Eh - if it ain't brogue, don't fix it.

Ah cha cha cha!

It takes someone about 4 years of full-time study, or 8 years of part-time study, or 10-12 years of one- or two-hour-a-day study to develop fluency in another language. (A bit faster if live in the country where the language is spoken, but not much.)

I wonder: do accentophobic and Spanish-language-phobic people honestly want immigrants to the United States spending their time learning fluent English, or do they want them finding jobs and WORKING to build stable, more or less comfortable lives where they can educate their children, etc.?

Because I don't think keeping people in classes studying English for a decade is the way we want to go.

I don't really have a problem with any of this, the employers got busted and so did the illegals, hold them both accountable to make sure a living wage is provided and that taxes are being paid.

Why is the "Fix your Accent" sign in English?

As long as the Latino gangs keep killing random blacks (which the mayor says has nothing to do with their race--suuuuurrrre...) I'm totally with Lou Dobbs on this one. Sorry.

Then again, maybe the sign is referring to the, like, you know, Valley Girl accent. I'm all for that as well.

Just so we're all on the same page here, you could do us all a big favor by providing us with an up-to-date, politically-correct, left-winger's guide to which laws it's "OK" to break and which laws it's not. Because, silly me, I have a hard time telling the difference.

I saw ads on the bus in Seattle today from the Seattle Language Academy for a 10-week program to fix people's accents.

Seems like this is a growing trend amoung people.

I want a hot, swarthy guy to teach me to speak like Ricardo Montelban!

Last night on the news they had a bit on inflation, and while most food items were up 10% or so over last year, chicken was up 35%.
That's going to cut into demand for the product, and that's going to hurt the growers and the entire economy they support. But hey, they are the ones who want this sort of thing, so screw-em.
If we resolve the immigrant issue this way, it will be because we create millions of jobs on the other side of the border when they disappear here.
We've already done quite a bit of that - sending formerly CA jobs to Baja as the Baja vegetable supply quickly displaces CA's.

Kinaidos:

I'm aghast. Are you suggesting that illegal immigrants taste like chicken?

Whoa. I'm seeing a solution to our illegal immigrant problem, and our underfunded school lunch programs!

My first thought at reading this post was, what happened with the employers? Sure, they rounded up a bunch of undocumented workers, but did the employers - who are violating Federal law - get busted as well?

I persused the three links in the post and found the following:

1. "poultry processing plant"

"No criminal or civil charges have been filed against Pilgrim's Pride, which has about 55,000 employees and operates dozens of facilities mostly across the South and in Mexico and Puerto Rico, supplying the KFC restaurant chain and other customers."

2. "Mexican restaurant"

"Lev Kubiak, acting special agent in charge of ICE in Buffalo, said [Simon] Banda entered the United States illegally an unknown number of years ago and created a false identity using the birth certificate of a Honduran man. As Delarco, Banda was granted temporary protected status and permission to work in this country, according to court documents."

Note that the owner of the restaurant was charged as being an illegal alien, too. So in this case it looks like the employer will face charges too, but apparently not for hiring undocumented workers, just his own illegal status.

3. "traffic stop"

This time there was no mention of employers, but to be sure there won't be any investigation into who may have employed them while they are here.

My whole point in this is that rarely are labor laws enforced when it comes to hiring undocumented workers. The bigger the company, the less likely that there would even be an investigation.

Unless we prosecute and punish those who profit from undocumented workers, there is little point in trying to locate and deport illegal aliens. So long as American companies are willing to look the other way and hire undocumented workers, people will continue to cross the border in search of work.

@3 - I support busting employers who hire illegals, but doint so in no way ensures that subsequent employees will get a "living wage". If they were cheap enough to hire illegals in the first place, why would they pay legal workers anything more than the bare minimum?

The problem is also with the antiquated system used by Social Security. I'm not passing blame from the employers but short of an full background check, how is anybody really able to determine if somebody is truly here legally? What employer would front the cost of that service for a minimum wage worker?

@10, @14 - The elephant in the room that everybody keeps ignoring in this ongoing debate is that if illegal immigration is stopped, jobs like working at the chicken plant or picking fruit will simply leave the country because it will no longer make economic sense to do that work here. In the long run, we just won't grow as much of the food we eat here anymore. That is unless the feds step in to provide even larger agriculture subsidies than they already do.

I'm not sure I'd want to take English lessons from someone who thinks there's an apostrophe in "accent".

Taking cues from the war on drugs, the government should learn two things:
1) Attacking the illegal immigrants themselves will not stop the problem. More will simply replace them. You need to go after the employers, not the illegal immigrants. They won't come if there are no jobs for illegal immigrants.
2) Improve the immigration paths and low-wage employment paths so that business that rely on illegal immigrant work can legally recruit and hire people from other countries. (This would be analgous to "legalize the drugs and tax the shit out of them" solution to the drug war)

The fact that the mayor knows that cracking down on illegal immigrants may hurt the economy should throw up a big red flag. He needs to address the problem with the employers, instead of turning a blind eye to it. I can only hope the voters will hold him accountable.

Sweet!

More jobs for the American kids who can't find summer jobs!

(caveat - I used to work on farms, baling hay, limbing trees, making shakes and shingles when I was 10 to 18)

I could use an accent fixing -- after 17 years in Seattle, I still haven't totally lost my Central MA accent.