Desi Diaspora, Immigrants' News

Australia prepares for more racial violence

NEW JERSEY, DEC 14: Mobile telephone text and e-mail messages calling for racial violence in four Australian states circulated on Wednesday, reported Reuters.

More than 450 police took to the streets in Australia's largest city Sydney, for a second night on Wednesday, erecting roadblocks to check drivers moving into areas of previous unrest, such as Cronulla Beach in the south.

Sydney's racial violence erupted at Cronulla last Sunday when some 5,000 people, some yelling racist chants, attacked people of Middle East appearance, saying they were defending their beach from Lebanese youth gangs. Police said white supremacists incited violence at Cronulla.

Meanwhile, the burning to the ground of a church hall on Tuesday night, smashing of church windows and shots fired at a Catholic school prompted authorities on Wednesday to say they would focus on places of worship to ensure they were safe from violence, reports Reuters.

Sydney Police said they were investigating text messages inciting racial violence in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia.

Some messages called for racial violence next Sunday, police said. Text messages were used to incite mob violence in Cronulla last weekend.

E-mail received by Reuters from an unknown source appeared to call on migrants to riot at Bondi beach at the weekend and read: "Time to show these people stuck in the 1950's that times have changed. We are the new Australia."

In a counter campaign, Lebanese and surfer gangs held "peace talks" at Maroubra Beach in Sydney on Wednesday and agreed to start a text message campaign calling for calm.

Similar "peace talks" between Muslim leaders and surfers will be held at Cronulla Beach on Wednesday night.

Muslim women's groups urged a voluntary curfew on Arabic youths, calling for parents to keep their children home this Friday and Saturday night and all day Sunday. They urged parents to confiscate mobile telephones and car keys.

"I urge community leaders to continue dialogue in an effort to defuse the aggression," said Assistant Police Commissioner Mark Goodwin.

NSW Police Minister Carl Scully said police were preparing for more unrest this weekend.

"We expect further problems. We had more than 400 cops (police) last night. Expect hundreds on top of that on Saturday and Sunday," he said.

(DesPardes News Monitor)

`Sadly...We Are a Racist Society�

NEW JERSEY, DEC 13: Authorities moved to crack down on rioters after three days of racial unrest in Sydney's beachside suburbs, while people of Middle Eastern descent were allegedly assaulted by whites in two other cities amid concerns the violence could spread, reported AP quoting police sources Tuesday.

Sydney has a large community of Lebanese who mostly live in a cluster of lower-income neighborhoods close to the city's Olympic sports complex. New South Wales state's Gov. Marie Bashir - who holds a largely ceremonial role as local representative of Britain's monarch - comes from a Lebanese family, says an AP news report.

In the 2001 census, nearly a quarter of Australia's 20 million people said they were born overseas. The country has about 300,000 Muslims, most in lower income suburbs of large cities.

Racial tensions in Australia have been rising in recent years, largely because of anti-Muslim sentiment fueled by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States and deadly bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, in October 2002.

They also were heightened by a gang rape case in 2002 in which Bilal Skaf, an Arab-Australian, allegedly a ring leader of a Lebanese gang was sentenced to 55 years, an unusually severe sentence for the country. Prosecutors and witnesses said members of the gang hurled racial abuse at their rape victims, all of whom were white.

"The rapes have had a significant impact in terms of race relations in Sydney," said professor Chris Culleen, director of the Institute of Criminology at Sydney University, to AP.

On Monday, Sydney police said they discovered weapons including firebombs and rocks on the roofs of some houses in the beachside suburb of Maroubra. Some of those arrested were armed with machetes and baseball bats.

Elsewhere, Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio reported Tuesday that a family of Middle Eastern origin was attacked the night before in the western city of Perth by a group of 11 white men, who threw eggs, shouted abuse and kicked their garage door.

In Adelaide, a taxi driver of Lebanese origin, Hossein Kazemi, was injured Tuesday when he was punched by a passenger. Police said there was an argument over the fare, but the victim was taunted about the riots in Sydney because he was of Lebanese origin.

And on the Gold Coast in Queensland state, text messages targeting ethnic groups have called for people to attend a demonstration on Sunday and to start "cracking skulls," Australian Associated Press reported.

According to one Op-Ed, the anti-terrorism law passed last week will allow racist hate speech anywhere in Australia to be prosecuted as sedition, leading to seven years' imprisonment, even though racial violence may have nothing at all to do with sedition or terrorism, writed Ben Saul.

Writing for Sydney Morning Herald - an influential Australian newspaper, Saul says that the author of the text message, which inflamed racial tensions last week committed sedition by writing: "This Sunday every f---ing Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb and wog bashing day."

Also seditious is this retaliatory text: "all arabs unite the aussies will feel the full force of the arabs as one/brothers in arms unite now/let's show them whos boss/destroy everything."

According to Ben, the intent of the messages is clear: to urge one racial or national group to use violence against another

Ben Saul is a law lecturer at the University of NSW.

Reuters reported quoting Australian media that mobile telephone text messages from Australians of Anglo-Saxon and Middle East backgrounds were both calling for revenge attacks to continue.

Islamic youth leader Fadi Abdul Rahman said further trouble could be brewing as Muslim youths were angry, believing police were not treating them fairly.

"They feel they have been dealt with by the authorities differently to the way Anglos have been dealt with," he said.

"They feel injustice and they feel angry about it."

Meanwhile, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, noting the nation has successfully absorbed millions of foreigners, has denounced the racial violence and called for calm.

Mr Howard described the violence as "sickening" but insisted it was not evidence of the deep-seated racism that some allege permeates Australian society.

"I do not accept there is underlying racism in this country," Howard said after the skirmishes Sunday. "I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people."

But some politicians laid the blame squarely on racism.

"We are just getting a sample of what happened in France a few months ago," said Labor opposition politician Harry Quick, according to Reuters.

"Sadly if you scratch Australians we are a racist society, it is only in the last 40-odd years that we have got rid of the White Australia (immigration) policy," Quick told television.

"We have reached a pressure cooker stage here. People of ethnic minority in Australia are just taking things into their own hands."

The Sydney racial unrest recalled three weeks of rioting in France that began in the suburbs of Paris on Oct. 27 and spread nationwide, baring frustration in communities with high immigrant and Muslim populations. (DesPardes News Monitor)

Immigration Booming
Bill in U.S. House would make illegal presence criminal

Immigrant Kids

NEW JERSEY: DEC 13: Immigration has accelerated, pushing the percentage of the U.S. population born in other countries to the highest point in nearly 100 years, says a report.

According to Center for Immigration Studies, there are 35.2 million foreign-born people living in the U.S. � about 12.1 percent of the population.

"The 35.2 million immigrants living in the country in March 2005 is the highest number ever recorded � two-and-a-half times the 13.5 million during the peak of the last great immigration wave in 1910," said the report, which advocates tougher policies on illegal immigration and favors attracting immigrants with needed job skills.

The report comes as the House prepares to take up a bill to curb undocumented immigration by requiring workplace enforcement of immigration laws and increasing border security. Illegal presence in the country, now a civil offense, would become a federal crime.

Bush's Temporary Guest Workers Program appears to have been put on the side burner for now.

The report estimates 9.7 million illegal immigrants are living in the United States. Other estimates range from 9 million to 13 million.

Mexico has been identified as the largest source of immigrants to the United States, followed by East Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, according to the report.

A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that immigration peaked about 2000, then dipped in 2002 and 2003. Nevertheless, Jeffrey Passel, a research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center, said that immigration levels remained high, compared with historical levels.

Desi owned IT firm asked to pay extra $2.25m to H1-Bs

NEW JERSEY, DEC 12: IT services company Computech Corp. has agreed to pay $2.25 million in back wages and $400,000 in fines to settle a U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) complaint that it underpaid 232 H-1B workers.

Michigan-based Computech - a Certified Minority Business Enterprise, will also be prohibited from participating in the H-1B visa program for 18 months under an agreement announced last week by DOL, reported ComputerWorld.

The firm was founded in 1996, and the settlement covers violations alleged to have occurred between 1998 and 2000.

Computech boasts on its website of having more than 400 consultants spread over USA, Canada and India, with 24-48 hour response time for staffing requests. Its philosophy: "Our solutions are the outcome of the synergistic contribution of our most-valued resource - Our People, ".

Within two years of its founding, the company had brought on more than 200 foreign workers. The company failed to pay these workers minimum required wage rates and �frequently� benched workers, the DOL said in a statement. Benching refers to the practice of not paying workers in between contracting jobs.

Vasudeva Patchava, a former Computech H1-B employee, said the company agreed to pay him at least $53,000 a year. Instead he received $35,000 a year.

With that salary, Patchava couldn't afford to buy a house and bring his family to Michigan, so they stayed with relatives for six months in Akron, Ohio, before they could reunite when the company moved him out of Michigan, said Detroit Free Press.

Despite agreeing to pay the back wages, Computech, which has done work for the City of Detroit and George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said it did nothing wrong.

Computech today has about 400 to 500 employees, according to its president, Indian-American Ram Kancharla.

Ram told Detroit Free Press his company is less dependent on H-1B workers today, but in 1998, there was a shortage of workers with the technology skills in Java- and Web-related work. Kancharla would not disclose the number of H-1B workers the company now uses but said most of the employees involved in the settlement have since left.

The firm, which handles ERP implementations, application support and development, and remote database management, does its work in India and the U.S. and has more than 200 employees based in the U.S.

Patchava stayed with Computech between 1999 and 2003. "I didn't want to go to a different employer and get into the same situation," said Patchava, 44, and now living in Cupertino, Calif. He also felt pressured to stick with Computech because the company sponsored his temporary visa.

Companies that hire large numbers of H-1B visa holders have been accused in the past of being �body shops� that underpay foreign workers and help U.S. firms move work overseas.

�Abuse of the temporary foreign worker program is not tolerated and violators, as this case shows, are vigorously pursued, � Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao said in a statement.

According to immigration law, those employees are entitled to a generally accepted wage for computer programmers for about 40 hours a week, even when they do not have assignments. The aim of the law, immigration law experts say, is so companies pay the prevailing wage and do not undercut wages paid to American workers.

H-1B worker visas are issued for up to six years.

The $2.65-million settlement is about $2 million less than what the Department of Labor said the company owed in March.

The settlement may be the largest back wage payment ordered under the H-1B program, according to Brad Mitchell, a DOL spokesman.