRS and/or the state in exchange of the IRS forgiving him/her fines and interests, some of these fraudulent tax preparers could be identified and prosecuted.
My only remaining question is what’s next? Effects of illegal immigration on the bad weather? Effects of illegal immigration on the results of American Idol? Or effects of idiocy on illegal immigration scapegoating?
Casie and Gracie, Casey is the cat (from Aspca's 'Adopt a shelter 2008')
Tinker (from Aspca's 'Adopt a shelter 2008')
NOTE TO THE POLL
This is the video of Sanford confessing his affair with his Argentine lover. Notice the two laughing girls at Sanford’s right. They represent the shinny hope that waits, after the shadows and the valley of death, for those who believe in the Christ of the religious Right, who commands you to love your neighbor unless he is a Third World immigrant:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
Appendix
This appendix will post quotes from the following books:
Hate Crimes Revisited. America’s war on those who are different. Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt. MA, 2002
Hate crimes. Donald Altschiller. California, 1999.
Hate groups. Deborah Able. NJ, 2000.
Blood in the face. James Ridgeway. NY, 1995
The quotes made of the first two have been made thinking about the anxieties capitalized by groups like NumbersUSA. The quotes made of the last two provide a summary of the history and connections among hate groups:
Hate Crimes Revisited. America’s war on those who are different. Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt. MA, 2002
Chapter 2
Sometimes "members of a group are typically infantilized only as long as they conform to playing a docile and obliging role vis-à-vis those in positions of power. If the members of a stigmatized group get ‘too uppity’ –perhaps even rebellious- they are no longer stereotyped as having the characteristics of children but are regarded as animals or demons. In a word, they are dehumanized."
(...)
"Most Americans, in principle, continue to support equal treatment of blacks and whites in jobs, housing, schools, and public accommodations. But when it comes to supporting these efforts through action, enthusiasm begins to wane. In other words, at an abstract level, most Americans believe in equality, yet in practice we really don’t want it –not if it means personal sacrifice!"
(...)
"Many people have a distorted view of social reality because they usually don’t bother to validate or test their beliefs about others in any systematic way. Thus they can go through a lifetime clinging to old stereotypes that are patently false, never considering that they are essentially inaccurate and unfair.
If an Italian-American makes headlines as a member of organized crime, everybody remembers that he is of Italian descent. (...)
According to a recent Gallup national survey, the average American estimates that 30 percent of the population of the United States is Black (actually, the figure for those who regard themselves as Black or African-American is about 12 percent); that 25 percent of all Americans are Latino (actually the figure is close to 13 percent); and that 15 percent of our population is Jewish (actually the figure is only 2 percent maximum).
(...)
Whatever the factors responsible for hate offenses, those who attack other human beings because they are different want validation in doing so."
Chapter 3.
"Certain politicians have sought to elicit a favorable response from their constituents by couching their racist messages in legitimate issues. Louisiana’s David Duke raised this strategy to an art form when he spoke eloquently about the need to get the federal government off the backs of the people (meaning: end federal programs that benefit blacks and Latinos) or about our right to expect a quality education for all our children (meaning: white children should not have to go to school with black children). Concerned about such matters, many Americans might support a candidate who addresses the important issues of the day –even if he also happens to espouse racism.
(...)
In a 1986 fund-raising letter distributed by the NAAWP, Duke stated
Unless we act soon, whites will become outnumbered in the nation that we created –within a generation! No issue is more important than our people preserving its identity, culture and rights. An America ruled by a majority of blacks, Mexicans, and other Third, World types will not be the America of our forefathers, or the kind of nation for which they struggled and sacrificed.
(...)
We would like to presume that hatred reflects a sick, pathological fringe element that has little, if anything, to do with the dominant American culture. We comfort ourselves believing that vicious acts of bigotry originated outside the mainstream society; that they reside only in the darkest recesses of the marginal or abnormal mind. To the extent that this view is accepted, we see ourselves as innocent, blameless, and clean, whereas they are as guilty as sin. We are free of prejudice to go about our business as usual, whereas they must change their evil ways."
Chapter 4.
"In 1959 production of goods represented some 60 percent of all employment; by 1985 this figure had dropped to 26 percent, and the overwhelming majority of Americans were employed in the service sector of the economy. During this transitional period, new jobs were created –mainly ‘bad’ jobs that paid poorly and provided few opportunities for upward mobility. Thus large numbers of Americans were forced to take a substantial drop in pay and, therefore, in their way of life. The trend toward service employment continued during the 1990s, when, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 90 percent of the job growth during the 1990s was in private service industries.
(...)
According to political analyst Kevin Phillips, the widening gap between rich and poor may have been encouraged by national economic policies of the 1980s –a period that represented a strong reversal of almost four decades of downward income redistribution At the upper end of our class system, the after-tax proportion of income controlled by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans climbed from 7 percent in 1977 to 11 percent in 1990. Even when adjusted for inflation, the number of millionaires doubled between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, resulting in a record 1.25 million households with a net worth exceeding $1 million. Through the 1990s this trend continued. ‘IRS data show that between 1995 and 1997 the average after tax income of the 1% of the tax-filers with the highest incomes jumped 31%... by contrast... the bottom 90% of tax filers... rose just 3.4 percent.’
For families positioned on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, however, the economic quality of life has deteriorated. Since 1977, the average after-tax family income of the bottom 10 percent of Americans declined 10.5 percent in current dollars. According to a recent study conducted by the National Center for Children in Poverty, despite some improvement during the 1990s, more children live in poverty today than in 1979. Compared with seven other industrial countries (Sweden, West Germany, Australia, Canada, Britain, France, and the Netherlands), the United States has the dubious distinction of being the most unequal, having more poverty and fewer people who are middle class. In his most recent work Kevin Phillips concludes, ‘By 2000... the United States was not only the world’s wealthiest nation with the greatest percentage of the world’s rich and the greatest gap between rich and poor.’
(...)
A Study by the Center for Social Policy Studies at George Washington University determined that almost 70 percent of all poor families are headed by a single parent. In 1960 just the opposite was true: 70 percent of poor families included two parents.
Polling data collected in conjunction with the 1990 presidential election reveal a watershed in public attitudes. For the first time in that century, most Americans believed that their children would not have a better standard of living than they did and that there is very little they can do to ameliorate this situation. (...)
According to American Demographics, young people have been particularly hard hit by downward mobility. (...) As part of a William T. Grant study entitled ‘The forgotten half revisited: American youth and young families 1988-2008,’ Samuel Halperin found that the percentage of young families owning their own home actually fell from 49 to 38 between 1980 and the mid-1990s.
(...)
Thus racial tolerance drops as the size of the minority population grows enough to challenge status quo.
(...)
To an increasing extent, then, Americans engage in zero-sum thinking. They view two or more individuals or groups as striving for the same scarce goals, with the success of one automatically implying a reduced probability that others will also attain their goal, be it a job raise, or promotion.
(...)
Zero-sum thinking engages the individual in a competitive struggle to upgrade himself and downgrade others. Respectability demands deviance, good requires bad. In his abortive campaign for the governorship of Louisiana and later the presidency, David Duke became an activist voice for White blue-collar workers who felt that ‘welfare parasites,’ corrupt government officials, and civil rights advocates were at the root of America’s economic woes."
Chapter 6
"According to a survey conducted by the Klanwatch Project, a unit of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Birmingham, Alabama, about half of all racially inspired acts of vandalism and violence are directed at blacks moving into previously white neighborhoods.
(...)
Of course, it you consider the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon a hate crime, then the largest number of retaliatory incidents in this nation’s recent history took place in the months after September 11, 2001. Citizens around the nation who were horrified by the assault on America focused their anger on Arab- and Muslim-Americans, if not on any immigrant with dark skin and a foreign accent. According to the FBI, there were more acts of bigotry directed against Arabs and Muslims –ethnic slurs, harassment threats, assaults, and vandalism –during the first thirty days following September 11 than in the last five years combined."
Chapter 7.
"Instead, he [lone wolf] believes that he has a higher-order purpose in carrying out his crime. He has been instructed by God or, in more secular versions, by der Fuhrer, the Imperial Wizard, or the Grand Dragon to rid the world of evil by eliminating all blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, gays, Muslims, or Jews; and he is compelled to act before it is too late.
The perpetrator of a mission hate crime is typically a conspiratorial thinker.
(...)
Before being arrested by the police some twenty miles from his original attack, Baumhammers had managed to kill five people. (...) On searching the home he shared with his parents, police discovered a number of documents detailing the killer’s anti-immigrant anxieties. Baumhammers feared that white Americans were destined to become a statistical minority, that Americans of European descent were losing their advantaged position, and that American citizens would soon be forced to live in isolated suburbs surrounded by Third World minorities. In response, he had developed a three-page manifesto for his fledging ‘Free Market Party,’ advocating the rights of European-Americans and denouncing immigration from Third World nations. Apparently Baumhammers had been totally ineffective in his efforts to recruit new members to his cause. When arrested, he was still the one and only member of his anti-immigrant organization.
Chapter 8.
The Metzgers, both Tom and John, were accused of being liable for Seraw’s murder. The suit claimed that, in their role as head of WAR, the two men had encouraged and instigated the skinheads, who ‘conspired to inflict serious bodily harm’ on Seraw.
(...) During the summer of 1988, John Metzger began writing to Portland skinheads, including Mieske, Brewster, and Strasser, urging them to join his cause. By the fall, WAR organizers had arrived.
(...)
Mazzella’s testimony left little to the imagination. Testifying for the plaintiffs, he candidly confessed that he had in fact been sent by WAR for the purpose of recruiting and training Portland skinheads. Tom Metzger had taught him how to assault blacks by provoking them first, attacking them with baseball bats, and then claiming self-defense. According to Mazzella, he would send ‘report cards’ to the Metzgers consisting of newspaper accounts of his beatings. In addition he had distributed copies of John Metzger’s Aryan Youth Movement newspaper as a tool for recruiting skinheads in Portland. (...)
In court, Tom Metzger attempted to distance himself from the murder. He had never met Mazzella and, anyhow, his freedom of speech was being abridged.
(...)
Another important lesson to be learned from the Seraw murder over ten years after the crime was committed is that the leaders of organized hate groups have tended to become mainstream rather than fringe, at least in the image they attempt to project. Tom and John Metzger wear ties, not sheets. Some of their most influential members are former KK members who recognize the futility of looking deviant, perhaps even anti-American. The new groups talk in code words and phrases about the issues that concern middle America. They preach that the heritage (meaning: race) of white Christians is being eroded by foreign (meaning: Jewish/communist) influence.
(...)
The head of the Klan in Florida urged its members to become a group ‘known for hating evil, instead of being a group known for hating Negroes.’ And the leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan has repeatedly suggested that his group does not hate anyone but ‘loves the white race.’
(...)
Followers of Metzger’s WAR (...) often disavow the Klan and the Nazi movement in favor of a brand of ‘American patriotism’ that plays better among the working people of Peoria (not to mention Rochester, Akron, Burbank, etc.). Matthew Hale, the twenty-nine-year-old lawyer who heads the Peoria-based World Church of the Creator went to law school. William Pierce who directs the National Alliance from its West Virginia headquarters has a PhD and comes across as well-educated and articulate spokesperson.
Moreover, white supremacist organizations now often cloak their hatred in the aura and dogma of Christianity. Followers of the religious arm of the hate movement, the Identity Church, are only ‘doing the work of God.’ At Sunday services, they preach that white Anglo-Saxons are the true Israelites depicted in the Old Testament, God’s chosen people, while Jews are actually the children of Satan. They maintain that Jesus was not a Jew, but an ancestor of the white, northern European peoples. In their view, blacks are ‘pre-adamic’ a species lower than whites. In fact, they claim that blacks and other nonwhite groups are at the same spiritual level as animals and therefore have no souls.
(...)
Rather than arrange themselves in large hierarchical groups that can be easily infiltrated, many in the hate movement now take lone wolf or leaderless resistance strategy, operating on their own or in small cells only loosely linked with some larger organization. (...)
The particularly depressed economic conditions in rural areas of the United States since the early 1980s have provided a fertile breeding ground for organized hate.
Like the Posse, the Populist Party also takes a conservative political position with an anti-Semitic twist. They claim that Jews are running the media as well as the federal government, and they oppose the US alliance with the state of Israel. Before being elected to the Louisiana State House as a Democrat, David Duke was an unsuccessful Populist candidate for president.
Chapter 9.
"The following flyer discovered hanging on the campus of Brown University epitomizes how some white students now perceive cultural diversity on their campus: ‘Once upon a time, Brown was a place where a white man could go to a class without having to look at little black faces, or little yellow faces or little brown faces, except when he went to take his meals. Things have been going downhill since the kitchen help moved into the classroom. Keep white supremacy alive!’"
Chapter 10.
After the acquittal on April 1992 of the four white police officers who beat Rodney King in Los Angeles, "rather than target whites, however, most of the rioters directed their hostility against Korean stores and shops in the neighborhood. The majority of the more than three thousand Korean-American companies in Los Angeles were damaged, totaling $350 million.
(...)
Blacks have also been at odds with segments of the rapidly growing Latino community. (...)
Ongoing tension between blacks and Latinos has in cities like Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and New York often provided the basis for political contests at the local level.
(...)
In June 1991 (...) nothing that the rioters did, however, could possibly alleviate the fundamental cause of racial tension in DC, namely, that growing numbers of poor Latinos are competing with inner-city blacks for jobs and housing.
(...)
In California, for example, the swelling population of Latinos and Asians has gained political clout, but at the expense of African-Americans. (...)
Even within the same racial, religious, or ethnic groups, animosity often arises on the basis of criteria that, to the outside observer, might appear inconsequential or even nonexistent.
(...)
Competition between economically disadvantaged groups for status, power, and wealth is nothing new. Indeed, America’s minorities have historically fought to climb the ladder of success while pushing their rivals off at every rung. At the turn of the century, the conflict grew between Irish and Italian immigrants; during the 1940s and 1950s, it was between Puerto Ricans and blacks."
Chapter 11.
"Speeches by the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen are now filled with neo-Nazi ideology."
(...)
In Austria, the far right leader is Joerg Haider.
(...)
"Gypsies living in the Czech Republic have been particularly hard hit by racist violence. (...)
In Russia (...) hundreds of thousands have already left; millions more are in their way out. Pro-communist groups have used Jews as scapegoats to explain the demise of Soviet Marxism; anticommunists have blamed Jews for the current state of economic misery.
(...)
To some extent, violence directed against newcomers may reflect an enduring mixture of such irrational factors as racism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia. Regardless of the state of the economy at any given point in history, certain members of society –especially those who can trace their own ancestry in a country back several generations- are bound to be offended by, and seek to remove, the strange customs, rituals, and appearance of ‘inferior outsiders.’
(...)
As a form of collective scapegoating, hate violence serves a purpose for the rulers of a nation as well. Sociologist Lewis Coser once referred to this phenomenon as a ‘safety valve.’ He suggested that when times are bad, hostility that might otherwise be directed at the leaders of a society –its king, president, prime minister, senators, and so on- is instead aimed squarely at its marginal members, those located along the bottom-most rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. By focusing blame on the ‘outsiders,’ the rulers of a society are able to preserve their positions of power, even if their policies and programs are in fact responsible for pervasive economic hardships."
Chapter 13.
The first federal statute on hate crimes protects an individual’s enjoyment of his or her civil rights (I.e., on housing). The second prohibits individuals from interfering with anyone who is exercising his constitutionally guaranteed rights. (I.e., in public schools or facilities). The third protect an individual’s constitutional rights from public officials (I.e., from police officers). The fourth prohibits any interference with an individual’s right to buy, rent or live in his or her home.
(...)
"One reason for the small number of federal hate crime prosecutions is that, in practice, the federal remedies are extremely limited. They only protect citizens who are threatened or attacked while they are exercising a federally protected right. (...) Unfortunately, many of the activities that victims are engaged in when they are attacked are not included among these federally protected rights.
An additional limitation of federal statutes" is that they "apply only to actions motivated by racial or religious prejudice, thus excluding from protection a number of victim groups, including those who are attacked because they are perceived to be gay or lesbian."
The Saint Paul (Minnesota) statute ("Whoever places on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including but not limited to a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable ground to know arouses anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender, commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.") was considered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1992 because "it protected only a limited set of intolerant expression; for example, actions intended to arouse anger, alarm, or resentment based on sexual orientation were not covered by the ordinance.
(...)
Like acts of terrorism, [hate crimes] send a message not only to the particular victims’ group and in fact to all minority groups who live or work in the area.
(...)
[At the state level] Previously employed in cases of gun crime and crimes committed by ‘career criminals,’ sentence enhancement statutes work by allowing the sentencing judge to increase the penalty that he or she would impose under specified conditions.
(...)
Another category of state statutes prohibits interference with religious worship.
(...)
Sixteen states have statutes that make it a criminal offense to burn a cross or other religious symbols. These laws differ according to whether the cross is burned on public or private property. In some states, a cross may be burned on private property with the owner’s permission (...) And our present Supreme Court agrees.
(...)
In many southern states, another type of anti-Klan statute prohibits wearing hoods, masks, and disguises."
Chapter 16.
"The hate crime offender actually commits an act of terrorism by sending a message to all members of his victim’s group. If successful, he reduces the immediate threat that he feels coming from those who are different. (...)
Hate crimes function to maintain the status quo; they protect the leaders –the people in charge, the men and women who are responsible for making important decisions at the highest levels of society. Blame tends to move away from the top, minimizing the possibility that profound changes could ever occur. For example, a disgruntled teenager who, out of a sense of personal frustration, spray-paints homophobic slurs on a government building may temporarily experience some psychological satisfaction, but he comes no closer to succeeding in school or on the job.
In 1830 the largest number of newcomers to the United States were Irish; in 1890 they were German. In 1900 they were Italian; then they were Canadian. During the 1980s, four out of five immigrants came from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. By 2002 the newcomers were arriving in great numbers from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, China and Taiwan, South Korea, and India. Smaller numbers entered from the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Jamaica, Haiti, and Iran.
(...)
The continuing influx of newcomers into the United States will have profound implications for the future of intergroup relations. Within a decade or so, multiculturalism will have become a focal point of social change. Indeed, within the lifetime of most Americans living today, the white Anglo-Saxon majority will have become a statistical minority. In many cities across the country this demographic transformation has already occurred.
(...)
Wherever possible, we need more programs and policies that help vulnerable groups without being specifically created for them. Rather than base all affirmative action policies solely on race or gender, we might develop programs and policies of affirmative action to reduce poverty –based, for example, on the neighborhood in which a person lives or the economic condition of a family. Such programs would disproportionately benefit people of color and women, who have been economically disadvantaged, without singling them our; and they might well generate less resentment from Americans who have become self-defensive in attitude. Focusing more directly on poverty, we would hope to counteract the perceived inequity in policies that aid racial minorities regardless or income or assets. Struggling to send their own children to college, for example, many middle-class Americans conjure up an image of affirmative action that seems as extreme as it is unfair. (...)
Colleges and universities located in the urban core provide a case in point. Such institutions of higher learning are increasingly being regarded by residents of surrounding neighborhoods as symbols of disenfranchisement rather than hope. To reverse this trend, institutions of higher learning must change their image from that of exclusivity to access. These institutions must look beyond simple measures such as SAT scores and determine which students is provided reasonable levels of support could succeed at their institutions.
(...) Some colleges –Brown University, Northeastern University, University of Pennsylvania- have already directed their scholarship aid in this direction. In addition, they have sought to contribute the academic support needed –extra help through in-school mentoring as well as after-school and summer tutoring- in order to give underrepresented youngsters a real chance to compete for a place in an appropriate institution of higher learning."
Hate crimes. Donald Altschiller. California, 1999
Chapter 1.
"Such crimes may frighten and humiliate other members of the community."
On R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) "the decision declared that pure or symbolic bias-motivated speech, no matter how damaging to the intended target, cannot be outlawed solely on the basis of its effect on the victim." On Wisconsin v. Mitchell (1993), the Supreme Court accepted the penalty enhancement statute and argued that "the statute would not stifle free speech because the bias motivation would have to be connected with a specific act; the law focused on a person’s actions, not on an individual’s bigoted ideas."
Chapter 2.
- April 9. Roman Ducksworth, a black soldier, is shot to death by a white policeman for refusing to sit in the back of a bus in Taylorsville, Mississippi. [On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action was not the first of its kind: Irene Morgan, in 1946, and Sarah Louise Keys, in 1955, had won rulings before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Interstate Commerce Commission respectively in the area of interstate bus travel – Note added to make noticeable the bravery implied in Rosa Parks’s defiant act.]
Chapter 4.
"The National Insti