Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered the Agriprocessors Inc. complex in northeast Iowa Monday morning to execute a criminal search warrant for evidence relating to aggravated identity theft, fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and other crimes, said Tim Counts, a Midwest ICE spokesman.

Agents are also executing a civil search warrant for people illegally in the United States, he said.

Anyone who’s been following the immigration issue in America during the last few years knows that one of the two paragraphs above is true, and the other is horseshit. The answer is below the fold.

A moment’s thought should give the answer. The ridiculously-named “ICE” is in the business of rounding up illegal aliens, not going after identity theft and “other crimes” against which all levels of government already have a bountiful supply of law-enforcement agencies and alphabet soup from which to choose.

No, what happened is the county sheriff got fed up with all the townsfolk complaining about the Hispanics in town (they’ve got enough trouble already dealing with all the Jews…), called up one of his buddies in whatever the capital of Iowa is, who called one of his buddies in Washington, who pulled some strings and got the migra to make take a little trip to northeast Iowa. There is no evidence of identity theft, no evidence of fraudulent use of Social Security numbers. Unless by “evidence”, they are referring to the presence of large numbers of Spanish-speaking people, among which one can reasonably guess there might be some illegals. However, a guess is not evidence. But in today’s climate of rounding up the foreigners who do our shit jobs for us at low wages, and sending ‘em back where they came from, so that you and I can pay higher food prices and enjoy a Spanish-free environment, a “guess” is good enough.

Rights groups on Wednesday praised Hollywood director Steven Spielberg’s decision to shun involvement with the Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies because China was not doing enough to help end the crisis in Darfur.

I can think of a lot of reasons to condemn China’s corrupt, murderous regime without dragging the Sudan into it.

China is believed to have special influence with Sudan because it buys two-thirds of the country’s oil exports, while selling the regime weapons and defending Khartoum in the U.N. Security Council.

Oh, it’s about oil. Well that explains it.

But one has to wonder whether some are finding it easier to criticize China via its propensity to stir up trouble in third-party proxies like Darfur than to directly address the even more appalling way it treats its own citizens. They probably know that China’s leaders tend to go ballistic at any direct criticism of the motherland, and resort to nonsensical cries of “victimization” (“It is hard to see Western bias dying down in the short term”), as if basic human dignity is a “foreign”, “Western” concept.

Look for more tip-toeing around China’s dreadful human rights record both at home and abroad in the run-up to this summer’s Olympics. This ought to be interesting.

“Can we simply abandon an enterprise because it is a problem for a particular individual?” Chertoff told CNN. “I don’t think I can accept that.”

A perfect expression of this administration’s contemptible loathsomeness.

Now, I’m not going to go deeply into the issue of immigration here, illegal or otherwise. As it happens, I’m rather in favor of immigration. I believe it makes our country stronger to allow the free flow of people seeking a better life. The rise in the number of illegals is due mainly to our broken immigration system, not to some imagined desire to “break the law”. For now, let’s take the Realpolitik view that illegals in large numbers are going to remain a permanent feature of American life.

The real issue with Spitzer’s idiotic display is the tortured, mixed message it sends about driver’s licenses. The State has always said, correctly, that driving is a privilege, not a right. Driving is dangerous enough that we expect a minimal level of competency before allowing a person to do it. But here comes Spitzer turning it into some kind of entitlement or product (“it’s just like buying a Metrocard!”). So which is it? Is driving a privilege or not?

More importantly, there is the mixed message brought about by the de-facto usage of the driver’s license (or non-driver ID) as a national ID card. The driver’s license is the most valuable document to provide to the federal government when applying for a passport (so valuable, in fact, that they don’t allow using a non-driver ID–as I found out a few years ago, with the bogus excuse that the non-driver ID did not require sufficient proof of citizenship). In other words, the driver’s license is recognized by the federal government as evidence of citizenship. Now Spitzer wants a “special” license for non-citizens. Illegals are predictably up-in-arms about this. They want a real license because they don’t want to be tracked by the government; better to just continue driving without one.

A cynic could almost view this initiative as a excuse to ignore (or bypass) the real, intractable problem: the broken immigration system. This view posits that we’ll never solve the immigration problem, and illegals need licenses, so we’ll give ‘em licenses. Well. I agree that drivers need to be licensed, but circumventing the national use of driver’s licenses as proof of citizenship is not the way to go about it. Instead, the real work of fixing the broken immigration system needs to happen. This will likely include some sort of amnesty to legalize the illegals who are already here–which I am completely in favor of for those who have proven otherwise law-abiding, productive members of society. But it will mainly involve speeding up the process of becoming a citizen, thereby removing the perverse incentive to remain here illegally in the first place.

It starts with an insightful observation that people are “done” at the age of twenty: their views are fully-formed and will not change. From there, it veers into a discussion of various times and places where it was just peachy to perpetuate vicious slurs against “the other”, including, most notably, an unbelievably unfunny piece in the National Lampoon by none other than P.J. O’Rourke that with a straight face provides a categorical listing of every vile stereotype that was current in white American culture at the time. “Niggers”, “kikes” and “chinks” are well-represented. I suppose O’Rourke’s piece was meant to be humorous in some way, but from the hindsight afforded by 2007, I am hard-pressed to imagine that it was anything other than scandalous even as long ago as 1977, when it was written. Derbyshire provides the answer to why this sort of thing isn’t “funny” any more:

Why aren’t foreigners funny any more? The answer is of course: Multiculturalism. When there is a foreign family living in the house next door, and four of the ten people in the office where you work are foreign, it’s hard to crack jokes about foreigners without causing offense. It’s especially hard in a milieu where the ability to take offense instantly and promiscuously, even when plainly no offense was intended, is regarded as a mark of fine and delicate sensibilities, indeed of moral purity.

So the culprit is one of the biggest bugaboos of the right: the dreaded multiculturalism. Those damn foreigners living next door; I knew it was their fault. As if today’s admittedly lamentable penchant to take offense at anything and everything is at all related to the fact that I have “chinks” living on one side of me and “camel jockeys” on the other. Derb then more-or-less approvingly notes China and Japan, two very homogeneous and racist societies, and offers as proof that they haven’t lost their “humor” the fact that they are still comfortable making fun of the White Devil and wearing blackface or whiteface. Funny!

Derb laments the loss of humor that accompanies the rise of multiculturalism, totally oblivious to the fact that “making fun of foreigners” was never particularly funny to begin with. He is a big fan of tribalism: the understanding that “we” are better than “they”. And he has a point. The United States is without any doubt a better place to live than many others around the world. I fail to see, however, why it’s important to reinforce that fact with unfunny stereotypes of people you don’t even know.

You can argue about whether multiculturalism has made us better or worse, but I don’t see how you can deny that it has made us shallower. Are patriotism and multiculturalism even compatible? Having chosen the second over the first, have we not lost a dimension?

Derb doesn’t get that it’s possible to love one’s country without adhering to blind, destructive “patriotism”. In his tribal worldview, that was undoubtedly formed sometime in the middle of the last century per his thesis at the beginning of the article, it’s “us” against “them”. It’s that view that lacks any depth.