Arrests shed light on border kidnappings

Immigrants trying to cross into the U.S. walk into traps set up by gangs with far-reaching networks, authorities learn.

By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times

July 18, 2010

Reporting from Tecate, Mexico

The bedraggled immigrants were picking their way through the boulders and scrub when a group of heavily armed men descended on them just short of the California- Mexico border. They corralled them in a cave and pointed their guns on the 10 men and one woman.

These lawless badlands in the hills east of Tijuana have long teemed with bandits and rapists, but these criminals demanded only phone numbers. They started calling the immigrants' loved ones in Pomona, San Diego and Bakersfield: Send us money or we'll shoot, they said.

The days-long kidnapping ordeal in May illustrates a growing trend as roaming gangs of well-organized, heavily armed gunmen turn their sights on illegal immigrants, making a treacherous journey ever more dangerous for people trekking north.

In the spree of kidnappings, which began about two years ago, gunmen hold people captive until family members in the U.S. send wire transfers of up to $5,000 to accounts in Mexico. Some immigrants are beaten; several have been killed, including a pair of brothers from Mexico City. Many straggle across the border and turn themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents. Others end up in migrant shelters in Tijuana, too frightened to report the cases to Mexican police.

Little was known about how the criminals operate until Mexican authorities dismantled two gangs in recent months, including the one in May, when 11 suspects were arrested after a shootout and a wild foot chase through the hills.

The arrests provided authorities with a rare glimpse into criminal networks whose reach stretches from the border to cities across the U.S. and Mexico. The gang was allegedly run by a career criminal from Nayarit and included a former Mexican army soldier. They admitted kidnapping more than 100 immigrants over 18 months, holding them in remote caves, makeshift camp and ranches.

"We threatened the families that if they didn't pay we would kill the immigrants," said Jose Flores Romero, the alleged ring leader, in his statement to detectives, referring to the abductions in May.

Authorities believe several gangs continue to operate. With a network of lookouts scattered at key points across 60 miles of rugged, isolated terrain, few immigrants slip by without them knowing about it.

"They know all the trails leading to the border, from Tijuana to Tecate and the La Rumorosa" mountain range, said Fermin Gomez, a Baja California assistant attorney general. "They know exactly where they're going, how many are walking, and they're all intercepted."

The current situation resulted from a convergence of factors in the U.S. and Mexico that put increasing pressure on the traditional human smuggling groups in the area, according to authorities in both countries.

Organized-crime bosses in Tijuana, squeezed by a drug war, demanded higher payoffs, while U.S. authorities, adding fencing and staffing on the border, were making it more difficult to get immigrants through.

With a smuggling infrastructure already in place, it was easy and profitable for criminals to switch to kidnapping. Federal authorities in the U.S. immediately noticed the dangerous trend. Many immigrants began showing up at the border, seeking medical attention instead of eluding agents.

"They're traumatized," said Robert C. Rodgers, a supervisor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego, which investigates smuggling groups in the area. "They jump the fence into the U.S. looking for help."

The journeys start out straightforward enough. In Tijuana, recruiters scour fleabag motels that house immigrants waiting to cross the border. Offering safe passage, the recruiters transport the immigrants to staging areas in the ranchlands east of the city. Many of the recruiters and drivers are women who bring along their children to put the immigrants at ease.

At the staging areas, foot guides lead the immigrants into the mountains, down well-worn paths, into the hands of gunmen. "For the guides it's a win-win proposition: They don't have to cross the border, or risk being captured by the Border Patrol, and they still get paid," one Mexican federal agent said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media.

The deception doesn't end there. One gang, arrested in April, would plant a member in the group of immigrants. When asked for a telephone number, he would immediately provide it and be rewarded with good treatment. Other immigrants, seeking to avoid beatings, would do the same.

"You've saved yourself," the kidnapper told a gang member disguised as an immigrant, according to one victim in a videotaped interview with authorities that shielded his identity. "He acted like an immigrant, but we found out later that he wasn't. We realized that they had never hit him."

In the kidnapping incident in May, 11 immigrants were walking through the hills off the Tecate-Tijuana toll road when they were confronted at gunpoint. They were stripped, tied up and watched over by several gunmen while their families were contacted and ordered to wire $2,000 to gang associates in Mexico.

A couple of days later, Mexican authorities stumbled upon the gang during a routine patrol. In the ensuing gun battle, a Tecate deputy police chief was wounded in the leg by AK-47 gunfire. The group was eventually captured, and members led police to the alleged ring leader, Flores.

The highly publicized arrests have made immigrants aware of the dangers. Cupartin Sanchez, 27, interviewed at an immigrant shelter in Tijuana, said several smugglers had promised to get him across the border. He doesn't trust any of them, so he's going home to Guerrero.

"I'm not scared of the Border Patrol," Sanchez said, "but I am scared of the kidnappers."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immigrant-kidnap-20100718,0,6274375,print.story

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Missing Moreno Valley teen's belongings were found along path she usually took, authorities say

Authorities continued their search Saturday for a 17-year-old Moreno Valley girl who vanished Thursday while on her way home from summer school.

Teams of detectives and deputies scattered throughout the region have been looking for clues in the whereabouts of Norma Lopez. Police said there were signs of a struggle and that personal property was found along the path she usually took to get home from class.

"The teams are out there searching for her right now," said Det. Matt Diaz of the Riverside Sheriff's Department, which provides police services in Moreno Valley.

Norma was reported missing around 12:30 p.m. Thursday by her older sister, Sonja, after she did not return home from summer school, Sgt. Joe Borja said at a Friday news conference.

She was attending classes at Valley View High School and was out of class by 10 a.m., Borja said. The teen often took a shortcut through a dirt field located southeast of the school.

"She had plans to meet her sister and another friend," Borja said. "When she didn't arrive they began looking for her. They looked for approximately two hours, they looked in the dirt field and along the trail that she normally walks through and found some property belonging to her."

Investigators said there were signs of a struggle in the area, which caused them to suspect that she may have been taken against her will. Borja did not elaborate.

"They're personal belongings and they do belong to her, we've confirmed that," Borja said.

Investigators are also looking for the driver and passengers of a newer-model green SUV seen near the dirt field at the time of her disappearance.

"We're not saying it's the suspect's vehicle at this point because it may not be," Borja said. "But it was seen in that area…maybe they were witnesses to something that may have occurred."

Norma, who was last seen wearing a white, horizontal-striped sleeveless shirt with a floral pattern and black jeans, was described as a good daughter who attended school every day.

"She has never been in trouble, she has never run away in the past," Borja said. "We're not believing that she just ran away, if we did believe that, we probably wouldn't be here."

Standing in front of cameras, Norma's older sister spoke on behalf of the family.

"We miss her and we want her home safe," Sonja Lopez said, fighting back tears. "We just need you back."

Anyone with information about Norma's disappearance is urged to call the Riverside Sheriff's Dispatch Center at (951) 776-1099

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/07/search-for-moreno-vally-teen-norma-lopez-continues.html#more

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ICE holds driver in fatal collision

He has a history of driving without a license and police say he has been deported once. Task force says incident should serve as a wake-up call.

By Joseph Serna,

July 16, 2010

NEWPORT BEACH — An Anaheim man involved in a fatal collision with a bicyclist has a history of being ticketed for driving without a license and was previously deported by immigration authorities, police said Friday.

Jose Luis Huerta Mundo, 38, was being held in Orange County Jail without bail after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials ordered that he be held for possible deportation proceedings.

Court records show that in 1999, Mundo was convicted of driving with a suspended license and not having proof of insurance. In 2002, he was convicted of not having his license on him and a year later, for not having his vehicle registered. He was convicted two more times of driving without a license, in 2005 and 2006.

Mundo, a landscaper, was detained by Newport Beach police Thursday morning his truck collided with bicyclist Michael Nine, 43, of Santa Ana. Mundo was driving a white Chevrolet stake bed truck that collided with Nine, who was riding his bicycle near Spyglass Hill Road and Harbor Ridge Drive. Nine died from his injuries, and police are investigating what happened.

Federal authorities would not say if and when Mundo was previously deported, but a record of a past deportation showed up when officers verified his identity at the police station, said Sgt. Evan Sailor.

The area is frequented in the morning by cyclists who coast down the swerving, downhill street.

This was the third fatal bicycle-vehicle collision here in less than a year.

Darryl Benefiel, a 43-year-old bicyclist from Newport Beach, was killed July 23 in Newport Coast. Donald Murphy, 49, of Irvine, died from injuries Dec. 9 when he was rear-ended on Jamboree Road.

After Benefiel's death, the city created a task force to study bicycle safety in Newport Beach. The task force came back to the council in May with a list of recommendations to improve bicyclist safety and drivers' awareness of bike riders in the city.

Group members consider Thursday's crash a wake-up call to the city to do something about bicyclists and drivers, especially in popular biking areas like Corona del Mar and the Balboa Peninsula.

"I'm not sure anything we discussed in the task force would've prevented this," said group member Daniel Murphy. "Anytime a bike and a car tangle, unfortunately the car is going to be the victor. I do think what it does is bring back into focus how important bike safety is. Hopefully it'll jump start discussions."

Task force member Tony Petros agreed.

"Each situation has to be evaluated on its own merits," Petros said. "Right now we don't know whose fault it is. We don't even know if there's fault to be assigned."

He said the city could add street signs warning drivers about bicyclists, or add bike lanes among other things. But the city can only do so much, Petros said.

"We can plan and design but no amount of planning and design can mitigate the individual," he said. "Unfortunately, good planning and design can always be trumped by the individual, be it the cyclist or the motorist."

http://www.dailypilot.com/news/tn-dpt-0717-nine-20100716,0,1902806,print.story

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California can't legalize marijuana

No matter what argument you use, the fact remains that the federal Controlled Substances Act makes it a felony to grow or sell cannabis.

By Mark A.R. Kleiman

July 16, 2010

Now that California's billion-dollar " medical marijuana" industry and its affiliated "recommendationists" have made marijuana legally available to any Californian with $75 and the willingness to tell a doctor that he sometimes has trouble sleeping, why not go all the way and just legalize the stuff for recreational use as proposed in Proposition 19 on the November ballot? Then we could tax it and regulate it, eliminating the illicit market and the need for law enforcement against pot growers. California would make a ton of money to help dig out of its fiscal hole, right?

Well, actually, no.

There's one problem with legalizing, taxing and regulating cannabis at the state level: It can't be done. The federal Controlled Substances Act makes it a felony to grow or sell cannabis. California can repeal its own marijuana laws, leaving enforcement to the feds. But it can't legalize a federal felony. Therefore, any grower or seller paying California taxes on marijuana sales or filing pot-related California regulatory paperwork would be confessing, in writing, to multiple federal crimes. And that won't happen.

True, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. has announced that the Justice Department will not prosecute people who are selling medical marijuana in compliance with California's law. But that's an entirely different matter. The attorney general could cite good legal and constitutional reasons for that policy, because the regulation of medical practice is a state and not a federal responsibility. And if the medical justification for most of the pot sold through dispensaries is sketchy at best? Well, that too is a state problem. The international treaties that require their signatories, including the United States, to ban the production and sale of cannabis have an exception for medical use.

Most important, the feds can afford to take a laid-back attitude toward California's medical marijuana trade because it's unlikely to cause much of a trafficking problem in the rest of the country. Because dispensaries' prices are just as high as those for black-market marijuana, there's not much temptation to buy the "medical" sort in California and resell it out of state.

By contrast, the non-medical cannabis industry that would be allowed if Proposition 19 passed would quickly fuel a national illicit market. According to a study issued by the RAND Corp.'s Drug Policy Research Center this month, if the initiative passes, the pretax retail price of high-grade sinsemilla marijuana sold legally in California is likely to drop to under $40 per ounce, compared with current illicit-market (or dispensary) prices of $300 an ounce and more. Yes, the counties would have authority to tax the product, but even at a tax rate of $50 an ounce — more than 100% of the pretax price — the legal California product would still be a screaming bargain by national standards, at less than one-third of current black-market prices.

As a result, pot dealers nationwide — and from Canada, for that matter — would flock to California to stock up. There's no way on earth the federal government is going to tolerate that. Instead, we'd see massive federal busts of California growers and retail dealers, no matter how legal their activity was under state law.

Even without the magnet effect of cheap drugs here, the feds couln't afford to simply ignore a state's flouting of the federal prohibition on marijuana. For one thing, allowing Californians to openly grow cannabis for non-medical purposes would be a clear violation of international law; that's why the Netherlands, which tolerates retail cannabis sales through "coffee shops," still bans marijuana production. As the Dutch say, the front door of the coffee-shop trade may be legal, but the back door is illegal.

So, then, should marijuana be kept strictly illicit throughout the United States? Not necessarily. Legalizing cannabis isn't a terrible idea, but I'd very much prefer to do it on a non-commercial (grow-your-own or consumers' co-op) basis rather than creating a multibillion-dollar industry full of profit-driven firms trying to encourage as much cannabis use as possible. The only way to sell a lot of pot is to create a lot of potheads — not casual, moderate recreational users but chronic, multiple-joints-per-day zonkers. (The alcohol industry, for example, gets 80% of its income from people with drinking problems.) A grow-your-own or co-op system would prevent that marketing push.

In any case, whenever and however we legalize the Demon Weed, it's going to have to be at the national level (which includes modifying the anti-drug treaties) rather than state by state. Any other approach is a pipe dream.

Mark Kleiman is professor of public policy at UCLA and the editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. His latest book is "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kleiman-marijuna-legalization-20100714,0,2553407,print.story

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From the New York Times

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A Defector Goes Home, but to What End?

WASHINGTON — When Shahram Amiri , the Iranian scientist, took his C.I.A. handlers by surprise last week by un-defecting back to Tehran, he was gambling with his life.

Would he end up like Vitaly Yurchenko, the one-time K.G.B. officer who defected to Washington exactly a quarter-century ago, revealed some of the deepest secrets of a collapsing empire, and then bolted from his C.I.A. handlers at a French restaurant in Georgetown and ended up back in Moscow?

The French restaurant is long gone; in one of those oddities of spy-vs.-spy history, it was just seven blocks south of the office block where Mr. Amiri took refuge Monday night in the Iranian interests section of the Pakistani Embassy.

But, remarkably, Mr. Yurchenko is still around. And as his interrogation by Iranian intelligence began on Friday, Mr. Amiri could only hope for the same fate.

Because there's an alternate ending to such dramas that Mr. Amiri no doubt doesn't want to think about. It is the case of Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein . Mr Kamel escaped from Iraq to Jordan in 1995, and gave the West an insider's view of Mr. Hussein's then-active research projects on chemical, biological and other weaponry, not unlike the view of Iran's nuclear program that American officials say they got from Mr. Amiri. Mr. Kamel, too, went back home, promised by his father-in-law's lieutenants that all was forgiven. He was shot a few days later .

From afar, it appears that the Iranians are still uncertain which model should best apply to the bizarre case of Shahram Amiri.

Viewed one way, Mr. Amiri's decision to return is a huge propaganda boon for the Iranians. For months they have insisted that Mr. Amiri was kidnapped in Saudi Arabia in June 2009, by the C.I.A. and Saudi intelligence, then drugged and tortured into making up stories about Iran 's covert nuclear program. “I was under the harshest mental and physical torture,” Mr. Amiri said when he landed in Tehran , an account American officials dismissed as a “fantasy” spun to save his life.

Viewed another way, the Amiri case must be deeply unsettling to the Iranians. If you believe only part of the American version of events — the part that claims that the 32-year-old specialist in radiation safety provided information for a few years to the C.I.A., then voluntarily defected and spilled even more — then Iran's leaders have to wonder about the latest penetration of their program and how deeply it has been compromised.

All of which must make it hard to decide how to deal with Mr. Amiri's return. “We first have to see what has happened in these two years and then we will determine if he's a hero or not,” Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister, said in Portugal on Thursday.

As Ray Takeyh , a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations , notes, there are no real Iranian precedents for dealing with returning nuclear defectors. “I think they have a Soviet approach — they will want to make propaganda use of him,” Mr. Takeyh said. “My impression is that he will be around for a year or so.” But then, he said, “I don't think it's going to turn out well for him. They have to establish to other potential defectors that there is a cost to be paid.”

On this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, one mystery in this bizarre case is why, after Mr. Amiri rejected the pleas of American officials to stay in the United States as a $5 million ward of the C.I.A., American officials were suddenly willing to talk about his role.

After all, for a year American and European officials had pretty uniformly responded to questions about him with blank stares. A few allowed that he had offered up insights into how Iran had hidden various research projects and facilities, some based inside the university where he worked.

Now it appears that he offered some insight into the covert world created by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a scientist who is almost an obsession on the campus of the C.I.A. Mr. Fakhrizadeh, who is named in a United Nations sanctions resolution against Iran, was the head of what were once known as Project 110 and Project 111 ,believed to be code names for Iran's efforts to design nuclear weapons that could fit on missiles.

It is possible that American officials began to talk about Mr. Amiri last week simply to defend their handling of the case. “This is clearly one that went bad,” a senior administration official said on Friday. “I don't know whether that's because the agency mishandled it, or whether it's because the guy was a bit unstable.”

It's also possible, as many in the blogosphere have speculated, that Mr. Amiri was a double agent, sent by Iran to spread disinformation. That, however, seems unlikely, since American officials insist that most of his information checked out. And had they believed that he was a double, it's unlikely that he would have been allowed to return to Iran.

Now that he's back in Tehran, of course, the Iranians have to worry that Mr. Amiri could be an American double agent. But that also seems unlikely. As Mr. Takeyh says, “Who would trust him enough to let him inside the program again?” Just ask Mr. Yurchenko: the former K.G.B. agent was grilled for years about what he knew and, more important, what he told the Americans.

At best, Mr. Amiri seems headed to the same kind of multiyear interrogation. His hope, of course, is that he will be able to live long enough to tell the whole, complicated tale of his mysterious travels to his young son — when the son is old enough to understand it, and maybe when the world finds out whether Iran was racing for the bomb or gave up trying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/weekinreview/18iran.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Women's Role in Holocaust May Exceed Old Notions

JERUSALEM — Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated by a few brutal women have always stood out, like aberrations of nature.

There were notorious camp guards like Ilse Koch and Irma Grese . And lesser known killers like Erna Petri , the wife of an SS officer and a mother who was convicted of shooting to death six Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland; or Johanna Altvater Zelle, a German secretary accused of child murder in the Volodymyr-Volynskyy ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

The Nazi killing machine was undoubtedly a male-dominated affair. But according to new research, the participation of German women in the genocide, as perpetrators, accomplices or passive witnesses, was far greater than previously thought.

The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has drawn attention to the number of seemingly ordinary German women who willingly went out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as part of the war effort, to areas where genocide was openly occurring.

“Thousands would be a conservative estimate,” Ms. Lower said in an interview in Jerusalem last week.

While most did not bloody their own hands, the acts of those who did seemed all the more perverse because they operated outside the concentration camp system, on their own initiative.

Ms. Lower's findings shed new light on the Holocaust from a gender perspective, according to experts, and have further underlined the importance of the role of the lower echelons in the Nazi killing apparatus.

“In the dominant literature on perpetrators, you won't find women mentioned,” said Dan Michman, the chief historian at Yad Vashem , the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

Ms. Lower, 45, presented her work for the first time at this summer's workshop at Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research. She has been trying to decipher what motivated these women to commit such crimes.

“They challenge so deeply our notion” of what constitutes normal female behavior, she said. But the Nazi system, she added, “turned everything on its head.”

Ms. Lower said she worked for many years at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and is now teaching and researching at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich .

She began traveling to Ukraine in the early 1990s, as the Soviet archives opened up. She started in Zhytomyr, about 75 miles west of Kiev, where the SS leader Heinrich Himmler had his Ukrainian headquarters, and where she found original German files, some burned at the edges, in the local archive. She noticed the frequency with which women were mentioned at the scenes of genocide. Women also kept cropping up as witnesses in West and East German investigations after the war.

In an anomalous twist on Christopher R. Browning 's groundbreaking 1992 book, “Ordinary Men,” it appears that thousands of German women went to the eastern territories to help Germanize them, and to provide services to the local ethnic German populations there.

They included nurses, teachers and welfare workers. Women ran the storehouses of belongings taken from Jews. Local Germans were recruited to work as interpreters. Then there were the wives of regional officials, and their secretaries, some from their staffs back home.

For women from working-class families or farms in Germany, the occupied zones offered an attractive opportunity to advance themselves, Ms. Lower said.

There were up to 5,000 female guards in the concentration camps, making up about 10 percent of the personnel. Ms. Grese was hanged at the age of 21 for war crimes committed in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; Ms. Koch was convicted of participating in murders at Buchenwald.

Mr. Browning's book chronicled the role of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, which helped provide the manpower for the elimination of most Polish Jewry within a year. The book mentions one woman, the young, pregnant bride of one of the captains of the police battalion. She had gone to Poland for a kind of honeymoon and went along with her husband to observe the clearing of a ghetto.

Only 1 or 2 percent of the perpetrators were women, according to Ms. Lower. But in many cases where genocide was taking place, German women were very close by. Several witnesses have described festive banquets near mass shooting sites in the Ukrainian forests, with German women providing refreshments for the shooting squads whose work often went on for days.

Ms. Petri was married to an SS officer who ran an agricultural estate, complete with a colonial-style manor house and slave laborers, in Galicia, in occupied Poland. She later confessed to having murdered six Jewish children, aged 6 to 12. She came across them while out riding in her carriage. She was the mother of two young children, and was 25 at the time. Near naked, the Jewish children had apparently escaped from a railroad car bound for the Sobibor camp. She took them home, fed them, then led them into the woods and shot them one by one.

She told her interrogators that she had done so, in part, because she wanted to prove herself to the men.

She was tried in East Germany and served a life sentence.

Ms. Altvater Zelle went to Ukraine as a 22-year-old single woman and became the secretary of a district commissar, Wilhelm Westerheide. Survivors remembered her as the notorious Fräulein Hanna, and accused her, among other things, of smashing a toddler's head against a ghetto wall and of throwing children to their deaths from the window of a makeshift hospital.

Back in Germany, Ms. Altvater Zelle married, became a welfare case worker for youth in her hometown, Minden, and adopted a son.

In Commissar Westerheide's region, about 20,000 Jews were wiped out. He and his loyal secretary were tried twice in West Germany, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were acquitted both times because of contradictions that arose in the testimonies of witnesses gathered over 20 years, the former chief prosecutor in the case told Ms. Lower.

One survivor, Moses Messer, said he saw the woman he knew as Fräulein Hanna smashing the toddler to death against the wall. He told lawyers in Haifa, Israel, in the early 1960s: “Such sadism from a woman I have never seen. I will never forget this scene.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/world/europe/18holocaust.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Militia With Neo-Nazi Ties Patrols Arizona Desert

PHOENIX (AP) — Minutemen groups, a surge in Border Patrol agents and a tough new immigration law are not enough for a reputed neo-Nazi who is now leading a militia in the Arizona desert.

Jason Ready is taking matters into his own hands, declaring war on what he calls “narco-terrorists” and keeping an eye out for illegal immigrants. So far, he said, his patrols have found only a few border crossers, who were given water and handed over to the Border Patrol. Once, they found a decaying body in a wash, and alerted the authorities.

But local law enforcement officials are worried, given that Mr. Ready's group is heavily armed and identifies with the National Socialist Movement , an organization that believes that only non-Jewish, white heterosexual people should be American citizens and that everyone who is not white should leave the country — “peacefully or by force.”

“We're not going to sit around and wait for the government anymore,” Mr. Ready said. “This is what our founding fathers did.”

An escalation of civilian border watches has taken root in Arizona in recent years. Various groups patrol the desert and report suspicious activity to the Border Patrol, and generally they have not caused problems.

But Mr. Ready, a 37-year-old ex-Marine, is different. He and his friends are outfitted with military fatigues, body armor and assault rifles. Mr. Ready takes offense at the term “neo-Nazi,” but admits he identifies with the National Socialist Movement.

“These are explicit Nazis,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project . “These are people who wear swastikas on their sleeves.”

Mr. Ready is a reflection of the anger over illegal immigration in Arizona. Gov. Jan Brewer signed a new immigration law in April that requires police officers, while enforcing other laws, to question a person's immigration status if officers have a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally.

Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County said there had not been any episodes with the group in his jurisdiction. But he said he was concerned because an untrained group acting without the authority of the law could cause “extreme problems” and put itself and others in danger.

“I'm not inviting them. And in fact, I'd rather they not come,” Sheriff Babeu said. “Especially those who espouse hatred or bigotry such as his,” he said of Mr. Ready.

Mr. Ready said he is planning patrols throughout the summer.

“If they don't want my people out there, then there's an easy way to send us home: secure the border,” he said. “We'll put our guns back on the shelf, and that'll be the end of that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/us/18militia.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Jobs for the Picking

The United Farm Workers union has issued a call to unemployed American citizens:

“Job may include using hand tools such as knives, hoes, shovels, etc. Duties may include tilling the soil, transplanting, weeding, thinning, picking, cutting, sorting & packing of harvested produce. May set up & operate irrigation equip. Work is performed outside in all weather conditions (Summertime 90+ degree weather) & is physically demanding requiring workers to bend, stoop, lift & carry up to 50 lbs on a regular basis.”

It is safe to conclude that few if any Americans will take up the offer, no matter how hungry they are. The campaign is a sly attempt to draw attention to the push for immigration reform, particularly an effort to legalize undocumented farm workers. With anti-immigrant resentment running hot, many accuse immigrants of stealing American jobs. The union replies: How can immigrants steal jobs nobody else wants?

There are, of course, industries besides agriculture in which immigrant labor dominates, and it is fair to note that more Americans would take dirty, difficult jobs if they offered better pay and benefits. Still, it is hard to imagine the native-born work force itching to return en masse to housekeeping, landscaping, car washing, meatpacking, poultry plucking and street-corner day labor.

The answer is not to eradicate immigrants so American sons and daughters can have the low-wage economy all to themselves. It is to have those jobs filled by a legal immigrant work force, and to raise the floor on wages and working conditions so no American industry gets to run on cheap, exploited labor. That is the reform that President Obama and some members of Congress have been pushing for, against the objections of those who would rather complain about immigrant workers than fix the system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/opinion/18sun3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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