05/08/2011
H/T the always-valuable Mangan’s blog for a great piece Cheap Chalupas and Car Thieves which discusses an a very frank article in the Washington Post: International theft rings steal hundreds of vehicles in D.C. area every year By Matt Zapotosky April 29 2011
This story — which is definitely worth reading — is based on a case where a car was stolen to be shipped to Nigeria, involving:
… members of a sophisticated transatlantic car theft ring … Officials estimate that each year in the Washington area alone, hundreds of cars are stolen and shipped overseas…
“This has gone on and on and on, and it has become such an enterprise for them in the U.S.,” said Prince George’s County auto theft detective Luis Aponte. “There’s a major market for this.”
The ring’s bosses are usually based in African countries or other developing nations…
Mangan’s remarks
Wouldn’t it be amazing if someone, say, in the government, actually began to see that protecting the lives and property of American citizens demanded that immigrants be screened a little more carefully? Or maybe even if someone, this time let’s say from the government — you know, that institution created and sustained for the purpose of protecting the lives and property of citizens — decided that the costs of immigrants from certain countries — let’s just pull one out of a hat and say, oh, Nigeria — outweighed the benefits?
To me this rang a bell. In Alien Nation, (P 186 in our download) Peter Brimelow reported
…U.S. law enforcement officials estimate an incredible 75 percent of the 100,000 Nigerians now in the United States are involved in “an impressive and innovative variety of fraud schemes…(The State Department estimates that 35 to 40 percent of all heroin entering the United States is imported by Nigerians) … .Interestingly, Nigerian criminals come from their country’s privileged classes…”[Nigeria] is notorious for corruption and non-existent business ethics even by African standards”
The citation is from an article in the spring 1993 issue of Social Contract by Daniel Simcox.
I remember 30 years ago (Aaargh!) the State Department was circulating an enormous loose leaf Binder entitled "Fraudulent Firms doing business in Nigeria". Does anyone know if there still something similar?
Those depressed by the failure of the Polity to respond to these facts over all these years should read James Fulford’s The (First) Thirty Years War For Immigration Reform.
Dennis Mangan is particularly annoyed by a moronic comment on the WP story by libertarian loony Tyler Cowen:
Car thieves are not locavores, or the law of one price
saying
Tyler "Cheap Chalupas" Cowen blames a string of carjackings in Maryland which were committed by Nigerian nationals on … Nigerian government tariffs on imported cars. No kidding. Because immigration, even by Nigerian car thieves, is so wonderful and enhances the quality of American life so dramatically that one can never point out that some immigrants are criminals. After all, in this case the carjackers were just doing an end run around unjust government restraint of free trade.
(I am impressed by the devastating refutations which appear in Cowen’s comments thread, for instance:
A Lee May 6, 2011 at 6:54 pm
There are also extremely high tariffs on imported cars in Japan and Singapore. I don’t see any organized Singaporean and Japanese car-jacking rings operating in the US, smuggling cars to their countries.Sorry, your reasons are bogus. The real reasons are:
1. Nigeria has an extremely corrupt and ineffective government.
2. Nigerian immigrants to America have above-average levels of criminal behavior.
3. The American penal system provides comparatively little deterrence for people used to a Nigerian standard-of-living.)
Unfortunately it seem that loony libertarianism is the flavor du jour.
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