Results tagged “immigration”

Local Thai restaurant chain Thai Ginger is at the center of an immigration fraud conspiracy. Restaurant owner Varee Bradford was arrested yesterday for assembling "sham marriages" between four Thai nationals--three of which were her relatives--and Thai Ginger employees. Bradford had offered $10,000-$20,000 to select restaurant workers with U.S. residency that could move up the chain's corporate ladder, simply by agreeing to marry her relatives until death green card do they part. Now Bradford is looking at a maximum prison term of five years on the conspiracy charge and ten years for each of the document fraud counts.

BOOKS: Local author (from Anacortes) William Dietrich will be making the rounds of local book stores, starting tonight at University Book Store. He'll be reading from his recent book, The Rosetta Key. The book sounds a little stressful, but full of Indiana Jones-style adventure.

Expect a four-mile progression of mostly immigrant workers and the blue-collar citizens who love them. It's nothing new for immigrants (legal and illegal) to be the ones fighting for labor rights in this country. Indeed, they were a huge part of what we'll call the labor movement heyday now about a century ago.

Bill Gates doesn't have to wait for much of anything these days, even when it comes to Homeland Security altering laws based on his recommendations. Gates testified before Congress on March 12th of this year requesting the government to reconsider its stance on the length of time foreign non-immigrant students could remain and work in the US. Less than a month later, on April 4th, the Department of Homeland Security granted his request verbatim.

Has immigration become the most divisive issue in America? If the battle brewing at the University of Washington over planned protests on the issue is any indication, we're leaning towards yes. An email from College Republicans is making the rounds at UW, announcing a planned game of "Find the Illegal Immigrant Tag" on the HUB lawn. The "game" is planned for Tuesday afternoon to call for the securing of American borders and a crack-down on illegal immigration.

Poor John Vanderslice.

Trader Joe's Silent Movie Mondays wrap up tonight at the Paramount -- the redoubtable Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ -- with a trifecta of Charlie Chaplin shorts from 1917: The Cure, The Immigrant, and The Adventurer. Tickets are $12. The show starts at 7pm, but if you get there early, you can hear Freehold Theatre's George Lewis talk about Chaplin's contribution to the field of physical comedy.

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to.

This week's Comment of the Week was posted as a reply to a post about an immigration announcement out of the office of Mayor Greg Nickels and uses the word "homo" six times, including such creative constructions as "homo liberals," "homo culture," and "liberal homos."

The press release came in a short time ago and we haven't really had the opportunity to go through it with our hair pick of information discovery, but the fact that the Mayor even has an Immigration and Refuges Initiative is, itself, a good start. Look, World, Seattle has an immigration initiative and it doesn't involve the construction of any Great Walls, much less mass arrests or the floating of barges full of human cargo out the Sound (or, if it does call for mass arrests and deportations at least that part's buried and "improving services to Seattle's growing immigrant population" is the headline).

Everything we know about dodging the draft by heading to Canada we learned from The Brothers K and popular mythology. So, we don't know much. Little before our time, there. Despite the fact that today's army is all volunteer (and today's Canada is more Conservative) there are still some soldiers waiting out Iraq up north. Almost everyone that this Salon article mentions seems to have already pulled a shift in the Middle East and is in Canada dodging a redeployment. The article talks about these soldiers (they estimate some 250 of them) and the great lengths that Canada has gone to to see that they are returned to the U.S. military.

Last year's immigrant rights protest was out of character with the well-publicized, poorly-attended quick hitter marches that seem to be de rigueur in Seattle currently. Thirty thousand people came out for that one and snaked through the streets of Downtown for hours. Yesterday afternoon we left the office a few minutes early to try and track down the 2007 version and after chasing 5th all the way back to Westlake Center and coming up empty we found exactly one dude in the square with some immigrant rights flyers. "Yeah, they're already back at Seattle Center. I stayed here." That was 5:15pm, when the picture to the left was taken across the street from Westlake Center. C'mon guys, can't you linger a little while you're Downtown. You got the permit, take advantage of it. Camp out in the street a little, double back, do something to let us know that a couple thousand immigrants were here looking for their rights. Don't fly down your route like Eastern Washington is a half-block behind simultaneously trying to deport you and employ you under the table.

Austinist gets arty with an interactive guide to SXSW, loved some local art galleries and a new art exhibit and lamented the possible loss of "Friday Night Lights" production to New Mexico.

We sent our passport off to Philadelphia last week for routine renewal, then got unexpected assignment to cover a travel symposium in Italy...next week! No chance of getting new passport in time. Called State Department, expecting endless bureaucracy, got helpful advice on first ring. Used automated system to schedule interview right here in Seattle, got appointment within the hour. Impressive staff at Passport Office. At least one federal agency doing things right, makes leaving home a breeze.

Peter Bagge has an incredible comic in Reason that skewers absolutely everyone involved in immigration debate in this country. There are even some panels depicting the immigrant rights protests in Seattle that we attended.

Our little ditty against the Statuette of Liberty drew some comments from Dan Savage yesterday:

Seattlest has been a fan of the Hamilton Corner billboard (a.k.a. the right-wing Uncle Sam billboard) between Centralia and Chehalis since our first trip to Portland after moving here in the '90s. We love it in a "defend to the death your right to say it" sort of way.

Interleauge play begins again this weekend. In baseball stadiums all over the West geographical rivals will stare each other down: Oakland vs. San Francisco, Houston vs. Texas, Los Angeles of Los Angeles vs. Los Angeles of Anaheim, and Seattle vs. San Diego.

Yesterday, in the midst of a would-be rush hour, Seattle bore witness to one of the largest marches the city has seen in many years.

Before yesterday's game, seven Mariners of Latino descent asked for a private meeting with manager Mike Hargrove. Inside his office, they told Hargrove that, to show solidarity with immigration rights marchers, they were sitting out Monday's game against Minnesota.

We noted the arrival of some new water rat to the Seattle area on Friday, but after every single newspaper in the entire free world printed the AP story about it over the weekend maybe we should note it again. We're also going to note that nearly everyone who printed the article was fine with the AP headline, "South American Rodents Found in Seattle." Descriptive, but not all that punchy. You know, fine for the AP and thirty other newspapers around the world, but not quite up to Fox News standards. Fox had to modify rodents and spice up the verb a bit --"Ravenous South American Rodents Invade Washington State Lake". They INVADED. Personally Seattlest wonders if some editor at Fox News mistakenly thought he was heading an article on immigration when he wrote this.

LAist tracks an award-winning TV writer who worked on Good Times to a homeless shelter and sees a Little Old Lady get a jaywalking ticket because she can't get across fast enough (in the same post!). Poets invade Metro and an LAist contributor's new book asks WWJB.

There's a whole lot of latino going on in the park right outside our house in the Central District. Normally our neighborhood is exceptionally quiet all day, save for the sound of baking donuts from Gai's, until the little league softball or pee-wee football teams start showing up around 2:30. So we were mighty surprised to hear quite the ruckus out in Judkins Park, and peeking out we saw at least a couple hundred people in the park--more than pass through in a month, we'd wager.

In 2000 or 2001 a number of shipping containers showed up at Harbor Island filled not with stereos and Nikes, but with hopeful new residents. Local author Jonathan Raban was so affected by the human smuggling operation at that time that he wrote it as central to his 2003 novel Waxwings in which an entrepreneurial-minded transplant from "Everett" arrives on our shores the sole surviver of a similar container cruise and sets about making good. If the news pieces from 2001 didn't cement human trafficing via shipping container into our regional mythology, Raban's novel did.

The General marched with immigrants and their supporters this weekend in Yakima and has a post up about it now:

Seattlest saw a house party get senselessly attacked with a shotgun and end in seven dead. A local senator is debated and their version of the big dig is investigated. To truly get to the bottom of it they interview the writer Jonathan Raban.

The Seattle Times today stokes the raging firestorm of fear created by the discovery last week of the dope tunnel between houses straddling the border with Canada. Who knows what Canadian fury could be streaming into the state of Washington through similar operations?