The Rot

[Mr King]

LAPD Officer Arrested For Trying To Smuggle "Immigrants" Across Border

 

 

SAN DIEGO (CBSLA) — A Los Angeles police officer has been arrested on federal charges alleging he tried to smuggle two illegal immigrants into the United States this week in southeastern San Diego County.Mambasse Koulabalo Patara has been charged with violating immigration laws, according to a federal complaint filed Wednesday.

He was arrested early Tuesday morning at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Pine Valley, located about 12 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to the complaint, at 12:15 a.m. Tuesday, Patara drove up to the checkpoint with two male passengers in a 2006 Toyota Corolla.

While being interviewed by Border Patrol agents, Koulabalo showed them his LAPD badge and stated he was off-duty, the complaint states. Agents later patted him down and found his service-issued gun in his waistband, the complaint reads.

Koulabalo reportedly told border agents his two passengers were U.S. citizens. The men, identified as Herman Lopez and his nephew German Ramirez Gonzalez, eventually admitted they were in the country illegally.

One of the men said they had known Koulabalo for years and had worked for him at his Fontana home. He added they had decided to go to a casino in Alpine in southern San Diego County, before heading to another one in Campo and ending up at the border checkpoint near Pine Valley.

All three men were transported to the Campo Border Patrol Station and arrested at around 1:30 a.m.

Back at his home in Fontana, neighbors were in disbelief.

“I heard what happened, and I’m really shocked,” said one woman. “They’ve always just been a really nice family ever since my husband and I have lived here. […] There’s always multiple sides to every story, so I think that’s important for everyone to keep in mind […] before jumping to conclusions on these types of things.”

“I just don’t believe that he’s doing that,” another neighbor told CBS2. “I don’t believe at all that he’s capable of doing something like that.”

An LAPD spokesperson confirmed to CBS2 that Patara has been placed on paid administrative leave.

If convicted, Koulabalo faces up to five years in prison.

 

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/04/26/lapd-officer-arrested-smuggle-immigrants-border/

[Paul G.]

This is the real reason for illegal immigration.

 

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/19/big-name-businesses-exploit-immigrant-labor/

[seahawk]

California...

[TTK Ciar]

Nothing that can't be solved by raising visa limits by an order of magnitude and reducing naturalization delays from 20+ years to something sane (like six months).

 

The California tech industry is straining at the bit for well-educated tech workers, and work visas are at a premium.

 

Every work visa used to bring in low-skilled menial labor is a visa that can't be used to bring in a highly-skilled tech worker, and what's the sense in that? And the agricultural industry depends on immigrants every bit as much as the technology industry.

 

Until the immigration laws are fixed, there's no good recourse but to break them.

 

Negative consequences of this include exploitation of undocumented laborers, families broken up by immigration enforcement, lives lost in unsafe border crossings, expensive hysterics like Trump's proposed border wall, and increased xenophobia (since they're "criminals" for coming here illegally, they must be "criminals" in other ways too, right?).

 

H1B work visa quotas explained:

 

http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/H1BvisaCapH1BquotaSystem/ref/1568/

Edited April 28, 2018 by TTK Ciar

[Brian Kennedy]

Broadly agree with you, but the NorCal tech industry is having trouble recruiting more techies simply because housing in the area has become too expensive. Its literally impossible to buy a house and raise a family off a Facebook programmers income anymore, even though those guys are getting paid like $150k a year.

[DKTanker]

Nothing that can't be solved by raising visa limits by an order of magnitude and reducing naturalization delays from 20+ years to something sane (like six months).

 

If you want to essentially do away with limits and standards, why the pretense?

[Colin]

A Border fence is part of it, a guest worker program that allows for people to work at jobs where you need people and keeps everyone on the legal side, is good for the community, workers and reduces policing costs. Your immigration system is borked, you are going to need an amnesty program to keep the otherwise law abiding people who are already working a way to stay, because really they are the people you want. Do you blame them for wanting to leave Mexico behind? Any real solution is going to leave people dissatisfied on both sides of the political fence.

[TTK Ciar]

If you want to essentially do away with limits and standards, why the pretense?

On the scale from "must secure a visa every year for 20+ years to become a citizen, any lapse restarts the clock" at one end, and "no standards" at the other end, what would you consider "just right"? :-)

 

The existing policies are strangling businesses. What is your solution?

[DKTanker]

 

If you want to essentially do away with limits and standards, why the pretense?

On the scale from "must secure a visa every year for 20+ years to become a citizen, any lapse restarts the clock" at one end, and "no standards" at the other end, what would you consider "just right"? :-)

 

The existing policies are strangling businesses. What is your solution?

 

Start by stopping the incentive not to work, instead use money saved by not feeding the sloth to incentivize parents and their children to work toward STEM degrees. Start an educational PR war that returns shame to sloth while praising productivity. Recruit well respected Black Americans to go on an educational PR offensive that states being educated =/= white, rather being educated means being educated. Publicly shame leftists that demand minorities be kept in virtual bondage to victimhood.

 

There are boatloads of people in our society that have been taught the wrong lessons for the last 55 years and it will take some time to overcome the institutionalized mediocrity perpetuated by the Great Society, but the answer isn't importing talent, the answer is to grow talent from within. The Dems created the problem, the GOP sat by and let it happen, time for both the left and right to put things right.

[JWB]

The left wing education establishment resists STEM because they believe education is about teaching compassion.

[R011]

DK:

 

That's worth doing, but it will take years, perhaps a couple of decades, before the effects are noticeable. In the meantime, you're still going to need guest workers and skilled immigrants. As more Americans get needed skills and attitudes, the need for foreign labour should decrease.

[DKTanker]

DK:

That's worth doing, but it will take years, perhaps a couple of decades, before the effects are noticeable. In the meantime, you're still going to need guest workers and skilled immigrants. As more Americans get needed skills and attitudes, the need for foreign labour should decrease.

Should be the first serious objective. To do otherwise is to sacrifice the long term prospects of the native population to satiate the short term goals of politicians and business. Spoiler alert, we are doing otherwise with no intention of changing.

 

Sort of reminds me of the mocking of "drill, baby, drill" arguing it would take 10 years or more before drilling could have even a little impact. Took much less than 10 years and the global impact has been enormous.

Edited May 1, 2018 by DKTanker

[R011]

It takes twelve years of school before a kid is ready to spend another four to get s basic STEM degree. Drilling or tracking only a couple before oil flows. Meanwhile, someone has to pick lettuce and write code. The problems is that what should be a temporary solution is better for politicians and employers than the permanent one.

[BansheeOne]

There is a still-developing affair surrounding the former head of the Bremen field office of the German Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), named as Ulrike B., who is suspected of having illegaly granted asylum requests in at least 1,176 cases. Her motivation is still diffuse from what is publically known; she is noted to have cared about the fate of Yazidis in Iraq in social media, and most of those who benefited from her actions are reported to be Kurds of that religion. She also seems to have colluded with a lawyer named as Irfan C. for the benefit of his clients between 2013 and 2016, and may have either accepted gratifications like restaurant outings or had a personal relationship with him. Applicants were reportedly even bussed to Bremen from the neighbor states of Lower Saxony and NRW for this purpose; only about 100 were living in the city itself. Two other lawyers, an interpreter and at least one more person are also being investigated, and several more BAMF staffers had their IT access blocked and were transfered due to suspected involvement.

 

As it has turned out, as far back as July 2014 the head of the BAMF's field offices in Friedland and Oldenburg, Lower Saxony, complained to both B. and national HQ that she was interferring with cases in his AOR, like suddenly notifying a court that two Iraqis up for deportation would get a stay. Apparently one Sunday in 2015 she logged into the BAMF system and filed 25 follow-on asylum requests at one go for Iraqis who had first applied in Austria and should have gone back there under the rules of the Dublin Agreements. HQ didn't however get in gear until January 2016, when disciplinary proceedings were opened that involved her being removed as field office head and her access to the IT system blocked in July, though she kept working at the office in quality management (...).

 

In September the same year the Lower Saxony state minister of interior complained to the president of the BAMF in person about two deportations that had failed after the Bremen office had issued a ban. Even after disciplinary proceedings against B. ended in the spring of 2017, she might have been involved in illicit actions; in June that year, one of her co-workers advised HQ that there may have been "hundreds" of cases over the years. In October, new internal investigations were started, and in November BAMF finally filed a criminal complaint over a false asylum grant which led to police investigations of the aforementioned suspects. Three weeks ago, various of their offices and dwellings were searched, and B. was put on administrative leave.

 

This week, a leaked internal report by the acting new head of the Bremen field office, Josefa Schmid, was presented by national broadcaster ZDF, which states that there had been at least 3,332 cases illicitely processed there between 2015 and 2017, and possibly more before that, which may have resulted in wrong asylum grants; though a lot of the problems she listed are a litany of stuff that has been known to occur throughout the field offices, mostly due to work overload in the crisis years of 2015/16, like identities not properly ascertained, passports not checked for validity, no fingerprints taken, etc.* Bremen prosecutors investigating the affair have said that they can't confirm the numbers so far, anyway.

 

However, Schmid also stated that in view of the numerous ineffective complaints by staffers to HQ, the impression was that the latter was not really interested in resolving the issue, and possibly involved in it; she therefore suggested a neutral investigative body. To prove her charges of CYA right, she was promptly removed as an office head the day after the TV report, banned from entering her office and transfered back to her native Bavaria "for her protection", though she is fighting the decision in court. Just two weeks ago, BAMF president Jutta Cordt told the Bundestag's interior committee that she was seeing no systemic problem in her agency, though she couldn't rule out that control procedures could be circumvented with subversive collusion of several staffers. Anyway, the Interior Ministry is having a total of 4,500 decisions revisited as part of a new QA system, something that has been done before in the last two years.

 

It's of course not surprising that a major agency dealing with processing the cases of refugees would include folks who are sympathetic to the pro-asylum cause, though most would probably not go the lengths in this affair. It should be recalled that a major factor for the 2015 refugee crisis was an internal BAMF memo that the Dublin rules will be temporarily suspended to concentrate on processing the growing number of arrivals, which was somehow forwarded to a pro-asylum organization that promptly plastered it all over the net. But in fact Bremen has been known for years for being big on awarding protection status and small on deportations; in 2017, acceptance rate for Iraqis there was 96 percent compared to the national average of 64.5, and for Iranians it was 86 vs. 57, both at the national top. Other nationalities like Ethiopians, Somalis and Turks showed no peculiarities though, or were actually at the low end. The emerging shenanigans would explain a lot of that, particularly considering the apparent sympathy for Kurds/Yazidis.

 

 

 

* Crash-hiring additional staff did not necessarily improve quality in the short term, particularly in the freelance field. This and last year, 2,100 interpreters alone were terminated as help due to issues ranging from shoddy work to lack of trust in their neutrality, and in some cases reporting on applicants to Turkish intelligence. There is the well-known case of the Bundeswehr 1LT arrested a year ago on the suspicion of having planned false-flag terror attacks; this guy presented himself as a refugee from a French-Syrian family and was awarded protection status though he didn't even speak Arabic. He is no longer considered a flight risk and was released from remand last November, but charges are pending.

[DB]

Presumably she thinks she's a modern day Schindler, or something.

[Mobius]

 

If you want to essentially do away with limits and standards, why the pretense?

On the scale from "must secure a visa every year for 20+ years to become a citizen, any lapse restarts the clock" at one end, and "no standards" at the other end, what would you consider "just right"? :-)

 

The existing policies are strangling businesses. What is your solution?

 

So add the work requirement for food stamps?

[Marek Tucan]

Sure. But don't whine when Democrats get extra votes

[BansheeOne]

In the affair surrounding the Bremen BAMF field office, all ca. 18,000 positive asylum decisions from that authority since the year 2000 will be reviewed within the next three months. A little over 4,500 connected to the incriminated three lawyers have already been checked, including 1,500 from Bremen; obviously they also had other clients, though no foul play has so far being reported from other field offices. Apparently they took 700-1,000 Euro per head up front to bus people to Bremen for guaranteed recognition. By tentative reports, about 600 of the 1,500 decisions might be revoked, though it will not be quick or easy.

 

Allegedly 90 percent of the reviewed Bremen cases are also included in the report of the former acting field office head Josefa Schmid over which she was transfered back to Bavaria, though the BAMF now says she was to leave anyway because after all she was only acting. OTOH, it has been pointed out that she is also the unsalaried mayor of her hometown for the FDP and happens to be running for the Bavarian state assembly in the state elections coming up in October, so might not be adverse to some publicity.

 

There are certainly attempts to tie the affair to those elections now, particularly via former Bavarian minister president and now-federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer. He can't be held responsible for things that occurred within BAMF before he assumed that post two months ago of course, so the rather laborious construction is that Schmid gave her report to his state secretary Stephan Mayer in March already, but Seehofer previously stated he only got to know about the issue in April. The FDP in the Bundestag is already demanding a parliamentary investigation, which looks a little convenient given Schmid's own party affiliation.

Edited May 19, 2018 by BansheeOne

[BansheeOne]

The Interior Ministry has suspended the authority of the BAMF Bremen field office to grant asylum for the time being. Apparently it has been found that 97 percent of applications by clients of the two main suspects among the investigated lawyers were approved. Federal investigators have gotten in on the case since the local anti-corruption squad of Bremen police seems to have become overwhelmed with the extent.

 

By what is known at this point, BAMF HQ was dicking around over what to do as late as February 2017, with a division leader finally deciding there should be a "noiseless" investigation to head off a "politically noisy" one by the State of Lower Saxony, which had repeatedly complained over the meddling of the Bremen office in their affairs. What caused it to be finally handed over to prosecution authorities in October was a false asylum grant turning up in Gießen, Hesse, allegedly processed by a Bremen staffer who was actually on sick leave at the time.

 

It's funny watching the political parties bending themselves into pretzels trying to attack Interior Minister Horst Seehofer over this; by the current timeline, all they can lay at his door is that he was informed only the day after police searched the premises of the suspects, two weeks after the acting head of the Bremen office sent her report to his state secretary (who reportedly only read it four days earlier himself and forwarded it to the appropriate division of the ministry rather than the minister).

 

As noted, the FDP wants a parliamentary investigation, and the AfD would obviously be in; however, they need at least one other party to reach the 25 percent quorum in the Bundestag necessary to start one. The Greens and Left would like to piss on Seehofer's leg, but not in cooperation with the political right, on an issue that runs counter to their pro-asylum stance. FDP head Christian Lindner promptly blasted the Greens that their job as an opposition party should not be to defend Merkel's policies.

 

Meanwhile Seehofer himself has stated he would welcome an inquiry, but CDU/CSU are obviously not going to vote for it if they can help it, while the SPD is saying that the minister is obviously not at fault for things that happened before he assumed his office, but should get to the bottom of it anyway. I'm sure that separately from the factual investigation, the affair will provide great political entertainment for quite some time.

[BansheeOne]

In the affair surrounding the Bremen BAMF field office, all ca. 18,000 positive asylum decisions from that authority since the year 2000 will be reviewed within the next three months.

 

According to a news report, the internal investigation of the Bremen affair has found "gross disregard of regulations" in 165 out of 18,315 positive asylum decisions made by the local BAMF office since the year 2000. That's a lot less than the initially suspected ca. 1,200, though there may be more not-so-gross irregularities. At any rate, the issue has largely vanished from public interest as various actors have found other balls to chase.

[Murph]

Having been appointed as the Internal Affairs Sgt in my department, it has opened my eyes to say the least, especially about false allegations.

[Simon Tan]

Why is everyone hooked on Degrees? They are only marginally useful for a small part of the work force. Less academia is better.

[Paul G.]

Why is everyone hooked on Degrees? They are only marginally useful for a small part of the work force. Less academia is better.

Because the consumer economy is the US no longer can support blue collar wages alone. A degree now will earn you the same living on average that a HS diploma would've got you in 1960.

[Simon Tan]

Only if you be some unskilled person. Learn a solid trade. Be a plumber.

[Ivanhoe]

Why is everyone hooked on Degrees? They are only marginally useful for a small part of the work force. Less academia is better.

 

IME because HR types are stupid, and want easily verifiable creds with which they can filter resumes. Judging knowledge and skills is difficult, checking checkboxes is easy.