The CDC just released a report on sexual and domestic violence that has the media hopping. Predictably the focus is on the “shocking” discovery that one-in-five women are raped in their lifetimes. I say “shocking” because that number has gone down since the “shocking” one-in-three figure given by a “study” in the 1980s, revised to a “shocking” one-in-four in the 1990s. The CDC didn’t use its own objective methodology, but that of a women’s advocacy organization, which predictably throws in everything including the kitchen sink to inflate the numbers. One curiosity is that Hispanic women report incidents of rape a third lower than white women and 50 percent lower than black women. This study was, however, different than similar studies in the past in that for the first time men were included. The numbers under which “domestic violence” would fall under are particularly eye-opening—and certainly not what the creators of this methodology intended when they sought number inflation for the sake of victim politics; it “works” just as well for men as it does for women. Not surprisingly, these revelations are low on the totem pole of media attention. The document is certainly more interesting than the superficial treatment the media has given; after examining it further, I’ll go into more detail about what I found here.
For the present I want to comment on yet another example how the Seattle Times’ plays a double game in regard to the immigration issue. True, as of this writing the Times hasn’t published yet another “Mexican” story giving readers another opportunity to bring out the Nazi in themselves lately, or at least not on the front page where I could see it. Last week I talked about how the news media seems loath to touch the thorny issue of how U.S. immigration authorities not only turn a largely blind eye to, but silently assists the illegal immigration of non-Latino groups. It has been estimated that one-quarter of all illegal immigrants in this country are non-Latino; anti-Latino apologists claim that these numbers are either inflated—or even if true, most merely over-stayed their visas and intend to go “home,” someday. But reports I have already referenced put this number in the range of 25 to 40 percent, meaning that as many as 75 percent of illegal immigrants of non-Latin American origin have entered the country illegally. How they are doing this and what happens once they are here has received little federal, state, media or political attention. Why? You won’t find out from the Times, because it has a racial agenda, and the local Asian and European immigrant community, unlike the Latino community here, has benefited from preference and positive press. Instead, we get stories about how Chinese and Russian nationals with lots of cash can obtain a green card if they “invest” a minimum of $500,000 in real estate or ski resorts that create at least 10 new jobs for “real” Americans. This story received mixed reactions from readers, but the ground was set to establish the “difference” between the “wanted” and “unwanted” immigrants, which goes against the grain of what this country allegedly stood for the advancement of the world’s poor and hungry—not the advancement of the greed of a few.
Before I continue further, let me say that I am more than willingly to acknowledge that the vast majority of non-Latino immigrants are hard-working people just trying to get along, a sentiment that I sense is not reciprocated, thanks to the media and politicians seeking scapegoats for propaganda purposes; since there are people who I am speaking of now who I feel no ill will toward and possibly even like, I dislike having to be forced into pointing out the hypocrisy of criminalizing and demonizing immigrants slaving in the fields when one considers that a sizable number of the non-Latino immigrants that this country has welcomed with open arms have taken advantage of their “opportunities” in ways that do not inspire confidence in this country’s melting-pot pretensions, even for “model” minorities. Take for instance the immigration that occurred after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, when tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians were allowed to immigrate to this country as refugees. Along with them came Chinese and Hmong (an “aboriginal” group that was originally situated in China) under similar political circumstances. Some of these people have successfully integrated (or have chosen to) into the larger community; but many others have simply melted into self-isolated, self-contained communities like the generic “Chinatowns” that seem to pop-up in large cities with significant immigrant populations.
In these places the stereotype of “model minority” has a serious flaw, one that cities like Chicago have discovered. Suburbs with large immigrant communities, like Highland Park and Glendale Heights, may appear from the outside to be the typical serene, “civilized” neighborhoods in comparison to the black inner-city communities, as envisioned by popular stereotype. But the quaint restaurants and souvenir shops merely disguise the terror behind the scenes perpetrated by violent gangs, such as The Wolf Boys and the Black Widows—perpetrating extortion, heroin dealing and home robberies. Chicago police are at a loss to deal with them, and not merely because the communities in which they operate are shut tight to outside interference due to culture and language, as well (like Latino communities) great distrust of the police because of experiences with brutal police oppression in their home countries. Police are also hamstrung by the fact that instead of using local gangsters, anonymous drug runners or enforcers from out of town are brought in to perform special “jobs,” and then simply skip town—leaving police helpless to apprehend the guilty parties.
Some members of these gangs might be illegal immigrants (one-in-nine Asian residents in this country may are likely illegal), although I suspect that most are second-generation or later citizens for whom the “American Dream” has failed. But while politicians in this country cry the seal the borders chant, there are other less obvious “borders” that seem just as sieve-like. Jumping ship or concealment in shipping containers in Canadian ports serving merchant ships from the Pacific Rim are one method to get into the country; another is operating complicated smuggling rings, such as the one operated by Chinese couple in Miami—until they were arrested by federal agents in 2003—which brought in thousands of Chinese illegal immigrants, each of whom paid $50,000 for this “service.” Others find entry using fraudulent identification in which to obtain Taiwanese passports, which allows them to enter the U.S. “legally,” and eventually to “disappear” into one of the ethnic communities that immigration authorities never seem to venture into.
Meanwhile, in New York City, there is a different kind of immigrant “problem,” revealed by a CBS News expose in 2009. “Little Odessa” in Brooklyn is “ground zero” for the Russian mob in the U.S.; Robert Friedman, an authority on the subject, claimed that today "Italian organized crime in America is a pimple on a horse's ass compared with Russian organized crime in America—and globally.” The Russian mafia operates in 50 countries, primarily those with weak or corrupt governments, particularly in eastern Europe, former Soviet “republics” and Latin America. In Mexico, Russian mobsters, in exchange for “services” like money-laundering, receive “discounted” drugs from the cartels. According to a 2007 Justice Department report, “Their major activities include drug and arms trafficking, money laundering, prostitution, traffic in women from Eastern and Central Europe and Russia, emigrant smuggling, kidnapping and credit card fraud.” Again, let us first make clear that this isn’t a blanket condemnation like the one that typically covers Latinos in this country; most Russian immigrants in this country are honest, hardworking people. Nevertheless Friedman, author of the book “Red Mafiya,” believes that the Russian mob is given dangerously little attention overall. He noted that "What the Italians were able to do was to get into labor unions, to get into legitimate industries to use their money to corrupt major politicians, cops, prosecutors—sometimes even fix political races. The Russians aren't there yet in America, but they'll learn. They'll learn very quickly." According to the FBI, the belief amongst the population that organized crime in this country, as typified by the Italian mob, is gradually disappearing is not only not true, but is in an “explosive” growth mode.
One may fairly ask how the “Red Mafiya” gained a foothold in the U.S. if immigration laws are so “stringent.” “Under pressure from the Nixon administration,” according to the CBS report, “Moscow agreed to allow more Soviet Jews to emigrate. But in a move copied years later by Fidel Castro, the Soviets opened prison doors in the gulag and thousands of hard-core criminals left for the United States.” And these people were no amateurs “Since then, the Russian Mafia has been linked to penny stock manipulation, gas excise tax scams, health care fraud and cybercrime—criminal enterprises where they are pioneers, not just perpetrators…Russians are particularly good at money laundering, the lifeblood of organized crime. In fact, other crime groups use the Russians to clean their dirty money.”
It isn’t my desire to stereotype other groups like Latinos have been; my point here is that the media is guilty of high hypocrisy when it “lionizes” one group of immigrants and demonizes another. Truth above all is what the media should strive for, and media like the Times has failed miserably.
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