Reporter Steve Lieberman has this story today from Rockland County:

AIRMONT – An 18-year-old Montebello man wearing a shirt with racist insignias has been charged with a second hate crime since April involving an attack on a Hispanic male, authorities said today. Ramapo police accused Michael Conklin of shooting a 17-year-old Hispanic man three times with a BB gun at 10:45 p.m. Monday on Cragmere Road.

Conklin wore a “shirt with a Ku Klux Klan insignia on the back and a (Nazi) swastika on the arm,” District Attorney Thomas Zugibe said today.

In April, Conklin and four other young men were each charged with a felony assault count as a hate crime after being accused of shouting “white power” while beating up a Hispanic male in the woods in Sloatsburg.

That case is pending in court and should be resolved within a week, Zugibe said.

On Monday, Conklin is accused of shooting the Hispanic teenager twice in the left forearm and once in the buttocks, Ramapo Detective Sgt. John Lynch said today. The teen’s wounds were not serious.

Conklin was being held today in the county jail on $75,000 bail on one count of second-degree assault and a single count of second-degree assault as a hate crime.

Police had been looking for Conklin on a misdemeanor charge of second-degree criminal trespass involving an incident that occurred Aug. 11 at a home on Laura Drive in Airmont, Lynch said.

Read more about this story tomorrow in The Journal News.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on anti-Latino hate crimes on Long Island — and its assertion that local politicians had fanned the flames — prompted one politician’s son to speak out.

Elie Mystal, the son of a former county legislator of the same name, has an interesting post on Long Island Wins regarding his father’s 2007 comment on day laborers: “If I’m living in a neighborhood and people are gathering like that, I would load my gun and start shooting, period. Nobody will say it, but I’m going to say it.”

The younger Mystal reiterates his father’s claim that he was joking, but also describes local pols as being in a predicament when it comes to calling out racists. He acknowledges that they play on people’s fears.

Why? Well, have you ever tried to say, “You have an unenlightened and borderline racist distrust of Latinos, but I appreciate your check….

The middle class suburban voters (of all races) have a point here as well. When you look at these well manicured suburban communities … you can understand how groups of grown men walking up and down the road would freak some people out. You’d like those lucky enough to own homes to offer them a glass of lemonade. But this is America and it’s not entirely surprising when they call the cops.

A wide-ranging survey asked immigrants about their satisfaction with life in the United States in May. The headline seems to be that despite the recession, immigrants are still happy here, but less extremely happy than they were a few years ago.

Click here for the summary or read through the individual questions from the poll of 1,100 foreign-born people by Public Agenda, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Almost half those polled, 46 percent, were U.S. citizens, 35 percent were legal residents and 15 percent were undocumented. The answers were generally compiled by region of birth rather than legal status.

The poll found that 87 percent of the foreign-born are happy with life in the U.S., but the number who are “extremely happy” fell from 55 percent to 34 percent since 2002. Seventy-one percent plan to stay in the United States permanently and would do it all over again. That’s a 9-point decline from 2002.

Another set of questions dealt with immigration reform. Some 72 percent said the government should offer a path to citizenship (a way for illegal immigrants with no criminal record and who have shown a commitment to the United States to become citizens). The idea is more popular with Mexicans (84 percent) than Middle Easterners (62 percent), East Asians (54 percent) and South Asians (48 percent). Support also declines as people grow older.

One detail that surprised me: Among the U.S. citizens who were polled, fully a third said they were also citizens of another country.

Immigrants were also asked whether their kids would want to live in their home country; South Asians were the most optimistic about that. East Asians gave it the lowest odds.

Here’s another question that kind of boils it down. Seventy-six percent of immigrants agreed that “The United States is a unique country that stands for something special in the world.”

Twenty percent of immigrants agreed with, “The United States is just another country that is no better or worse than any other.” And another 3 percent don’t know.

Two Southeast Town Board candidates were angered by allegations that their party line was likened to the Ku Klux Klan and called for the removal of a recently-appointed Architectural Review Board member.

Matthew Neuringer and Joseph DePaola said they were deeply offended by Lynne Eckardt’s comments concerning their Save our Southeast party line. Last month, Eckardt posted online her thoughts concerning a contractor law the Town Board is reviewing that would crack down on illegal hiring in the town. Her statement: “Why else do you suppose the SOS logo is still the symbol of choice? Probably because KKK was already taken.”

Neuringer and DePaola said the comments insulted them and their families and are asking the Town Board to consider removing her from the ARB. Neuringer said he is of Jewish and Puerto Rican descent and DePaola said he is a practicing Roman Catholic with Italian roots.

To read more about the story, check it out here.

Interestingly, one commentator on the story noted that the “KKK has been dead for years,” which piqued my curiosity.

A little historical research on the group shows that they formed in Tennessee in 1865 following the Civil War. Presently, the KKK is not one organization but includes several small chapters throughout the country. There are an estimated 5,000 members spread across more than 100 chapters, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The League says issues involving gay marriage and immigration have recently fueled KKK activity.

On the same day a report comes out on anti-Latino hate crimes in Long Island, Newsday is reporting another bias incident in Patchogue. Hate-crime detectives are looking into a break-in at a Latino church where anti-Hispanic notes were left behind, the paper reports.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s report is available here. It compiles new and published reports of hate crimes on Long Island, starting with the tensions in Farmingville in the 1990s and continuing beyond Marcelo Lucero’s stabbing death in November of last year. Woven into the narrative are comments by local politicians and a “quality of life” group in Farmingville, which grew with assistance from the national Federation for American Immigration Reform. SPLC, based in Alabama, regards FAIR as a hate group.

The report’s editor, Mark Potok, writes:

Latino immigrants in Suffolk County are regularly harassed, taunted, and pelted with objects hurled from cars. They are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles, and many report being beaten with baseball bats and other objects. Others have been shot with BB guns or pepper-sprayed. Most will not walk alone after dark; parents often refuse to let their children play outside. A few have been the targets of arson attacks and worse.

“If I’m living in a neighborhood and people are gathering like that, I would load my gun and start shooting, period. Nobody will say it, but I’m going to say it.”

“I know I speak for all the good, law-abiding people of this county in denouncint all acts of crime and violence against all persons. We welcome any information that can be provided to assist the district attorney in pursuing accusations.”

A harvest celebration from the southern Indian state of Kerala is finding a home here in the New York suburbs, Hema Easley reports today. Malayalees (known by their language, Malayalam) celebrate the festival of Onam over the course of 10 days with dances, games and the popular snake boat races in India.

The Hudson Valley Malayalee Association, whose members are mostly from Rockland, will mark Onam on Sept. 19. The Westchester Malayalee Association will hold its celebration Sept. 12. Click here for Hema’s story.

Above, Shiny Thomas, Ruby Thomas and Meera Patel celebrate the harvest festival of Onam with an Onam Pookalam, created from flower petals in New City. Below, Bindu Shaji, Neetu Shaji, and Shaji Alappatt display a replica of their chundan boat in their family’s home in the Bronx.

Alappatt’s actual chundan boat remains in India. During the Onam festival, more than 80 oarsmen row each boat to the rhythm of percussion instruments.

(Photos: Vincent DiSalvio and Angela Gaul/The Journal News )

The Southern Poverty Law Center says it will release a report Wednesday examining “violent, anti-immigrant climate” in Suffolk County.

The report, entitled “Climate of Fear: Latino Immigrants in Suffolk County,  N.Y.,” documents numerous hate crimes committed against Hispanics and a volatile environment created, in some instances, by community leaders. Researchers for the Center spent months interviewing immigrants, religious figures and business owners.

A bilingual hotline has been set up—800-328-2322—to report crimes committed on Long Island against Hispanics.

I’m reading an amazing book called “The Snakehead,” about the underworld of human-smuggling between China’s Fujian province and New York. Snakeheads are the smugglers; the Chinese version of “coyotes” who bring people across the border. Author Patrick Radden Keefe has written in detail about the snakehead known as Sister Ping. Here he expands on that story in a suspenseful narrative. If you remember the calamity of the Golden Venture, the ship full of Chinese migrants that ran aground off Queens in 1993, this book gives you a new version of the story from behind the scenes.

Stories of illegal immigration from China are in some ways just like the stories from Latin America. I’ve been amazed to hear Ecuadorians describe the practice of taking on $18,000 in debt in exchange for being brought to New York. For Chinese migrants, the cost has topped $70,000. They are driven by the promise of making exponentially more money here than at home, and by better opportunities in business and education. In an article for Slate, the author brought up one of many questions that move past the American-dream cliches: Why did the Fujianese keep streaming out of China while the country was experiencing such explosive economic growth? According to researchers, he says, economic migration may be driven by ”’relative deprivation’: income disparities and the experience of watching your neighbor do better than you. So, ironically, economic development sometimes causes people to leave.”

In the book, Keefe describes the unbelievable determination by immigrants to get to the United States, people who are “in some ways more American than I will ever be.”

He appeals for more attention to the business of human smuggling, saying it’s been overlooked by scholars and refugee advocates for fear of worsening the stigma against illegal aliens. In following up on the Golden Venture story, he raises questions about enforcement on the global scale, the U.S. asylum system and the growing use of detention.

There’s further discussion about the book on Slate exploring the Chinatown underground and its moral ambiguities — part gangland, part entrepreneurship.

Speak up if you’ve read the book and let us know what you thought.

I had a chance this morning to ask Sen. Chuck Schumer about the prospects for a comprehensive immigration bill, something he has pledged to introduce this year as head of the immigration subcommittee. Schumer took the lead on immigration reform at the request of the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. Today he noted that his own approach would be somewhat different.

“I’m not doing it quite the way he did. I’m a little more moderate than he is on some of these things. But getting the job done is what he wanted,” Schumer said after a news conference in White Plains.

The new bill will have a greater emphasis on enforcement, he said. I asked about the complaints from immigrant advocates that the administration is sending mixed signals as it expands the 287(g) police program and maintains the system of detention.

“You have to be tough on enforcing, because the American people will be fair and open and generous on legal immigration if they’re convinced their isn’t future wave after wave after wave of illegal immigrant,” Schumer said.

About the bill: “It’ll be aware of need for immigrants, and aware of the importance of immigrants. All of the people we’ve talked to, business, labor, liberal, conservative, are saying get something done and do it smartly. Even Lou Dobbs, who is anti-immigration, he had some positive words to say about the approach we’re taking.”

A handful of local groups are among 500 across the country that signed a letter asking President Obama to “immediately terminate the 287(g) program.”

Among the names are the Hispanic Resource Center of Larchmont and Mamaroneck, the Sisters of the Divine Compassion and the Mount Kisco Drug and Alcohol Council. Others were the Hudson Valley Community Coalition, Westchester Hispanic Coalition and Rockland Immigration Coalition.

The Aug. 25 letter, by Marielena Hincapie of the National Immigration Law Center, dismisses the administration’s plan to add oversight to the program, which trains local law enforcement to check a person’s immigration status and to begin deportation duties. Instead she focuses on the risks of racial profiling:

The program, largely recognized as a failed Bush experiment, relinquishes the power to enforce immigration law to local law enforcement and corrections agencies and has resulted in the widespread use of pretextual traffic stops, racially motivated questioning, and unconstitutional searches and seizures primarily in communities of color.