Wednesday, September 30, 2009

ILLEGALS and HEALTH-CARE - An American Speaks

THE ENTIRE NATION IS WITNESS TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA LIE THAT ILLEGALS WERE NOT INCLUDED IN HIS DRUGSTERS' HEATH CARE "REFORM", YET ANOTHER DEVICE TO SIPHON OFF MORE OF THE ECONOMY INTO THE POCKETS OF THE CORPORATE RICH. WE WATCHED OBAMA LIE AND DO THE SAME FOR THE BANKSTERS FIRST. NEXT IT'S AMNESTY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED EVEN MORE THAN THE $200 - $300 BILLION PER YEAR THE MEXICAN OCCUPATION COSTS THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS!

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR DID AN ARTICLE YEARS AGO ABOUT THE MEXICAN MIDDLE-CLASS NOW HOPING OUR BORDERS. ADMITTEDLY IF THERE IS A MEXICAN MIDDLE CLASS IT IS MIGHTY SMALL. MEXICO IS AN OLIGARCHY WHICH THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, IN ANOTHER ARTICLE, CHARACTERIZED AS THE MOST CORRUPT IN THE HEMISPHERE. THERE ARE MORE BILLIONAIRES IN MEXICO THAT SAUDI ARABIA OR SWITZERLAND! ONE SUCH BILLIONAIRE ($70 BILLION) IS CARLOS SLIM, WHO NOW OWNS ABOUT 10% OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, WHICH IS WHY YOU NEVER READ ANY ARTICLE IN THE NYT ABOUT THE TRUE COST, FINANCIALLY, CULTURALLY, OR CRIME WISE, OF THE MEXICAN INVASION AND OCCUPATION. THE RULING OLIGARCHY IN MEXICO IS CLEVER ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT THE CORRUPT CORPORATE OWNED GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES, WILL ALWAYS LIE TO ITS PEOPLE TO ADVANCE THE INTERESTS OF THE CORPORATE CLASS. DURING THE 20 PLUS YEARS OF BUSH, HILLARY, BILLARY, BUSH, THEIR WAR PROFITEER, DIANNE FEINSTEIN, AND NOW BARACK OBAMA, THE NATION'S ECONOMY HAS BEEN SO SUCCESSFULLY SHIFTED TO THE CORPORATE WEALTHY THAT NOW 1% OF THE NATION OWNS 95% OF THE NATION'S WEALTH. THE BYPRODUCT OF THIS IS THAT 50% OF ALL HOMES ARE UNDERWATER AND ONE IN NINE UNDER FORECLOSURES. WE ALL WITNESSED OBAMA, USING BUSH'S ARCHITECT FOR BANKSTERS' BAILOUT, TIM GEITHNER, SELL US OUT, OUR HOMES, AND GENERATIONS OF TAXES TO THESE BANKSTER CRIMINALS.... AND IT'S ONLY THE BEGINNING OF OBAMA'S CONTRIBUTION TO WALL STREET'S RAPE AND PILLAGE OF THIS ONCE GREAT LAND.

THERE IS A REASON WHY MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO LA RAZA, THE VIRULENTLY RACIST MEXICAN SUPREMACIST PARTY THAT IS NOW A PARTNER WITH OUR GOVERNMENT IN THE EXPANSION OF THE MEXICAN INVASION AND OCCUPATION.

BACK TO THE INVASION, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR'S ARTICLE SAID THINGS WERE SO GOOD HERE FOR ILLEGALS FROM MEXICO, THAT NOW THE MIDDLE CLASS WAS CLIMBING OUR BORDERS. MEXICANS ARE SPECIAL CLASS OF PEOPLE HERE. THEY ILLEGALLY VOTE, THEY DRIVE WITHOUT DRIVER'S LICENSE OR INSURACNE, GET BILLIONS IN WELFARE,($50 MILLION PER MONTH GOES TO ILLEGALS IN LOS ANGELES ALONE), SPECIAL EDUCATION DISCOUNTS, ALREADY GET FREE MEDICAL IN AMERICAN HOSPITALS, WHICH ARE CHARACTERIZED AS IN "MELTDOWN" BECAUSE OF IT, OUR JOBS (47% OF THOSE EMPLOYED ARE ILLEGAL IN LOS ANGELES), AND THE MEXICAN TAX-FREE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS CALCULATED TO BE ABOUT $2 BILLION PER YEAR AND GROWING.

THE ILLEGALS NOT ONLY HAVE IT A HELL OF A LOT BETTER HERE IN OCCUPIED "DEL NORTE", THEY KNOW THE LA RAZA DEMS, LIKE BARACK OBAMA, WILL HISPANDER TO ANYTHING THEY WANT.

BARACK OBAMA HAS LIED TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SO MUCH WITHIN THE FIRST 30 DAYS OF HIS CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION, THAT HIS ONLY HOPE FOR A SECOND TERM WILL BE MASSIVE BANKSTERS' CAMPAIGN BRIBES (HE GOT AS MUCH AS GEORGE W BUSH IN 08) AND THE ILLEGAL VOTES OF THE ILLEGALS! HE CAN'T HISPANDER ENOUGH!
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, September 28, 2009


And T.J. BONNER, president of the National Border Patrol Council, will weigh in on the federal government’s decision to pull nearly 400 agents from the U.S.-Mexican border. As always, Lou will take your calls to discuss the issues that matter most-and to get your thoughts on where America is
headed. Call him toll-free on the Independent Hotline at 877-55 DOBBS.
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
And there are some 800,000 gang members in this country: That’s more than the combined number of troops in our Army and Marine Corps. These gangs have become one of the principle ways to import and distribute drugs in the United States. Congressman David Reichert joins Lou to tell us why those gangs are growing larger and stronger, and why he’s introduced legislation to eliminate the top three international drug gangs.
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Thursday, September 18, 2008

Another victory for American workers in Arizona. Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the get-tough employer sanctions law in the state. The law hits employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens with strict penalties and in some cases even strips businesses of their licenses. A lower court upheld the same law in February. But open-borders and amnesty groups along with the business lobby are considering yet another appeal.

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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, February 11, 2008
In California, League of United Latin American Citizens has adopted a resolution to declare "California Del Norte" a sanctuary zone for immigrants. The declaration urges the Mexican government to invoke its rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo "to seek third nation neutral arbitration of ....disputes concerning immigration laws and their enforcement." We’ll have the story.

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Last year, Prince William County, Virginia passed an initiative to allow local police to check the immigration status of anyone in police custody. The county recently held its first immigration training session for local police officers. We’ll have a look inside the training.

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Mexican President Felipe Calderon is in New York today on the first leg his five day tour across America to meddle in immigration issues in the United States. This is his first visit to the U.S. since he became President in 2006, but he will not meet with President Bush or any of the presidential candidates, who he has accused of spewing anti immigrant rhetoric. Join us for that report.

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Lou Dobbs Tonight Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Immigration experts are appearing on Capitol Hill today to release the results of a study showing the cost of illegal immigration on the criminal justices system in the 24 U.S. counties bordering Mexico–more $1 billion in less than a decade.

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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Gov. Schwarzenegger said California is facing “financial Armageddon”. He is making drastic cuts in the budget for education, health care and services. But there is one place he isn’t making cuts… services for illegal immigrants. These services are estimated to cost the state four to five billion dollars a year. Schwarzenegger said he is “happy” to offer these services. We will have a full report tonight.

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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Thursday, May 28, 2009

Plus drug cartel violence is spreading across our border with Mexico further into the United States. Mexican drug cartels are increasingly being linked to crimes in this country. Joining Lou tonight, from our border with Mexico is the new “border czar” Alan Bersin, the Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Special Representative for Border Affairs.


AN AMERICAN SPEAKS:


Illegals and health care (Don't understand)
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Date: 2009-09-30, 4:31AM PDT
Reply To This Post
________________________________________

Obama's in office. The Democrats control Congress. The recipe is perfect to grant all illegals a general amnesty.

This would make them eligible for government-sponsored healthcare.

Question: What will prevent a flood of illegals coming into this country either just prior to a general amnesty or immediately afterwards.

According to a recent poll taken in Mexico, over 50 % of Mexicans surveyed said they would cross the river if they had the means to do so.

So general amnesty + free healthcare = a very scary situation.This country couldn't afford it.
• Location: Don't understand
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

WHO IS HIRING ILLEGALS? And Taking AMERICAN JOBS? WeHireAliens.com

Name Area of Operation
Centurion Industrial Nation
food exchange , NY
Zemer international Ellis County, TX
Star Electric KERN County, CA
Mathis Bros Furniture State of CA
Stringer's Temecula, CA
mcdonalds Nation
A1 Truck and Equipment Ventura County, CA
Hill Horticulture san antonio, TX
Eagle-Riverview Group, Inc. State of NY
Subway Sandwich Shops Nation
Grand Sanitation plainfield, NJ
Luie Luie Landscaping & Tree Service State of CT
blue air commercial refrigeration Nation
Thomsen Properties State of
Onkar and Shipra Sud "Subway" Riverside. County, CA
Mediquip Medical Supplies Dekalb County, GA
Tiffany Construction State of AZ
Pilates Developments LLC MISSION, TX
Capital City Boiler and Machine Works State of IA
Classic Management LLC State of AZ
Williams Mechanical Contacting Corporation
Maurices Wenatchee, WA
Victor Murguia Peachtree City, GA


Don't forget to forward this email to your friends and relatives who may be in a position to patronize this employer. We need to get as many people involved as possible if we want the hiring of illegal aliens to stop.

Please help to keep WeHireAliens.com operating by donating at http://www.firecoalition.com/donate

Thank you for using www.WeHireAliens.com!

Sincerely,

WeHireAliens.com Staff

If you would like to volunteer with the FIRE Coalition, please register with our FIRE Coalition citizen network at http://www.firecoalition.com/register.

Monday, September 28, 2009

SAN JOSE - GANG STABBINGS and MURDER

SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

Weekend fights: One fatally stabbed, six injured, San Jose police say
By Mark Gomez

09/28/2009


One person was killed and six others were wounded over the weekend in San Jose in two separate fights that police say may be gang-related.

The stabbing death was the city's 21st homicide this year; in 2008, 32 people were killed in San Jose.

Although police are investigating both cases as gang-related, police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said the incidents, which happened Saturday and Sunday nights, are "in no way" connected.

The fatal stabbing happened Saturday night, when police say two groups got into a verbal altercation in the 100 block of South King Road. One of the groups left the area but returned a short time later, which is when the fight broke out, Lopez said. During the fight, four people suffered stab wounds, Lopez said.

All four people were taken to hospitals, Lopez said. One of the victims died Sunday, Lopez said.

As of Monday, police had not released his name.

Sunday night, three more people were stabbed during a fight east of downtown San Jose, Lopez said.

Police say six to 10 people were involved in the fight just before 9:30 p.m. on Locust Street, near McLaughlin Avenue and East William Street, according to officer Jermaine Thomas.

The first officers to arrive found two people with minor stab wounds and a third with moderate wounds, Thomas said. The three victims were taken to hospitals, Thomas said.

There are no suspects in custody and the incident remains under investigation, Thomas said.


"This was two incidents and unfortunately we had numerous victims," Lopez said.

Gang-related violence, including homicides, are down this year compared with 2008, according to police statistics. Not including this weekend's stabbing death, six of the city's 21 homicides have been classified as gang-related, compared with 15 in 2008, according to police.

The overall number of violent gang-related crimes decreased by 12 percent this summer from 2008, according to police.

BORDER GUARDS PULLED OFF BORDER - Not Enough Mexican Gangs or DRUG CARTEL?

More lives have been lost along the American - Mexican border than in Bush's wars.

Mexican gangs have now spread across the country working hard for the Mexican drug cartel.

In Los Angeles there are 500-1,000 gang related murders per year, that cost American one million each just to prosecute.... and yet the LA RAZA DEMS, AND HISPANDERING FOR THE ILLEGALS' VOTES BARACK OBAMA, LEAVES US EXPOSED TO THE MEXICAN TERRORISTS!

GET ON LOU'S DAILY EMAILS


Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, September 28, 2009


And T.J. BONNER, president of the National Border Patrol Council, will weigh in on the federal government’s decision to pull nearly 400 agents from the U.S.-Mexican border. As always, Lou will take your calls to discuss the issues that matter most-and to get your thoughts on where America is
headed. Call him toll-free on the Independent Hotline at 877-55 DOBBS.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Petition to Stop Illegal Immigration

BUT THE PROBLEM IS... OUR OWN GOVERNMENT WORKING FOR THE WALL STREET INTERESTS, EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS AND THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT IS WORKING HARD FOR QUICK AMNESTY, NO E-VERIFY, NO REAL WALL, OPEN BORDERS CALLED PROTECTED BORDERS, NO ENGLISH ONLY, AND NO ID TO VOTE. You won't find many in Congress that are not HISPANDERERS! Certainly Barack Obama is a HISPANDERER!


Petition to Stop Illegal Immigration

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Date: 2009-09-16, 9:34AM CDT
Reply to: comm-etfzz-1377099729@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

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Petition to US Congress to stop illegal immigration and amnesty for the law breakers. We need Americas support and we need to stand as one and take our country back. Please read the petition and sign so Congress can hear our voice. Please help to put this on every site you know of,America has to make a stand and we need to act fast before it is to late and we have 12 million + more illegals receiving amnesty. http://www.petitiononline.com/x123x123/petition.html


it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests



PostingID: 1377099729

THE ISSUE OF THE MEXICAN LOATHING FOR ENGLISH and LITERACY - How To Build a Great Nation? OR HOW TO EXPAND THE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE!

A CL POSTING ON EDUCATION IN OKLAHOMA
75 Percent of Oklahoma High School Students Can't Name First President (NATION)


75 Percent of Oklahoma High School Students Can't Name the First President of the U.S.
Posted: Updated:
Gilbert Stuart's 1796 oil on canvas portrait of George Washington on display at Washington's National Portrait Gallery. A majority of Oklahoma high school students could not name Washington as the nation's first president in a recent survey. (AP Photo) Gilbert Stuart's 1796 oil on canvas portrait of George Washington on display at Washington's National Portrait Gallery. A majority of Oklahoma high school students could not name Washington as the nation's first president in a recent survey. (AP Photo)

News9.com

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today.
The survey was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday. Brandon Dutcher is with the conservative think tank and said the group wanted to find out how much civic knowledge Oklahoma high school students know.

The Oklahoma City-based think tank enlisted national research firm, Strategic Vision, to access students' basic civic knowledge. "They're questions taken from the actual exam that you have to take to become a U.S. citizen," Dutcher said. A thousand students were given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens. About 92 percent of the people who take the citizenship test pass on their first try, according to immigration service data. However, Oklahoma students did not fare as well. Only about 3 percent of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test.

Dutcher said this is not just a problem in Oklahoma. He said Arizona had similar results, which left him concerned for the entire country. "Jefferson later said that a nation can't expect to be ignorant and free," Dutcher said. "It points to a real serious problem. We're not going to remain ignorant and free."

Question % of Students
Who Answered Correctly
What is the supreme law of the land?
28

What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
26

What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
27

How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?
10

Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
14

What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?
61

What are the two major political parities in the United States?
43

We elect a U.S. senator for how many years?
11

Who was the first President of the United States?
23

Who is in charge of the executive branch?
29
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They did not do a breakdown of the test results along racial lines, you know why? It's those illegal wetback Mexican alien anchor babies I keep saying are diluting our educational system (since at least 1980) and dragging native Hispanics into the educational-knowledge black hole. Native Hispanics cannot make any gains on all fronts if they keep shipping illiterate illegals over here. Sorry it's the truth.
• Location: NATION
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests


PostingID: 138020965

Why Do Nothing About Illegal Aliens - AN AMERICAN ASKS

There are only 8 states with a population greater than the County of Los Angeles. That county pays out $50 MILLION PER MONTH in welfare to illegals! 47% of those employed are ILLEGALS. The underground tax-free underground economy is calculated to be in LA $2 BILLION PER YEAR.

The City of Los Angeles is characterized as the "Mexican gang capital of America", however Mex gangs have now spread all over the country!

In Los Angeles there are 500 - 1,000 murders every year which cost one million each just to prosecute. These are overwhelmingly Mexican gang related deaths. There are more murders in Los Angeles than the entire EUROPEAN UNION!

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
WHY DO WE DO NOTHING ABOUT ILLEGAL ALIENS? BECAUSE THE WAGES OF AMERICANS ARE DEPRESSED $200 TO $300 BILLION PER YEAR AND THESE SAME AMERICANS ARE FORCED TO PAY FOR THE WELFARE STATE THAT GOES ALONG WITH THE MEXICAN OCCUPATION!

WORKS OUT NICE FOR MANY OF THE FORTUNE 500 WHO ARE GENEROUS DONORS OF LA RAZA, AND ALSO THE GOVERNMENT OF MEXICO. WE ARE MEXICO’S WELFARE SYSTEM!


AN AMERICAN SPEAKS! UNFORTUNATELY THE GOVERNMENT IS NOT LISTENING AND CERTAINLY NOT INTERESTED!


Why We Do Nothing About Illegal Aliens
________________________________________
Date: 2009-09-25, 9:53AM CDT
Reply to: comm-n8nyg-1391705941@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
________________________________________

Many illegals get paid cash without any taxes removed from their pay. Others use fictitious Social Security numbers and have taxes withheld. Either way this is a win-win for the government. If the employer cannot show where the payroll money went he is taxed at a much higher rate than the illegal would have been. If taxes are withheld from the illegals they never get filed for the refund. Besides these facts you have to consider just how many illegals are employed indirectly by the government. Who builds the highways and infrastructures of this country? Companies who hire illegal aliens as cheap labor. Therefore the government can pay less to have highways built.

The major problems with this is often they use our SS numbers to obtain employment. Some have filed their taxes and had the refund held up for years until they could prove they did not work each day in Boston and L.A. Seldom do illegals have health or auto insurance. When they get injured or have a baby they go to the hospital and get free healthcare. When they rearend your car you have no recourse for the damage done or injury suffered. Some commit crimes and end up in state custody not to mention the impact on the victim.

Personally, I do not believe under any circumstances should people suffer to subsidize the business who employ illegal aliens. If they cannot afford to pay a decent wage including worker's comp and taxes they have no business in business. It's not my responsibility to take risks for your bottom line.
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests


PostingID: 1391705941

FRESNO - TWO MEX TEACHERS BUSTED FOR CHILD PORN!

Mexican men are frequently child predators and molesters. In Mexico the legal age for intercourse is 12!

Every day there are 8 children molested by Mexican illegals. THERE ARE ALSO 12 AMERICANS MURDERED BY ILLEGALS.

There have been more than 2,000 Californians murdered by Mexican illegals that fled back over the border to Mexico to avoid prosecution. 95% of all arrest warrants for murder in Los Angeles are illegals from Mexico.

Give Feinstein, Boxer, Lofgren, Pelosi, Waxman, Baca, Farr, Bacerra, Sanchez of California and ask them what they're doing about the staggering crime rates the Mexicans bring with them when they occupy. THEIR REPLY WILL BE AMNESTY! NO WALL! NO E-VERIFY! NO ENGLISH ONLY! NO ID TO VOTE!




2 mexican teachers at same school busted for kid porn (What are the odds?)

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Date: 2009-09-26, 10:45AM PDT


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Two mexican teachers at the same school arrested for child porn but neither case is related to each other.
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At Grant Middle School in Reedley, "shock" seems to be the top lesson.

"It surprises me," Juanita Ortis said.

Ortis has a 7th grader at the school.

Tuesday morning Fresno County sheriff's deputies arrested 31-year-old Vincent Chavez, a 6th grade English teacher at Grant, and 31-year-old Samuel Garza, a substitute teacher, on charges of possessing child pornography.

"That's gonna be where our kids are all day, with those teachers?" Ortis asked.

"This is a very sad, shocking turn of events," John Campbell, assistant superintendent with the Kings Canyon Unified School District, said.

Campbell says the arrests caught everyone off-guard.

"Mr. Chavez was a well-respected teacher and member of the community, so it is shocking both for the faculty of the school as well as the students," he said.

Campbell says there were no red flags with either teacher that would've led the district to believe students were at risk.

"We go through a thorough background check which includes fingerprints, D.O.J clearance. He came to us from another school district with a good record. The other gentleman is just a sub. He works sporadically here and there. I don't know too much about him. But he went through the same background check," Campbell said.

School officials want to emphasize to parents that there were no arrests or any kind of action on the school's campus.

And as far as they know, there were no Kings Canyon students involved with the charges.

All they can do now is try to move on.

"Unfortunately with hundreds of teachers, these kinds of things do happen in all school districts and we just do our best to focus on the students and help the students through things like this," Campbell said.

"What am I gonna do? I can't send them to another school," Ortis said.

For parents like Juanita Ortis, the shock is far from wearing off.

And they can only hope teachers like Chavez and Garza have taught their last lesson.

Chavez and Garza both posted a $5,000 bail Wednesday night and were released from jail.

School officials say both teachers have been placed on paid administrative leave.

A phone message is going out to parents to notify them of the situation.

And crisis teams will be on hand at the school to work with students and faculty.

The Fresno County District Attorney's Office released a statement Wednesday saying an investigation is currently underway involving the adult child of one of their investigators, saying "The alleged crime is unacceptable and needs to be treated very seriously."

THE VIRULENTLY RACIST POLTICAL PARTY FOR MEXICAN SUPREMACY - LA RAZA - VIVA MEXICO!

“Wherever there’s a Mexican, there is Mexico!”... President Calderone. As an American living under Spanish speaking Mexican occupation, I would add to this “Where there’s a Mexican, there’s a violent Mexican gang!”

THE LA RAZA AGENDA
AGENDA OF LA RAZA, et al
TAKEN FROM TRANSCRIPTS DATED 1995. MANY OF THESE LA RAZA POLITICIANS HAVE WON HIGHER OFFICES WITH THE VOTES OF ILLEGALS.

“WE WILL TAKE CONTROL OF OUR COUNTRY (U.S.) BY VOTE IF POSSIBLE AND VIOLENCE IF NECESSARY!”
Agendas of MEChA, La Raza, MALDEF, and Southwest Voter Registration Projects These are transcripts of live, recorded statements by elected U.S. politicians, college professors, and pro-illegal alien activists whose objective is to take control of our country "by vote if possible and violence if necessary!" 1. Armando Navarro, Prof. Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside at Latino Summit Response to Prop 187, UC Riverside, 1/1995
"These are the critical years for us as a Latino community. We're in a state of transition. And that transformation is called 'the browning of America'. Latinos are now becoming the majority. Because I know that time and history is on the side of the Chicano/Latino community. It is changing in the future and in the present the balance of power of this nation. It's a game - it's a game of power - who controls it. You (to MEChA students) are like the generals that command armies. We're in a state of war. This Proposition 187 is a declaration of war against the Latino/Chicano community of this country. They know the demographics. They know that history and time is on our side. As one community, as one people, as one nation within a nation as the community that we are, the Chicano/Latino community of this nation. What this means is a transfer of power. It means control."

“THE NEW LEADERSHIP OF THE AMERICAS... IS MEXICAN!”
“REMEMBER: (PROPOSITION) 187 IS THE LAST GASP OF WHITE AMERICA IN CALIFORNIA!”

2. ART TORRES
Art Torres, former CA state senator, currently Chair of California Democrat Party at UC Riverside 1/1995 "Que viva la causa! It is an honor to be with the new leadership of the Americas, here meeting at UC Riverside. So with 187 on the ballot, what is it going to take for our people to vote - to see us walking into the gas ovens? It is electoral power that is going to make the determination of where we go as a community. And power is not given to you -- you have to take it. Remember: 187 is the last gasp of white America in California. Understand that. And people say to me on the Senate floor when I was in the Senate, 'Why do you fight so hard for affirmative action programs?' And I tell my white colleagues, 'because you're going to need them.'"

“WE ARE NOT IMMIGRANTS THAT CAME FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY TO ANOTHER COUNTRY....WE ARE FREE TO TRAVEL THE LENGTH AND BREADTH OF THE AMERICAS BECAUSE WE BELONG HERE.”

3. Jose Angel Gutierrez, Prof. Univ. Texas at Arlington, founder La Raza Unida Party at UC Riverside 1/1995 "The border remains a military zone. We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we're a new Mestizo nation. And they want us to discuss civil rights. Civil rights. What law made by white men to oppress all of us of color, female and male. This is our homeland. We cannot - we will not- and we must not be made illegal in our own homeland. We are not immigrants that came from another country to another country. We are migrants, free to travel the length and breadth of the Americas because we belong here. We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It's a matter of time. The explosion is in our population."

“WE HAVE TO BAND TOGETHER, AND THAT MEANS LATINOS IN FLORIDA, CUBAN-AMERICANS, MEXICAN-AMERICAS, PUERTO RICANS, SOUTH AMERICANS, WE HAVE TO NETWORK BETTER......”
BILL RICHARDSON. WE ALL WERE WITNESS TO OBAMA, ALWAYS THE HISPANDERER, ATTEMPT TO PUT RICHARDSON IN HIS CABINET TO SIGNAL THE ILLEGALS THAT AMNESTY WAS COMING. LIKE MOST HISPANIC POLITICIANS, RICHARDSON WAS TOO CORRUPT TO PASS EVEN THE CORRUPT CONGRESS AND WITHDREW HIS NOMINATION.
4. Bill Richardson, New Mexico Governor, former U.S. Congressman, U.N. Ambassador, U.S. Secretary of Energy interviewed on radio Latino USA responding to Congressional Immigration Reform legislation in 1996 "There are changing political times where our basic foundations and programs are being attacked, illegal and legal immigration are being unfairly attacked. We have to band together, and that means Latinos in Florida, Cuban-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, South Americans, we have to network better - we have to be more politically minded, we have to put aside party and think of ourselves as Latinos, as Hispanics more than we have in the past."


“WE’RE GOING TO TAKE OVER ALL THE POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS IN CALIFORNIA. IN FIVE YEARS THE HISPANICS ARE GOING TO BE THE MAJORITY POPULATION OF THIS STATE.... ANYONE THAT DOESN’T LIKE IT SHOULD LEAVE IT!”, Mario Obledo,
Mario Obledo, founding member/former national director of Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), former CA Secretary Health/Welfare on Tom Leikus radio talk show "We're going to take over all the political institutions in California. In five years the Hispanics are going to be the majority population of this state." Caller: "You also made the statement that California is going to become a Hispanic state and if anyone doesn't like it they should leave - did you say that?" Obledo: "I did. They ought to go back to Europe."

“WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA.. THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION STATE!”6. Mario Obledo CCIR commentary on Mario Obledo: When CCIR, the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, erected a billboard on the California/Arizona border reading, "WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA, THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION STATE", Mario Obledo, infuriated, went to the billboard location and threatened to blow it up or burn it down. Even after this threat to deny American citizens their freedom of speech, President Clinton awarded Obledo the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor. CCIR question to Obledo: "Jose Angel Gutierrez said, 'We have an aging white America, they are dying, I love it.' How would you translate that statement?" Obledo: "He's a good friend of mine. A very smart person."

“THEY’RE AFRAID THAT WE’RE GOING TO TAKE OVER THE GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS. THEY ARE RIGHT, WE WILL TAKE THEM OVER....”
7. Richard Alatorre, former Los Angeles City Councilman at Latino Summit conference in Los Angeles opposing CA Prop. 209 ending affirmative action in 9/1996 "Because our numbers are growing, they're afraid about this great mass of minorities that now live in our community. They're afraid that we're going to take over the governmental institutions and other institutions. They are right, we will take them over, and we are not going to go away - we are here to stay, and we are saying 'ya basta' (enough!) and we are going to turn... and de... not elect or re-elect people that believe that they are going to advance their political careers on the backs of immigrants and the backs of minorities."

MEXICAN SUPREMACIST LA RAZA PARTY REP. FROM INLAND EMPIRE WHERE HE WORKS HARD TO THE EXPANSION OF THE MEXICAN OCCUPATION AND WELFARE SYSTEM.


“THE LATINOS ARE COMING... THE LATINOS ARE COMING!!! AND THEY’RE GOING TO VOTE!”8. Joe Baca, former CA Assemblymember, currently member of Congress at Latino Summit Response to Prop 187 UC Riverside 1/1995 and Southwest Voter Registration Project annual conference in Los Angeles, 6/1996 "We need more Latinos out there. We must stand up and be counted. We must be together, We must be united. Because if we're not united you know what's going to happen? We're like sticks - we're broken to pieces. Divided we're not together. But as a unit they can't break us. So we've got to come together, and if we're united, si se puede (it can be done) and we will make the changes that are necessary. But we've got to do it. We've got to stand together, and dammit, don't let them divide us because that's what they want to do, is to divide us. And once we're divided we're conquered. But when we look out at the audience and we see, you know, la familia, La Raza (the family, our race), you know, it's a great feeling, isn't it a good feeling? And you know, I started to think about that and it reminded me of a book that we all read and we all heard about, you know, Paul Revere, and when he was saying, 'The British are coming, the British are coming!' Well, the Latinos are coming, the Latinos are coming! And the Latinos are going to vote. So our voices will be heard. So that's what this agenda is about. It's about insuring that we increase our numbers. That we increase our numbers at every level. We talk about the Congressional, we talk about the Senate, we talk about board of supervisors, board of education, city councils, commissions, we have got to increase out numbers because the Latinos are coming. Because what's going on right now, with 187, the CCRI (CA Civil Rights Initiative against affirmative action), and let me tell you, we can't go back, you know, we're in a civil war. But we need to be solidified, we need to come together, we must be strong, because united we form a strong body. United we become solidified, united we make a difference, united we make the changes, united Latinos will win throughout California, let's stick together, que si se puede, que no? (it can be done, right?)

“IF THEY’RE SUPPORTING LEGISLATION THAT DENIES THE UNDOCUMENTED DRIVER’S LICENSE, THEY DON’T BELONG IN OFFICE, FRIENDS. THEY DON’T BELONG HERE!”
9. Antonio Villaraigosa, Chair of MEChA (student wing of Aztlan movement) at UCLA, former CA assemblymember, former CA Assembly speaker, currently Los Angeles City Mayor, and formerly Councilman at Southwest Voter Registration Project Conference in Los Angeles, 6/1997 "Part of today's reality has been propositions like 187 (to deny public benefits to illegal aliens, 1994), propositions like 209 (to abolish affirmative action, 1996), the welfare reform bill, which targeted legal immigrants and targeted us as a community. That's been the midnight. We know that the sunny side of midnight has been the election of a Latino speaker - was the election of Loretta Sanchez, against an arch-conservative, reactionary hate-mongering politician like Congressman Dornan! Today in California in the legislature, we're engaged in a great debate, where not only were we talking about denying education to the children of undocumented workers, but now we're talking about whether or not we should provide prenatal care to undocumented mothers. It's not enough to elect Latino leadership. If they're supporting legislation that denies the undocumented driver's licenses, they don't belong in office, friends. They don't belong here. If they can't stand up and say, 'You know what? I'm not ever going to support a policy that denies prenatal care to the children of undocumented mothers', they don't belong here."


GLORIA MOLINA, RACIST MEXICAN SUPREMACIST IS NOW ON THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS. A HUGE PORTION OF THE COUNTY’S REVENUES ARE PAID OUT TO ILLEGALS. LOS ANGELES COUNTY CALCULATES THAT THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IS ABOUT $2 BILLION PER YEAR AND GROWING FAST.

“I’M GONNA GO OUT THERE AN VOTE BECAUSE I WANT TO PAY THEM BACK!”10. Gloria Molina, one of the five in Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors at Southwest Voter Registration Project Conference, 6/1996 "This community is no longer going to stand for it. Because tonight we are organizing across this country in a single mission, in a plan. We are going to organize like we've never organized before. We are going to go into our neighborhoods. We are going to register voters. We are going to talk to all of those young people that need to become registered voters and go out to vote and we're are politicizing every single one of those new citizens that are becoming citizens of this country. And what we are saying is by November we will have one million additional Latino voters in this country, and we're gonna march, and our vote is going to be important. But I gotta tell you, there's a lot of people that are saying, 'I'm gonna go out there and vote because I want to pay them back!' And this November we are going to remember those that stood with us and we are also going to remember those that have stood against us on the issues of immigration, on the issues of education, on the issues of health care, on the issues of the minimum wage."

“LONG LIVE OUR RACE!”11. Vicky Castro, former member of Los Angeles Board of Education at Southwest Voter Registration Project Conference, 6/1996 "Que viva la raza, que viva la raza (long live our race)! I'm here to welcome all the new voters of 18 years old that we're registering now in our schools. Welcome, you're going to make a difference for Los Angeles, for San Antonio, for New York, and I thank Southwest for taking that challenge. And to the Mechistas (MEChA students) across this nation, you're going to make that difference for us, too. But when we register one more million voters I will not be the only Latina on the Board of Education of Los Angeles. And let me tell you here, no one will dismantle bilingual education in the United States of America. No one will deny an education to any child, especially Latino children. As you know, in Los Angeles we make up 70% of this school district. Of 600,000 -- 400,000 are Latinos, and our parents are not heard and they're going to be heard because in Los Angeles, San Antonio and Texas we have just classified 53,000 new citizens in one year that are going to be felt in November!"

“I STARTED THIS VERY QUIETLY BECAUSE THERE ARE THOSE THAT IF THEY KNEW THAT WE WERE CREATING A WHOLE NEW CADRE OF BRAND NEW CITIZENS IT WOULD HAVE TREMENDOUS POLITICAL IMPACT.”


“WE HAVE PROCESSED A LITTLE OVER 78,000 BRAND NEW CITZENS.”12. Ruben Zacarias, former superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District at Southwest Voter Registration Project Conference, 6/1997 "We have 27 centers now throughout LAUSD. Every one of them has trained people, clerks to take the fingerprints. Each one has the camera, that special camera. We have the application forms. And I'll tell you what we've done with I.N.S. Now we're even doing the testing that usually people had to go to INS to take, and pretty soon, hopefully, we'll do the final interviews in our schools. Incidentally, I started this very quietly because there are those that if they knew that we were creating a whole new cadre of brand new citizens it would have tremendous political impact. We will change the political panorama not only of L.A., but L.A. County and the State. And we do that we've changed the panorama of the nation. I'm proud to stand here and tell you that in those close to three years we have processed a little over 78,000 brand new citizens. That is the largest citizenship program in the entire nation."

“I HAVE PROUDLY AFFIRMED THAT THE MEXICAN NATIONAL EXTENDS BEYOND THE TERRITORY ENCLOSED BY ITS BORDERS....”13. Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico announcing the Mexican constitutional amendment allowing for dual citizenship on 6/23/97 "I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican national extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders, and that Mexican migrants are an important - a very important part of it. For that reason my government proposed a constitutional amendment to allow any Mexican with the right as he desires to acquire another nationality to do so without being forced to first give up his or her Mexican nationality. Fortunately, the amendment was passed almost unanimously by our federal Congress and is now part of our constitution. I am also here today to tell you that we want you to take pride in what each and every one of your Mexican brothers and sisters are doing back home.

“WE’RE HERE... TO SHOW THE WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANT L.A., THE FEW OF YOU WHO REMAIN, THAT WE ARE THE MAJORITY, AND WE CLAIM THIS LAND AS OURS, IT’S ALWAYS BEEN OURS, AND WE’RE STILL HERE, AND NONE OF THE TALK ABOUT DEPORTING. IF ANYONE’S GOING TO BE DEPORTED IT’S GOING TO BE YOU!”

“WE ARE THE MAJORITY IN L.A. THERE’S OVER SEVEN MILLION MEXICANS IN L.A. COUNTY ALONE.”


14. Augustin Cebada, Information Minister of Brown Berets, militant para-military soldiers of Aztlan shouting at U.S. citizens at an Independence Day rally in Los Angeles, 7/4/96 "Augustin Cebada, Brown Berets, we're here today to show L.A., show the minority people here, the Anglo-Saxons, that we are here, the majority, we're here to stay. We do the work in this city, we take care of the spoiled brat children, we clean their offices, we pick the food, we do the manufacturing in the factories of L.A., we are the majority here and we are not going to be pushed around. We're here in Westwood, this is the fourth time we've been here in the last two months, to show white Anglo-Saxon Protestant L.A., the few of you who remain, that we are the majority, and we claim this land as ours, it's always been ours, and we're still here, and none of the talk about deporting. If anyone's going to be deported it's going to be you! Go back to Simi Valley, you skunks! Go back to Woodland Hills! Go back to Boston! To back to the Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You're old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you, leave like beaten rats. You old white people, it is your duty to die. Even their own ethicists say that they should die, that they have a duty to die. They're taking up too much space, too much air. We are the majority in L.A. There's over seven million Mexicans in L.A. County alone. We are the majority. And you're going to see every day more and more of it, as we manifest as our young people grow up, graduate from high school, go on to college and start taking over this society. The vast majority of our people are under the age of 15 years old. Right now we're already controlling those elections, whether it's by violence or nonviolence. Through love of having children we're going to take over." Other demonstrators: "Raza fuerza (brown race power), this is Aztlan, this is Mexico. They're the pilgrims on our land. Go back to the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria."

“BUT THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT IF WE DO NOT MOBILIZE OUR COMMUNITY WE ARE NOT PUTTING TOGETHER A SETTING - THE PARAMETER IS TO ESTABLISH A MASSIVE MOVEMENT IN OUR COMMUNITY. THAT’S WHAT THIS IS ABOUT. THAT’S WHY I AM HERE TODAY.... TO TALK ABOUT WHO HERE WANTS TO ORGANIZE THE MASSES....”15. Fabian Nunez, formerly Alliance for Immigrant Rights, political liaison for L.A. School District, currently Speaker of the CA Assembly at Latino Summit Response to Prop 187 at UC Riverside, 1/1995 "There's only two forms of power in this country and in this world. One is economic power, We certainly don't have the economic power because we don't own the means of production, but there's another form of power, and that's the power of the masses. So you can be as revolutionary as you want, you can be Chicano nationalist, you can be Mexican-American, you can be Hispanic, you can believe in the concept of Aztlan, you can believe in the concept of multi-culturalism. Somebody can say 'Everybody here is wrong, I am the only one that has reached revolutionary completeness'. But the bottom line is that if we do not mobilize our community we are not putting together a setting - the parameters to establish a massive movement in our community. That's what this is about. And that's why I am here today - to talk about who here wants to organize the masses, and who here is interested in developing that movement that somebody earlier said that the sleeping giant is in a coma.

17. Tom Tancredo, U.S. Congressman from Colorado,, speaking on CSPAN, 6/27/2001 "In the June 21 issue of Time Magazine, the lead story of which is titled, "AMEXICO". It describes the de facto elimination of the border between Mexico and the United States. I believe that the debate revolving around our immigration policy should reflect the fact that this phenomenon is underway. President Fox (of Mexico) yesterday stated that he came to the United States to "play a more active role in establishing the new international architecture". I believe that this new "international architecture" can be described as AMEXICO.

18. Gray Davis, former governor of California, recalled by the voters 10/2003, speaking to a Latino audience in 1999 "In the near future, people will look at California and Mexico as one magnificent region.” GRAY WAS CORRECT IN ONE RESPECT. CALIFORNIA AND MEXICO, NOW KNOWN AS MEXIFORNIA, the Mexican welfare state, IS ONE REGION, BUT MORE GRAFFITI DRENCHED DUMPSTER THAN ANYTHING “MAGNIFICENT”.
LA RAZA:
“FOR THE RACE, EVERYTHING, FOR THOSE OUTSIDE THE RACE

Should HISPANDERING OBAMA Apologize to the American People For Lies?

Obama To Apologize For Lie To The Nation

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Date: 2009-09-15, 7:38AM CDT
Reply to: comm-wrjz9-1375251807@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

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Rising Calls for President Obama To Apologize For Lie To The Nation
http://www.alipac.us/article-4512-thread-1-0.html
The national non-partisan immigration enforcement organization known as ALIPAC is calling on President Barack Obama to publicly apologize to the Congress, media, and the entire nation for lying about illegal immigrants having access to health care reform benefits.

"Considering the large volume of evidence suggesting President Obama lied in his speech before Congress, he should follow Congressman Joe Wilson's example and apologize immediately," said William Gheen of ALIPAC. "Many people feel Joe Wilson was rude, but that is pale by comparison to the President of the United States of America intentionally lying to Congress, the media, and every American."

Obama's claim that illegal aliens would not be covered by his health care reform plans have been disproved by the lack of enforcement measures in HR 3200, Democrat party line votes blocking any enforcement amendments to the bills, the fact that the US Senate is now moving to close loopholes Obama said did not exist, and the Congressional Research Service analysis showing Obama's comments to be incorrect.

Further evidence that Obama intends to offer these benefits to illegal aliens are found in the fact his initial national estimates of the number of uninsured in America included over 6.6 uninsured illegal aliens.

President Obama also told Katie Couric in a recent interview he plans to push for a "path to citizenship" for illegal aliens and that would qualify them for all taxpayer benefits and American jobs.

The Congressional Research Service analysis notes "that most of the language in the main House bill does not include illegals -- but has few mechanisms for enforcing this. The bill's individual mandate to get coverage does include illegals." (Investor's Business Daily, 9/11/2009)

A recent Rasmussen poll showed that 83% of Americans oppose taxpayer health care benefits for illegal aliens in the United States.

Congressman Joe Wilson has announced that he will not apologize again for his comments and FOX News is reporting the Congressman's website is under Cyber attack after raising close to 1 Million dollars in the few days following his "You Lie!" outburst.

"President Obama came to power asking Americans to BELIEVE in what he was saying and that belief has given way to 'YOU LIE'," said William Gheen. "Every American, regardless of their race, political party, stances on health care reform, or illegal immigration suffers when a sitting President lies to the nation."

The recent dust up between Congressman Joe Wilson and President Obama is leading to more immigration enforcement in the US Senate, where Democratic leaders are rushing to close the loopholes that Obama claimed did not exist. Wilson's 'YOU LIE' comment may have also stymied US Senator Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) plan to introduce Comprehensive Immigration Reform AMNESTY legislation this past week. The Obama administration cannot promote Amnesty on top of health care reform, without making the President's recent lie more obvious.

"Over time the truth will get out there and Obama's support levels will fall even more just like Nazi Bush (Scherrf)," said William Gheen. "Obama just lied about his illegal alien weapons of mass job destruction."

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) is a non-partisan, mulit-ethnic, national grass roots organization fighting against amnesty and illegal immigration that has endorsed the campaigns of Congressman Joe Wilson since 2004. ALIPAC's supporters are calling their members of Congress today to request pressure for Obama to apologize. (Obama is an illegal alien himself and should resign from the oval office and continue his CIA “asset” status!)

Obama Longtime CIA Asset
The name's Obama -- BARACK Obama.
http://uruknet.info/?p=m57169&hd=&size=1&l=e
http://www.cannonfire.blogspot.com/2009/08/names-obama-barack-obama.html

Barack Obama’s mother is another CIA asset!
Is Stanley Anne Dunham Still Alive? YES!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2148751/posts
Obamaunism 101: The Stanley Ann and Madelyn Dunham factor
It is reported that Obama's grandparents were members of the CPUSA communist party; also his mother Ann Dunham.

She supposedly DIED in Nov. 1995, and Verizon didn’t come onto the scene until 1996...after the merger of Bell Atlantic and GE
http://verizonpathetic.com/historylesson6.html

ALIPAC's comments on the Wilson vs. Obama conflict appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Congressional Quarterly, and National Public Radio.

For more information or to schedule interviews please visit http://www.alipac.us

Paid for by Americans for Legal Immigration AMERICANS FOR LEGAL IMMIGRATION PAC
Post Office Box 30966, Raleigh, NC 27622-0966
Tel: (919) 787-6009 Toll Free: (866) 703-0864
FEC ID: C00405878

WOLF: INTC, SpecOps, Commando, BlackWatch, 3 PhDs

CONVERTING THE UNITED STATES INTO A SPANISH SPEAKING NATION

How much does it cost this nation to convert to being a SPANISH SPEAKING COUNTRY by virtue of the illegals' loathing for ENGLISH AND LITERACY?

Have you ever gone into a ROSS store, or TARGET? The overwhelmingly low paid Hispanic employees barely grunt at customer that are Americans, but their faces light up when it's another illegals which they can banter on in Spanish gleefully.

Mexicans are the most racist people in this hemisphere. They loathe Americans, American values, literacy, and the ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

In Mexican occupied Los Angeles, at the SANTEE EDUCATIONAL COMPLEX High School, the student body is overwhelmingly ILLEGALS, or the children of ILLEGALS who identify as being MEXICANS, not Americans! This school teaches in SPANISH. The books and handouts are in SPANISH. The students sit on their ass when the (American) national anthem is played at assemblies, and these assemblies end in !VIVA MEXICO! VIVA MEXICO!

Just the cost for schools, prisons, jails, courts, and hospitals where illegals get "free" medical attention, and free birthing, is STAGGERING.

AN AMERICAN SPEAKS - CRAIGSLIST HOUSTON

Taxpayers Yet Unearned Dollars Going to Illegals (Houston to USA)

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Date: 2009-09-21, 4:48PM CDT
Reply to: comm-mcymk-1385658221@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

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US Tax dollars for ILLEGALS are from womb to tomb on the backs of the diminishing working US Citizen of Generations as taxpayers:

Houston Area libraries use their staff time to not only teach ENGLISH as a Second Language; but also have citizenship classes: all paid for by you and me who go to work daily till we die...Houston and other tax paid libraries AID and Abet ILLEGALS; encouraging them to blatantly violate USA laws. If you or I do so: we pay the penalty and our record is on-line F O R E V E R even if dismissed.
See you local library Calendar

PS I forgot: they also include Computer Classes in Spanish; Story Hour para los ninos in Spanish etc and etc.
Of course, the library has encourage teens to come to the library: to play computer games.
So why bother having any library whatsoever?

Location: Houston to USA
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests



PostingID: 1385658221

WHAT WILL AMERICA BE IN 2050? What is it now under occupation?

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR


from the May 28, 2009 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0528/p09s01-coop.html
What will America stand for in 2050?
The US should think long and hard about the high number of Latino immigrants.
By Lawrence Harrison

PALO ALTO, CALIF.
President Obama has encouraged Americans to start laying a new foundation for the country – on a number of fronts. He has stressed that we'll need to have the courage to make some hard choices. One of those hard choices is how to handle immigration. The US must get serious about the tide of legal and illegal immigrants, above all from Latin America.
It's not just a short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment approaches 10 percent or the number of uninsured straining the quality of healthcare. Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.
The political realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.
Do I sound like a right-wing "nativist"? I'm not. I'm a lifelong Democrat; an early and avid supporter of Obama. I'm gratified by his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I'm also the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants; and a member, along with several other Democrats, of the advisory boards of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Pro English. Similar concerns preoccupied the distinguished Democrat Barbara Jordan when she chaired the congressionally mandated US Commission on Immigration Reform in the 1990s.
Congresswoman Jordan was worried about the adverse impact of high levels of legal and illegal immigration on poor citizens, disproportionately Latinos and African-Americans. The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.
The healthcare cost of the illegal workforce is especially burdensome, and is subsidized by taxpayers. To claim Medicaid, you must be legal, but as the Health and Human Services inspector general found, 47 states allow self-declaration of status for Medicaid. Many hospitals and clinics are going broke because of the constant stream of uninsured, many of whom are the estimated 12 million to 15 million illegal immigrants. This translates into reduced services, particularly for lower-income citizens.
The US population totaled 281 million in 2000. About 35 million, or 12.5 percent, were Latino. The Census Bureau projects that our population will reach 439 million in 2050, a 56 percent increase over the 2000 census. The Hispanic population in 2050 is projected at 133 million – 30 percent of the total and almost quadruple the 2000 level. Population growth is the principal threat to the environment via natural resource use, sprawl, and pollution. And population growth is fueled chiefly by immigration.
Consider what this, combined with worrisome evidence that Latinos are not melting into our cultural mainstream, means for the US. Latinos have contributed some positive cultural attributes, such as multigenerational family bonds, to US society. But the same traditional values that lie behind Latin America's difficulties in achieving democratic stability, social justice, and prosperity are being substantially perpetuated among Hispanic-Americans.
Prominent Latin Americans have concluded that traditional values are at the root of the region's development problems. Among those expressing that opinion: Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa; Nobelist author Octavio Paz, a Mexican; Teodoro Moscoso, a Puerto Rican politician and US ambassador to Venezuela; and Ecuador's former president, Osvaldo Hurtado.
Latin America's cultural problem is apparent in the persistent Latino high school dropout rate – 40 percent in California, according to a recent study – and the high incidence of teenage pregnancy, single mothers, and crime. The perpetuation of Latino culture is facilitated by the Spanish language's growing challenge to English as our national language. It makes it easier for Latinos to avoid the melting pot and for education to remain a low priority, as it is in Latin America – a problem highlighted in recent books by former New York City deputy mayor Herman Badillo, a Puerto Rican, and Mexican-Americans Lionel Sosa and Ernesto Caravantes.
Language is the conduit of culture. Consider: There is no word in Spanish for "compromise" (compromiso means "commitment") nor for "accountability," a problem that is compounded by a verb structure that converts "I dropped (broke, forgot) something" into "it got dropped" ("broken," "forgotten").
As the USAID mission director during the first two years of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, I had difficulty communicating "dissent" to a government minister at a crucial moment in our efforts to convince the US Congress to approve a special appropriation for Nicaragua.
I was later told by a bilingual, bicultural Nicaraguan educator that when I used "dissent" what my Nicaraguan counterparts understood was "heresy." "We are, after all, children of the Inquisition," he added.
In a letter to me in 1991, Mexican-American columnist Richard Estrada described the essence of the problem of immigration as one of numbers. We should really worry, he wrote, "when the numbers begin to favor not only the maintenance and replenishment of the immigrants' source culture, but also its overall growth, and in particular growth so large that the numbers not only impede assimilation but go beyond to pose a challenge to the traditional culture of the American nation."
Obama should confront the challenges by enforcing immigration laws on employment to help end illegal immigration. We should calibrate legal immigration annually to (1) the needs of the economy, as Ms. Jordan urged, and (2) past performance of immigrant groups with respect to acculturation.
We must declare our national language to be English and discourage the proliferation of Spanish- language media. We should limit citizenship by birth to the offspring of citizens. And we should provide immigrants with easy-to-access educational services that facilitate acculturation, including English language, citizenship, and American values.
Lawrence Harrison directs the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, in Medford, Mass. He is the author of "The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change A Culture And Save It From Itself."

You thought things couldn’t get much worse in CALIFORNIA… now MEXIFORNIA… then you don’t know how fast ILLEGALS are breeding. But then you probably didn’t know that YOU’RE PAYING FOR THE HOSPITAL COSTS OF ALL THESE ANCHORS!
POPULATION TO DOUBLE... LATINO THE DOMINANT ETHNIC GROUP.....double the deficits above! And double the crime, graffiti, anchor babies and homes foreclosed on with bars on the windows.
Riverside will become the second most populous county behind Los Angeles and Latinos the dominant ethnic group, study says. By Maria L. La Ganga and Sara Lin
Times Staff Writers
July 10, 2007
Over the next half-century, California's population will explode by nearly 75%, and Riverside will surpass its bigger neighbors to become the second most populous county after Los Angeles, according to state Department of Finance projections released Monday. California will near the 60-million mark in 2050, the study found, raising questions about how the state will look and function and where all the people and their cars will go. Dueling visions pit the iconic California building block of ranch house, big yard and two-car garage against more dense, high-rise development. But whether sprawl or skyscrapers win the day, the Golden State will probably be a far different and more complex place than it is today, as people live longer and Latinos become the dominant ethnic group, eclipsing all others combined. Some critics forecast disaster if gridlock and environmental impacts are not averted. Others see a possible economic boon, particularly for retailers and service industries with an eye on the state as a burgeoning market."It's opportunity with baggage," said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., in "a country masquerading as a state."Other demographers argue that the huge population increase the state predicts will occur only if officials complete major improvements to roads and other public infrastructure. Without that investment, they say, some Californians would flee the state.If the finance department's calculations hold, California's population will rise from 34.1 million in 2000 to 59.5 million at the mid-century point, about the same number of people as Italy has today. And its projected growth rate in those 50 years will outstrip the national rate — nearly 75% compared with less than 50% projected by the federal government. That could translate to increased political clout in Washington, D.C. Southern California's population is projected to grow at a rate of more than 60%, according to the new state figures, reaching 31.6 million by mid-century. That's an increase of 12.1 million over just seven counties. L.A. County alone will top 13 million by 2050, an increase of almost 3.5 million residents. And Riverside County — long among the fastest-growing in the state — will triple in population to 4.7 million by mid-century. Riverside County will add 3.1 million people, according to the new state figures, eclipsing Orange and San Diego to become the second most populous in the state. With less expensive housing than the coast, Riverside County has grown by more than 472,000 residents since 2000, according to state estimates. No matter how much local governments build in the way of public works and how many new jobs are attracted to the region — minimizing the need for long commutes — Husing figures that growth will still overwhelm the area's roads.USC Professor Genevieve Giuliano, an expert on land use and transportation, would probably agree. Such massive growth, if it occurs, she said, will require huge investment in the state's highways, schools, and energy and sewer systems at a "very formidable cost."If those things aren't built, Giuliano questioned whether the projected population increases will occur. "Sooner or later, the region will not be competitive and the growth is not going to happen," she said.If major problems like traffic congestion and housing costs aren't addressed, Giuliano warned, the middle class is going to exit California, leaving behind very high-income and very low-income residents. "It's a political question," said Martin Wachs, a transportation expert at the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. "Do we have the will, the consensus, the willingness to pay? If we did, I think we could manage the growth."The numbers released Monday underscore most demographers' view that the state's population is pushing east, from both Los Angeles and the Bay Area, to counties such as Riverside and San Bernardino as well as half a dozen or so smaller Central Valley counties.Sutter County, for example, is expected to be the fastest-growing on a percentage basis between 2000 and 2050, jumping 255% to a population of 282,894 , the state said. Kern County is expected to see its population more than triple to 2.1 million by mid-century.In Southern California, San Diego County is projected to grow by almost 1.7 million residents and Orange County by 1.1 million. Even Ventura County — where voters have imposed some limits on urban sprawl — will see its population jump 62% to more than 1.2 million if the projections hold.The Department of Finance releases long-term population projections every three years. Between the last two reports, number crunchers have taken a more detailed look at California's statistics and taken into account the likelihood that people will live longer, said chief demographer Mary Heim.The result?The latest numbers figure the state will be much more crowded than earlier estimates (by nearly 5 million) and that it will take a bit longer than previously thought for Latinos to become the majority of California's population: 2042, not 2038.The figures show that the majority of California's growth will be in the Latino population, said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at USC, adding that "68% of the growth this decade will be Latino, 75% next and 80% after that."That should be a wake-up call for voting Californians, Myers said, pointing out a critical disparity. Though the state's growth is young and Latino, the majority of voters will be older and white — at least for the next decade."The future of the state is Latino growth," Myers said. "We'd sure better invest in them and get them up to speed. Older white voters don't see it that way. They don't realize that someone has to replace them in the work force, pay for their benefits and buy their house."

North Carolina PERMITS ILLEGALS HIGHER EDUCATION IN VOLATION OF FED LAWS

N.C. Reverses Illegal Alien Ban
View Discussion Last Updated: Thu, 09/24/2009 - 11:43am
A year after North Carolina’s Attorney General ordered public community colleges to stop accepting illegal immigrants, the state board that governs the system has revised the admissions policy to allow them to enroll.

In issuing the directive last May, Attorney General Roy Cooper pointed out that federal law bans illegal immigrants from getting state benefits, including a higher education. For years the North Carolina Community College System, which serves nearly 1 million students, openly admitted illegal aliens to all of its 58 campuses.

The Attorney General’s order, the nation’s first statewide policy blocking illegal aliens seeking a taxpayer financed college education, outraged Latino rights advocates who were quick to cry racism and discrimination. Supporters pointed out that it didn’t make sense for illegal immigrants to be trained at taxpayer-supported colleges if they can’t even be legally employed in the U.S.

This week, the state board that governs North Carolina’s public college system reversed the ban to allow illegal immigrants to once again enroll in schools throughout the state. About half of the 21-member board is appointed by the governor, a few are appointed by state legislators and the rest includes North Carolina’s lieutenant governor and treasurer.

Proudly announcing the vote that reversed the ban, the board’s chairwoman said that students who are striving for a better future will have access to a “seamless educational pathway” from kindergarten through twelfth grade and beyond. The president of the community college system added that the new policy maintains “all-important hope” for students who were brought to the U.S. as minors and keeps the path to a better life for the illegal immigrants “clearly in view.”

The board did set some conditions for admitting illegal aliens, however. Among them are that they must graduate from a U.S. high school and that they don’t displace a state resident or legal U.S. resident from a class or program.

DEPARTMENT of JUSTICE Promoting Illegal Immigration? WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS!

DOJ Grant To Empower Illegal Aliens
View Discussion Last Updated: Tue, 09/22/2009 - 4:26pm
The U.S. Department of Justice has given a public university a special grant to help illegal immigrants in the Midwest and teach their employers, primarily in the meatpacking and construction industries, how to curb discrimination against foreign-born workers.

Indeed, the government agency charged with defending the nation's interests and enforcing the law is helping those who have violated it. The Justice Department is supposed to ensure public safety against foreign and domestic threats and seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior not reward them.

Instead, the agency has given the University of Iowa a $50,000 grant to help empower the illegal immigrant labor force that, according to a press release, substantially benefits significant Midwestern industries. The taxpayer money went to the school’s Center for Human Rights, which plans to stop the exploitation of immigrant workers who are too often vulnerable to discrimination and unsafe working conditions.

Among other things, the school will use the cash to extend significant outreach activities to immigrant workforces in Iowa and Nebraska and provide educational opportunities to the business community relating to immigration law and the rights of foreign-born workers. Industries notorious for hiring illegal aliens, such as meatpacking and construction, will be heavily targeted.

The Justice Department has a history of protecting illegal immigrants and accommodating them in exchange for their testimony in the criminal prosecutions of U.S. law enforcement officers. The agency recently brought deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to testify against an Arizona sheriff who enforces immigration law through a federal partnership.

A few years ago, Justice Department officials actually went into Mexico to give a drug dealer immunity to testify against two veteran Border Patrol agents who intercepted his U.S.-bound vehicle loaded with 743 pounds of marijuana. The admitted Mexican drug smuggler got shot trying to evade the federal officers and the Justice Department prosecuted both of them. Incredibly, the agents got convicted of causing serious bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon, discharge of a firearm and violating the drug smuggler’s civil rights.

JUDICIAL WATCH - Hispandering SENATOR ROBERT MENENDEZ Wants Health-care for ILLEGALS

Senator Wants Illegal Aliens Covered In Health Plan
View Discussion Last Updated: Mon, 09/21/2009 - 3:06pm
An influential senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee is withholding support for his party’s recently drafted healthcare reform bill because illegal immigrants won’t benefit under the plan.

The only Hispanic in the U.S. Senate, New Jersey’s Robert Menendez, doesn’t like the way illegal aliens are treated in the bill, recently released by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, and refuses to vote for it until changes are made. This could create a huge problem, according to the congressional newspaper that broke the story, because Menendez has considerable leverage and may represent the committee’s deciding vote.

Specifically, Menendez objects to the portion of the bill that forbids illegal immigrants from buying health insurance through newly created exchanges that will be set up to cut costs. The senator, once among the highest ranking Democrats in the U.S. House, has joined forces with Hispanic advocacy groups that have denounced the proposed measure’s emphasis on legal and illegal immigrants.

Menendez is also concerned that, under the bill, families made up of both legal and illegal residents won’t be treated fairly because they can’t purchase reduced-premium insurance from companies participating in the new exchange. That means they would be forced to pay much higher prices for private coverage than legal residents.

Indeed the drafted bill says that families that include illegal immigrants will receive lower federal subsidies than those without. That means that the income of an illegal alien will be counted when assessing a family’s federal aid although the illegal immigrant will not be eligible for healthcare subsidies. This concerns Menendez terribly, though changing it would put him at odds with the White House.

President Obama has steadfastly maintained that his healthcare plan will not help illegal immigrants, although some aren’t buying it. A few weeks ago a Republican lawmaker made worldwide headlines for shouting out “You lie!” after Obama told a joint session of Congress that illegal immigrants will not be insured when his overhaul takes effect. That will certainly change if Menendez has his way.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

BARACK OBAMA'S hispandering TO KEEP WALL STREET HAPPY!

BARACK IS AS HISPANDERING FOR "CHEAP" WAGES AND AMNESTY JUST AS BAD AS BUSH, HILLARY, BILLARY, BUSH!

There's a reason why the FORTUNE 500 are generous donors to LA RAZA, the virlulently racist Mexican supremacist fascist party for OPEN BORDERS, ONE LANGUAGE - SPANISH,AND ONE FLAG, THE MEXICAN!

"For the race (Mexican) everything! For others, nothing!" La Raza campagin slogan.



Interesting News


Legalize illegals to get them health care
By Stephen Dinan

President Obama said this week that his health care plan won't cover illegal immigrants, but argued that's all the more reason to legalize them and ensure they eventually do get coverage.

He also staked out a position that anyone in the country legally should be covered - a major break with the 1996 welfare reform bill, which limited most federal public assistance programs only to citizens and longtime immigrants.

"Even though I do not believe we can extend coverage to those who are here illegally, I also don't simply believe we can simply ignore the fact that our immigration system is broken," Mr. Obama said Wednesday evening in a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. "That's why I strongly support making sure folks who are here legally have access to affordable, quality health insurance under this plan, just like everybody else.

Mr. Obama added, "If anything, this debate underscores the necessity of passing comprehensive immigration reform and resolving the issue of 12 million undocumented people living and working in this country once and for all."

Republicans said that amounts to an amnesty, calling it a backdoor effort to make sure current illegal immigrants get health care.

"It is ironic that the president told the American people that illegal immigrants should not be covered by the health care bill, but now just days later he's talking about letting them in the back door," said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

"If the American people do not want to provide government health care for illegal immigrants, why would they support giving them citizenship, the highest honor America can bestow?" Mr. Smith said.

But immigrant rights groups see the speech as a signal that Mr. Obama is committed to providing health care coverage for anyone in the United States legally, regardless of their citizenship status.

"It's the first time I've certainly heard, publicly, him talking more about legal immigrants," said Eric Rodriguez, vice president for research and advocacy at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). "I think that was certainly positive progress. We were absolutely concerned about not hearing that."

PEOPLES MOVEMENT TO END MEXICAN WELFARE STATE

Mexican occupied Los Angeles is operating ONE BILLION DOLLARS in deficits while still paying out $50 MILLION per MONTH in welfare to ILLEGALS. In Los Angeles 47% of those employed are ILLEGALS. This city is characterized by the Christian Science Monitor as the "Mexican gang capital of America". Los Angeles has a Mexican tax-free underground economy calculated to be $2BILLION PER YEAR.

IS IT TIME TO END THE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE? AND IS IT TIME MEXICO HELP ITS OWN PEOPLE, AND NOT SEND THEM OVER THE BORDER WHERE THEY DO NOT WANT TO BE!


AN INITIATIVE TO HELP CALIFORNIA'S
BUDGET DEFICIT CRISIS:
CALIFORNIA TAXPAYER PROTECTION ACT
BORDER CONTROL BY STOPPING THE MAGNETS



The initiative requires illegal alien mothers to apply in person and pay an additional fee for a certificate designating a "Foreign Parent;" submit official government issued identification with photograph and fingerprint, all of which is transmitted to the United States Department of Homeland Security.

ENDS illegal aliens use of all public funded benefits including pre-natal, non-emergency medical care and in-state tuition. California is one of thirteen states with this taxpayer expense. In 1987, California had a teenage birth rate below the national average. Pre-natal commenced for illegal aliens in 1988. Four years later the teenage birth rate was twice the national average and the highest of any state. If you understand the multitude of long term problems that are transferred from one generation to the next which are caused by teenage births, you will support this initiative.


TERMINATES all child welfare checks that are now direct deposited into illegal aliens bank accounts for the anchor babies. Many of these checks become remittances that are sent out of the U.S.

The California Legislature allows issuance of child welfare to illegal aliens for 18 years. Citizens can only receive the benefit for five years. Between 1988-1995 this welfare program quadrupled and continues to spiral out of control. In spite of the budget deficits the Legislature refuses to end this welfare magnet or lower the number of years to five.

Public benefits issued to only citizens, or qualifed aliens with signed affidavits verified for lawful status. The text is the same as Oklahoma's laws that have been upheld in district court. The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the state can require lawful presence of all applicants to prevent state block grant funds from going to illegal aliens.


If "birth tourism," and all other welfare paid to illegal aliens had been stopped 20 years ago there would not be the state budget deficit crisis there is today. That problem is costing taxpayers between $2.8 Billion and $3.5 Billion every year.

An article in the Sacramento Bee on September 10, 2007 by Washington correspondent David Whitney summed up automatic citizenship: "Although Congress has never passed a law saying so, no president has ever ordered it, and no court has ever ruled on the issue, each of these babies automatically becomes a U.S. citizen when it takes its first breath."

Our citizen’s movement will launch the national debate we need to bring an end to "birth tourism" and AUTOMATIC CITIZENSHIP in the United States of America. The movement will uphold the recorded words and real intent of the authors of our Constitution. To the authors and the states which passed the 14th Amendment "subject to the jurisdiction" is to mean even today that citizens are born to parents who are "not subjects of a foreign power." Their intent was to clarify that there is no automatic birthright citizenship.

With your support to Taxpayer Revolution we can launch the legal movement to end birth tourism, caused by the unconstitutional policy of automatic U.S. citizenship. Please mail donations and self-addressed stamped envelopes for petitions to:

TAXPAYER REVOLUTION P.O. Box 9985 San Diego, CA 92169

Formally supported by the American Legion, Department of California, Reps. Ed Royce, Dana Rohrabacher and Brian Bilbray, Numbers USA, and more. Please see Endorsements. PLEASE CONTRIBUTE on-line now.

CITY JOURNAL - Why Unskilled Immigrants HURT OUR ECONOMY

City Journal
How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy
A handful of industries get low-cost labor, and the taxpayers foot the bill.
Steven Malanga
Summer 2006
The day after Librado Velasquez arrived on Staten Island after a long, surreptitious journey from his Chiapas, Mexico, home, he headed out to a street corner to wait with other illegal immigrants looking for work. Velasquez, who had supported his wife, seven kids, and his in-laws as a campesino, or peasant farmer, until a 1998 hurricane devastated his farm, eventually got work, off the books, loading trucks at a small New Jersey factory, which hired illegals for jobs that required few special skills. The arrangement suited both, until a work injury sent Velasquez to the local emergency room, where federal law required that he be treated, though he could not afford to pay for his care. After five operations, he is now permanently disabled and has remained in the United States to pursue compensation claims.
“I do not have the use of my leg without walking with a cane, and I do not have strength in my arm in order to lift things,” Velasquez said through an interpreter at New York City Council hearings. “I have no other way to live except if I receive some other type of compensation. I need help, and I thought maybe my son could come and work here and support me here in the United States.”
Velasquez’s story illustrates some of the fault lines in the nation’s current, highly charged, debate on immigration. Since the mid-1960s, America has welcomed nearly 30 million legal immigrants and received perhaps another 15 million illegals, numbers unprecedented in our history. These immigrants have picked our fruit, cleaned our homes, cut our grass, worked in our factories, and washed our cars. But they have also crowded into our hospital emergency rooms, schools, and government-subsidized aid programs, sparking a fierce debate about their contributions to our society and the costs they impose on it.
Advocates of open immigration argue that welcoming the Librado Velasquezes of the world is essential for our American economy: our businesses need workers like him, because we have a shortage of people willing to do low-wage work. Moreover, the free movement of labor in a global economy pays off for the United States, because immigrants bring skills and capital that expand our economy and offset immigration’s costs. Like tax cuts, supporters argue, immigration pays for itself.
But the tale of Librado Velasquez helps show why supporters are wrong about today’s immigration, as many Americans sense and so much research has demonstrated. America does not have a vast labor shortage that requires waves of low-wage immigrants to alleviate; in fact, unemployment among unskilled workers is high—about 30 percent. Moreover, many of the unskilled, uneducated workers now journeying here labor, like Velasquez, in shrinking industries, where they force out native workers, and many others work in industries where the availability of cheap workers has led businesses to suspend investment in new technologies that would make them less labor-intensive.
Yet while these workers add little to our economy, they come at great cost, because they are not economic abstractions but human beings, with their own culture and ideas—often at odds with our own. Increasing numbers of them arrive with little education and none of the skills necessary to succeed in a modern economy. Many may wind up stuck on our lowest economic rungs, where they will rely on something that immigrants of other generations didn’t have: a vast U.S. welfare and social-services apparatus that has enormously amplified the cost of immigration. Just as welfare reform and other policies are helping to shrink America’s underclass by weaning people off such social programs, we are importing a new, foreign-born underclass. As famed free-market economist Milton Friedman puts it: “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”
Immigration can only pay off again for America if we reshape our policy, organizing it around what’s good for the economy by welcoming workers we truly need and excluding those who, because they have so little to offer, are likely to cost us more than they contribute, and who will struggle for years to find their place here.
Hampering today’s immigration debate are our misconceptions about the so-called first great migration some 100 years ago, with which today’s immigration is often compared. We envision that first great migration as a time when multitudes of Emma Lazarus’s “tired,” “poor,” and “wretched refuse” of Europe’s shores made their way from destitution to American opportunity. Subsequent studies of American immigration with titles like The Uprooted convey the same impression of the dispossessed and displaced swarming here to find a new life. If America could assimilate 24 million mostly desperate immigrants from that great migration—people one unsympathetic economist at the turn of the twentieth century described as “the unlucky, the thriftless, the worthless”—surely, so the story goes, today’s much bigger and richer country can absorb the millions of Librado Velasquezes now venturing here.
But that argument distorts the realities of the first great migration. Though fleeing persecution or economic stagnation in their homelands, that era’s immigrants—Jewish tailors and seamstresses who helped create New York’s garment industry, Italian stonemasons and bricklayers who helped build some of our greatest buildings, German merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans—all brought important skills with them that fit easily into the American economy. Those waves of immigrants—many of them urban dwellers who crossed a continent and an ocean to get here—helped supercharge the workforce at a time when the country was going through a transformative economic expansion that craved new workers, especially in its cities. A 1998 National Research Council report noted “that the newly arriving immigrant nonagricultural work force . . . was (slightly) more skilled than the resident American labor force”: 27 percent of them were skilled laborers, compared with only 17 percent of that era’s native-born workforce.
Many of these immigrants quickly found a place in our economy, participating in the workforce at a higher rate even than the native population. Their success at finding work sent many of them quickly up the economic ladder: those who stayed in America for at least 15 years, for instance, were just as likely to own their own business as native-born workers of the same age, one study found. Another study found that their American-born children were just as likely to be accountants, engineers, or lawyers as Americans whose families had been here for generations.
What the newcomers of the great migration did not find here was a vast social-services and welfare state. They had to rely on their own resources or those of friends, relatives, or private, often ethnic, charities if things did not go well. That’s why about 70 percent of those who came were men in their prime. It’s also why many of them left when the economy sputtered several times during the period. For though one often hears that restrictive anti-immigration legislation starting with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 ended the first great migration, what really killed it was the crash of the American economy. Even with the 1920s quotas, America welcomed some 4.1 million immigrants, but in the Depression of the 1930s, the number of foreign immigrants tumbled far below quota levels, to 500,000. With America’s streets no longer paved with gold, and without access to the New Deal programs for native-born Americans, immigrants not only stopped coming, but some 60 percent of those already here left in a great remigration home.
Today’s immigration has turned out so differently in part because it emerged out of the 1960s civil rights and Great Society mentality. In 1965, a new immigration act eliminated the old system of national quotas, which critics saw as racist because it greatly favored European nations. Lawmakers created a set of broader immigration quotas for each hemisphere, and they added a new visa preference category for family members to join their relatives here. Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy reassured the country that, “contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants,” and “it will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”
But, in fact, the law had an immediate, dramatic effect, increasing immigration by 60 percent in its first ten years. Sojourners from poorer countries around the rest of the world arrived in ever-greater numbers, so that whereas half of immigrants in the 1950s had originated from Europe, 75 percent by the 1970s were from Asia and Latin America. And as the influx of immigrants grew, the special-preferences rule for family unification intensified it further, as the pool of eligible family members around the world also increased. Legal immigration to the U.S. soared from 2.5 million in the 1950s to 4.5 million in the 1970s to 7.3 million in the 1980s to about 10 million in the 1990s.
As the floodgates of legal immigration opened, the widening economic gap between the United States and many of its neighbors also pushed illegal immigration to levels that America had never seen. In particular, when Mexico’s move to a more centralized, state-run economy in the 1970s produced hyperinflation, the disparity between its stagnant economy and U.S. prosperity yawned wide. Mexico’s per-capita gross domestic product, 37 percent of the United States’ in the early 1980s, was only 27 percent of it by the end of the decade—and is now just 25 percent of it. With Mexican farmworkers able to earn seven to ten times as much in the United States as at home, by the 1980s illegals were pouring across our border at the rate of about 225,000 a year, and U.S. sentiment rose for slowing the flow.
But an unusual coalition of business groups, unions, civil rights activists, and church leaders thwarted the call for restrictions with passage of the inaptly named 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized some 2.7 million unauthorized aliens already here, supposedly in exchange for tougher penalties and controls against employers who hired illegals. The law proved no deterrent, however, because supporters, in subsequent legislation and court cases argued on civil rights grounds, weakened the employer sanctions. Meanwhile, more illegals flooded here in the hope of future amnesties from Congress, while the newly legalized sneaked their wives and children into the country rather than have them wait for family-preference visas. The flow of illegals into the country rose to between 300,000 and 500,000 per year in the 1990s, so that a decade after the legislation that had supposedly solved the undocumented alien problem by reclassifying them as legal, the number of illegals living in the United States was back up to about 5 million, while today it’s estimated at between 9 million and 13 million.
The flood of immigrants, both legal and illegal, from countries with poor, ill-educated populations, has yielded a mismatch between today’s immigrants and the American economy and has left many workers poorly positioned to succeed for the long term. Unlike the immigrants of 100 years ago, whose skills reflected or surpassed those of the native workforce at the time, many of today’s arrivals, particularly the more than half who now come from Central and South America, are farmworkers in their home countries who come here with little education or even basic training in blue-collar occupations like carpentry or machinery. (A century ago, farmworkers made up 35 percent of the U.S. labor force, compared with the under 2 percent who produce a surplus of food today.) Nearly two-thirds of Mexican immigrants, for instance, are high school dropouts, and most wind up doing either unskilled factory work or small-scale construction projects, or they work in service industries, where they compete for entry-level jobs against one another, against the adult children of other immigrants, and against native-born high school dropouts. Of the 15 industries employing the greatest percentage of foreign-born workers, half are low-wage service industries, including gardening, domestic household work, car washes, shoe repair, and janitorial work. To take one stark example: whereas 100 years ago, immigrants were half as likely as native-born workers to be employed in household service, today immigrants account for 27 percent of all domestic workers in the United States.
Although open-borders advocates say that these workers are simply taking jobs Americans don’t want, studies show that the immigrants drive down wages of native-born workers and squeeze them out of certain industries. Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz, for instance, estimate that low-wage immigration cuts the wages for the average native-born high school dropout by some 8 percent, or more than $1,200 a year. Other economists find that the new workers also push down wages significantly for immigrants already here and native-born Hispanics.
Consequently, as the waves of immigration continue, the sheer number of those competing for low-skilled service jobs makes economic progress difficult. A study of the impact of immigration on New York City’s restaurant business, for instance, found that 60 percent of immigrant workers do not receive regular raises, while 70 percent had never been promoted. One Mexican dishwasher aptly captured the downward pressure that all these arriving workers put on wages by telling the study’s authors about his frustrating search for a 50-cent raise after working for $6.50 an hour: “I visited a few restaurants asking for $7 an hour, but they only offered me $5.50 or $6,” he said. “I had to beg [for a job].”
Similarly, immigration is also pushing some native-born workers out of jobs, as Kenyon College economists showed in the California nail-salon workforce. Over a 16-year period starting in the late 1980s, some 35,600 mostly Vietnamese immigrant women flooded into the industry, a mass migration that equaled the total number of jobs in the industry before the immigrants arrived. Though the new workers created a labor surplus that led to lower prices, new services, and somewhat more demand, the economists estimate that as a result, 10,000 native-born workers either left the industry or never bothered entering it.
In many American industries, waves of low-wage workers have also retarded investments that might lead to modernization and efficiency. Farming, which employs a million immigrant laborers in California alone, is the prime case in point. Faced with a labor shortage in the early 1960s, when President Kennedy ended a 22-year-old guest-worker program that allowed 45,000 Mexican farmhands to cross over the border and harvest 2.2 million tons of California tomatoes for processed foods, farmers complained but swiftly automated, adopting a mechanical tomato-picking technology created more than a decade earlier. Today, just 5,000 better-paid workers—one-ninth the original workforce—harvest 12 million tons of tomatoes using the machines.
The savings prompted by low-wage migrants may even be minimal in crops not easily mechanized. Agricultural economists Wallace Huffman and Alan McCunn of Iowa State University have estimated that without illegal workers, the retail cost of fresh produce would increase only about 3 percent in the summer-fall season and less than 2 percent in the winter-spring season, because labor represents only a tiny percent of the retail price of produce and because without migrant workers, America would probably import more foreign fruits and vegetables. “The question is whether we want to import more produce from abroad, or more workers from abroad to pick our produce,” Huffman remarks.
For American farmers, the answer has been to keep importing workers—which has now made the farmers more vulnerable to foreign competition, since even minimum-wage immigrant workers can’t compete with produce picked on farms in China, Chile, or Turkey and shipped here cheaply. A flood of low-priced Turkish raisins several years ago produced a glut in the United States that sharply drove down prices and knocked some farms out of business, shrinking total acreage in California devoted to the crop by one-fifth, or some 50,000 acres. The farms that survived are now moving to mechanize swiftly, realizing that no amount of cheap immigrant labor will make them competitive.
As foreign competition and mechanization shrink manufacturing and farmworker jobs, low-skilled immigrants are likely to wind up farther on the margins of our economy, where many already operate. For example, although only about 12 percent of construction workers are foreign-born, 100,000 to 300,000 illegal immigrants have carved a place for themselves as temporary workers on the fringes of the industry. In urban areas like New York and Los Angeles, these mostly male illegal immigrants gather on street corners, in empty lots, or in Home Depot parking lots to sell their labor by the hour or the day, for $7 to $11 an hour.
That’s far below what full-time construction workers earn, and for good reason. Unlike the previous generations of immigrants who built America’s railroads or great infrastructure projects like New York’s bridges and tunnels, these day laborers mostly do home-improvement projects. A New York study, for instance, found that four in ten employers who hire day laborers are private homeowners or renters wanting help with cleanup chores, moving, or landscaping. Another 56 percent were contractors, mostly small, nonunion shops, some owned by immigrants themselves, doing short-term, mostly residential work. The day laborer’s market, in other words, has turned out to be a boon for homeowners and small contractors offering their residential clients a rock-bottom price, but a big chunk of the savings comes because low-wage immigration has produced such a labor surplus that many of these workers are willing to take jobs without benefits and with salaries far below industry norms.
Because so much of our legal and illegal immigrant labor is concentrated in such fringe, low-wage employment, its overall impact on our economy is extremely small. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences study estimated that immigration’s net benefit to the American economy raises the average income of the native-born by only some $10 billion a year—about $120 per household. And that meager contribution is not the result of immigrants helping to build our essential industries or making us more competitive globally but instead merely delivering our pizzas and cutting our grass. Estimates by pro-immigration forces that foreign workers contribute much more to the economy, boosting annual gross domestic product by hundreds of billions of dollars, generally just tally what immigrants earn here, while ignoring the offsetting effect they have on the wages of native-born workers.
If the benefits of the current generation of migrants are small, the costs are large and growing because of America’s vast range of social programs and the wide advocacy network that strives to hook low-earning legal and illegal immigrants into these programs. A 1998 National Academy of Sciences study found that more than 30 percent of California’s foreign-born were on Medicaid—including 37 percent of all Hispanic households—compared with 14 percent of native-born households. The foreign-born were more than twice as likely as the native-born to be on welfare, and their children were nearly five times as likely to be in means-tested government lunch programs. Native-born households pay for much of this, the study found, because they earn more and pay higher taxes—and are more likely to comply with tax laws. Recent immigrants, by contrast, have much lower levels of income and tax compliance (another study estimated that only 56 percent of illegals in California have taxes deducted from their earnings, for instance). The study’s conclusion: immigrant families cost each native-born household in California an additional $1,200 a year in taxes.
Immigration’s bottom line has shifted so sharply that in a high-immigration state like California, native-born residents are paying up to ten times more in state and local taxes than immigrants generate in economic benefits. Moreover, the cost is only likely to grow as the foreign-born population—which has already mushroomed from about 9 percent of the U.S. population when the NAS studies were done in the late 1990s to about 12 percent today—keeps growing. And citizens in more and more places will feel the bite, as immigrants move beyond their traditional settling places. From 1990 to 2005, the number of states in which immigrants make up at least 5 percent of the population nearly doubled from 17 to 29, with states like Arkansas, South Dakota, South Carolina, and Georgia seeing the most growth. This sharp turnaround since the 1970s, when immigrants were less likely to be using the social programs of the Great Society than the native-born population, says Harvard economist Borjas, suggests that welfare and other social programs are a magnet drawing certain types of immigrants—nonworking women, children, and the elderly—and keeping them here when they run into difficulty.
Not only have the formal and informal networks helping immigrants tap into our social spending grown, but they also get plenty of assistance from advocacy groups financed by tax dollars, working to ensure that immigrants get their share of social spending. Thus, the Newark-based New Jersey Immigration Policy Network receives several hundred thousand government dollars annually to help doctors and hospitals increase immigrant enrollment in Jersey’s subsidized health-care programs. Casa Maryland, operating in the greater Washington area, gets funding from nearly 20 federal, state, and local government agencies to run programs that “empower” immigrants to demand benefits and care from government and to “refer clients to government and private social service programs for which they and their families may be eligible.”
Pols around the country, intent on currying favor with ethnic voting blocs by appearing immigrant-friendly, have jumped on the benefits-for-immigrants bandwagon, endorsing “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies toward immigrants who register for benefits, giving tax dollars to centers that find immigrants work and aid illegals, and enacting legislation prohibiting local authorities from cooperating with federal immigration officials. In New York, for instance, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ordered city agencies to ignore an immigrant’s status in providing services. “This policy’s critical to encourage immigrant day laborers to access . . . children’s health insurance, a full range of preventive primary and acute medical care, domestic violence counseling, emergency shelters, police protection, consumer fraud protections, and protection against discrimination through the Human Rights Commission,” the city’s Immigrant Affairs Commissioner, Guillermo Linares, explains.
Almost certainly, immigrants’ participation in our social welfare programs will increase over time, because so many are destined to struggle in our workforce. Despite our cherished view of immigrants as rapidly climbing the economic ladder, more and more of the new arrivals and their children face a lifetime of economic disadvantage, because they arrive here with low levels of education and with few work skills—shortcomings not easily overcome. Mexican immigrants, who are up to six times more likely to be high school dropouts than native-born Americans, not only earn substantially less than the native-born median, but the wage gap persists for decades after they’ve arrived. A study of the 2000 census data, for instance, shows that the cohort of Mexican immigrants between 25 and 34 who entered the United States in the late 1970s were earning 40 to 50 percent less than similarly aged native-born Americans in 1980, but 20 years later they had fallen even further behind their native-born counterparts. Today’s Mexican immigrants between 25 and 34 have an even larger wage gap relative to the native-born population. Adjusting for other socioeconomic factors, Harvard’s Borjas and Katz estimate that virtually this entire wage gap is attributable to low levels of education.
Meanwhile, because their parents start off so far behind, the American-born children of Mexican immigrants also make slow progress. First-generation adult Americans of Mexican descent studied in the 2000 census, for instance, earned 14 percent less than native-born Americans. By contrast, first-generation Portuguese Americans earned slightly more than the average native-born worker—a reminder of how quickly immigrants once succeeded in America and how some still do. But Mexico increasingly dominates our immigration flows, accounting for 43 percent of the growth of our foreign-born population in the 1990s.
One reason some ethnic groups make up so little ground concerns the transmission of what economists call “ethnic capital,” or what we might call the influence of culture. More than previous generations, immigrants today tend to live concentrated in ethnic enclaves, and their children find their role models among their own group. Thus the children of today’s Mexican immigrants are likely to live in a neighborhood where about 60 percent of men dropped out of high school and now do low-wage work, and where less than half of the population speak English fluently, which might explain why high school dropout rates among Americans of Mexican ancestry are two and a half times higher than dropout rates for all other native-born Americans, and why first-generation Mexican Americans do not move up the economic ladder nearly as quickly as the children of other immigrant groups.
In sharp contrast is the cultural capital transmitted by Asian immigrants to children growing up in predominantly Asian-American neighborhoods. More than 75 percent of Chinese immigrants and 98 percent of South Asian immigrants to the U.S. speak English fluently, while a mid-1990s study of immigrant households in California found that 37 percent of Asian immigrants were college graduates, compared with only 3.4 percent of Mexican immigrants. Thus, even an Asian-American child whose parents are high school dropouts is more likely to grow up in an environment that encourages him to stay in school and learn to speak English well, attributes that will serve him well in the job market. Not surprisingly, several studies have shown that Asian immigrants and their children earn substantially more than Mexican immigrants and their children.
Given these realities, several of the major immigration reforms now under consideration simply don’t make economic sense—especially the guest-worker program favored by President Bush and the U.S. Senate. Careful economic research tells us that there is no significant shortfall of workers in essential American industries, desperately needing supplement from a massive guest-worker program. Those few industries now relying on cheap labor must focus more quickly on mechanization where possible. Meanwhile, the cost of paying legal workers already here a bit more to entice them to do such low-wage work as is needed will have a minimal impact on our economy.
The potential woes of a guest-worker program, moreover, far overshadow any economic benefit, given what we know about the long, troubled history of temporary-worker programs in developed countries. They have never stemmed illegal immigration, and the guest workers inevitably become permanent residents, competing with the native-born and forcing down wages. Our last guest-worker program with Mexico, begun during World War II to boost wartime manpower, grew larger in the postwar era, because employers who liked the cheap labor lobbied hard to keep it. By the mid-1950s, the number of guest workers reached seven times the annual limit during the war itself, while illegal immigration doubled, as the availability of cheap labor prompted employers to search for ever more of it rather than invest in mechanization or other productivity gains.
The economic and cultural consequences of guest-worker programs have been devastating in Europe, and we risk similar problems. When post–World War II Germany permitted its manufacturers to import workers from Turkey to man the assembly lines, industry’s investment in productivity declined relative to such countries as Japan, which lacked ready access to cheap labor. When Germany finally ended the guest-worker program once it became economically unviable, most of the guest workers stayed on, having attained permanent-resident status. Since then, the descendants of these workers have been chronically underemployed and now have a crime rate double that of German youth.
France has suffered similar consequences. In the post–World War II boom, when French unemployment was under 2 percent, the country imported an industrial labor force from its colonies; by the time France’s industrial jobs began evaporating in the 1980s, these guest workers and their children numbered in the millions, and most had made little economic progress. They now inhabit the vast housing projects, or cités, that ring Paris—and that have recently been the scene of chronic rioting. Like Germany, France thought it was importing a labor force, but it wound up introducing a new underclass.
“Importing labor is far more complicated than importing other factors of production, such as commodities,” write University of California at Davis prof Philip Martin, an expert on guest-worker programs, and Michael Teitelbaum, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. “Migration involves human beings, with their own beliefs, politics, cultures, languages, loves, hates, histories, and families.”
If low-wage immigration doesn’t pay off for the United States, legalizing illegals already here makes as little sense as importing new rounds of guest workers. The Senate and President Bush, however, aim to start two-thirds of the 11 million undocumented aliens already in the country on a path to legalization, on the grounds that only thus can America assimilate them, and only through assimilation can they hope for economic success in the United States. But such arguments ignore the already poor economic performance of increasingly large segments of the legal immigrant population in the United States. Merely granting illegal aliens legal status won’t suddenly catapult them up our mobility ladder, because it won’t give them the skills and education to compete.
At the same time, legalization will only spur new problems, as our experience with the 1986 immigration act should remind us. At the time, then-congressman Charles Schumer, who worked on the legislation, acknowledged that it was “a riverboat gamble,” with no certainty that it would slow down the waves of illegals. Now, of course, we know that the legislation had the opposite effect, creating the bigger problem we now have (which hasn’t stopped Senator Schumer from supporting the current legalization proposals). The legislation also swamped the Immigration and Naturalization Service with masses of fraudulent, black-market documents, so that it eventually rubber-stamped tens of thousands of dubious applications.
If we do not legalize them, what can we do with 11 million illegals? Ship them back home? Their presence here is a fait accompli, the argument goes, and only legalization can bring them above ground, where they can assimilate. But that argument assumes that we have only two choices: to decriminalize or deport. But what happened after the first great migration suggests a third way: to end the economic incentives that keep them here. We could prompt a great remigration home if, first off, state and local governments in jurisdictions like New York and California would stop using their vast resources to aid illegal immigrants. Second, the federal government can take the tougher approach that it failed to take after the 1986 act. It can require employers to verify Social Security numbers and immigration status before hiring, so that we bar illegals from many jobs. It can deport those caught here. And it can refuse to give those who remain the same benefits as U.S. citizens. Such tough measures do work: as a recent Center for Immigration Studies report points out, when the federal government began deporting illegal Muslims after 9/11, many more illegals who knew they were likely to face more scrutiny voluntarily returned home.
If America is ever to make immigration work for our economy again, it must reject policies shaped by advocacy groups trying to turn immigration into the next civil rights cause or by a tiny minority of businesses seeking cheap labor subsidized by the taxpayers. Instead, we must look to other developed nations that have focused on luring workers who have skills that are in demand and who have the best chance of assimilating. Australia, for instance, gives preferences to workers grouped into four skilled categories: managers, professionals, associates of professionals, and skilled laborers. Using a straightforward “points calculator” to determine who gets in, Australia favors immigrants between the ages of 18 and 45 who speak English, have a post–high school degree or training in a trade, and have at least six months’ work experience as everything from laboratory technicians to architects and surveyors to information-technology workers. Such an immigration policy goes far beyond America’s employment-based immigration categories, like the H1-B visas, which account for about 10 percent of our legal immigration and essentially serve the needs of a few Silicon Valley industries.
Immigration reform must also tackle our family-preference visa program, which today accounts for two-thirds of all legal immigration and has helped create a 40-year waiting list. Lawmakers should narrow the family-preference visa program down to spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and should exclude adult siblings and parents.
America benefits even today from many of its immigrants, from the Asian entrepreneurs who have helped revive inner-city Los Angeles business districts to Haitians and Jamaicans who have stabilized neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn to Indian programmers who have spurred so much innovation in places like Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128. But increasingly over the last 25 years, such immigration has become the exception. It needs once again to become the rule.
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POSTED BY THE MEXICAN INVASION & OCCUPATION AT 5:16 PM
FORBES Wharton IMPACT OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
FORBES

Knowledge@Wharton
Immigration's Impact
Knowledge@Wharton 01.02.07, 2:30 PM ET


Illegal immigration into the United States has sparked heated debate in Congress, roiled the two main political parties and prompted hundreds of thousands of immigrant supporters to take to the streets recently in peaceful demonstrations nationwide.

The controversy picked up new momentum on May 15 when President George W. Bush, in a televised address to the nation, called for a comprehensive approach to immigration reform. He said he would send 6,000 National Guard troops to four states along the U.S.-Mexican border beginning in June to provide intelligence and logistical support--but not armed law enforcement--to civilian border patrol agents. In addition to securing the border, Bush also said it was necessary for the House and Senate to pass legislation that would allow illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States for a long time to remain and be able to undergo a process to become citizens.

"There is a rational middle ground between granting an automatic path to citizenship for every illegal immigrant and a program of mass deportation," the president said. "That middle ground recognizes that there are differences between an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently and someone who has worked here for many years and has a home, a family and an otherwise clean record." Meanwhile, Congressional leaders have said that they would like to send immigration-reform legislation to the president for his signature before the end of May.

At stake in the debate are the lives and livelihoods of as many as 12 million undocumented workers, the companies they work for, respect for the rule of law, and the job opportunities of millions of low-skill American citizens--both native-born and immigrants who became naturalized by going through the proper channels. The large number of illegal immigrants raises key economic questions: Do illegal immigrants depress wages paid to low-skill workers? Do they take jobs away from Americans? How dependent on undocumented workers is the U.S. economy? Should illegal immigrants be compelled by law to return to their native countries? Or should Democrats and Republicans hammer out legislation that would allow illegal immigrants to pay some type of penalty yet remain in the United States and continue working?

Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and Vernon M. Briggs Jr., professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., are firm in their conviction that illegal workers exert downward pressure on wages and reduce job opportunities for low-skill U.S. citizens. Briggs believes that the negative impact of undocumented workers on American low-skill workers and on labor standards is so great that immigration authorities should clamp down on employers who hire illegals so that a clear message is sent to current and potential illegal workers: Illegal immigration will not be tolerated.

However, Bernard Anderson, practice professor in Wharton's management department and an assistant secretary of labor for employment standards during the administration of President Bill Clinton, says that while illegal workers do have some effect on wages and displace some American workers, their impact is far less onerous than Cappelli and Briggs assert. In addition, Anderson says, illegal immigrants work hard, do not come to the United States to receive welfare and should be allowed to remain in the U.S. after paying penalties.

Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer and senior research associate with the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C., says Pew, which bills itself as a nonpartisan "fact tank," has taken no formal position on the immigration issue. But he does say that the data on the broad economic impact of undocumented workers does not lend particularly strong support to either side of the argument.

Portrait Of Illegal Immigrants

A study released in March by the Pew Hispanic Center, which is supported by the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, contains extensive information on the nature and extent of illegal immigration. The study uses the term "unauthorized migrant," which it defines as a person who resides in the United States, but who is not a U.S. citizen, has not been admitted for permanent residence and has no temporary status permitting longer-term residence and work.

The report, which uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau's March 2005 Current Population Survey, estimates that the U.S. is home to between 11.5 million and 12 million illegal immigrants, up sharply from 8.4 million in 2000. Unauthorized migrants accounted for 30% of all foreign-born people in the U.S. as of 2005. Most unauthorized migrants--6.2 million, or 56%--come from Mexico. About 2.5 million, or 22%, come from the rest of Latin America.

In 2005, illegal migrants accounted for about 5% of the civilian labor force, or 7.2 million workers out of a labor force of 148 million. Approximately 19% of illegal workers were employed in construction jobs, 15% in production, installation and repair, and 4% in farming. The Pew report also shows that illegal immigrants comprise 24% of all workers in farming, 17% in cleaning, 14% in construction and 12% in food preparation. Within those categories, unauthorized migrants tend to be concentrated in specific jobs: They represent 36% of all insulation workers, 29% of all roofers and drywall installers, and 27% of all butchers and other food-processing workers.

It is often said by supporters of illegal, low-skill immigrants that the U.S. economy needs such laborers because they do the kinds of work that Americans will not do. But Cappelli calls that assertion a "complete myth." Immigrants have been hired to do such jobs in such large numbers not because Americans refuse them, but because Americans are not willing to perform such tasks where the wages are lower than they would otherwise be, where work rules may not exist and where the working conditions may be hazardous. Many employers seek illegal workers for the simple reason that it keeps costs down and means the companies do not have to invest in equipment and other capital improvements. Relative wage levels for low-skill and unskilled American workers, according to Cappelli, have plummeted over the past generation and show no signs of rising.

Cappelli says he has witnessed the effects of immigrant workers on wages and working conditions in other parts of the world, including the Middle East. In Bahrain, for instance, where guest workers from Bangladesh are frequently used on construction sites, a visitor can see them using picks and shovels instead of machinery.

Why do illegal immigrants force down wages? "That's how markets work," responds Cappelli. "It's hard for the average person to understand that these are markets. If illegal workers left the U.S. tomorrow, what would happen? Some people think nobody would do those jobs. If that were to happen, companies would change those jobs, and wages would go up. Yes, companies would hire the people who are not necessarily doing those jobs now. This goes on in every labor market. There are no jobs that we can think of where, over time, work doesn't get done. It doesn't happen."

While it is true that low-skill workers who enter the United States legally also exert downward pressure on wages, there is a significant difference between them and their undocumented counterparts. "The difference is legal immigrants are let in, at least in part, on economic judgments about where the needs are for their skills," Cappelli notes. "That's one of the criteria for being allowed to come in."

Cappelli says the United States needs legislation that "faces up to the real economic issues. If you allow more unskilled workers into the U.S., it will lower costs for employers. It will also lower wages for people who do those jobs. It's clearly a political question. If you want to benefit low-skill American workers, you reduce illegal immigration. It's important to have a very clear conversation on the choice we want to make. And we are ducking that by saying these are jobs no one wants to do."

Briggs, the Cornell professor, says turning a blind eye to illegal workers, as U.S. immigration authorities have done, can end up harming U.S. citizens and the illegal employees themselves. Undocumented workers can "displace," to use the term of labor economists, African-Americans and other minorities who are young and seeking their first jobs or older minority workers with few skills. Moreover, even if the illegal workers are earning the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour--and most are, according to Briggs--the conditions under which they work can be dangerous. Yet these people have no way to seek legal remedies because they are in the U.S. illegally.

Democracy's 'Seamier Side'

"Many [illegal immigrants] are working under conditions that are appalling," Briggs says. "Some are paid in violations of hours laws; some are children working in jobs they shouldn't be. It's one of the seamier sides of democracies. ... Some are working basically as slaves." Illegal immigrants are typically males ages 18 to 30 who are very ambitious, Briggs adds, and they will take any job, including those that make them vulnerable to abuse.

"Illegal immigration is an issue that takes everything down to its crudest level and makes it vile to discuss," he says. "The illegal immigrants will always win in jobs competition with U.S. citizens. This doesn't mean there's anything wrong with U.S. citizens; it just means there is a contrast" between the U.S. and the illegal immigrants' countries of origin. "No matter how bad things are in the U.S., it's better than the country [these workers] are coming from. If it means crowding into apartments or working weekends, they will do it, and they won't complain about sexual discrimination or racial discrimination. Tragically, many employers, if given a choice between illegal immigrants or U.S. citizens, will always take the illegal immigrant."

Briggs acknowledges that there is scant data to support his concerns about the plight of many illegal workers. But he is firm in his belief that "if we don't get serious about enforcing [immigration laws], people are going to continue to be hurt. These are the most vulnerable members of society."

In Briggs' view, the only effective way to reduce illegal immigration is to take employer sanctions seriously and actively enforce them at work sites. "That means [instituting] heavy penalties on employers who hire immigrants and making it clear that illegal immigrants are not going to work. They are not supposed to be here; they are not supposed to be working. You have to make it impossible for them to work. They will gradually get the idea they have to go back, that there's not much hope they are going to get legalized status."

Briggs says it may be useful to require immigrant workers to carry a "job identification" card that they would have to present to prospective employers in order to obtain work and to apply for government services. Briggs opposes building "massive walls" along the U.S.-Mexico border, but adds that "physical barriers" of some kind in strategic locations along the border may help. "We could possibly build more electronic fences that give signals when people cross them and tell [authorities] where they are."

Anderson, the Wharton labor economist, disagrees with Briggs' view of illegal immigration, saying the situation "is not as bad as Briggs says it is. ... One line of argument as to why it's necessary to protect the borders is that the failure to do so subjects the United States to an intolerable risk of terrorism, not that there's been any evidence at all that terrorists have come through the southern border. The other question is what impact there is on wages, economic status and employment for American workers. That's where you get a clear divide in the economic literature. The evidence produced by economists who have studied this question is mixed."

Anderson says there is indeed much anecdotal evidence that Hispanics now do many of the jobs once performed by African-Americans, such as service jobs in the hotel industry. Anderson says he himself has witnessed such changes across the American South during his travels over the past 30 years. "No one will convince me that there has not been labor displacement," he says. Nonetheless, there also is evidence that many African-Americans no longer perform low-skill service jobs--not because illegal immigrants have taken those jobs from them, but because they have moved on to take better-paying jobs or have grown older and retired from the labor force.

"There has been substantial [improvement] in the economic status of minorities in this country as a result of the civil rights movement," Anderson says. "There is no question that African-Americans have benefited in their occupational status as a result of that." He says that 70% of black workers today hold white-collar and service-sector jobs, while others are working in the many auto-manufacturing plants that have sprung up across the South.

Weighing all the available evidence, and noting that the data are mixed, Anderson concludes that "there has been some displacement and some depression of wages" among U.S. citizens as a result of illegal immigration. "But it has not, in the main, had a significant effect in reducing the earnings and employment opportunities of American workers, including minority-group workers. Immigration, including illegal immigration, has not been terribly detrimental to employment opportunities for African-Americans. I firmly believe this. It is for that reason that you don't find African-American political leaders lining up with the opponents of immigration."

When you look at opponents of illegal immigration, Anderson adds, "you find the same right-wing, reactionary scoundrels who have opposed progressive legislation, who have opposed the minimum wage and efforts to improve the economic opportunities of minorities."

What kind of an immigration bill would Anderson like to see emerge from Congress? "We must secure the borders. That has to be part of any legislation. We have to recognize that the huge numbers [of undocumented workers in the U.S.] are not here to receive welfare; they are here to work. If there were no employment opportunities for them, they wouldn't be coming. But we should not have an immigration system that allows immigrant workers to reduce the wages and diminish the working conditions of American workers. Therefore, I say protect the borders to significantly reduce the inflow. We should then move toward the legalization of those who are already here. If we legalize them [after requiring them to pay a penalty], then we let them out of the box they are imprisoned in and set in motion a process for improving wages and working conditions."

On the broad question of the effects, positive or negative, of illegal immigration, Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center, says: "I don't know if there's anything in the data that clearly points one way or the other. At one level, it's a lot of people: 11.5 million to 12 million. But it's about one in 20 workers, so it's not a huge share of the labor market. It is, of course, a much higher share of the low-education labor market, maybe as much as 15% or 20%."

Passel adds, however, that he has seen no evidence in the economic literature proving that illegal immigrants have displaced American citizens in low-skill jobs. "The presence of illegals is not associated with higher unemployment among natives, and it seems to me you would have to see that kind of thing for there to be true displacement in any sense. Geographically, it tends to be the reverse: Places with large numbers of illegals tend to have lower unemployment than places without illegals. Illegals go where the economies are strong, and as a result, there's no impact."

An Ineffective Policy

Although the Pew Hispanic Center takes no position on the immigration issue, Passel says it is clear from the demographic evidence that U.S. immigration policy is not working in its attempt to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States and reducing the number already here.

"At least for the last decade, and even longer than that, we have focused on two different approaches," Passel says. "One is we have made it harder for [illegal immigrants] to get in and have even tried to block people from coming in. That's clearly not working. There's some evidence from some of my work, and more directly from the work of others, that it's actually been counterproductive. What we have really done is, instead of keeping people out, we have kept people in."

The reason: Many illegal immigrants would actually prefer to move back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico, taking employment when it is needed and returning home to visit family. But by making it more dangerous and expensive to come into the United States over and over again, the immigrants decide to bring their wives and children and stay put once they arrive. Indeed, Passel says that some 1.8 million illegal immigrants in the United States are under 18. About 3.1 million more are children who were born here to illegal immigrants and thus are U.S. citizens. Whatever policy decisions are made in Washington, they will have to take into account the fate of nearly 5 million children.

The second approach U.S. immigration officials have followed in recent years is to make it hard for undocumented immigrants to stay in the United States once they have arrived by refusing to give them drivers' licenses, making them ineligible for government benefits or cracking down on day-labor sites. "But that doesn't seem to have had much impact either," Passel says. "It's probably because no matter what is done to make life difficult, life is still easier than it was back home."

A European Perspective

Rafael Puyol, executive vice president of the Instituto de Empresa Foundation Madrid and an expert on demography and immigration, suggests that immigrants are almost always active in the same kinds of activities. "In the U.S., they are largely involved in agriculture, especially harvesting crops. They move throughout the country, following the calendar. In Europe, agriculture--particularly in eastern Spain--always [offers] entry-level [jobs], although many immigrants want to leave these jobs as soon as they can" and move into other industries. In Spain, in addition to agriculture, immigrants work in construction, hotels, restaurants and as domestics. Lately, however, Puyol has observed a greater diversification of activity into specialized services such as plumbing and home repair.

Two factors determine the arrival of immigrants in any particular place, Puyol says. "The first factor is the availability of jobs in the high-priority areas. In a country such as Spain, immigrants come from the Mediterranean region, where there is a combination of agriculture, construction and services." They also flock to large tertiary cities, "because there is a multitude of activities in both services and construction."

The main issue, he notes, is whether jobs are available. But there is also another very important consideration: "The impact of earlier immigrants to the same country, from the same geographical region. The people from the first wave of immigration usually greet, orient and assist those immigrants who come from the same place of origin. They help them get settled and find a job until they can be somewhat independent," he says. As a result, "relatives, friends and acquaintances play an important role when it comes time for new immigrants to locate."

Puyol believes that the two main focal points of immigration are the United States and "old Europe." The U.S., the primary focal point, "is a country of immigrants, and you cannot understand the demographic history of the United States without understanding its history of immigration. First, there was the European immigration, and lately it has diversified into other [regions] of origin--Latin America above all, but also Asia. The second focus of immigration is "old Europe"--the 25-member states of the European Union, which was the first region in Europe that had immigrants, and which now has an increasing number of them, from Eastern Europe. "Next are the smaller focal points in Asia, the Near East and, of course, Australia," he says.

Regarding immigration laws, he says: "You have to establish a regular process for dealing with arriving immigrants. In this day and age, you cannot pursue a policy of completely open doors. The results are economically inappropriate and socially complicated. You must arrange things so that the incoming migration is regulated. Second, the legal system must contribute to immigrants' progressive integration. Give immigrants the same legal rights as other citizens. Immigrants also have to accept the basic laws that regulate social life, [particularly with regard to] the constitution. Immigrants in the U.S. and Europe must enter the country in a legal way, and they must have access to arrangements that permit their gradual integration.

Laws that arrange for temporary legal status almost never provide good results, Puyol says. "You must let free-market forces determine whether people who enter the country want to stay there permanently or return to their country of origin," he says. "In addition, you must assist legal immigration by making arrangements with the countries of origin that help immigrants from those countries arrive at their destination through regularly established channels. That means you have to support a legal immigration policy that is sufficiently generous that immigrants arrive under favorable conditions. You also need a parallel, generous policy for integrating those people. Those generally applied laws must not have any special exceptions; they must be laws that are accepted by all countries that welcome immigrants."

Finally, Puyol makes a distinction between Europe and the U.S. "America has a better demographic situation than Europe. In America, immigrants come predominantly because of work-related reasons. In Europe, you have to add a certain demographic factor to the economic ones. Population growth in European Union countries is at rock bottom. Fertility rates are much lower than those in the U.S., and aging people constitute a much larger percentage [of the population] than in the U.S.," he says. "In Europe, we are going to require more immigrants or our labor market is not going to function; it will not be possible to finance pensions and social costs for those people who have already retired. In Europe, there are going to be a lot more immigrants in the future than there are now. Perhaps this the key difference between the situation in the U.S., on one hand, and old Europe on the other."
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City Journal
Immigration Confusions
A response to the New York Sun.
Steven Malanga
27 September 2006
The issue of immigration has prompted great soul-searching and re-evaluation among economists across the political spectrum. For years, mainstream thought in the field, based on numerous studies, held that immigration’s benefits largely outweighed its drawbacks and that in general newcomers were strong contributors to the growth and development of the American economy.
But over the last 30 years, as the nature of immigration has shifted to include more low-wage, low-skilled workers, opinion within the field has slowly changed, too, based on mounting evidence that the benefits of such immigration are small, while the costs are growing. On the right, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman has perhaps best expressed that change: “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” On the left, New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman recently wrote that although he is “instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration,” “a review of serious, non-partisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration,” and that, eventually, “we’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.”
It was the weight of this evidence and the shift in thinking that I chronicled in a piece that appeared in the summer issue of City Journal (“How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy”). Needless to say, I was surprised to read at the end of the New York Sun’s critique of that piece (“The Case for Immigration,” September 22) that the author, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, placed me within the line of a group of “small but influential thinkers” whose ideas on immigration have, over the decades, spawned such disreputable movements in American society as the Know-Nothing party. In nearly 20 years of engaging in public policy debates, I’ve always felt great satisfaction when my opponents resort to implying that my arguments help underpin racism or nativism or some other despicable “ism.” It’s generally a sign that they find their own arguments weak.
The irony here is that it’s Furchtgott-Roth who stands with a small (and shrinking, though still influential) circle of thinkers—that is, open-borders advocates, who have clung tenaciously to the notion that all immigration is ultimately good for our economy, despite growing evidence to the contrary, and despite a significant shift of opinion within academic circles. Presented with a series of studies on modern immigration by the most authoritative economists in the field, a bipartisan congressional commission on immigration reform wrote in the mid-1990s, “It is not in the national interest to admit unskilled workers.”
In my piece, I recounted studies that explained that the first great immigration, from 1880 to the mid-1920s, brought economic benefits to the country largely because the newcomers of that era brought much-needed skills with them; indeed, a 1998 study by the National Academy of Sciences reported that those earlier immigrants were on average more skilled than native workers, more than a third of whom still toiled on farms. Those skills are a key reason why many of those immigrants and their children succeeded so well. One research report cited by the academy noted that the American-born children of those immigrants were just as likely to be accountants, engineers, and lawyers as were other native-born Americans.
Today’s immigration, the so-called second great wave, began roughly 50 years ago and has come increasingly to feature low-skilled, uneducated workers and their families at a time when succeeding in our economy demands ever-more education and skills. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, illegal immigrants alone—consisting almost entirely of unskilled workers—have crossed our borders at the rate of between 225,000 and 300,000 a year. Legal immigration has also turned sharply toward the low-skilled, thanks to 1965 legislation that changed our national quota system so that the vast majority of legal immigration now hails from poorer countries.
Not surprisingly, as low-skilled workers have arrived in ever-greater numbers, their fortunes have fallen. Today, for instance, Mexican immigrants, who overwhelmingly dominate the ranks of our low-skilled migrants, typically begin work in America with a 40 percent wage gap compared with native-born workers. Rather than disappearing over time, moreover, that wage gap persists and may even be growing larger, according to work by the Harvard economist George Borjas. Equally unsurprisingly, the advantage of such low-wage immigration to America’s broader economy is limited. An authoritative study by the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 found that immigration contributed a mere $10 billion to our (at the time) $8 trillion economy, an inconsequential amount, all the more so in that the cost of immigration was increasing.
Furchtgott-Roth begins her response to my piece with a singularly inappropriate example of the supposed benefits of low-wage immigration: immigrant entrepreneurs plying the streets of Washington, D.C., during a rainstorm to sell umbrellas to stranded pedestrians. She fails to note that such “entrepreneurs” rarely pay taxes and business fees, and that legitimate retailers often complain that these street-corner merchants undercut their prices precisely because they don’t play by the rules. If this is the best example we can find of how immigrants complement native workers and invigorate our economy, we’re in trouble.
From this anecdote Furchtgott-Roth proceeds to the old saw that immigrants are here to work (though the percentage of nonworking women, children, and the elderly among immigrants is much higher than in the past), and they do jobs that Americans won’t. To buttress this claim, she cites unemployment rates among high-school dropouts, noting approvingly that among immigrants, the rate is only 5.7 percent, while among the native born, it is 9.1 percent (or double the nation’s overall unemployment rate). But rather than providing cause to celebrate the immigrant work ethic, the gap in the unemployment rate among high-school dropouts is more likely evidence that native-born workers are finding themselves crowded out of labor markets by immigrants taking jobs for lower pay and fewer benefits.
Borjas and his colleague Lawrence Katz have authored the most important study of immigration’s effect on native-born workers. In their 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, they found that immigrants depress the wages of low-skilled native workers by 5 percent, even when one adjusts for the additional investment that businesses make when they have access to a large pool of cheap labor. Moreover, two new papers, one published by the National Bureau of Economic Research this month by Borjas and two colleagues and another by researchers from Northeastern University published by the Center for Immigration Studies, show that the impact of low-wage immigration falls especially heavily on native-born blacks and Hispanics, not merely depressing wages but increasing unemployment levels.
In contrast, Furchtgott-Roth cites the work of economist Giovanni Peri, who argues that low-wage immigrants bring a net benefit to higher income Americans and depress the wages of all low-skilled Americans by just 1 percent. But an important component of Peri’s work (and that of others who follow him) is the claim that immigration has a muted impact on native-born Americans because immigrants largely compete with one another and hold down one another’s wages. In Furchtgott-Roth’s world, this wage impact on immigrants is unimportant because she notes that we don’t see immigrants calling for less immigration. If they don’t care about the competition from other immigrants, why should the rest of us?
The first answer to this question is that immigrants don’t protest our current policy because many of them have relatives on the list of those awaiting visas; indeed, the principal source of legal immigration in America today is family reunification, and nearly two-thirds of everyone who comes here legally does so because a family member is already here.
But in this case, what immigrants think isn’t the point. What’s troubling about the wage effect of immigrants on unskilled workers—whomever it falls on—is that it is in danger of slowing economic mobility at the bottom rungs of our society. In my City Journal piece, I devote much attention to the growing research showing how continued low-wage immigration is making it increasingly tougher on migrants themselves. This is not inconsequential; in fact, it is decisive. Americans have welcomed immigrants when we believed they could pull their own weight. Now we see signs that the economic success of immigrants is slowing. Even more disturbingly, their children are also finding it harder to make it in America, research shows, in part because of what economists describe as the “transmission of ethnic capital,” by which they mean cultural influences on children. As the children of today’s immigrants grow up in ethnic enclaves where most adults don’t speak English or value education and haven’t graduated from high school, many kids adopt those unfortunate characteristics, one reason why high-school dropout rates among native-born Hispanic children are far higher than among American-born children in general.
The danger, as Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson argues, is that of “importing poverty” in the form of a new underclass—a permanent group of working poor. As Borjas recently observed, “If these historical trends continue . . . the next few decades can lead to a somewhat pessimistic forecast for the economic performance of the children of the current (i.e., circa 2000) wave of immigrants.”
This poor economic performance has significant consequences in a society that now offers substantial transfers of income through government social programs. The National Academy of Sciences in 1998 studied the trade-off between taxes paid and government services received for both the native born and immigrants in California. It found that the average native-born household paid nearly $1,200 more in taxes to support services to immigrants. Furchtgott-Roth minimizes this substantial burden by quoting only the section of the report that discusses the additional local government cost for the education of immigrant children in public schools. She ignores, however, the section about the dollars that the state and federal governments spend on immigrants for social programs. According to the study, immigrants in California received in total an average of $5,067 in benefits per household, compared with $1,983 for native-born households. Behind those costs, the study notes, was substantially greater immigrant participation in many programs.
Occasionally, Furchtgott-Roth resorts to hyperbole. In my piece, I refer to a study by two noted agricultural economists, Wallace Huffman and Alan McCunn, who find that without low-wage immigrant workers, the price of produce in America would rise only modestly. The authors offer three reasons: labor is a small part of the cost of produce, many farms would make greater user of mechanization to become more productive, and America would import more produce. To this, Furchtgott-Roth retorts, “It makes little sense to send a whole economic sector to other countries.” Of course, this isn’t remotely what Huffman and McCunn suggest would happen, nor how I characterize their study. In fact, as I point out, agricultural economists have been urging American farmers to forsake cheap labor and invest more heavily in mechanization to save their farms from competition from countries where workers earn just a few cents an hour—a rate that we’ll never compete with, no matter how many migrant workers we import. Following the path of guest-worker programs and cheap labor advocated by Furchtgott-Roth is far more likely to result in our agricultural output moving offshore.
This and other discomfiting evidence about today’s immigration has prompted considerable soul searching, as I’ve said, and not just by economists. City Journal editor Myron Magnet noted in a piece accompanying mine that most of us at the magazine are the children and grandchildren of immigrants ourselves. Over the years, the magazine has published any number of stories about the contribution of immigrants to America and especially New York. But as Magnet is fond of quoting, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, and increasingly the discomfiting evidence was becoming undeniable.
Such soul-searching seems to be going on everywhere except among open-borders advocates on the left and the right. On the left, advocacy for open borders is not about what’s good for our economy but about immigration as an extension of the civil rights battles of the 1960s. But on the right it’s hard to understand what’s behind the increasingly strident advocacy other than ideology—to be defended at all costs and by any rhetorical technique available, including branding its opponents as enablers of Know Nothingness or other disreputable movements.