not innovative

Border Patrol lets some illegals go — over and over again

by ALICIA A. CALDWELL, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 7 minutes ago

EL PASO, Texas - Josefa Gonzalez Loya has sneaked across the Mexican border at least 128 times in the past eight years. And each time, the Border Patrol has been nice enough to give her a lift home.

Gonzalez and a group of other women and children — all Indians from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca — have no interest in staying in the United States. All they want to do is panhandle outside El Paso businesses, using the children as lures.

At the end of a productive day, they wait for the Border Patrol to come pick them up and drive them back to the border.

Little dramas like this play out day after day, accounting for thousands of arrests but hardly any prosecutions in the past several years.

The Oaxacan immigrants fall under a loophole that gives border agents discretion to keep some adults and children together and out of jail.

"They do qualify for jail and prosecution," Border Patrol spokesman Ramiro Cordero said. "However, we've got to look at the humanitarian factor first if we are going to have to separate the family."

Nearly 500 Oaxacan (pronounced wah-HAH-ken) women and children in colorful serapes have been rounded up since the fiscal year began in October, accounting for thousands of arrests.

The middle-aged Gonzalez and some of the others make a mad dash across the Rio Grande with the help of a guide. Occasionally they get caught trying to slip across, but evidently they are good at evading the Border Patrol, even though they use the same general area over and over. Sometimes, authorities realize they have arrived when they see the little footprints the diminutive immigrants leave along the banks of the Rio Grande.

Once she makes it across, Gonzalez, who speaks only a language common among Indians in Oaxaca, catches a bus to a strip mall a few miles away from the border, just far enough into El Paso to evade agents on patrol. There she starts begging for spare change.

Border agents say when she and her entourage are ready to go home, they muster in front of a store. Then they wait, knowing their presence will create enough of a nuisance that agents will come pick them up. When they do, the beggars' mugshots are taken and their fingerprints checked. Then they are walked back across the border.

"Half the time when you see them, they're ready to go," Cordero said.

Gonzalez has been arrested 128 times. Despite a crackdown on illegal immigration along much of the border, she and most of her tribal members have never been jailed.

Most illegal immigrants cannot count on the goodness of immigration officials' hearts. Unlike the Oaxacans and other Mexicans caught near the border, illegal immigrants arrested in the U.S. interior are routinely separated from their children, with some youngsters placed in foster care while their parents are deported.

Cordero said agents have the authority to "look at the totality of the circumstances" when deciding if an illegal immigrant should be prosecuted.

"They are coming to beg. They are not trying to further their entry into the United States," Cordero said.

He said it is impossible to say how much each arrest costs the taxpayers.

Gonzalez and her crew seem well-aware of the law. The women all claim the children as their own, but that would mean women obviously in their 50s and 60s have just had babies. Often the same child is claimed by different women on different days. And still, the agents err on the side of keeping the self-proclaimed "families" together.

"We're pretty sure they are family units or at least close-knit groups," Cordero said.

Even David Hensley, manager of an El Paso department store, gives the panhandlers a few dollars before calling the authorities to take them away.

"It's good to see that the Border Patrol is showing some common sense in dealing with the reality that is life on the border," said Ruben Garcia, who runs a shelter in El Paso that sometimes houses some of the Oaxacans. "Nothing is served by locking these people up."

sometimes the policy solutions should be tough or innovative (like the gladwell article), not easy

Dumb as We Wanna Be

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: April 30, 2008

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again — which often happens — investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies.

The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down, and Mr. Bush — showing not one iota of leadership — refused to get all the adults together in a room and work out a compromise. Stalemate. Meanwhile, Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. Ours, at best, run two years.

“It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘Congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.”

It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point “where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics” that it would turn its back on the next great global industry — clean power — “but that’s exactly what is happening.” If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.

While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio, no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany — 540 high-paying engineering jobs — because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not.

In 1997, said Resch, America was the leader in solar energy technology, with 40 percent of global solar production. “Last year, we were less than 8 percent, and even most of that was manufacturing for overseas markets.”

The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.