Thread: AMERICAS WATER SUPPLY IN DANGER

While states fight over our deminishing water resource our leaders keep inviting in more immigrants .

The price of water will continue to go up . We can add this exspense to all the other exspenses of out of control immigration . Already medical, food ,national deficit and insurance prices have risen with the immigrant floods into America .

36 states are facing shortage but Califonia, Florida and Texas are in the most danger .

The Great Lakes and other large bodies of water are shrinking .

Will water soon cost as much as oil ?

Could this have something to do with these 3 states also having the largest refugee ,illegal and new legal immigrant populations ?

wrong website, anyone have that site info ?

'Crisis Feared for US Water Supply Drying Up '



www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21494919/

Once again, where are the environmentalists? No where to be found.

I saw a clip on the news where these people were living in trees at Berkley because the trees were set to be chopped down to make room for an athletic field. These people were complaining how the environment was being ruined.

Since these people lived in a tree for a year they obviously don't need to work. How come they did not spend a year at the border and fight all the environmental damage being done down there? All the birds and trees and foliage that is being eaten, trampeled on, urinated on.

I saw Brian Bilbray speak once how in San Diego thew illegals were crossing the border and biting the heads off of some endangered bird/duck. They put up some type of border/wall and now the bird/duck is no longer endangered.

Most-not all-environmental groups do not care. If they really did they would all be against illegal invasion and overpopulation. They are agenda driven groups who want open borders.

A few years ago there was a guy on the board of the Sierra Club who wanted to have the club have a position against illegal aliens. He is no longer on the board.

30-40 million x-tra illegals don't help the problem!

Originally Posted by Nicole

Once again, where are the environmentalists? No where to be found.

I saw a clip on the news where these people were living in trees at Berkley because the trees were set to be chopped down to make room for an athletic field. These people were complaining how the environment was being ruined.

Since these people lived in a tree for a year they obviously don't need to work. How come they did not spend a year at the border and fight all the environmental damage being done down there? All the birds and trees and foliage that is being eaten, trampeled on, urinated on.

I saw Brian Bilbray speak once how in San Diego thew illegals were crossing the border and biting the heads off of some endangered bird/duck. They put up some type of border/wall and now the bird/duck is no longer endangered.

Most-not all-environmental groups do not care. If they really did they would all be against illegal invasion and overpopulation. They are agenda driven groups who want open borders.

A few years ago there was a guy on the board of the Sierra Club who wanted to have the club have a position against illegal aliens. He is no longer on the board.

Nicole, they are too busy pushing fat boy massive carbon footprint (Gore) and his crap rhetoric regarding man made global warming.

So true, sippy. Global Warming is, in my opinion, just a diversion so we won't talk about the real problems in this country.

Our air is dirty, that's just a fact and the EPA is a joke.

Our land is contaminated by every manner of refuse and dumping imaginable. In Texas, they are digging up thousands of acres of good land. Land that can grow food. Most years it can grow food with no irrigation. It is being forever ruined by the digging of coal. Also, underground water is being polluted by this digging.

Our water is getting scarce and good water even more scarce. There was an article recently stating that over half the rivers in Texas were 'unswimmable and unfishable'. Think about that.

Yet, we are busy discussing something that might happen 10-50-100 years down the road.

How long has it been since we have had a good discussion about actual environmental concerns? A long time - and certainly since global warming came on the scene.

I always find this most amussing....

the states with the most problems are usually the states with the highest illegal immigration issues. We also, in california, have issues with electricty too. Did we have these issues 10 years ago when the population was under control?

You minus tens of millions of illegals, and our water shortage and electricity shortage would not be an issue.

Well, I don't know if you have seen the news.

You can add Georgia to the list. Along with record growth and construction, landscaping, we are supporting a huge illegal population in Georgia.

I would love to know what the real numbers are. Everyone I know has been in an accident with an illegal. They are absolutely everywhere here.

It is a percentage of our growth population that is not counted or reported.

Add water to another resource to drain dry.

We have a total outdoor watering ban, and in most counties it applies to landscaping. Most immigrants are in construction and landscaping here. Maybe this ban will smoke some of them out of Georgia, since they have all recently lost jobs.

Locals are also pushing for a halt on permits for new housing construction, because we have a glut of housing, and that industry uses a lot of water.

Some months ago there were stories of illegals leaving GA. The story seemed to say it was because of the job verification, I think.

When I heard about the water problem in GA, I wondered if it might not be because the jobs are just not there. It would seem landscaping, even agricultural jobs would be in jeopardy because of such a situation.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/ ... _1008.html Link to the following article


"Little blowback for illegal worker hires
Enforcement shifts toward suspected criminal activity"


It was 2:30 a.m. when federal agents arrived at Jillian's restaurant in Lawrenceville looking for illegal workers.


As the cleaning crew started work on a night last February, agents arrested four Guatemalans who came to mop and vacuum the theme restaurant.

The arrests were part of sting on a Florida-based janitorial service that provided workers on contract to restaurants around the country.

If the janitors at Jillian's had been garden-variety undocumented workers, they likely would have kept sweeping floors. But their employer was suspected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of violating a collection of laws.

The janitor bust is the new style of federal work site immigration enforcement. Since about 1999 and definitely since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the government has targeted employers who knowingly break the law by encouraging or participating in immigrant smuggling, abusing workers, not paying taxes or document fraud.

The owners of Palm Beach-based Rosenbaum-Cunningham International were charged with evading $18.6 million in employment taxes.

Agents arrested about 200 illegal workers nationwide in the sting, including 13 at four restaurants in metro Atlanta. All 13 were Guatemalan and were processed for deportation, Smith said.

The new enforcement tactic is a shift away from the 1990s, when the government annually issued hundreds of noncriminal fines to businesses for employing illegal immigrants.

The new direction means ICE has drastically cut enforcement efforts against employers who just hire illegal workers in Georgia and nationally. Now, fines for simply hiring illegal immigrants are rare.

ICE initiated only three such noncriminal fines in the United States in 2004, the last year for which national statistics are available. In the southern region, the government issued one fine in four years, for $123,000, to a restaurant in North Carolina earlier this year.

Noncriminal fines are usually issued to employers who don't complete the paperwork to prove an employee has the right to work in the United States.

Federal immigration officials say it's a shift in policy rather than a retreat from work site enforcement.

Mandate changed

The mandate is two-pronged: the primary goal, since Sept. 11, is to protect sensitive targets such as airports, military bases and nuclear power plants. The next priority is to target abusive employers and those involved in immigrant recruiting, smuggling or fraud.

"The sheer volume of our work requires us to prioritize our response among all our investigative duties," said Ken Smith, special agent in charge of the Atlanta office of ICE.

Under the first mandate, the agency reviewed the employment forms of about 5,000 workers at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and arrested 35 illegal immigrants in the past four years, Smith said. In January, ICE raided Fort Benning, another sensitive site, charging 24 illegal workers with document fraud and ID theft.

On the second score, local ICE agents busted Sin Sin Employment Agency in Chamblee in 2005. The couple who ran the agency placed thousands of illegal workers in restaurants in several states. They were convicted of conspiracy and fraud related to immigrant smuggling and were sentenced to prison.

Such criminal prosecutions and seizures hit an employer harder than noncriminal fines, Smith said.

The government says criminal fines, restitutions and civil judgments this year from work site enforcement nationally total more than $30 million, according to ICE. But ICE has not said how much of that money was actually collected or whether it was from a few employers.

It's hard to tell whether the change in approach is having any effect on illegal immigration or on employers' behavior, partly because ICE says data that could illustrate that is not readily available.

ICE did not provide dollar values of fines collected from the 1990s, when the government issued thousands of fines to employers.

But, in 1992, for example, the government delivered 1,461 notices of intent to fine to employers for violating immigration laws. By 2004, there were three.

The number of people arrested at work sites for being in the country illegally has also declined sharply since the change in policy, from about 17,500 in 1997 to about 4,000 in 2007, according to INS statistics and ICE. There has been a recent uptick in arrests in the last two years.

To some degree, states and counties have stepped into the void left when ICE backed away from grass roots enforcement.

Georgia passed a law requiring anyone contracting with a public entity to run new hires through a federal database to ensure the employee can legally work in the United States. Cobb and Gwinnett counties have similar rules for contractors.

But that only affects companies paid with tax dollars.

The state can only regulate licensing, taxation and contracts, said Chip Rogers, sponsor of the law. It can't prosecute immigration violations criminally, he said.

"I think if [federal agents] would go out and find some employers who were violating the law and put them in jail because of it, then what you would have happen is the other employers would think twice about employing illegal immigrants," Rogers said.


'Contempt for law'

The change in policy has other critics.

"If you don't do the mundane work of enforcement and make that a real possibility that an employer will run afoul of the law, then what you do is you create a general contempt for the rule of law," said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C. think tank that favors tighter immigration controls.

"Interior enforcement, including going after employers, has had nothing but a precipitous fall over the last 14 years," Camarota said.

Smith said the reason for that is because it's difficult for the government to prove that employers knowingly hired illegal immigrants. Workers show fake IDs that look real, he said.

"The fines became just the cost of doing business for the employer," Smith said. Many levies were bartered down to "pennies on the dollar."

Mary Kay Woodworth, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Landscape & Turf Association, says an employer who is trying to follow the rules but may have some illegal immigrants on the payroll should not be the focus of a federal investigation.

The landscape industry employs many immigrants, but most employers try to hire legal workers, she said.

"Ninety-nine percent of them are filing taxes and filling out the paperwork," Woodworth said. It's not easy to spot fake documents and asking too many questions can violate a worker's rights.

"Do you think the employer can go and ask, 'Do you really think this is a legal document?' You can't do that," Woodworth said. "If it looks legal, that's the most you can do."

1999 marked shift

The shift in thinking on work site enforcement began in 1999.

In July that year, Robert Bach, an executive associate commissioner for the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, told Congress that even if INS tripled its budget it still would "not have a significant impact on illegal workers and certainly not on employers and labor markets."

INS would focus on criminal investigations against employers who engage in patterns of knowingly employing illegal workers, or who seek to hire them through smugglers, or abuse workers, Bach said.

At that time, there were an estimated 5 million unauthorized migrants in the United States, Bach said.

Estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center put that number last year at between 11 and 12 million.



Is the Ms. Woodworth nuts??

She says 14,000 landscape workers have been laid off. We know they have wives and children. So how many is that. Most are still working they just can't plant new landscaping or water. There is still mowing, etc.