Borderline Insanity – Parts I and 2
By Diane Alden
In a kind of frenzied groupthink they are quick to label critics and immigration realists as racist, nativist, xenophobic, anti-free trade or anti-immigrant. Debate is stifled even when the reform-minded are armed with enough data and unpalatable truths to reach to the moon and back.
Loaded with piles of evidence, immigration realists make a valiant attempt to bust the myth that unrestricted immigration (migration) and porous borders can continue, with no real harm done.
In that regard, it has become obvious to me over the last year that the entire immigration mess is driven by extremely wrong-headed, shortsighted commercial and economic considerations. Also in play is a quixotic post-Cold War attempt to remake the world and human nature through a process of deconstructing the nation-state system. The idea is to reconstruct the entire world system into something else – heaven on earth, I suppose.
Given the evidence that guest worker amnesty/programs in the past have been flops, the response is the same: "We are a dynamic nation that can absorb the world and connect willing workers with willing employers and it won't cost much."
Think again.
Most of us muddle along pretending things are as they always were – business as usual. One would think border anarchy, increase in Third World disease in the U.S., drug cartels, human traffickers, gangs and gang warfare, kidnapping, and the rise of ethnic mafias would provide enough reasons to put a moratorium on immigration and regulate the borders. Additionally, our leaders give no consideration to misuse of work and student visas, bankrupting the states, crime and mayhem, putting up with those who have citizenship in two countries, refugee status given to people who shouldn't have it, along with all the other aberrations.
If Washington were not so insulated from reality, our leaders would recognize this grab bag of chaos and rethink the entire immigration/open borders question.
The opportunity presented itself after 9/11. Commerce and economics, trade and corporate needs, as well as identity group interests, made it impossible to react in a truly rational way. Instead we added another federal agency to the government, thereby creating another opportunity for paper shuffling and throwing money down the bureaucratic rat hole. Sensible provisions for national security and self-interest were not priorities.
Rational leaders would have gone after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, but they would also have ENDED the visa and immigration system as we know it rather than institute pathetic reforms. Someone with intelligence would have demanded demographic profiling, at least by age and gender. Nonetheless, commerce, economics and political correctness trumped national security and continue to do so. Proof is on the way – read on.
A statement from the latest research piece from the Center for Immigration Studies puts it in perspective:
"Put simply, the mere fact that employers want more workers, and foreigners wish to work in this country, does not mean that Americans necessarily benefit from their coming. This fact must be considered when formulating policy." (www.cis.com)
It is all about commerce and economics, which are then rationalized for the public by cloaking them in "compassion." President Bush says that "family values do not stop at the Rio Grande." He also maintains that border jumpers are simply people who want to feed their families. Nonetheless, nearly every government and Census Bureau study on the issue tells us that the VAST majority of border jumpers are young males under 40, poorly educated and single. Some of them also make up approximately 25 to 30 percent of the prison population in the United States.
But that does not seem to make a blip on the "compassion" radar in D.C. as it impacts U.S. citizens and states, which must deal with the problem of illegal and legal immigration. The fact is, if the leadership actually believes the compassion rhetoric, we are in real danger because no one is looking out for us as either citizens or taxpayers. According to Census Bureau statistics, only 37 percent of foreign-born living in the U.S. have even bothered to become naturalized citizens. That is a far cry from earlier immigration, wherein the vast majority of immigrants became citizens. Also, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. at its peak in 1910 was less than half the number of immigrants in the U.S. today. When you add the welfare state to mass migration and the failure to keep welfare for citizens only, as my dad would say, "Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?"
An Invasion by Any Other Name
The L.A. Times reported in last Sunday's edition (1/23/05) that a group comprising New Mexico and federal law enforcement agencies, the Southwest New Mexico Border Security Task Force, issued a report in 2003 that it didn't have the resources to adequately protect the border against drug dealers, illegal immigrants and "potentially weapons of mass destruction" from making it across the border.
The article relates that border agents have run into heavily armed Mexican soldiers inside the U.S. Patrol agent Rick Moody reported: "I have found up to 10 Mexican soldiers in a Humvee on our side of the border. We don't know what they are doing here. They usually say they got lost. When that happens, we confront them and escort them back."
Police Chief Clare May of Columbus, N.M., told the Times that cars with illegals or drug dealers go through town at 100 mph with border agents in pursuit. Stolen vehicles litter the roadsides, and drug and immigrant trafficking is rife among those in his community. Calls for assistance, most of them related to illegal immigrants, jumped from 450 in 2003 to 900 last year.
Recently, the Washington Post looked into the anarchy near the border town of Nuevo Loredo, Texas. Federal officials indicate there have been 27 Americans kidnapped in the area since August. Out of that number, 15 – including three American girls in their early 20s – are still missing.
The paper also related a warning from the U.S. consular office in the area. "Last month, U.S. consular officials here issued a warning to the thousands of Americans who cross the bridge each week, including Mexican Americans visiting relatives or shopping and tourists on short sightseeing trips."
"U.S. citizens are urged to be especially aware of safety and security concerns when traveling through or visiting in Nuevo Laredo," said the warning. It went on to say that 21 U.S. citizens had been kidnapped or had disappeared between August and December, with nine later released, two found dead and 10 still missing. It also mentioned the "alarming rate" of kidnappings that has continued for some time across Mexico, including "express" abductions for quick-cash ransoms.
One U.S. official stated: "We're seeing outright lawlessness in Nuevo Laredo. Things are just getting out of hand."
There is a drug war going on along the border. So, what else is new? Cartels vying for control of the border has been going on for years. Well, hey, why not? The federal government isn't interested in controlling the border. As the Post reports, "millions of dollars' worth of marijuana, cocaine and heroin are smuggled north by truck and train among cargoes of legitimate goods."
Michael Yoder, the U.S. consul, informs us that one Mexican gang, the Zetas, are composed of former military commandos who deserted from the Mexican army and are busy kidnapping for ransom. It is a way of moonlighting when the drug business falls off or there is a major drug bust. (Mary Jordan, Washington Post, 1/22/05)
In an unprecedented move along the U.S.-Mexico border last year, a convoy of 12 pickup trucks packed with suspected illegal immigrants barreled through the Tohono O'odham Nation and tried to run down approaching Border Patrol agents.
Confrontations with ranchers and Border Patrol and police are commonplace. Nevertheless, it is as if Washington, D.C., and the states and people impacted by migration live in different realities.
These are not isolated incidents. Reports of Mexican army and Mexican police incursions across the border have been reported for years, as well as kidnappings and millions crossing the border illegally. Each and every day thousands enter the U.S. illegally, and not just from Mexico. They are coming in from all over the world. Numbers of illegal Chinese entering is now in the hundreds of thousands. They arrive in shipping containers and cross the borders from Mexico and Canada.
Hustling the Invasion
Citizens of border states, particularly those hit hardest by the human migration from other areas of the world, are at the point of desperation. But it isn't just border states being impacted. The heartland is taking a hit on all its systems as taxpayers foot the bill for the "compassion" the Washington elite and national politicians expend on providing cheap labor and growth of government at all levels
Washington continues to pretend there is no problem. The greater concern in Washington is that actually dealing with the problem of this economic invasion by the people of the Third World would interfere with commerce and take money away from supplying more bureaucrats to Washington.
Retiring Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge informed USA Today that the part of the recently passed intelligence bill that includes 10,000 new Border Patrol agents over five years is not a good use of resources. He informs us that President Bush is not going to ask for money to fund them.
Ridge told the paper, "The notion that you're going to have 10,000 is sort of a fool's gold." He would rather spend it on other kinds of agents and technology, cameras, spy in the sky.
Border Patrol agents are asking, What use are cameras if the invaders they capture electronically are not taken into custody because there are not enough agents to do the job? My suggestion: Gather as many as they can and deposit them at the gate of Vicente Fox's villa and include a bill for upkeep and incarceration. But that has already been tried.
Last year an Idaho County commissioner, Robert Vasquez, sent a bill to the Mexican government to reimburse his county for the $2 million the county spent on health care for illegals. The potato industry is where the illegals are employed, but apparently the potato industry doesn't know much about health-care insurance for employees, given that most of them are illegal.
By the way, if you think guest worker amnesty is going to solve this problem by forcing employers to pay benefits – think again. Employers do not want employees on the books. It messes with the whole scam they have going to get taxpayers to pick up the tab. Social costs for immigration, legal and illegal, on the states also allow wages to remain depressed because of a never-ending supply of labor. (Phillip Martin – UC-Davis Study, CAWS, NAWS, Department of Agriculture)
This does not sound like a good deal either for the taxpayer or for migrants already in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Canyon County, Idaho, commissioner is asking the governor to declare the region a disaster area.
The Department of Homeland Security does not want more money for Border Patrol agents, but it does have enough money for conferences, gatherings, increases in numbers of bureaucrats to staff whiz-bang new agencies like the National Intelligence Council. The Council was created after 9/11 – one more effort to produce paperwork and occasions for playing footsie with other highly paid but clueless bureaucrats in the Beltway.
There are thousands of them in government. These are Very Important People who discuss world trends and theories of geopolitics over tidbits at local Georgetown eateries. These highly overpaid officials would drop over in a dead faint if they ever had to spend a night with the Border Patrol. A ride down a dusty, dirty back road playing hide-and-seek with drug dealers, murderers, the Mexican army and police, illegal border crossers and deadly traffickers in anything and everything: It would not make their day.
The objective of one more "intelligence" council in D.C. is beyond me. I surmise from its Web site that the intention is to think great thoughts, share information, coordinate strategic thinking while mapping the global future – which amounts to traveling and shuffling papers from one bureaucracy to the next.
Here's a thought for retiring Secretary Ridge, the new DHS Secretary Chertoff, the boys and girls at the National Intelligence Council, and the Bush White House: GET A GRIP!!!
Numbers of Border Patrol agents are convinced that Mexican authorities are protecting drug runners and traffickers in human beings. The Mexican government and authorities, for the most part, are about as corrupt as it gets. On occasion and with great fanfare, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security) and Mexican authorities catch one or two obvious crooks or evildoers and tell us how great the cooperation is.
Tom Ridge, Condoleezza Rice and President Bush are all shoveling that pile of horsehockey every time a question is asked about why Mexico is so lax in helping us patrol the border. Piled high and deeper: the reasons they give why we can't hire more Border Patrol or use National Guard on the border. The answer is always more technology and guest worker green cards. They obstinately refuse to consider more boots on the ground to catch the invaders; no increase in much-needed detention centers, no reform of the idiotic immigration courts and deportation system – no nothing.
Many Border Patrol agents do not believe Washington has the will to solve the border or immigration chaos. I have heard some say that Washington priorities are so out of whack it may take a major unpleasant event to place priorities in proper order. A major pandemic will probably be the most likely event. A nuclear incident might be small potatoes in comparison.
The current administration wants to remake entire nations and cultures, but it does nothing to control U.S. borders or the comings and goings of non-citizens into the U.S. The result of that incompetence led to the events of 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report revealed that simple things such as border control and tight visa policy could have prevented 9/11.
WAOL TV in San Antonio informs us that on Monday, January 24, 2005, federal officers from the Office of Homeland Security forced down a plane owned by Azval Hameed of Dover, Del. The aircraft was carrying four illegal Chinese immigrants and a pilot identified as a Mexican national. The plane landed at San Antonio airport Monday night.
At first there was concern that these particular illegals were part of a terrorist plot to set off a dirty bomb in the Boston area. But as it turns out, a Mexican trafficker in human beings probably turned them in. He may have been angry because the Chinese he was trying to smuggle into the U.S. did not pay his fee.
I feel so much better learning they were only illegal aliens trying to force their way illegally into the U.S. on an unregistered aircraft. What a blessing they were not exceptionally bad guys trying to blow up the Boston Commons or Old North Church.
The only conclusion a reasonable person can arrive at is that the leadership in Washington consciously remains oblivious to what constitutes a clear and present danger to U.S. sovereignty, our borders and our best interests.
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Borderline Insanity – Part II: People Tsunami
Thursday, Feb. 3, 2005
Former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm put the immigration issue, past and present, in context:
"Of course, immigration ‘has been good for America,' but we are no longer an empty continent – we are a crowded country of 290 million people, with problems of sprawl, pollution, and disappearing open space. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, there were less than 65 million Americans. What other public policy applicable to the 1880s is still applicable today? It is said that immigration is important because there are ‘jobs that Americans won't do.' This probably never was true, but this cliche has now become a job-destroying and wage-lowering philosophy where employers use both unskilled and (increasingly) skilled immigrants to hold down wages and obtain cheap labor at the expense of American workers."
The Izaak Walton League studies the immigration issue and its impact on the U.S. They reveal that "87% percent of United States population growth in the year 2002 was a result of mass immigration, comprised every year of approximately one million legal and an equal or greater number illegal immigrants plus their high U.S. fertility. If current immigration policies are not changed, the population of the United States is projected to exceed half-a-billion by 2050 – within the lifetime of our current schoolchildren – and more than 1.2 billion at 2100…!"
Legal immigration allows 1 million into the U.S. every year. Chain immigration has been one of the major factors in population growth through immigration. Not only are a spouse, minor children and parents allowed to migrate to the U.S., but also siblings and adult children. Once a person gains admission, the chain extends to that immigrant's spouse, who sponsors his or her parents, and brothers, and sisters, and relatives, and in effect brought entire villages to the U.S.
As for illegal migration, the numbers are staggering. The official government estimate is between 8 and 13 million. The financial house Bear-Stearns puts it at more like 20 million. At the same time, American-born citizens have limited their own families, reasoning U.S. population would level off. Instead, population, particularly since 1990, has exploded. Nearly 90 percent of population growth has been through immigration.
What about the financial cost of immigration in all its permutations? In a 1997 study Dr. Don Huddle, professor of economy, Emeritus, Rice University made a ten-year projection that mass immigration would cost a net (after subtracting taxes immigrants pay) $93 billion per year, during the decade 1997-2006.
Among the largest federal costs from illegal immigration are Medicaid ($2.5 billion); treatment for the uninsured ($2.2 billion); food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC and free school lunches ($1.9 billion); the federal prison and court systems ($1.6 billion); and federal aid to schools ($1.4 billion). (Camarota, Steven A. "The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget," Center For Immigration Studies, August 2004)
Lawlessness on Many Levels
Nationally, huge increases in identity theft, fraud on dozens of fronts, foreign gangsters, the Russian Mafia, the Chinese Mafia, Mexican gangs, Central American MS-13, and the Southeast Asian Mafia are disregarded as reasons to limit legal and illegal immigration. The connection of the international Salvadoran gang MS-13 to al-Qaida and the gang's use of extreme violence in American cities does not seem to be causing much of a stir in D.C. The states are forced to deal with all the increasingly costly problems associated with diverse forms of immigration, including an increase in formation of ethnic gangs.
There seems little concern about huge increases in traffic of human beings, gang warfare, armed home invasions, kidnappings, drug use, smuggling, Third World disease, corruption, sexual slavery, female genitalia mutilation, polygamy, kidnappings, car theft, failure to carry insurance, increase in hit and runs, honor killings, prostitution of ethnics by their own people, murder, marriage fraud, cultural clashes between groups, radical foreign students at major American universities fomenting trouble, welfare benefit fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud and anarchy on the border with Mexico.
However, Mexico is not the sum total of our immigration problems. Mexico offers an easy target, but the influx from Mexico and Central America is only half the problem. National leaders are importing significant chunks of the world into the U.S. through refugee and legal immigration as well.
Some apologists say gang membership among immigrants is a historical pattern and it reflects gang and criminality in other eras of high immigration. That is bunk. There is no correlation between former high influx of immigration and our own day. We live in an era of political correctness, increased mobility wherein gangs have the ability to move from one city and region to the other, and preferred minority status for recent immigrants.
You must also include the welfare state, ACLU, identity activist groups like La Raza, immigration lawyers, terrorism, pandemics, and an education system blathering about multiculturalism and doing next to nothing to encourage people to assimilate. It should be obvious we have problems, but our leadership refuses to discuss them. Rather, they camouflage it all in platitudes, myths and wishful thinking.
In every other era of high immigration to America, ethnic groups were allowed time to assimilate. That pattern has been broken thanks to legal immigration, chain immigration, illegal migration, influx of refugees, work and student visas, the totally economic immigrant, and changes in the thinking of authority influenced by political correctness.
In other eras of high immigration the U.S. had a small population. It had room to expand. It was not overburdened with taxes, the welfare system, and preference given to some identity groups over the rest of society. It had a culture that was largely self-disciplined and self-contained, requiring little external force and a pile-on of rules. Most of the inhabitants of the U.S. lived in family-oriented rural agrarian societies, whereas today we are largely urban. Assimilation was encouraged a hundred years ago. It is not in 2005. Later the draft helped to bring together large groups of people, and that also drove assimilation and unity forward.
Even during decades of high immigration in the past, urban areas were hellholes of political and economic corruption, class distinctions, gangs, Mafia and sweatshops. It is more so today. In addition, immigrants are learning bad habits, violence and corruption from native-born Americans who primarily live in urban areas. They are picking up the worst aspects of life in America today.
Meanwhile, the "compassion" toward immigration exhibited by those who live in gated communities, with children in private schools, who live off the profits or benefits which accrue from migration/immigration, have no charity for America and its people. They reap votes or huge financial considerations from industries that depend on cheap labor.
The fact is, politicians like George W. Bush and others prefer not to accept the data and conclusions which should be made from the data. They ignore reams of federal, state and private studies that chronicle the rise in destabilizing influences which have come via immigration and its cousin "free" trade.
It is laughable, but part of the reasoning of the open-borders crowd amounts to promoting the glories of multicultural diversity, herbal medicine shops, and neat ethnic restaurants and markets. The biggest myth of all is that the huge influx of residents only takes "jobs Americans don't want." During the building of the railroads in the mid-1800s using Chinese and Irish labor, at least the railroads and government did not have the gall to pretend it wasn't really about cheap and expendable labor.
In addition, it is fashionable among intellectuals and policy makers that immigrants should not be assimilated but allowed to be part of the American "salad bowl." Never mind history. There has never been a nation or civilization in history that survived when composed of competing and fractured cultures and language groups without imposing some form of tyranny. Think Yugoslavia under Tito. Think the former Soviet Union. Think Africa.
All the above comprised fractured ethnic, religious and ideological rivals. They could only be contained and suppressed using some form of tyranny, colonialism or despotism. Think about what happened when tyranny or colonialism collapsed and a "united" nation splintered into competing ethnic, tribal and religious groups.
As the last U.S. election indicated, we are a nation split by moral/cultural/political factors. In fact, this nation is shattering on a thousand different levels. Our leaders are ignoring it because they have no motivation to act otherwise. They have placed commerce above all else and have the gall to disguise the real motivation in noble feelings while heaping ridicule and name-calling upon those who disagree with their obtuse and contradictory vision of 21st century America.
States of Anarchy
Arizona has one of the largest illegal immigrant populations in the U.S. It also has the largest incidence of identity theft thanks to that population. Whether illegals steal the information in order to appear legal and work, or whether it is a way of making extra money, does not matter. What matters is that the law, the rule of law and citizens are forced to accept this anarchy and turmoil, courtesy of the blockheads in Washington, D.C.
FBI and State Department reports say that illegal money-making involved in human trafficking is beginning to surpass that made in drug trafficking. Also remember that $120 billion per year of the drug money returns to Mexico's drug cartels and corrupt officials.
Do not forget that at least $40 billion returns to Mexico in the form of remittances. That is $40 billion that is not spent in the U.S. Add that to approximately another $50 billion sent as allotments by other ethnic groups back "home" and we are talking real money. This is money that is not recycled back into American society. It is also money that has nothing to do with investment in Mexico and everything to do with the cost of survival.
By the way, Mexico is one of the richest countries in the hemisphere. We import oil and manufactured goods far more than we export to Mexico. Mexico has more billionaires than Saudi Arabia. In return they give us over a million illegals a year and recently demanded that Arizona continue to supplement the illegal lifestyle or they would sue the state of Arizona. Only on RARE occasions do they cooperate with us on criminal, drug-related and legal matters. Mexico also has a corrupt, aristocratic political and economic structure that appears beyond reform.
Be advised the cost of the War on Drugs to the U.S. is approximately $80 billion a year. For $80 billion we could build one heck of a fence or security system along the border. That would also give us enough money to employ soldiers for hire much like we use in Iraq to pacify that country. By the way, according to Fox News, some of our federal Border Patrol agents were sent to Iraq to secure their borders. Yet Tom Ridge and, by extension, George Bush don't want to spend the money to increase numbers of Border Patrol on our own.
U.S. State Department statistics and the FBI Crime Status Report deal with traffic in human beings into the U.S. For instance, Chinese "snakeheads" have been bringing illegal Chinese into the U.S. for over a decade. They often charge $30,000 to $60,000 a head. The traffic in human beings has increased significantly since 1995. The Chinese entering are required to pay or work off the debt to the traffickers. That leaves them little more than slaves.
A close inspection of urban areas known as Chinatown would turn up thousands of these souls. Men, women and children who work for depressed wages they seldom get to keep. Last year Congress passed a law which attempts to address the problem with criminal penalties, but Congress will not stop the flood by instituting adequate immigration policy and control of our borders and ports. Every container coming into a U.S. port should be X-rayed – and could be if the money were not frittered away providing more paper shufflers in Washington.
Meanwhile, Chinese here on legal student or work visas are not always in the U.S. to see the Grand Canyon, buy jeans at the Gap or get a degree from Cal Tech. Every year, the FBI and now DHS arrest Chinese who come here on work or student visas. These exchange students and businessmen are stealing us blind of classified information and technology. The DHS Web site lists the numbers and stories just this year.
Two years ago, the FBI said there were 3,000 Chinese front companies or individuals passing information and intellectual property back to the Chinese. Ask yourself how many of these economic migrants or "visitor" students or businessmen the government doesn't catch. They are passing on our edge, comparative advantage, whatever we have left in the ability to keep ahead of the bad guys and competitors.
Much of Chinese investment in the U.S. is made by the Chinese military. There was a big flap on Capital Hill in the late '90s over Bill Clinton, Loral and Hughes passing on classified systems to the Chinese. That has not stopped. The China-American Review Commission said last year that one of the best fronts for the Chinese were American corporations. They carry the water for Chinese interests and pass technology and industrial secrets as well as investment funds over to the Chinese in the name of "free" trade. Then, of course, there are Asian gangs. The University of Chicago is looking into the impact of Asian gangs in the Chicago area. In Chicago, "Violent acts are said to be relatively more likely among Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian, and Laotian youth gangs, as compared to Khmer or Hmong gangs Finally, it has also been observed that some Asian gangs, Filipino gangs in particular, may evolve from well-educated and affluent families (Operation Safe Streets Gang Detail, 1994). This is a clear indication that the formation of Asian youth gangs cuts across all socioeconomic lines and, therefore, is not a phenomenon concentrated solely in economically depressed communities."
The study indicates that "Many Japanese and Chinese gangs tend to resemble more organized crime syndicates rather than street gangs. These gangs may invest in legitimate U.S. business in order to accommodate their illegal activities (e.g., money laundering, illegal gambling) and to present a facade of legitimacy and respectability (Operation Safe Streets Gang Detail, 1994). Chinese youth gangs are also often closely associated with well-established adult groups and controlled to a considerable degree by them."
The Chicago Police Department's Asian Task Force, formed in October 1989, has been disbanded in favor of an "International Enterprise Crime Task Force," headquartered out of 219 S. Dearborn and under the auspices of the FBI and the Illinois State Police
The tide of foreign nationals pouring into this city from Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico and South America have forced law enforcement officially to divert thinly stretched resources across the board to counter each new threat. http://www.ssa.uchicago.edu/publications/advforum/v5n2/youthgang.html
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire offers a continuing education course in dealing with Hmong gangs. Introduction to the course tells us that Hmong gangs have been a part of Minnesota and Wisconsin since the early '80s and have evolved into some of the most violent street gangs nationwide. "Every year there is an increase in violence, the total number of gangs, the total number of gang members, and the level of sophistication. This suggests that Hmong gangs are not going away; in fact, their numbers are increasing every year."
Anyone who can read ought to get the message: The gang problem is not all about poverty. It is also about a failure to assimilate into American culture, unless you consider the culture to be one of total and complete anarchy and violence. Furthermore, the exchange of students and businessmen with countries like China should be closely scrutinized. But again, needs of commerce surpass national security.
By the Numbers
Official statistics for illegal immigration have it at between 8 and 13 million. No one knows for sure. Nonetheless, a recent article in the business magazine Barron's reports that Robert Justich, a senior managing director at Bear Stearns Asset Management in New York thinks the number is more like 20 million.
Barron's relates that the underground economy in the U.S. may be growing at a faster rate than the legitimate economy. Working with colleague emerging market specialist Betty Ng, Justich found evidence of a larger illegal immigrant population by analyzing data on construction and on remittances sent from the U.S. to Mexico and other countries. They interviewed immigrants from a dozen countries as well as local business owners, real estate salespeople and police.
In the same Barron's article, "the IRS estimates a tax gap owed by the illegal work force and the amount collected to be around $311 billion in any given year." According to Barron's, "the agency will produce an new estimate in 2005, and it could be as high as $400 billion, says former IRS Commissioner Donald Alexander."
The answer is supposed to be guest worker amnesty. That is not the way it works in real life. In the last amnesty, 1986, the feds promised to crack down on employers who employed illegal migrants. That petered out and is now not even on enforcement radar. Federal cases made against employers employing illegal migrants have dropped precipitously even since 9/11, the recession and outsourcing.
The federal government never keeps its promises. Half the time Congress passes a law, like making it illegal to employ illegals, they don't leave enough money to enforce it. Enforcement slacks off and we are back to square one. Bush and company are naive to think the guest worker amnesty is the answer.
In the midst of high taxes, a sluggish economy, and individual and national debt stretched to the max, government spends $68 billion a year to pay for resettlement of legal immigrants. Meanwhile, each household headed by an illegal alien costs the taxpayer in social services and infrastructure approximately $2,700 over what the illegal might pay in taxes. Multiply that by what Bear Stearns' figures reveal to be 15 to 20 million illegals in the U.S., and it amounts to $20 billion per year. (Source: Center for Immigration Studies, August 2004)
Do not forget that millions of legal immigrants receive tax credits wherein they not only do not pay taxes but they also receive a remittance from the government because their wages are so low. On taxes and income redistribution our problem isn't simply illegal immigration; our larger problem is legal immigration. We need a time-out for a host of reasons.
The Center for Immigration Studies released in December 2004 one of its voluminous documented studies. Some of the conclusions contain facts our leaders do not want to hear. The National Research Council has estimated that the net fiscal cost of immigration ranges from $11 billion to $22 billion per year, with most government expenditures on immigrants coming from state and local coffers, while most taxes paid by immigrants go to the federal treasury. The net deficit is caused by a low level of tax payments by immigrants, because they are disproportionately low-skilled and thus earn low wages, and a higher rate of consumption of government services, both because of their relative poverty and their higher fertility. (www.cis.com)
Illegal aliens do not make much use of welfare. But the cost of illegal immigrants, their anchor babies born in the U.S. to illegal parents, are astronomical. Education, prisons and the legal system, and emergency care cost a lot. In fact, $1.6 billion alone goes into housing them in prison when they break the law. Plus, each and every year 300,000 illegal female migrants produce children in the U.S. They are called anchor babies. Born to illegals, they receive welfare status. The annual cost per child K-12 is $7,161 and exceeds $109 billion annually per cycle of anchor babies.
Usage of means-tested programs by legal immigrants has increased since Welfare Reform of 1996. It is up to 23 percent of legal immigrant households that use various welfare programs. The biggest drain is on the Medicaid system. At the current rate of usage it will collapse in a not-too-distant future if we don't get a grip on the increasing numbers of immigrants who are forced to use it due to low wages. Wave after wave of them entering the U.S. tends to keep wages down at all levels.
In my home states of Georgia and Minnesota, Georgia had a 600 percent increase in immigration in the last 10 years, both legal and illegal. Most of it is coming from south of the border.
Georgia ran a $63 million deficit for 64,000 unpaid doctor visits in Atlanta alone for Grady Health Care system in 2002. In the same year, Georgia taxpayers paid $27 million for 11,188 anchor baby hospital births. The budget buster was the $242 million for educating illegal alien children in 2003. This is in a state where the budget and social problems had begun to stabilize prior to the influx.
Washington does not care. Georgia national politicians like Saxby Chambliss don't care. Much as before, Saxby is more interested in accommodating the cheap labor needs of agriculture and the meatpacking and carpet industries. Before illegal immigration, there were poor whites and blacks who did the jobs, were paid decent wages and benefits in these industries. Now wages and benefits are stagnant and barely above the minimum wage, benefits are almost nonexistent, and there is a 100 percent turnover in meatpacking alone. Working conditions are reaching back to when Congress was forced to pass labor laws to address the horror.
Before the 1990 immigration, "adjustment" highway crews in Georgia were a mix of black, white and Hispanic. Now crews are almost 100 percent Hispanic. Add occupations like carpenters, brick masons, painters, landscapers, and certainly fast food workers. These were jobs that required some skills that could be learned on the job. These were the kinds of jobs helpful to the blue-collar class, allowing them to have a decent middle class life and a little extra besides. It allowed those who did not go on to college to thrive as well.
These jobs are now almost all in the hands of legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Consequently, wages have fallen or are depressed, and for the blue-collar class there is almost nowhere else to go. Where is the U.S.-born working class supposed to go? Straight to hell if Washington's attitude is any indication.
Jobs Americans don't want? Please!
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If you can't get enough of Diane, you can listen to me every week on WNDB AM, on the Marc Bernier Show, Wednesdays, 10 a.m. CST/11 a.m. EST. Marc is one of the most intelligent non-ideological talk radio hosts ever. He allows me to wear my military and terrorism expert hat, which I have done for the last three years. I am also on regularly with Mark Edwards, KDWN Las Vegas, to discuss immigration and other issues. Mark may be heard on the Internet every night at 10 p.m. PST. My good friend George Putnam also allows me to pontificate every so often on his show out of L.A.
You can reach Diane at alden@newsmax.com
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