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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Greetings. TRAC’s new report on Immigration Judges shows vast differences in the rate at which the nation’s 200-plus immigration judges decline hundreds of thousands of applications for asylum in the United States.
In one recent period, for example, while ten percent of the judges denied asylum in 86% or more of the their decisions, another ten percent denied asylum in only 34% of theirs. The Immigration Court, a branch of the Justice Department, asserts in a mission statement that it is committed to the “uniform application of the immigration law in all cases.” Yet at one end of the scale was a Miami judge who turned down 96.7% of the asylum requests. At the other end was a New York judge who rejected only 9.8%.

To see the new study — complete with graphics and judge-by-judge data — go to http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/160/ . The report is part of a new site devoted exclusively to immigration issues. This site — http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/ — has other reports on the Border Patrol apprehensions, Border Patrol staffing, the inspection process at official ports of entry, the criminal enforcement of the immigration laws, etc. Also available is a plain English glossary of words and phrases common to the immigration world and a special library of immigration studies from the GAO, Congressional Research Service and the inspectors general of several agencies.

But we ain’t on it. Texas earned three mentions Friday from Frida Berrigan as she briefed Amy Goodman on the role of the USA in supplying Israeli weapons.

Texas gets attention from Berrigan as the location where Lockheed-Martin co-manufactures the Sufa F-16 fighter, a double-seated holy terror of incoming air attacks.
Lockheed Martin does the finishing work on these 45-million-dollar weapons after they are started in Israel. The contract to build 102 Sufas will be financed by taxpayers of the USA. When the Sufas are completed, Israel will have a stock of 362 F-16s, second largest only to the US Air Force.

Boeing and Raytheon also make Berrigan’s list of arms suppliers to Israel. Both companies make missiles. Boeing, as we know, also makes planes and helicopters.

When Berrigan mentions these big names in weaponry, she hits three of the five finalists for the huge SBInet border contract that is scheduled to be let in the Fall of 2006. Is it not deeply chilling to think that these powers are competing for security along the Rio Grande?

I think we have to dissent while there is still time. We should seek to grow better things than these in the name of homeland security.

Rahul Mahajan, the former Green Party candidate for Governor, had courage enough to campaign for a de-militarized Texas.

“Homeland Security is part of a pre-planned program for domestic repression, occasioned, among other things, by fear of the possibilities of the so-called anti-globalization movement,” said that former candidate for Governor.

We now have quite a spectacle of candidates we’ll be hearing from lots and loudly. By comparison to Mahajan, ain’t they all whistlin’ Dixie?

Paul Craig Roberts argues in the subscriber edition of CounterPunch that declines in pay and availability of USA employment can be best explained by ‘free trade’ policies that encourage export of middle-class work. We offer some excerpts, beginning with another indication of suppressed public information–gm

“If outsourcing jobs offshore is good for U.S. employment, why won’t the U.S. Department of Commerce release the 200-page, $335,000 study of the impact of the offshoring of U.S. high-tech jobs? Republican political appointees reduced the 200-page report to 12 pages of public relations hype and refuse to allow the Technology Administration experts who wrote the report to testify before Congress.
Democrats on the House Science Committee are unable to pry the study out of the hands of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. On March 29, 2006, Republicans on the House Science Committee
voted down a resolution designed to force the Commerce Department to release the study to Congress. Obviously, the facts don’t fit the Bush regime’s globalization hype.”

American economists, some from incompetence
and some from being bought and paid for, described globalization as a “win-win” development. It was supposed to work like this: The U.S. would lose market share in tradable manufactured goods and make up the job and economic loss with highly educated knowledge workers. The win for America would be lower-priced manufactured goods and a white-collar work force. The win for China would be manufacturing jobs that would bring economic development to that country.

It did not work out this way, as Morgan
Stanley’s Stephen Roach, formerly a cheerleader for globalization, recently admitted. It has become apparent that job creation and real wages in the developed economies are seriously lagging behind emtheir historical norms as offshore outsourcing
displaces the “new economy” jobs in “software programming, engineering, design, and the medical profession, as well as a broad array of professionals in the legal, accounting, actuarial, consulting,
and financial services industries”.

The real state of the U.S. job market is revealed by a Chicago Sun-Times report on January 26, 2006, that 25,000 people applied for 325 jobs at a new Chicago Wal-Mart. According to the BLS payroll jobs data, over the past half-decade (January 2001 – January 2006, the data series available at time of writing) the U.S. economy created 1,050,000 net new private sector jobs and 1,009,000 net new government jobs for a total five-year figure of 2,059,000. That is seven million jobs short of keeping up with population growth, definitely a serious job shortfall.

The BLS payroll jobs data contradict the hype from business organizations, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that offshore outsourcing is good for America. CounterPunch subscriber edition Vol. 13, No. 13

By TOM HARRIS / KVUE News

A controversy is brewing over whether or not the state of Texas should provide prisoners with free condoms.

One of the reasons this topic is coming into light is because Texas ranks No. 2 in the nation for the number of inmates diagnosed with AIDS.

Texas ranks third for number of prisoners with HIV.

About twenty ACT UP Austin members marched to the offices of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

They are group working to stop the spread of HIV and they think condoms in prisons will help.

“It’s not just an issue that is contained behind bars people come out of the prisons they come back to our communities and bring with them anything they got in prison,” said Ruth True of ACT UP. Source: KVUE