Illegals

[joblo7]

do we have american food? pizza.falafel,french fries,greek salad.roti.

 

 

black eyed peas?

 

[joblo7]

i like " illegal aliens'. those guys come from really far!!!! and should definitely get no rights.

[sheaf_stout]

Illegal Immigration - Crime

 

 

Statistics point to significantly higher crime rates in the illegal immigrant population. Document forgery, identity theft, and illegal use of stolen Social Security Numbers are nearly universal among illegals. But consider this data regarding hard crime: In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

 

Illegals kill 9,000 people annually

 

According to US Representative Steve King (R-IA), illegal aliens commit 12 murders every day in the U.S. and kill another 13 daily through drunk driving incidents.

 

That's more than 9,000 people killed every year by illegal aliens.

 

As World Net Daily's Joseph Farah points out, that means more people are murdered by illegal aliens in one year

than have been killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since their inception.

 

Rep. King also notes that on average eight children are sexually abused by illegal aliens every day -- that's over 2,920 annually. And that's just a small portion of the illegal alien crime wave.

 

4.1 million crimes committed by illegal aliens

 

As reported in Grassfire's booklet, "The Truth About The Illegal Invasion," some 325,000 criminal illegal aliens will be incarcerated in state and federal prisons this fiscal year. A GAO study found that illegal aliens commit, on average, 12.6 criminal offenses. This means incarcerated illegal aliens have committed over 4.1 million crimes -- and that does not include illegal alien criminals who are not incarcerated. And we learned from Rep. Tom Tancredo that thousands of illegals are coming from terrorist and suspect nations.

 

[sheaf_stout]

Another report below. What do you folks have to say about the criminals that have been attacking our border patrol agents as of late?

 

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_mexifornia.html

 

Mexifornia, Five Years Later

Victor Davis Hanson

 

The flood of illegal immigrants into California has made things worse than I foresaw.

 

In the Spring 2002 issue of City Journal, I wrote an essay about growing up in the central San Joaquin Valley and witnessing firsthand, especially over the last 20 years, the ill effects of illegal immigration (City Journal’s editors chose the title of the piece: “Do We Want Mexifornia?”). Controversy over my blunt assessment of the disaster of illegal immigration from Mexico led to an expanded memoir, Mexifornia, published the following year by Encounter Press.

 

Mexifornia came out during the ultimately successful campaign to recall California governor Gray Davis in autumn 2003. A popular public gripe was that the embattled governor had appeased both employers and the more radical Hispanic politicians of the California legislature on illegal immigration. And indeed Davis had signed legislation allowing driver’s licenses for illegal aliens that both houses of state government had passed. So it was no wonder that the book sometimes found its way into both the low and high forms of the political debate. On the Internet, a close facsimile of a California driver’s license circulated, with a picture of a Mexican bandit (the gifted actor Alfonso Bedoya of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), together with a demeaning height (5’4”), weight (“too much”), and sex (“mucho”) given. “Mexifornia” was emblazoned across the top where “California” usually is stamped on the license.

 

In such a polarized climate, heated debates and several radio interviews followed, often with the query, “Why did you have to write this book?” The Left saw the book’s arguments and its title—Mexifornia was originally a term of approbation used by activists buoyed by California’s changing demography—as unduly harsh to newcomers from Mexico. The Right saw the book as long-overdue attention to a scandal ignored by the mainstream Republican Party.

 

Fast-forward nearly five years, and the national climate has radically changed, so much so that the arguments of Mexifornia—close the borders, return to the melting pot, offer earned citizenship to most aliens of long residence in exchange for acceptance of English and American culture—seem tame today, if not passé. In 2002, when I wrote the original City Journal essay, no one thought that the U.S. Congress would vote to erect a wall. Today there is rumbling that the signed legislation entails only 700 miles of fencing instead of spanning the entire 1,950-mile border.

 

Deportation was once an unimaginable response to the problem of the 11 million here illegally. Now its practicality, rather than its morality, appears the keener point of contention. And the concerted effort by Chicano activists to drive from popular parlance the descriptive term “illegal alien” in favor of the politically correct, but imprecise and often misleading “undocumented worker” has largely failed. Similar efforts to demonize opponents of open borders as “anti-immigrant” or “nativist” have had only a marginal effect in stifling debate, as has the deliberate effort to blur illegal and legal immigration. The old utopian talk of a new borderless zone of dual cultures, spreading on both sides of a disappearing boundary, has given way to a reexamination of NAFTA and its facilitation of greater cross-border flows of goods, services—and illegal aliens and drugs.

 

So why has the controversy over illegal immigration moved so markedly to the right?

 

We return always to the question of numbers. While it is true that no one knows exactly how many are here illegally from Mexico and Latin America, both sides in the debate often accept as reasonable estimates of 11 to 12 million illegals—with an additional 500,000 to 1 million arriving per year. Given porous borders, such guesses about the number of illegal aliens in the United States are outdated almost as soon as they are published. It is plausible, then, that there may be an additional 3 to 4 million illegal aliens here who were not here when the City Journal “Mexifornia” piece appeared.

 

The result of such staggering numbers is that aliens now don’t just cluster in the American Southwest but frequently appear at Home Depot parking lots in the Midwest, emergency rooms in New England, and construction sites in the Carolinas, making illegal immigration an American, rather than a mere Californian or Arizonan, concern.

 

Indeed, we forget how numbers are at the crux of the entire debate over illegal immigration. In the 1970s, perhaps a few million illegals resided in the United States, and their unassimilated presence went largely unnoticed. Most Americans felt that the formidable powers of integration and popular culture would continue to incorporate any distinctive ethnic enclave, as they had so successfully done with the past generations that arrived en masse from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But when more than 10 million fled Mexico in little over a decade—the great majority poor, without English, job skills, a high school education, and legality—entire apartheid communities in the American Southwest began springing up.

 

During the heyday of multiculturalism and political correctness in the 1980s, the response of us, the hosts, to this novel challenge was not to insist upon the traditional assimilation of the newcomer but rather to accommodate the illegal alien with official Spanish-language documents, bilingual education, and ethnic boosterism in our media, politics, and education. These responses only encouraged more illegals to come, on the guarantee that their material life could be better and yet their culture unchanged in the United States. We now see the results. Los Angeles is today the second-largest Mexican city in the world; one out of every ten Mexican nationals resides in the United States, the vast majority illegally.

 

Since Mexifornia appeared, the debate also no longer splits along liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, or even white/brown fault lines. Instead, class considerations more often divide Americans on the issue. The majority of middle-class and poor whites, Asians, African-Americans, and Hispanics wish to close the borders. They see few advantages to cheap service labor, since they are not so likely to need it to mow their lawns, watch their kids, or clean their houses. Because the less well-off eat out less often, use hotels infrequently, and don’t periodically remodel their homes, the advantages to the economy of inexpensive, off-the-books illegal-alien labor again are not so apparent.

 

But the downside surely is apparent. Truck drivers, carpenters, janitors, and gardeners— unlike lawyers, doctors, actors, writers, and professors—correctly feel that their jobs are threatened, or at least their wages lowered, by cheaper rival workers from Oaxaca or Jalisco. And Americans who live in communities where thousands of illegal aliens have arrived en masse more likely lack the money to move when Spanish-speaking students flood the schools and gangs proliferate. Poorer Americans of all ethnic backgrounds take for granted that poverty provides no exemption from mastering English, so they wonder why the same is not true for incoming Mexican nationals. Less than a mile from my home is a former farmhouse whose new owner moved in several stationary Winnebagos, propane tanks, and outdoor cooking facilities—and apparently four or five entire families rent such facilities right outside his back door. Dozens live where a single family used to—a common sight in rural California that reifies illegal immigration in a way that books and essays do not.

 

The problem with all this is that our now-spurned laws were originally intended to ensure an (admittedly thin) veneer of civilization over innate chaos—roads full of drivers who have passed a minimum test to ensure that they are not a threat to others; single-family residence zoning to ensure that there are adequate sewer, garbage, and water services for all; periodic county inspections to ensure that untethered dogs are licensed and free of disease and that housing is wired and plumbed properly to prevent mayhem; and a consensus on school taxes to ensure that there are enough teachers and classrooms for such sudden spikes in student populations.

 

All these now-neglected or forgotten rules proved costly to the taxpayer. In my own experience, the slow progress made in rural California since the 1950s of my youth—in which the county inspected our farm’s rural dwellings, eliminated the once-ubiquitous rural outhouse, shut down substandard housing, and fined violators in hopes of providing a uniform humane standard of residence for all rural residents—has been abandoned in just a few years of laissez-faire policy toward illegal aliens. My own neighborhood is reverting to conditions common about 1950, but with the insult of far higher tax rates added to the injury of nonexistent enforcement of once-comprehensive statutes. The government’s attitude at all levels is to punish the dutiful citizen’s misdemeanors while ignoring the alien’s felony, on the logic that the former will at least comply while the latter either cannot or will not.

 

Fairness about who is allowed into the United States is another issue that reflects class divides—especially when almost 70 percent of all immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive from Mexico alone. Asians, for example, are puzzled as to why their relatives wait years for official approval to enter the United States, while Mexican nationals come across the border illegally, counting on serial amnesties to obtain citizenship.

 

These class divisions cut both ways, and they help explain the anomaly of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page mandarins echoing the arguments of the elite Chicano studies professors. Both tend to ridicule the far less affluent Minutemen and English-only activists, in part because they do not experience firsthand the problems associated with illegal immigration but instead find millions of aliens grist for their own contrasting agendas. Indeed, every time an alien crosses the border legally, fluent in English and with a high school diploma, the La Raza industry and the corporate farm or construction company alike most likely lose a constituent.

 

The ripples of September 11—whether seen in the arrests of dozens of potential saboteurs here in America or the terrorist bombings abroad in Madrid and London—remind Americans that their present enemies can do us harm only if they can first somehow enter the United States. Again, it makes little sense to screen tourists, inspect cargo containers, and check the passenger lists of incoming flights, when our border with an untrustworthy Mexico remains porous. While it may be true that the opponents of illegal immigration have used the post–September 11 fear of terrorism to further their own agenda of closing the border with Mexico, they are absolutely correct that presently the best way for jihadist cells to cross into the United States is overland from the south.

 

Other foreign developments have also steered the debate ever more rightward. In the last decade, the United States has clearly seen the wages of sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism abroad. The unraveling of Yugoslavia into Croatian, Serbian, and Albanian sects followed the Hutu-Tutsi bloodbath in Rwanda. And now almost daily we hear of Pashtun-Tajik-Uzbek hatred among the multiplicity of warring clans in Afghanistan and the daily mayhem among Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis in Iraq. Why—when we are spending blood and treasure abroad to encourage the melting pot and national unity—would anyone wish to contribute to tribalism or foster the roots of such ethnic separatism here in the United States?

 

Moreover, all during the 1990s, blue-state America offered up the European Union as the proper postmodern antidote to the United States. But just as we have recoiled from the EU’s statist and undemocratic tendencies—which have resulted in popular dissatisfaction, sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, falling demography, and unsustainable entitlement commitments—so, too, have its unassimilated Muslim minorities served as another canary in the mine. The riots in France, the support for jihadism among Pakistanis in London, and the demands of Islamists in Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands do not encourage Americans to let in more poor Mexican illegal immigrants with loud agendas, or to embrace the multicultural salad bowl over their own distinctive melting pot.

 

Then there were the April–May 2006 demonstrations here in the United States, when nearly half a million protesters took to the streets of our largest cities, from Chicago to Los Angeles. Previously, naive Americans had considered that their own discussions over border security and immigration were in their own hands. And while Chicano-rights organizations and employer lobbyists were often vehement in their efforts to keep the border open, illegal aliens themselves used to be mostly quiet about our internal legal debates.

 

In contrast, this spring Americans witnessed millions of illegal aliens who not only were unapologetic about their illegal status but were demanding that their hosts accommodate their own political grievances, from providing driver’s licenses to full amnesty. The largest demonstrations—held on May Day, with thousands of protesters waving Mexican flags and bearing placards depicting the communist insurrectionist Che Guevara—only confirmed to most Americans that illegal immigration was out of control and beginning to become politicized along the lines of Latin American radicalism. I chronicled in Mexifornia the anomaly of angry protesters waving the flag of the country they vehemently did not wish to return to, but now the evening news beamed these images to millions. In short, the radical socialism of Latin America, seething in the angry millions who flocked to support Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Mexico’s Andrés López Obrador, had now seemingly been imported into our own largest cities.

 

Turmoil in areas of Mexico that send many illegal aliens to the United States is especially worrisome. Recently, for example, almost the entire state of Oaxaca was in near-open revolt over efforts to force the resignation of provincial governor Ulises Ruiz. There was widespread lawlessness, vigilantism, and at times the complete breakdown of order. All this feeds the growing perception that illegal aliens increasingly are arriving not merely as economic refugees but as political dissidents who don’t hesitate to take to the streets here to demand social justice, as they did back home.

 

More important still, Oaxaca’s troubles cast doubt on the conventional wisdom that illegal immigration is a safety valve that allows Mexico critical time to get its house in order. Perhaps the opposite is true: some of the areas, like Oaxaca, that send the most illegal aliens to the United States, still experience the greatest social tensions—in part because of the familial disruption and social chaos that results when adult males flee and depopulated communities consequently become captive to foreign remittances.

 

Two further issues have persuaded Americans to close the borders: the attitude of the Mexican government and the problems with first-generation native-born children of illegal aliens.

 

Worker remittances sent back to Mexico now earn it precious American dollars equal to the revenue from 500,000 barrels of daily exported oil. In short, Mexico cannot afford to lose its second-largest source of hard currency and will do almost anything to ensure its continuance. When Mexico City publishes comic books advising its own citizens how best to cross the Rio Grande, Americans take offense. Not only does Mexico brazenly wish to undermine American law to subsidize its own failures, but it also assumes that those who flee northward are among its least educated, departing without much ability to read beyond the comic-book level.

 

We are also learning not only that Mexico wants its expatriates’ cash—and its nationals lobbying for Mexican interests—once they are safely away from their motherland; we are also discovering that Mexico doesn’t have much concern about the welfare of its citizens abroad in America. The conservative estimate of $15 billion sent home comes always at the expense of low-paid Mexicans toiling here, who must live in impoverished circumstances if they are to send substantial portions of their wages home to Mexico. (And it comes as well at the expense of American taxpayers, providing health-care and food subsidies in efforts to offer a safety net to cash-strapped illegal aliens.) So it is not just that Mexico exports its own citizens, but it does so on the expectation that they are serfs of a sort, who, like the helots of old, surrender much of the earnings of their toil to their distant masters.

 

But even more grotesquely, in the last five years, the Mexican real-estate market has boomed on the Baja California peninsula. Once Mexico grasped that its own unspoiled coast was highly desirable for wealthy expatriate Americans as a continuation of the prized but crowded Santa Barbara–San Diego seaside corridor, it began to reform its real-estate market, making the necessary changes in property and title law, and it welcomed with open arms cash-laden subdividers looking to come south. This is sound economics, but examine the ethical message: Mexico City will send the United States millions of its own illiterate and poor whom it will neither feed nor provide with even modest housing, but at the same time it welcomes thousands of Americans with cash to build expensive seaside second homes.

 

Of course, the ultimate solution to the illegal immigration debacle is for Mexican society to bring itself up to the levels of affluence found in the United States by embracing market reforms of the sort we have seen in South Korea, Taiwan, and China. But rarely do Mexican supporters of such globalization, or their sympathetic counterparts in the United States, see the proliferation of a Wal-Mart or Starbucks down south in such terms. Rather, to them American consumerism and investment in Mexico suggest only an owed reciprocity of sentiment: Why should Americans get mad about Mexican illegals coming north when our own crass culture, with its blaring neon signs in English, spreads southward? In such morally equivalent arguments, it is never mentioned that Americanization occurs legally and brings capital, while Mexicanization comes about by illegal means and is driven by poverty.

 

At the same time, focus has turned more to the U.S.-born children of Mexican illegal immigrants, in whom illegitimacy, school dropout rates, and criminal activity have risen to such levels that no longer can we simply dismiss Mexican immigration as resembling the more problematic but eventually successful Italian model of a century ago. Then, large numbers of southern European Catholics, most without capital and education, arrived en masse from Italy and Sicily, lived in ethnic enclaves, and for decades lagged behind the majority population in educational achievement, income, and avoidance of crime—before achieving financial parity as well as full assimilation and intermarriage. Since 1990, the number of poor Mexican-Americans has climbed 52 percent, a figure that skewed U.S. poverty rates. Billions of dollars spent on our own poor will not improve our poverty statistics when 1 million of the world’s poorest cross our border each year. The number of impoverished black children has dropped 17 percent in the last 16 years, but the number of Hispanic poor has gone up 43 percent. We don’t like to talk of illegitimacy, but here again the ripples of illegal immigration reach the U.S.-born generation. Half of births to Hispanic-Americans were illegitimate, 42 percent higher than the general rate of the American population. Illegitimacy is higher in general in Mexico than in the United States, but the force multiplier of illegal status, lack of English, and an absence of higher education means that the children of Mexican immigrants have illegitimacy rates even higher than those found in either Mexico or the United States.

 

Education levels reveal the same dismal pattern—nearly half of all Hispanics are not graduating from high school in four years. And the more Hispanic a school district becomes, the greater level of failure for Hispanic students. In the Los Angeles district, 73 percent Hispanic, 60 percent of the students are not graduating. But the real tragedy is that, of those Hispanics who do graduate, only about one in five will have completed a high school curriculum that qualifies for college enrollment. That partly helps to explain why at many campuses of the California State University system, almost half of the incoming class must first take remedial education. Less than 10 percent of those who identify themselves as Hispanic have graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree. I found that teaching Latin to first-generation Mexican-Americans and illegal aliens was valuable not so much as an introduction to the ancient world but as their first experience with remedial English grammar.

 

Meanwhile, almost one in three Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 recently reported being arrested, one in five has been jailed, and 15,000 illegal aliens are currently in the California penal system.

 

Statistics like these have changed the debate radically. While politicians and academics assured the public that illegal aliens came here only to work and would quickly assume an American identity, the public’s own ad hoc and empirical observations of vast problems with crime, illiteracy, and illegitimacy have now been confirmed by hard data. Ever since the influx of illegals into our quiet valley became a flood, I have had five drivers leave the road, plow into my vineyard, and abandon their cars, without evidence of either registration or insurance. On each occasion, I have seen them simply walk or run away from the scene of thousands of dollars in damage. Similarly, an intoxicated driver who ran a stop sign hit my car broadside and then fled the scene. Our farmhouse in the Central Valley has been broken into three times. We used to have an open yard; now it is walled, with steel gates on the driveway. Such anecdotes have become common currency in the American Southwest. Ridiculed by elites as evidence of prejudice, these stories, statistical studies now show, reflect hard fact.

 

The growing national discomfort over illegal immigration more than four years after “Mexifornia” first appeared in City Journal is not only apparent in the rightward shift of the debate but also in the absence of any new arguments for open borders—while the old arguments, Americans are finally concluding, really do erode the law, reward the cynical here and abroad, and needlessly divide Americans along class, political, and ethnic lines.

 

 

[foraker]

you won't stop them coming over the border until you remove the economic incentive for them to do so. and with shrub's 'war' and pork barrel spending to pay for, i'm disinclined to pay for another hideously expensive, most likely ineffective, public works project like a wall. frankly, i'm surprised conservatives are too. but, then, it's easier to go after the little brown people than the white corporate execs and Bob and Susan down the street who have a gardener and a maid service.

[sheaf_stout]

I'm all for a big wall and have been long before folks used the term Shrub. He doesn't really have anything to do with it. In fact he is in favor of a lot of immigration policies which I disagree with. Securing our borders should be done regardless of cost.

 

It doesn't have anything to do with brown or white. That's a cheap shot since you don't really have any real argument besides hot air.

[foraker]

you don't have much of an argument either since you've neither described the cost of a wall (building, maintaining, securing), whether or not people are willing to pay for it, and whether or not it will be effective. You haven't addressed my solution at all, which is hardly hot air. Which is easier? Going after 11 million illegal immigrants or going after their employers? Who is easier to identify and nail down? Which is more cost effective? Are we going to build a wall all along the Gulf coast and along the Canadian border as well? Those are leaky too, last time I checked.

[sheaf_stout]

You think the cost of a wall in the long term will not curb the cost of harboring people we should not already be paying for?

 

The cost of securing our borders should come first and foremost. Here are some sources of revenue we can start looking at curtailing immediately. As for the effectiveness - it depends on what would be built. Of course any obstacle is more effective than what we have today.

 

We can build nuclear weapons. We can build walls too.

 

 

 

 

Economic costs of legal and illegal immigration

Why borders can not be open

"Business interests however are short-term. Easy immediate access to labour will always be preferred to the costs of training and capital investment for the longer term. In the nature of economic cycles, yesterday's essential labour can often become, as the defunct factories and mills of Europe have shown, today's unemployed. Employers who demanded immigrant labour are not held to account for this or required to contribute to subsequent costs of their unemployed former workers. Few things are more permanent that temporary worker from a poor country. If business were made responsible for the lifetime costs of their migrant labour in the same way as they must now deal with the lifetime environmental costs of their products, perhaps enthusiasm for labour migration might be moderated and make way for longer-term investment in capital-intensive restructuring."7

 

Economic and social costs of illegal immigration

The economic and social consequences of illegal immigration across the 1,940 mile long America-Mexico border are staggering.

 

An average of 10,000 illegal aliens cross the border every day - over 3 million per year. A third will be caught and many of them immediately will try again. About half of those remaining will become permanent U.S. residents (3,500 per day).

 

Currently there are an estimated 9 to 11 million illegals in the U.S., double the 1994 level. A quarter-million illegal aliens from the Middle-east currently live in the U.S, and a growing number are entering by crossing the Mexican border.

 

FAIR research suggests that "between 40 and 50 percent of wage-loss among low-skilled Americans is due to the immigration of low-skilled workers. Some native workers lose not just wages but their jobs through immigrant competition. An estimated 1,880,000 American workers are displaced from their jobs every year by immigration; the cost for providing welfare and assistance to these Americans is over $15 billion a year." The National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, found in 1997 that the average immigrant without a high school education imposes a net fiscal burden on public coffers of $89,000 during the course of his or her lifetime. The average immigrant with only a high school education creates a lifetime fiscal burden of $31,000.8

 

80% of cocaine and 50% of heroin in the U.S. is smuggled across the border by Mexican nationals. Drug cartels spend a half-billion dollars per year bribing Mexico's corrupt generals and police officials, and armed confrontations between the Mexican army and U.S. Border Patrol agents are a real threat. There have been 118 documented incursions by the Mexican military over the last five years.

 

Illegal aliens have cost billions of taxpayer-funded dollars for medical services. Dozens of hospitals in Texas, New Mexico Arizona, and California, have been forced to close or face bankruptcy because of federally-mandated programs requiring free emergency room services to illegal aliens. Taxpayers pay half-a-billion dollars per year incarcerating illegal alien criminals.

 

Immigration is a net drain on the economy; corporate interests reap the benefits of cheap labor, while taxpayers pay the infrastructural cost. FAIR research shows "the net annual cost of immigration has been estimated at between $67 and $87 billion a year. The National Academy of Sciences found that the net fiscal drain on American taxpayers is between $166 and $226 a year per native household. Even studies claiming some modest overall gain for the economy from immigration ($1 to $10 billion a year) have found that it is outweighed by the fiscal cost ($15 to $20 billion a year) to native taxpayers."

 

"In the NAFTA era, a staggering 87 percent of Mexico's imports go to the United States, while Mexicans living in the United States send home more than $8 billion annually. Fox has said he considers his constituency to include the 22 million to 24 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the United States. Mexican candidates now make campaign stops in U.S. cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Fresno, Calif." (Mexico's muddle, Ruben Navarrette Jr., March 26, 2003)

 

For more information, see The Washington Times article and series Chaos along the border, October 6, 2002, the FAIR reports Immigration and the Economy, Immigration Lowers Wages for American Workers, and the article Record amount of remittances sent from US to Mexico.

 

Remittances

$60 billion dollars are earned by illegal aliens in the U.S. each year. One of Mexico's largest revenue streams (after exports and oil sales) consists of money sent home by legal immigrants and illegal aliens working in the U.S. Economists say this will help Mexico reduce its $17.8 billion defecit and may bolster the peso. $10 billion dollars (as of 2003) are sent back to Mexico annually, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, reported in an Associated Press article, up $800 million from the previous year. ($9 billion dollars were previously sent back annually, according to a September 25, 2002 NPR report). That figure equals what Mexico earns annually from tourism. This is a massive transfer of wealth from America - essentially from America's displaced working poor - to Mexico.

 

A May 28, 2004 study by Bendixen & Associates6 found that legal and illegal immigrants send a total of $30 billion to their home countries on an annual basis. Mexico receives $13.3 billion a year. The largest amount in remittances ($9.6 billion) is sent from California, followed by New York ($3.6 billion), Texas ($3.2 billion) and Florida ($2.5 billion). Of those surveyed by the study, 24% were Latin American-born U.S. citizens, 39% were legal residents, and 32% were illegal aliens. Sixty-one per cent of those surveyed send remittances overseas at least once a month. A typical remittance is between $150 and $250. (See this state-by-state map of remittances.)

 

Education costs

The total K-12 school expenditure for illegal immigrants costs the states $7.4 billion annually—enough to buy a computer for every junior high student nationwide.9

 

For more information, see CAIR's education section.

 

'Anchor baby' Hospital costs

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads in part, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside."

 

It's estimated there may be over 300,000 anchor babies born each year in the U.S. Thus, illegal alien mothers now add more to U.S. population each year than immigration from all sources in an average year before 1965. These babies are called anchor babies because they act as an anchor that pulls the illegal alien mother and a host of other relatives into permanent U.S. residency.

 

FAIR estimates "there are currently between 287,000 and 363,000 children born to illegal aliens each year. This figure is based on the crude birth rate of the total foreign-born population (33 births per 1000) and the size of the illegal alien population (between 8.7 and 11 million). In 1994, California paid for 74,987 deliveries to illegal alien mothers, at a total cost of $215.2 million (an average of $2,842 per delivery). Illegal alien mothers accounted for 36 percent of all Medi-Cal funded births in California that year."

 

FAIR research shows that "the Urban Institute estimates that the cost of educating illegal alien children in the nation's seven states with the highest concentration of illegal aliens was $3.1 billion in 1993 (which, with the growth of their population to 1.3 million, would be more like $5 billion in 2000). This estimate does not take into account the additional costs of bilingual education or other special educational needs."

 

In a recent year in Colorado, the state's emergency Medicaid program paid an estimated $30 million in hospital and physician delivery costs for about 6,000 illegal immigrant mothers - average of $5,000 per baby. Those 6,000 births to illegal aliens represent 40% of the births paid for by Medicaid in Colorado. Those 6,000 babies immediately became U.S. citizens and qualified for full Medicaid services, with a cost yet to be tabulated.

 

An illegal alien mother only has to say she is "undocumented" in order to receive immediate - and free - medical care. Denver Health is now proposing that taxpayers approve a bond issue to pay for a bigger obstetrics unit. The present unit was built for 1,600 births a year, yet last year alone it handled 3,500.

 

For more information, see the Denver Post article Track 'anchor babies', by Al Knight, September 11, 2002, the article Pretending Immigration Isn't an Issue, by Phyllis Schafly, September, 2002, and the FAIR article Anchor Babies: Is U.S. Citizenship Owed to Illegal Aliens' Children?

 

Medical care to illegal aliens

"Mexican ambulance drivers are driving their hospital patients who can't pay for medical care in Mexico, to facilities in the United States. They know that the federal Emergency Medical Act mandates that U.S. hospitals with emergency-room services must treat anyone who requires care, including illegal aliens.

 

Medical service for Americans in affected communities is being severely damaged as hospitals absorb more than $200 million in unreimbursed costs. Some emergency rooms have shut down because they cannot afford to stay open. Local tax-paying Americans are either denied medical care or have to wait in long lines for service as the illegals flood the facilities. In California, the losses are calculated to be about $79 million, with $74 million in Texas, $31 million in Arizona, and $6 million in New Mexico."1

 

These costs are staggering. The Cochise County, Arizona Health Department spends as much as 30 percent of its annual $9 million budget on illegal aliens.3 The Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee, Arizona, has spent $200,000 in uncompensated services out of a net operating budget of $300,000.3 The University Medical Center in Tucson may lose as much as $10 million and the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center, also in Tucson, has lost $1 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2002.3

 

As noted above, in a recent year in Colorado, the state's emergency Medicaid program paid an estimated $30 million in hospital and physician delivery costs for about 6,000 illegal immigrant mothers - average of $5,000 per baby.

 

The Gwinnett, Georgia, Hospital System expects has established a $34 million reserve to cover its anticipated outlay for illegal aliens in 2003. Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein wrote in his December 30, 2003 column that the 'Health-Care Storm Brewing in California Threatens to Swamp U.S... the impending Medicaid disaster is not a problem the states can handle alone; their budget shortfalls are too big.'2

 

"The General Accounting Office traveled to southern Arizona to study the impact of illegal immigrants on Arizona and other border state hospitals. In 2002, three hospitals located in Cochise County funded more than $1 million in uncompensated health care costs... The Florida Hospital Association surveyed 28 hospitals and found that health care for illegal aliens totaled at least $40 million in 2002."2

 

 

"There is one thing stronger than all the kings and queens, and all the armies of the world combined, and that is the power of an idea whose time has come"

- Victor Hugo

 

 

 

Illegal aliens cost $10 billion in 2002

A new Center for Immigration Studies report was released in August, 2004 that shows that illegal immigration cost $10 billion in 2002.4 Based on Census Bureau data, the study estimates that households headed by illegal aliens used $10 billion more in government services than they paid in taxes in 2002. These figures are only for the federal government; costs at the state and local level are also likely to be significant. The study also finds that if illegals were given amnesty, the fiscal deficit at the federal level would grow to nearly $29 billion. Among the findings:

 

* Illegal alien households are estimated to use $2,700 a year more in services than they pay in taxes, creating a total fiscal burden of nearly $10.4 billion on the federal budget in 2002.

 

* Among the largest federal costs: Medicaid ($2.5 billion); treatment for the uninsured ($2.2 billion); food assistance programs ($1.9 billion); the federal prison and court systems ($1.6 billion); and federal aid to schools ($1.4 billion).

 

* If illegal aliens were legalized and began to pay taxes and use services like legal immigrants with the same education levels, the estimated annual fiscal deficit at the federal level would increase from $2,700 per household to nearly $7,700, for a total federal deficit of $29 billion.

 

* Because many of the costs are due to their U.S.-born children, who are awarded U.S. citizenship at birth, barring illegals themselves from federal programs will not significantly reduce costs.

 

* Although they create a net drain on the federal government, the average illegal household pays more than $4,200 a year in federal taxes, for a total of nearly $16 billion.

 

* However, they impose annual costs of more than $26.3 billion, or about $6,950 per illegal household.

 

* About 43 percent, or $7 billion, of the federal taxes illegals pay go to Social Security and Medicare.

 

A 1997 report by the National Research Council (NRC) on the fiscal impact of immigrants concluded that education levels and resulting income is the primary determinant of tax payments and service use, which is also a central finding of this report. The results of this study closely match the findings of a 1998 Urban Institute study. Our estimated average tax payment for illegal households in New York State are almost identical to that of the Urban Institute, when adjusted for inflation. The results of this study are also buttressed by an analysis of illegal alien tax returns done by the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Treasury in 2004, which found that about half had no federal income tax liability, very similar to the study's findings of 45 percent.

 

Immigration causes average wage decline of $1,700

Two decades' growth in the supply of immigrant workers cost native-born American men an average $1,700 in annual wages by the year 2000, a top economist has concluded.5

 

Hispanic and black Americans were hurt most by the influx of foreign-born workers, says a report by Harvard University's George Borjas, considered a leading authority on the impact of immigration....

 

"What past immigration has done -- and what the temporary worker program will continue to do on a potentially larger scale -- is to depress wages and increase profits of the firms that employ the immigrants," Borjas said. "The reduction in earnings occurs regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or temporary. It is the presence of additional workers that reduces wages, not their legal status."

 

 

[sheaf_stout]

More "pork barrel spending" of another kind.

 

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/special_reports/2007/story/7192277p-7008557c.html

 

Illegal immigrants cost millions in N.J. tax dollars

By JOHN FROONJIAN Special Reports Unit, (609) 292-7206

Published: Friday, February 9, 2007

Press photo by David Benson

 

Sandra, and her 3-year-old nephew, Daniel, took part a demonstration in Washington calling for more rights for undocumented workers.

 

The illicit nature of the underground economy makes it impossible to precisely document its size. But illegal immigration clearly costs New Jersey hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

 

One national group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, claims all levels of government combined spend more $1.6 billion a year on illegal immigrants in New Jersey. That's a loose estimate based on studies done in other high-immigrant states.

 

Estimates from the state, other sources and Press of Atlantic City analysis suggest more than $750 million a year is spent on education, health care, food stamps and other programs.

 

New Jersey state and local governments spend more than $10,000 per pupil on education. About 40,000 children of illegal immigrants attend school here, according to state legislative estimates. So government spends at least $400 million educating those children. Press analysis of recent illegal immigrant numbers suggests that the student population is closer to 45,000, costing $450 million or more for their education.

 

The New Jersey Hospital Association estimates that member hospitals provide $257 million a year to treat in-patient illegal immigrants. The hospitals' estimate does not include patients treated in emergency rooms and released. So the price tag for medical treatment of illegal immigrants is higher.

 

 

 

Illegal immigrants do not qualify for welfare, but if they have children in this country, the children are citizens eligible for food stamps. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 12 percent of illegal immigrant households in New Jersey receive food stamps. Using an average U.S. household benefit of $213 a month, the annual cost in New Jersey would be around $50 million.

 

The state pays other expenses that are hard to quantify.

Critics claim there are huge outlays for imprisoning immigrants convicted of crimes. New Jersey pays about $55 million to imprison about 1,900 immigrants. But there is no way to know how many of those prisoners have papers. A state corrections spokesman said illegal immigrant criminals are generally deported.

 

Still, there are expenses. Some illegal immigrants do end up in state prisons, and others are housed in county jails. It costs tax dollars simply to arrest and process criminals.

 

Some illegal immigrants do pay taxes. Their Social Security numbers may be phony, but income taxes are deducted. However, many pay nothing. That's especially true of day laborers paid in cash. A 1997 State Commission of Investigation report said millions of tax dollars go uncollected. The shadowy nature of working off the books makes it tough to reasonably estimate lost taxes.

 

Other costs created by illegal immigrants include school lunches, translation services used by courts, government and medical services, bilingual education and covering accidents caused by uninsured motorists.

 

Then there is the impact to the overall economy of disappearing dollars.

Many immigrants send money to families back home. The Inter-American Development Bank estimated in October that nationwide, Latin American immigrants send $45 billion a year to their native countries. Immigrants send an average of $300 a month. Many send more.

 

The Press estimated that if 70 percent of illegal immigrants working in New Jersey send $300 a month home, about $59 million a month is being taken out of the state's economy. That would mean more than $705 million a year is taken out of circulation.

 

Rutgers economist Bill Rodgers said any money that leaves the country has an impact because it is not spent and reinvested in local businesses.

 

 

[Lars Larceny]

http://www.immigrationshumancost.org/text/crimevictims.html

[sheaf_stout]

Some of you who speak out about targeting big companies are infected with what your media has sold to you on television and radio. This problem starts on that invisible line called the border. That is where you stop it. The whole concept of stopping business owners will just naturally happen once the border is in control.

 

I liken it to the BRM. You don't shoot at the berm in front of the target. You shoot at the target.

 

 

http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/systems/mexico-wall.htm

 

Tunnel passages across an international border into the United States have become a real problem. There are 40 such tunnels that have been discovered since 9/11, and the great bulk of them are on the southern border. Large-scale smuggling of drugs, weapons, and immigrants takes place today through these tunnels. One tunnel running from San Diego to Tijuana was marked by inordinate sophistication. It was a half mile long. It went 60 to 80 feet deep, 8 feet tall. It had a concrete floor. It was wired for electricity. It had drainage. At one end, 300 pounds of marijuana were found, and at the other end, 300 pounds of marijuana. What was interesting is that the California entry into the tunnel was a very modern warehouse, a huge warehouse compartmented but empty and kept empty for a year. In one office there was a hatch in the floor. It looked much like the hatch which Saddam had secreted himself in. But lifting that hatch disclosed a very sophisticated tunnel. It went under other buildings all the way across the double fence into Mexico and up in Mexico in a building as well.

[ivan]

seems like a man so keen on scaring us w/ the evils of foreigners would have chosen an american beer to represent himself?

 

myself, i like the irony of the taco-negro re-invading the country that stole 1/2 his heritage - on my hoot-list it ranks up there w/ the salmon-negro getting the suv-negro drunk on his own fire-water and picking his pocket at the local casino

 

funny that you should compare the war on drugs w/ the war on immigrants - we appear to be having the same sucess on both fronts - maybe time to reconsider our original position, eh?

[Dechristo]

do we have american food?

 

M & M's

 

 

I simply wanted to get in on one of the longest pages in the cc.com archive.

 

 

But, while I'm here...

 

The repetitive surfacing of racist comments in use ostensibly to condemn political argument is tiresome and says as much about the accuser as the accused; give it a rest, will ya?

 

And the argument I saw here to put whatever costs "rightfully" on employers/businesses/corporations instead of taxpayers seems ignorant. In principle, all businesses pass their costs (overhead) onto consumers, aka taxpayers.

[sheaf_stout]

seems like a man so keen on scaring us w/ the evils of foreigners would have chosen an american beer to represent himself?

 

Weak. Is that all you have? Who is trying to scare us about the evils of foreigners? What assumptions have you made about me and my background or heritage in that empty space you call a skull?

 

myself, i like the irony of the taco-negro re-invading the country that stole 1/2 his heritage - on my hoot-list it ranks up there w/ the salmon-negro getting the suv-negro drunk on his own fire-water and picking his pocket at the local casino

 

You sound like you grew up in a trailer park. You people here cry out using racist words like "brown" and "negro" and "taco". Hmm sounds like you are the racists to me.

 

funny that you should compare the war on drugs w/ the war on immigrants - we appear to be having the same sucess on both fronts - maybe time to reconsider our original position, eh?

 

There was no comparison to a war on terror or drugs. If you feel like citing any of my previous remarks it might help your argument because you have not really said much. Here's a hint - try speaking about the subject at hand.

[olyclimber]

HELLO! I AM HERE TO ARGUE IN THIS IMPORTANT THREAD.

[Crux]

Go away. This thread is much too important for you.

[sheaf_stout]

HELLO! I AM HERE TO ARGUE IN THIS IMPORTANT THREAD.

 

Yes, I can see the circus is run by the clowns here. I already knew that though.

 

 

Were your last 10000 plus posts as intriguing and intelligent as this one? Gibberish in high volumes. Someone call a doctor.

 

[olyclimber]

I AM SO GLAD YOU GUYS ARE WORKING THIS OUT. KEEP IT UP!

[olyclimber]

WHEN YOU HAVE IT ALL WORKED OUT ANY EVERYONE AGREES LETS HAVE A PARTY.

[sheaf_stout]

I AM SO GLAD YOU GUYS ARE WORKING THIS OUT. KEEP IT UP!

 

Good. Now get back to dropping MySql tables and spying on IP addresses.

 

While you are at that you can fix the reply box so that it is full length. If you need help let me know.

[JosephH]

Some of you who speak out about targeting big companies are infected with what your media has sold to you on television and radio.

 

Are you dense? Which part of the concept of demand completely eludes you? No employers > no work > no pay > no illegal immigration. It isn't rocket science - it's holding the true criminals involved in this issue responsible for their actions.

 

This problem starts on that invisible line called the border. That is where you stop it.

 

Excuse me, but this statement is completely clueless. There is no physical barrier you can erect at the border which would stop illegal immigration while the demand remains unabated. In fact, the fact, any time a 'wall' is being built anywhere in the world a gross failure at of personal responsibility on a grand scale is taking place on the part of those building it.

 

The whole concept of stopping business owners will just naturally happen once the border is in control.

 

And this is too naive to merit a response....

 

[olyclimber]

I AM SO GLAD YOU GUYS ARE WORKING THIS OUT. KEEP IT UP!

 

Good. Now get back to dropping MySql tables and spying on IP addresses.

 

While you are at that you can fix the reply box so that it is full length. If you need help let me know.

 

 

OOOHH!! OOOOOOHH!!!!!! A GURU!!!!!

[sheaf_stout]

Excuse me, but this statement is completely clueless. There is no physical barrier you can erect at the border which would stop illegal immigration while the demand remains unabated. In fact, the fact, any time a 'wall' is being built anywhere in the world a gross failure at of personal responsibility on a grand scale is taking place on the part of those building it.

 

What's the failure here? Please enlighten the rest of us to your theories.

 

Are you dense? Which part of the concept of demand completely eludes you? No employers > no work > no pay > no illegal immigration. It isn't rocket science - it's holding the true criminals involved in this issue responsible for their actions.

 

They can have all the demand the companies want but if the problem is generally rectified then there is no supply. Get it? Who are the true criminals? The US govt that wants to open our borders and bankrupt our taxpayers who pay for the social programs?

 

And this is too naive to merit a response....

 

I'm sorry that you don't really have a response but that just shows your lack of creativity to me. A defensive border is just what we need to control the flow. Right now we have zero control who passes across and our border agents cannot possibly control it without a physical barrier. Kind of like when you go to the airport and you have to get screened for safety.

 

Don't get me wrong - immigration is ok. Illegal is not. We should know who is coming into this country and reserve the right to send them back.

 

The resolution to their social, economic and other struggles on the other side of the southern border should start in their home. The US cannot possibly absorb Mexico's population effectively and succeed economically in the long term.

 

[olyclimber]

DROPPING SQL TABLES IS AN ELITE ART. ASK SHEAF STOUT. HE IS HIRED IT GURU WHO KNOWS ALL. HE WAS CLICKING REFRESH FOR ALMOST 24 HOURS. HIS OPINION COUNTS.

[sheaf_stout]

I AM SO GLAD YOU GUYS ARE WORKING THIS OUT. KEEP IT UP!

 

Good. Now get back to dropping MySql tables and spying on IP addresses.

 

While you are at that you can fix the reply box so that it is full length. If you need help let me know.

 

 

OOOHH!! OOOOOOHH!!!!!! A GURU!!!!!

 

Yes I figured the experts here would have had that fixed in a jiffy. What's taking you so long there tough guy?

 

try editing

 

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