† Is This One Of Those Jobs That “Americans Won’t Do?”: Part XVI: In a new series of raids on Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurants, U.S. immigration agents interviewed employees in Los Angeles, Atlanta and other cities, Reuters reports:

Roughly 500 undocumented workers have been fired as a result of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) audits of the popular burrito chain's hiring paperwork in Minnesota, Virginia and Washington, D.C. …

ICE agents also interviewed workers in Minnesota and Washington, D.C., said Robert Luskin, Chipotle's outside counsel and a partner at Patton Boggs in Washington. …

Denver-based Chipotle has won plaudits from Wall Street for its seemingly uncanny ability to hold down labor costs. That ability has been a major factor behind its six-fold increase in share price since late 2008. Chipotle shares fell 2.4 percent Tuesday to $260.40.

The immigration probe may inflate costs in the long run if it leads to more mass firings. That could be bad news for Chipotle, which like other restaurants, is grappling with rising prices for everything from beef to produce.

It is also a blow to the reputation of a restaurant chain that prides itself on serving "Food with Integrity." …

Unlike many rivals that sell franchises, Chipotle owns and operates its restaurants and is ultimately responsible for hiring. …

Experts say restaurant owners are attracted to illegal laborers because they work hard, are loyal and will go the extra mile to hold down a job.

Experts are going to have to think of something else to say after McDonald’s received more than one million applications from U.S. citizens for 50,000 slots; franchisees ended up hiring 62,000 people.

† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: In a new spin on the slogan “Imported from Detroit,” it seems that to nearly half the American-born residents of the Motor City, English may as well be a foreign language , WWJ-TV Newsradio 950, reports:

According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are “functionally illiterate.” The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday. …

“Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job - those types of basic everyday (things). Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should take … just your basic everyday tasks,” [the Fund’s Director, Karen Tyler-Ruiz] said. …

Some of the Detroit suburbs also have high numbers of functionally illiterate: 34 percent in Pontiac and 24 percent in Southfield. 

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: More than  44 million Americans – or 14.3 percent of the population – are on food stamps, according a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Wall Street Journal notes that MS and OR are amongst states with the highest percentage of food stamp recipients – at least one in five residents. In comparison, only 6.6 percent of WY residents use food stamps.

† Prince Charles Is Carbon Neutral. Now We Are (ROTFL) Amused. (eighth item): On the occasion of a visit by Britain ’s Prince Charles to speak at Georgetown University about "sustainability" documentary filmmakers Phelim McAleer & Ann McElhinney released this YouTube video calling bullsh*t on the err-to-the-throne for his eco-hypocrisy:  

The Independent (London) sniggers over the fun of seeing “the rich, famous, and mollycoddled ruling class being brought down a peg or two” by the video, which “highlights some of the inconsistencies involved in a very wealthy royal, who lives in several palaces, demanding that his subjects ‘live with less.’”

† For The Good Of The Children?: Part II: Former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist (D) argues that parental school choice will keep urbanites from fleeing to the suburbs in this Wall Street Journal op-ed:

If a young couple moves to, say, St. Louis and chooses a home in one of the city's revitalizing neighborhoods like Forest Park, everything goes well until their first child approaches school age. They might decide to pay for private education at one of the few such schools in the city. Or they might take a chance on getting into one of the city's elite magnet schools. But what looks like the surest way to enroll their child in a good school is to move to a suburb, such as Webster Grove. The schools there draw from a mostly affluent population, have a large tax base behind each child, and are free of charge if you live there.

So although the couple enjoys urban life in St. Louis, they leave for better school opportunities. This process occurs all across the country; many parents with resources move away from cities and suburbs where poor people live.

Some may say that's the natural course of events. But in most provinces of Canada, parents can choose private and religious education with financial assistance from the government. And every nation in Western Europe, including heavily unionized social democracies like the Netherlands and Sweden, has some form of parental school choice. …

American liberals have been reluctant to embrace school choice, fearing it will drain resources from government-operated schools. Yet isn't it even worse to support a system that rewards concentration of the rich in exclusive suburbs segregated from the poor? Of course there are affluent people (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama come to mind) who enroll their children in urban private schools like D.C.'s Sidwell Friends, which still has some children enrolled from the choice program. Many more, including middle-class parents, would live in economically and racially diverse cities once school choice was universally available.

† Online Postings Pushing People To Suicide Not “Free Speech”: Judge: After finding him guilty of two counts of aiding suicide, Judge Thomas Neuville sentenced former nurse William Melchert-Dinkel to jail for the 2005 deaths of a 32-year-old British man and an 18-year-old Canadian woman, The Associated Press reports:

The judge structured the sentence so that Melchert-Dinkel would serve an initial 320 days, then be freed. Over the next 10 years, he would have serve two-day spells in jail on the anniversaries of his victims' deaths.

Melchert-Dinkel’s attorney plans to appeal the convictions on free-speech grounds, which could delay the start of his client’s sentence, which is scheduled to begin June 1^st.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Never Mind Marxism. Will An Obama Administration Be Totalitarian?: Part II): Gina Channell-Allen, president of the Pleasanton (CA) Weekly, tells The Daily Caller that after the paper ran a the feature article, “Inside Marine One, President Obama’s Helicopter” the White House called to ask that a sentence about Michelle Obama be edited out:

“Basically the reporter [Amory Gutierrez] said that the First Lady didn’t speak to the pilots but acknowledged them by making eye contact,” Allen wrote in her email. …

Allen says she “complied” with the White House’s request “because it was not worth making a fuss over.”

She added, “I thought it was interesting, though, that the [White House] was concerned enough about image to contact a little weekly paper in Pleasanton.”

MO’s press secretary Katie McCormick Lelyveld denied the censorship allegation:

“Our office has never interacted with the Pleasanton paper, and not knowing the story existed, we never asked for such a line to be removed.”

However, this is not the first time the White House communications office tried to stifle the Fourth Estate.

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, It’s A Topsy-Turvy Campaign): Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson notes – perhaps wistfully – that by assassinating Usama bin Laden, President Barack Hussein Obama will “probably be strong where his Democratic predecessors have been weak” when he runs for re-election in 2012:

[W]hatever domestic political advantage Republicans sought to gain from accusing Democrats of being “soft on terror” - much as previous generations of Republicans occasionally made hay by accusing Democrats of being soft on communism - has been spent. … Obama has done what George W. Bush failed to do: bring bin Laden to justice.

On the other hand, Obama has “also largely forfeited the Democrats’ traditional advantage in domestic economic policy”:

[U]nless Obama becomes as bold on the economy as he was in hunting down bin Laden, his campaign may not resemble Democratic campaigns of yore.

Strong on defense. Not much to say on the economy. Obama (or is that McCain?) for president.

The Stiletto fervently hopes that Obama 2012 is McCain 2008.