The U.S. Border Patrol is the largest federal law enforcement agency, but there are only about 150 black agents in its ranks. Some reasons: A lot of people don't know it exists, you have to work in a border town in the Southwest, where very few blacks live, before getting transferred to a cushier (I think?) area near the Canadian border, you have to be able to speak Spanish, and, to top it all off, there are snakes of some sort involved in day-to-day patrolling.

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According to the US Department of Labor, the unemployment rate for black teens is six times the national average, and almost 300,000 African American kids are actively seeking low-skill jobs for the upcoming summer and beyond. But many black teens looking for work in California have been caught off guard by a harsh new reality: if you don't speak Spanish, oftentimes you aren't finding minimum-wage employment.

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• LL Cool J calls on young people to seek out father figures. How about calling on fathers to actually stay in their kids' lives? [CM]

• Snoop Dogg's going to remix the One Life to Live song and make a cameo appearance on the soap opera. Yes. [EUR]

• Ever heard of a Bro Mitzvah? [JJ]

• Marylanders are pissed over an anti-immigration poster that depicts a (non-Hispanic) state legislator sporting a sombrero. [Ex]

• Hip hop invades Iran, much to the delight of the authorities there. [USNWR]

America's staunchest liberals just got another great reason to snuff the rants of the overzealous, self-important Minutemen patrolling our nation's borders. A new article from the Southern Poverty Law Center suggests that the ever-loudening immigrant debate in the United States has triggered an increase in its hate groups by almost half.

Entitled "The Year in Hate," the article by SPLC staffers David Holthouse and Mark Potok states that the Montgomery, Ala.-based organization's latest annual count of hate groups in America found 888 operating in 2007, up 5 percent from 844 the year before.

"Hate groups continue to successfully exploit the immigration debate to their advantage, even though the immigration issue has largely disappeared from the presidential debate," said Potok …

"The fact is that they've been aided and abetted by mainstream pundits and politicians who give these haters a platform for their propaganda," he added.

Is it bad I just briefly worried about how often I'm mistaken for Cuban (and Puerto Rican and Spanish and … )?

Pat Buchanan had a lovefest with Sean Hannity on Fox News's Hannity & Colmes Monday as they discussed Buchanan's new anti-immigration book, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, And Greed Are Tearing America Apart , which is basically a white supremacy manifesto. Care for a couple of excerpts? Check them out after the jump!

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America, it is a-changing. According to a new Census Bureau analysis, Garcia and Rodriguez are now among the top 10 most popular surnames in the country. And Martinez almost took 10th place from Wilson. I'm sure it makes all of those anti-immigration folks feel all warm and snuggly.

But while some parts of America are changing, some things are the same as they ever were. Consider this: 90 percent of people with the last name Washington are black. Seventy-five percent of our nation's Jeffersons are, too.

The founding fathers left their stamp on this country in more ways than one.

If nothing else, some rich whites welcome Hispanics into our country to provide a necessary alternative to black lawnmowers and maids. So said John Derbyshire of the National Review, possibly the most ignorant man to ever write a magazine column, during a wild tangent in a piece that was supposed to be about the immigration debate.

In some offline conversations I’ve been having, and on some websites I’ll leave you to search out by yourself, the opinion has been expressed that some portion of America’s white elites welcome Hispanic immigration as a way of sticking it to American blacks. That portion, it is suggested, would prefer to have its lawns mowed by small, polite, brown people, rather than large, surly black ones, even if the price is the same in both cases.

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Pending, bipartisan legislation that offers a widely approved plan for illegal immigrants to earn citizenship over time is championed by President Bush and Governor Jeb Bush, Barack Obama, and the NAACP, to name a few. It's vocally opposed by T. Willard Fair, president of Miami's Urban League chapter and a former member of the Florida Board of Education. In ads taken out in the Washington Post and the Roll Call, he says offering citizenship to illegal immigrants means snatching jobs away from black Americans.

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