[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

I almost choked on my Cheerios this morning reading this report on yesterday's May Day rallies in the LA Times:

"At a May Day news conference, Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce President Gary Toebben said the government should concentrate its limited resources and enforcement efforts on those companies with a clear history of exploitation of workers.

Toebben was joined by Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., which released a study showing that tens of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue could be lost if continued raids force businesses to flee the state.

The study analyzed three industries thought to employ high numbers of immigrant workers -- fashion, food processing and furniture manufacturing -- and found that about 10,000 businesses created nearly 500,000 direct and indirect jobs and produced $18.3 billion in wages in 2006. If 15% of those firms left the region would lose nearly 75,000 jobs, the report found.

"We can't afford any more of these raids," Kyser said, adding that recruiters from Washington state and elsewhere have begun aggressively courting businesses to relocate. ..."

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[courtesy of California Progress Report]

PPIC Survey: “California Screaming: Economic Angst Hits Record High”

By Frank D. Russo

The Public Policy Institute of California has released today a massive survey of 2,000 Californians with 35 pages of data that is richly textured and shows the mosaic of opinions on issues of importance to residents and voters in our state.

We’ve already written articles on the findings here from PPIC on the February 5 primary election: the presidential race and on Prop 93, the term limits reform measure, but the rest from this offering from the PPIC has information that will have longer influences than these other fleeting poll numbers of fascination to politicos and horserace handicappers.

I’d recommend taking some time to peruse what the PPIC finds from this very large sample which has a low 2% margin of error. In the conflicting or seemingly inconsistent responses of Californians lies a clue as to the direction we should move forward in as a state and the difficulties of governing with a divided government and voting population.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

Who said this? "Immigration to this country is increasing and is making its greatest relative increase from races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes among those races … half of whom have no occupation and most of whom represent the rudest form of labor.

"The immigrants who come to the United States reduce the rate of wages by ruinous competition, and then take their savings out of the country. Home as a foreign country. … They have no interest or stake in country and never become American citizens." Many, he went on, are genetically prone to crime, insanity and disease.

Five points credit if you guessed it isn't Rep. (and late presidential candidate) Tom "throw all illegals out" Tancredo of Colorado, or Mitt Romney, or Rush Limbaugh or Lou Dobbs of CNN. Two more points if you recognized it as not coming from anyone in this century. A perfect 10 if you traced it back to the last decades of the 19th century.

The author, in a pair of articles on "The Restriction of Immigration" for The Atlantic magazine in 1891, was Rep. (later Sen.) Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. His undesirables were Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, people like Tancredo's Sicilian great-grandparents. In those days, of course, everybody was undocumented.

by Todd Beeton [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

(cross-posted from Courage Campaign)

Yesterday, the Dreams Across America train took off from L.A.'s Union Station, one of four trains around the country carrying 100 "dreamers" to Washington, D.C. to tell the stories of their own immigration or how immigrants have touched their lives. There will be blogging from the train (Courage Campaign's own Rick Jacobs will have daily updates) to capture these stories both in written and video form, the goal being to humanize and personalize immigration the way a rally of hundreds of thousands in the street can't.

All of the immigrants on the train are legal American citizens but that didn't stop Lou Dobbs from attacking the Dreams Across America campaign yesterday. He likes to call it "The Amnesty Train" or "A Train" for short (ain't he clever!) So today, one of the dreamers, Cathy Gurney, shot back, challenging him to get on the train to hear the real stories of immigration in this country.

Cathy Gurney's statement and her story over the flip...