I hope you don't mind if I'm kind of quiet during the car ride.
"Mass. balks at Arizona licenses; Immigrants cite language barrier" by Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff / September 19, 2011
State Police are investigating hundreds of people who converted Arizona driver’s licenses to Massachusetts licenses, according to a police spokesman, and since October the state has suspended the driving rights of 124 of them.
Authorities said they have not found national security or identity fraud cases, but immigrants whose language barrier kept them from getting a Massachusetts license, so they traveled to Arizona to take advantage of more flexible options....
The pipeline from Massachusetts to Arizona has triggered a debate over how to serve hundreds of struggling refugees - legal immigrants who often have large families and need to work - while ensuring safety on the road....
Abdikadir Mohamed of Lynn is among the immigrants who joined a stream of refugees from Somalia, Bhutan, and Burma who caught flights to Arizona, obtained licenses, and returned to Massachusetts to exchange them, only to have them suspended.
The father of six said he needed a license to safely commute to the graveyard shift at a factory and to ferry his children to their separate schools. But, because of language barriers, he failed the written driving test twice, before he heard about a solution sweeping refugee communities across the state: He could get a driver’s license if he traveled more than 2,000 miles to Arizona.
“You go because you don’t have any other option,’’ said Mohamed, 55, through a translator at the Chelsea Collaborative, where he is studying to become a US citizen. “The people speak my language there.’’ He said he is bewildered by Massachusetts’ actions against him.
We all are in agreement there, barrier or not!!
To get a license in Massachusetts, eligible applicants must first pass a written learner’s permit test and then a road test, and pay fees and meet other requirements. To accommodate immigrants, Massachusetts offers the written test in English and 26 other languages, which state officials say is second only to California. State policy against allowing translators is designed to prevent fraud, officials said.
Rachel Kaprielian, head of the state Registry of Motor Vehicles, says the refugees broke the law by going to Arizona, and could have sought other help to pass the test, such as signing up for English classes or other programs offered through the state.
“You have to follow a set of rules,’’ she said, and added: “That doesn’t change if you came over on the Mayflower or if you just got here from a refugee camp. The same level of public safety applies. This isn’t about immigrant populations.’’
That is such double-talk from a government that says it cares about immigrants, blah, blah, blah, says it's relaxing the standards to only snare criminals, yet still operates a prison-industrial complex and whose elite prey and depend on illegal immigrant labor. The same system that has been promoted ad nauseam by the mouthpiece media pretending to look out for you.
And the Pilgrims, what rules did they have to follow? The Indians of North America had their own ICE back then? Then theirs failed. Look at what happened. An undeniable Holocaust.
She said the state suspended the licenses for 60 days and told violators they would have to pay a $100 reinstatement fee and take the permit test and road test to get a license here.
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
It ALWAY$ COME$ DOWN to THAT when it come$ to GOVERNMENT!!
Advocates say that while the state does offer the driving test in many languages, the options are out of date - featuring Finnish and Hungarian, but not the languages of Somali Bantus or other recent refugees. The list needs to be expanded, they say.
“Driving is absolutely crucial today for survival,’’ said Jozefina Lantz, director of services for new Americans at Lutheran Social Services of New England, an agency that helps to resettle refugees. “Refugees were really undermined here.’’
Aweis Hussein, a community organizer at the nonprofit Chelsea Collaborative, urged Massachusetts to allow translators for the written test, like Maine and a limited number of other states do.
“The main obstacle is getting that permit, the written test,’’ Hussein said. “They don’t have to provide an interpreter. We can help. But they need to let us do it.’’
Nationwide, fewer than a handful of states routinely allow people to use translators to take the written driving test because of concerns for public safety, said Brian Zimmer, president of the Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License, a Washington-based nonprofit that favors strong standards for licenses to prevent terrorism, crime, and identity theft. States discovered that many drivers who took the test via translators did not truly know the rules or road signs, he added.
In Arizona, state and federal officials are particularly investigating whether refugees exploited a provision that allows people to skip the written and road tests by taking lessons and obtaining a certificate from a state-approved driving school, said Harold Sanders, spokesman for the Arizona Department of Transportation.
The issue also raised questions about Arizona’s residency requirement. Unlike Massachusetts, which requires driver’s license applicants to provide proof of residency, Arizona has no such requirement.
To some, the greater flexibility in Arizona’s licensing process was surprising since it has been in the news for passing a strict law last year to combat illegal immigration.
Sanders said Arizona does require license applicants to prove they are in the country legally. Arizona also requires multiple documents to verify identity before issuing a license, he said.
Mohamed, who survived war in Somalia and 13 years in a squalid refugee camp before the United States granted him refuge, said he knows how to drive; he drove a tractor in Africa and understands road signs and rules. But English was his main barrier.
The wars cost you in more ways than you can believe, Americans. Not only do they drain our soul and spirit while stealing our money, they create situations like this where we take in refugees. Admittedly, the U.S. has created far more refugees than it has ever accepted; however, that's a problem for someone else (like Syria taking in millions of Iraqis for example).
He went to Arizona after spending $60 on two failed tests, signed up for driving lessons in Phoenix and passed. Because he obtained a certificate from the driving school, according to Sanders, Mohamed was not required to take the state tests.
Mohamed said he felt humiliated and afraid to take the Massachusetts test again, because of the state’s actions. But he feels pressure to try, so he can support his family and relatives, transport his children, and make life easier.
Now, he says, to go to the supermarket, his family walks a mile each way. When his young son broke a leg two years ago, they had to call a taxi to take him to the hospital.
“I want to get the license to help the kids, but they slammed the door now,’’ he said.
And how can you be against helping kids, readers?
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Honestly, I can't tell you how sick I am of having my thoughts and emotions manipulated by the agenda-pushing paper.
So who is the designated driver on this trip?
"Illegal immigrant charged with 6th DUI in Boxborough; Marlborough man arrested on I-495 ramp" September 26, 2011|By Travis Andersen, Globe Staff
A Marlborough man, who was in the country illegally and had been previously deported, was arrested Saturday morning in Boxborough on his sixth drunken driving charge, police said.
Boxborough police said that Eduardo Alementa Torres, 48, who is originally from Mexico, was driving a 1988 Chevrolet pickup truck with an expired inspection sticker when an officer saw him at about 10:45 a.m. on the southbound ramp from Massachusetts Avenue to Interstate 495 and pulled him over....
Police said Torres had no identification on him and gave the officer a false name. Torres was identified when police ran his fingerprints through an automated identification system, and police also learned that he had three prior drunken driving convictions in California and two in Massachusetts, authorities said.
Police said that Torres is a previously deported fugitive wanted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But we should give them all licenses.
In a phone interview, Torres’s brother, who requested his name not be used, said his brother, who called him from jail, works as a landscaper and has lived in Massachusetts for about five years....
Torres’s arrest comes amid growing controversy in the Bay State over illegal immigration....
The debate over Secure Communities was reignited in August after Nicolas Guaman, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador with traffic violations, was accused of running over and killing Matthew Denice, 23, a motorcyclist in Milford, while intoxicated.
See: Immigrants on the Move in Massachusetts
Immigration issues were also spotlighted recently when President Obama’s uncle, Onyango Obama, 67, was arrested Aug. 24 in Framingham on drunken driving and other charges and found to be in violation of a 1992 order to return to his native Kenya....
Related: Obama's Uncle Owes Back Taxes
I'll get back to that a little further below.
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"Drunken driving suspect had been deported 3 times" September 27, 2011|By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff
An illegal immigrant from Mexico arrested this weekend in Boxborough on a sixth drunken driving charge had returned to the United States despite having been deported three times, federal officials said yesterday.
Eduardo Alementa Torres, a 48-year-old landscaper who lived in Marlborough, had multiple drunken driving convictions, two in Massachusetts and three in California, according to Cara O’Brien, spokeswoman for the Middlesex district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting his case....
If I had done that they would have taken my license away.
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Related:
"Senators OK casino check on employees; They would review immigration status" September 27, 2011|By Noah Bierman, Globe Staff
State senators approved a measure yesterday that would require casino developers to verify their employees’ immigration status using a federal electronic database, thrusting the casino debate into a national controversy over immigration enforcement....
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Also see: R.I. education board OK’s in-state tuition for undocumented students
"Nearly 2,000 criminal immigrants detained" Associated Press / September 29, 2011
WASHINGTON - After months of complaints from immigrant advocates, the Obama administration promised in August that immigration authorities would start focusing their scarce resources on finding and deporting serious criminals and largely leave alone immigrants whose only offense was crossing the border illegally.
To prove the point, more than 1,900 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials spent the last week arresting nearly 3,000 criminal illegal immigrants in a nationwide sweep.
A public relations piece of propaganda.
Everyone arrested had at least one criminal conviction, and more than half were convicted of at least one felony. They will now face deportation.
The immigration agency’s director, John Morton, said yesterday that the roundup was its largest effort to hunt down criminal illegal immigrants.
“This is what we should be doing; this is good law enforcement,’’ he said. “It makes sense to be removing people who are committing crimes who are here illegally first and foremost.’’
There are still an estimated 1 million criminal illegal immigrants in the country, he said.
The immigration agency has been widely criticized in recent months for using fingerprints collected in local jails to identify illegal immigrants. Many of the people identified through the Secure Communities program have not been convicted of a crime, only charged, and have been arrested for traffic violations or other misdemeanors.
Like DUIs in Massachusetts.
And how you liking that promised AmeriKan justice? It's not what the agenda-pushing pamphlet promised, is it?
In an Aug. 18 letter to a group of senators who have pushed for immigration reform, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said officials from DHS and the Justice Department would review approximately 300,000 deportation cases pending in federal immigration court.
At the time, officials said most noncriminals and those who do not pose a threat to public safety or national security would likely have their cases put on hold indefinitely. Those people would be allowed to stay and apply for a work permit.
Critics have argued that delaying some deportation cases amounts to amnesty for thousands of illegal immigrants.
Morton said yesterday that the review has not started. But agents in the field have been instructed to use discretion in evaluating who should be arrested and put in the system for deportation.
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And remember what I said about getting back to the money?
"Unauthorized US workers claim $4.2b in tax credits" September 02, 2011|By Andrew Zajac, Bloomberg News
WASHINGTON - Tax filers who were not authorized to work in the United States collected $4.2 billion in tax credits in 2010, a Treasury Department watchdog reported yesterday.
Although federal law prohibits people residing illegally from receiving most public benefits, an increasing number filed tax returns claiming the additional child tax credit, according to J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.
“The payment of federal funds through this tax benefit appears to provide an additional incentive for aliens to enter, reside, and work in the United States without authorization, which contradicts federal law and policy to remove such incentives,’’ the report said.
The recipients did not qualify for Social Security numbers and filed returns with taxpayer identification numbers supplied by the Internal Revenue Service....
The IRS doesn't care where the money comes from; it just wants the taxes!
Income earned illegally is subject to taxation.
It is my contention that the IRS is illegal.
Watch: America: Freedom to Fascism
Identification numbers are provided so that workers can comply with tax laws even if they do not have the work authorization necessary for a Social Security number.
I think I just caught a whiff of fascism in a sentence.
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