Sunday, August 16, 2009

FRAUDULENT PAPER TO ENTER U.S.A...? Remember what the SAUDIS did to us Sept 11???

U.S. Immigration Agents Fell Short of Probe Goal
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 15, 2007; A02
U.S. immigration agents investigated only 139 suspected fraud cases referred by the main anti-fraud unit of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last year, or less than 1 percent of 1 percent of about 6 million applications for citizenship, green cards and other benefits, federal investigators reported yesterday.
The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, Richard L. Skinner, blamed a DHS policy set in February 2006 requiring that 100 percent of suspect applications be investigated, saying it overwhelmed claims officers and immigration investigators with work, rendering the policy all but useless.
"The current USCIS strategy for addressing immigration benefit fraud yields little measurable return," Skinner's office reported. Instead, agents diverted resources to higher priority national security and criminal background checks. DHS officials want to change the blanket policy but have not decided how, Skinner said.
Agency spokesman Christopher Bentley said that "USCIS remains committed" to improving anti-fraud efforts along with its sister investigative agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Neither ICE nor USCIS can help the fact the volume of potential fraud cases significantly exceeds the capability of both agencies," USCIS Director Emilio T. Gonzalez wrote Skinner in a formal response.
The inspector general's report, dated Oct. 29 and released yesterday, underscores problems dating to the March 2003 launch of DHS, which reorganized U.S. immigration agencies and expanded their duties. The report also highlights one of myriad hurdles to tougher U.S. immigration enforcement, a subject of heated national debate since Congress failed to pass a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws this summer.
USCIS's 315-member Fraud Detection and National Security office was created in May 2004 with the goal of tracking all applications with any sign of fraud. But in practice, not all 3,500 USCIS claim adjudicators turn in such forms, because doing so counts against their productivity.
FDNS referred less than 1 percent of applications to ICE for investigation in fiscal 2006, about 2,425 cases. ICE investigated less than 1 percent of them, or 139 cases, the inspector general reported. By comparison, in 2004 ICE conducted 53,376 investigations -- of which 5,351 were benefit fraud-related -- leading to 533 convictions.
Immigration officials say without massive new resources, they have to set priorities. ICE mostly targets conspiracies, fraud rings, security and safety risks, the report said. USCIS wants to target cases involving lawyers, third-party preparers and individuals from countries designated as posing terrorism risks.
The report noted other complaints with FDNS systems, which early this year had a backlog of more than 15,000 fraud referrals and security-related checks.

HERITAGE FOUNDATION REPORT on Costs of Illegals by ROBERT RECTOR 2006

By Robert Rector .............Heritage.org | May 16, 2006

This paper focuses on the net fiscal effects of immigration with particular emphasis on the fiscal effects of low skill immigration. The fiscal effects of immigration are only one aspect of the impact of immigration. Immigration also has social, political, and economic effects. In particular, the economic effects of immigration have been heavily researched with differing results. These economic effects lie beyond the scope of this paper. Overall, immigration is a net fiscal positive to the government’s budget in the long run: the taxes immigrants pay exceed the costs of the services they receive. However, the fiscal impact of immigrants varies strongly according to immigrants’ education level. College-educated immigrants are likely to be strong contributors to the government’s finances, with their taxes exceeding the government’s costs. By contrast, immigrants with low education levels are likely to be a fiscal drain on other taxpayers. This is important because half of all adult illegal immigrants in the U.S. have less than a high school education. In addition, recent immigrants have high levels of out-of-wedlock childbearing, which increases welfare costs and poverty. An immigration plan proposed by Senators Mel Martinez (R-FL) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) would provide amnesty to 9 to 10 million illegal immigrants and put them on a path to citizenship (THERE ARE PROBABLY NEARLY 40 MILLION ILLEGALS HERE NOW). Once these individuals become citizens, the net additional cost to the federal government of benefits for these individuals will be around $16 billion per year. Further, once an illegal immigrant becomes a citizen, he has the right to bring his parents to live in the U.S. The parents, in turn, may become citizens. The long-term cost of government benefits to the parents of 10 million recipients of amnesty could be $30 billion per year or more (CALIFORNIA PUTS OUT $20 BILLION A YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES OF ILLEGALS).

In the long run, the Hagel/Martinez bill, if enacted, would be the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years.


Immigration and Crime Historically, immigrant populations have had lower crime rates than native-born populations. For example, in 1991, the overall crime and incarceration rate for non-citizens was slightly lower than for citizens.[40] On the other hand, the crime rate among Hispanics in the U.S. is high. Age-specific incarceration rates (prisoners per 100,000 residents in the same age group in the general population) among Hispanics in federal and state prisons are two to two-and-a-half times higher than among non-Hispanic whites.[41] Relatively little of this difference appears to be due to immigration violations.[42] Illegal immigrants are overwhelmingly Hispanic. It is possible that, over time, Hispanic immigrants and their children may assimilate the higher crime rates that characterize the low-income Hispanic population in the U.S. as a whole.[43] If this were to occur, then policies that would give illegal immigrants permanent residence through amnesty, as well as policies which would permit a continuing influx of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants each year, would increase crime in the long term.

The Fiscal Impact of Immigration One important question is the fiscal impact of immigration (both legal and illegal). Policymakers must ensure that the interaction of welfare and immigration policy does not expand the welfare-dependent population, which would hinder rather than help immigrants and impose large costs on American society. This means that immigrants should be net contributors to government: the taxes they pay should exceed the cost of the benefits they receive. In calculating the fiscal impact of an individual or family, it is necessary to distinguish between public goods and private goods. Public goods do not require additional spending to accommodate new residents.[44] The clearest examples of government public goods are national defense and medical and scientific research. The entry of millions of immigrants will not raise costs or diminish the value of these public goods to the general population. Other government services are private goods; use of these by one person precludes or limits use by another. Government private goods include direct personal benefits such as welfare, Social Security benefits, Medicare, and education. Other government private goods are “congestible” goods.[45] These are services that must be expanded in proportion to the population. Government congestible goods include police and fire protection, roads and sewers, parks, libraries, and courts. If these services do not expand as the population expands, there will be a decrease in the quality of service. An individual makes a positive fiscal contribution when his total taxes paid exceed the direct benefits and congestible goods received by himself and his family.[46] The Cost of Amnesty Federal and state governments currently spend over $500 billion per year on means-tested welfare benefits.[57] Illegal aliens are ineligible for most federal welfare benefits but can receive some assistance through programs such as Medicaid, In addition, native-born children of illegal immigrant parents are citizens and are eligible for all relevant federal welfare benefits. Granting amnesty to illegal aliens would have two opposing fiscal effects. On the one hand, it may raise wages and taxes paid by broadening the labor market individuals compete in; it would also increase tax compliance and tax receipts as more work would be performed “on the books,”[58] On the other hand, amnesty would greatly increase the receipt of welfare, government benefits, and social services. Because illegal immigrant households tend to be low-skill and low-wage, the cost to government could be considerable. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has performed a thorough study of the federal fiscal impacts of amnesty.[59] This study found that illegal immigrant households have low education levels and low wages and currently pay little in taxes. Illegal immigrant households also receive lower levels of federal government benefits. Nonetheless, the study also found that, on average, illegal immigrant families received more in federal benefits than they paid in taxes.[60] Granting amnesty would render illegal immigrants eligible for federal benefit programs. The CIS study estimated the additional taxes that would be paid and the additional government costs that would occur as a result of amnesty. It assumed that welfare utilization and tax payment among current illegal immigrants would rise to equal the levels among legally-admitted immigrants of similar national, educational, and demographic backgrounds. If all illegal immigrants were granted amnesty, federal tax payments would increase by some $3,000 per household, but federal benefits and social services would increase by $8,000 per household. Total federal welfare benefits would reach around $9,500 per household, or $35 billion per year total. The study estimates that the net cost to the federal government of granting amnesty to some 3.8 million illegal alien households would be around $5,000 per household, for a total federal fiscal cost of $19 billion per year.[61] Granting Amnesty is Likely to Further Increase Illegal Immigration The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 granted amnesty to 2.7 million illegal aliens. The primary purpose of the act was to decrease the number of illegal immigrants by limiting their inflow and by legalizing the status of illegal immigrants already here.[63] In fact, the act did nothing to stem the tide of illegal entry. The number of illegal aliens entering the country increased five fold from around 140,000 per year in the 1980s to 700,000 per year today. Illegal entries increased dramatically shortly after IRCA went into effect. It seems plausible that the prospect of future amnesty and citizenship served as a magnet to draw even more illegal immigrants into the country. After all, if the nation granted amnesty once why wouldn’t it do so again? The Hagel/Martinez legislation would repeat IRCA on a much larger scale. This time, nine to ten million illegal immigrants would be granted amnesty. As with IRCA, the bill promises to reduce future illegal entry but contains little policy that would actually accomplish this. The granting of amnesty to 10 million illegal immigrants is likely to serve as a magnet pulling even greater numbers of aliens into the country in the future. If enacted, the legislation would spur further increases in the future flow of low-skill migrants. This in turn would increase poverty in America, enlarge the welfare state, and increase social and political tensions.

ILLEGALS AND CRIME - THE SOBBERING FACTS you won't hear from LA RAZA DEMS!

I, CAN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF

The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave
Heather Mac Donald EMAIL

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens.
Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the
police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their
immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of
a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after
having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly
weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and
know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should
a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he
who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule
against enforcing immigration law.

The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in
immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and
Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary
policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops,
from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.

Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies,
a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even
mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk
about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of
a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a
predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get
a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration
law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.

But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom
of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control
over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might
have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy.
The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the
law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and,
ultimately, the very idea of national borders.

It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has
become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime
problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And
a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a
strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy
commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions
of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view,
utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.

I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish
Moss, about his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In
September, the force arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven
vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in
custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his
immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his
visa overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled
the rapes. “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing
with immigration issues,” explains Moss, choosing his words
carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”

Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the
illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is
startling. Some examples:

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for
homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to
two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal
aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in
1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern
California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually
much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia,
the dominant force in California prisons, on complex
drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations,
and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang
has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting
recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central
America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses
murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s
MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former
assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia
member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while
serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime
analysis. The LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an
injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th
Street Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in
Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are virtually all
illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized by
18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to
the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line
of work is and stay in the business.

Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these
non-gang “Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but
the gang injunction is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a
Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer (known on the
street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even
notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003,
absorbed into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face
severe discipline for violating Special Order 40, the city’s
sanctuary policy.

L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s
policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior.
Pick up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well
prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws
nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration
violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known
felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize
illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at
court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or
casing a target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the
country after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to
garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S., say, who are
only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a deportee from the
Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know
I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if
the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop
him, such as an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but
not for the immigration felony.

The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage
illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops
without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take
advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose
maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of
course). There has never been any empirical verification that
sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever
suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating
drug-using crime victims. But in any case, this official rationale
could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some
subset of immigration violators: deported felons, say, or repeat
criminal offenders whose immigration status police already know.

The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from
immigration reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else
in immigration policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown
so large that public officials are terrified of alienating it, even at
the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a
breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th Street Gang, which
included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by
laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien
membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los
Angeles City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order
40. You would have thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v.
Wade. A police commander warned the council: “This is going to open
a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on
a brave front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.

But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding
residents of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the
tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting
up rivals outside their homes, but such anxiety can never equal a
politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the
reexamination process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that
allowing the department to work closely with the INS would give cops
another tool for getting gang members off the streets. Trying to
build a homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often
futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they
cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration violation would
allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a
witness’s life at risk.

But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any
broadening of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he
asserted. “It’s a federal law-enforcement issue, not a local
law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan Lewis told the
L.A. Police Commission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to
look at Special Order 40.”

Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow.
After their brief moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians
have only grown more adamant in defense of Special Order 40. After
learning that cops in the scandal-plagued Rampart Division had
cooperated with the INS to try to uproot murderous gang members from
the community, local politicians threw a fit, criticizing district
commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station houses. In
turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now,
big-city police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend
sanctuary policies as the politicians who appoint them; not so the
rank and file, however, who see daily the benefit that an immigration
tool would bring.
But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary
policies and start enforcing immigration violations where public
safety demands it, the resource-starved immigration authorities
couldn’t handle the overwhelming additional workload.

The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to
house, aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following
an order of removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation)
has forced immigration officials to practice a constant triage. Long
ago, the feds stopped trying to find and deport aliens who had
“merely” entered the country illegally through stealth or
fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens who
run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been
convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious
crime) or who have been deported following conviction for an
aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with
20 years in jail).

That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS
investigator Mike Cutler, who worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn
drug dealers in the 1970s, explains. “If you arrested someone you
wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss and start a bidding war,”
Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks, threw a
couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.' The boss would turn to
another agent: 'Next! Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed
over an old lady, and had a gun.' ” But such one-upmanship was
usually fruitless. “Without the jail space,” explains Cutler,
“it was like the Fish and Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear
and let them go.”

But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even
if a judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of
litigation and appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the
alien on a bus or plane and take him across the border. Second
alternative: detain him pending removal. Again, inadequate space and
staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were in
charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not all of
them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to
final orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a
notice asking the deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or
two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him.
Results: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run
letters disappeared, a number that was even higher—94 percent—if
they were from terror-sponsoring countries.

To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks
like complete indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to
Congress about the Queens rape by illegal Mexicans, New York’s
criminal justice coordinator defended the city’s failure to notify
the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the ground that the
agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time
again been unable to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said
last February. “When we reach them on the phone, they require that
we write a letter. When we write a letter, they require that it be by
a superior.”

Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John
Mullaly a former NYPD homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent
of the drug dealers and other criminals in Manhattan’s Washington
Heights were illegal. Were Mullaly to threaten an illegal-alien thug
in custody that his next stop would be El Salvador unless he
cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing that the INS would
never show up. The message could not be clearer: this is a culture
that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. If policing’s
broken-windows theory is correct, the failure to enforce one set of
rules breeds overall contempt for the law.

The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program
that would allow immigration officials to complete deportation
hearings while a criminal was still in state or federal prison, so
that upon his release he could be immediately ejected without taking
up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988,
immediately bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example,
nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency
couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent such an army
of criminal aliens (who have extensive due-process rights in
contesting deportation) and so would have to request delay after
delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available. In 1997,
the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born
inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons
without any review of their deportability. They included 1,198
aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.

Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The
INS was a creature of immigration politics, and INS district
directors came under great pressure from local politicians to divert
scarce resources into distribution of such “benefits” as
permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away from
criminal or other investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the
INS refused to join an FBI task force against Haitian drug trafficking
in Miami, fearing criticism for “Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after
Hispanic activists protested a much-publicized raid that netted
nearly two dozen illegals, the Border Patrol said that it would no
longer join Simi Valley, California, probation officers on home
searches of illegal-alien-dominated gangs.

The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of
politics driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.”
When, in the early 1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove
immigrants to apply for citizenship in record numbers to preserve
their welfare eligibility, the Clinton administration, seeing a
political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new welfare-dependent
citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically expedited.
Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in
1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and
tens of thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for
murder and armed robbery, were naturalized.

Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association,
has won from Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for
criminal aliens that can keep them in the country indefinitely.
Federal probation officers in Brooklyn are supervising two
illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi citizenship—who
look “ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a
probation official, but the officers can’t get rid of them. The
Jordanian had been caught fencing stolen Social Security and
tax-refund checks; now he sells phone cards, which he uses himself to
make untraceable calls. The Saudi’s offense: using a fraudulent
Social Security number to get employment—a puzzlingly unnecessary
scam, since he receives large sums from the Middle East, including
from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism,
so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself.
Currently, he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a
minor offense would not be prosecuted, but the government, fearing
that he had terrorist intentions, used whatever it had to put him in
prison.

Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the
country, but the two ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly
fighting their deportation. “Due process allows you to stay for
years without an adjudication,” says a probation officer in
frustration. “A regular immigration attorney can keep you in the
country for three years, a high-priced one for ten.” In the
meantime, Brooklyn probation officials are watching the bridges.

Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal
aliens, the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that
“they all come back. They can’t make it in Mexico.” The tens of
thousands of illegal farmworkers and dishwashers who overpower U.S.
border controls every year carry in their wake thousands of brutal
assailants and terrorists who use the same smuggling industry and who
benefit from the same irresistible odds: there are so many more of
them than the Border Patrol.

For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal
aliens is part and parcel of its inability to patrol the border,
period. For decades, the INS had as much effect on the migration of
millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the
immigrants themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens
living fearfully in the shadows, seemed to regard immigration
authorities with all the concern of an elephant for a flea.

Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the
hundreds of illegal day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in
Queens, New York, in front of money wire services, travel agencies,
immigration-attorney offices, and phone arcades, all catering to the
local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and
terrorists). “There is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully
explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like the dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans
on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping that an SUV seeking
carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t worry,
because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I
need the papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers.”

Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the
government really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only
a minor inconvenience to the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are
overwhelmingly in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter,
crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border
Patrol spotted them, but with six officers to 16 illegals, only five
got caught. In illegal border crossings, you get what you pay for,
Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the coyotes will abandon
you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into New York
from Los Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her
across the border. “Because I pay, I don’t worry,” he says
complacently.

The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of
criminals and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the
sending countries or an impregnably militarized border—is to remove
the jobs magnet. As long as migrants know they can easily get work,
they will find ways to evade border controls. But enforcing laws
against illegal labor is among government’s lowest priorities. In
2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and prosecute
the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens
who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.

Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to
worksite investigations, not much would change, because their legal
weapons are so weak. That’s no accident: though it is a crime to
hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business lobbies,
and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the fraud-proof form
of work authorization necessary to enforce that ban. Libertarians have
erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free number to the
Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social
Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping
employers verify work eligibility would result in discrimination
against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of
Hispanics work illegally.

The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated
industries are a charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to
present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to
believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a
worker is actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered
documents are not patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a
matchbook, say—the employer will nearly always be exempt from
liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find an employer guilty
of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities
must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost
insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit
documents has exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration
authorities seized nearly 2 million of them in Los Angeles, destined
for immigrant workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.

For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the
employment charade. If immigration officials ever do try to conduct
an industry-wide investigation—which will at least net the illegal
employees, if not the employers—local congressmen will almost
certainly head it off. An INS inquiry into the Vidalia-onion industry
in Georgia was not only aborted by Georgia’s congressional
delegation; it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the
growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the
spirit of the employment law, on the other hand, is considerable.
Ethnic advocacy groups are ready to picket employers who dismiss
illegal workers, and employers understandably fear being undercut by
less scrupulous competitors.

Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and
culture that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the
most profound is the breakdown of the distinction between legal and
illegal entry. Everywhere, illegal aliens receive free public
education and free medical care at taxpayer expense; 13 states offer
them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been pushed to grant
illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state tuition. One
hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of
cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to
credentialize illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush
administration has given its blessing to this matricula consular
card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns that the gaping
security loopholes that the card creates make it a boon to money
launderers, immigrant smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities
have already caught an Iranian man sneaking across the border this
year, Mexican matricula card in hand.

Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal
and an illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is
an act of irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the
border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican
government, that feature signs calling for “no más racismo.”
Immigrant advocates use the language of “human rights” to appeal
to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They
attack the term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the
validity of borders. Indeed, grouses Illinois congressman Luis
Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something
wrong and you need to be forgiven.”

Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think
the U.S. owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . .
. to work, to drive their kids to school,” said California
assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that people he
stops “get in your face about their rights, because our failure to
enforce the law emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme,
Joaquín Avila, a UCLA Chicano studies professor and law lecturer,
argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially in the many
California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of
apartheid.

Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders.
Quite the reverse. By a huge majority—at least 60 percent—they
want to rein in immigration, and they endorse an observation that
Senator Alan Simpson made 20 years ago: Americans “are fed up with
efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental
right of any people—to decide who will join them and help form the
future country in which they and their posterity will live.” But if
the elites’ and the advocates’ idea of giving voting rights to
non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be surprised if it
does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of people
outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.

However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and
incoherent immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a
minimum, authorities should expel illegal-alien criminals swiftly.
Even on the grounds of protecting non-criminal illegal immigrants, we
should start by junking sanctuary policies. By stripping cops of what
may be their only immediate tool to remove felons from the community,
these policies leave law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.

But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even
more destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation
into gangs seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture.
Toddlers are learning to flash gang signals and hate the police,
reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City, “every high school
has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to 14-year-olds have already
joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 18-year-old Mexican. Such
pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn
about U.S. law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it.
“Institutionalizing illegal immigration creates a mindset in people
that anything goes in the U.S.,” observes Patrick Ortega, the news
and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva Vida in southern
California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of social
ills.” It is broken windows writ large.

For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s
time to decide what our immigration policy is—and enforce it.

CONGRESSIONAL STUDY SHOWS ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS SAP TAX DOLLARS - And Yet They Push For Even More!

Illegal immigrants drain the tax dollars

Congressional study shows illegal immigrants sap tax dollars
The Business Journal of Phoenix - by Ty Young Phoenix Business Journal


A study by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday backs up the view that undocumented immigrants sap more tax dollars than they provide, especially in education, health care and law enforcement.

The study pulled together reports from the past five years, using data from sources including the Pew Hispanic Center, the Rand Corp., the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and various universities. The Congressional study also incorporated facts from states, including Arizona, but its authors acknowledged there was no aggregate estimate that could be applied to the entire country.

The report says that in 1990, 90 percent of undocumented immigrants primarily were in six states: California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas.

By 2004, undocumented immigrants had increased tenfold in other states, most notably Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, according to statistics from the Pew Hispanic Center.

The report estimates there are 12 million undocumented immigrants nationwide. Of those, 60 percent are uninsured and 50 percent of the children are uninsured. Again using 2004 statistics from the Pew Hispanic Center the average income of undocumented immigrants was $27,400 while Americans earned $47,800. The difference puts undocumented immigrants in a lower tax bracket, thus reducing the amount of federal and state income taxes generated.

The study also showed that while undocumented workers represented just 5 percent of state and federal service costs, their tax revenue did not offset the amount spent by government. The authors of the study stated that, "the general consensus is that unauthorized immigrants impose a net cost on state and local budgets. However, no agreement exists as to the size of, or even the best way of measuring, that cost at a national level."

In education, which the study notes is the largest single expenditure in state and local budgets, multiple states reported 20 to 40 percent higher costs educating non-English speaking students, many of whom come from the homes of undocumented immigrant parents. Using New Mexico statistics from 2004 as a model, education spending on undocumented immigrants comprised $67 million of the state's $3 billion education budget.

The study estimates there are 53.3 million school-age children in the U.S., 2 million of whom are undocumented immigrants and another 3 million who are legal citizens, but whose parents are not.

Undocumented immigrants are more likely to access emergency rooms and urgent care facilities because most do not have health care, the study said. In Arizona and other border areas, states paid nearly $190 million in health care costs for undocumented immigrants in 2000, the study reported. The amount, which the study says likely has risen since then, represented one-quarter of all uncompensated health care costs in those states that year.

While the report found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than American natives, it said states still bear a large cost for the legal process. Based on a report from the U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition from 2001, counties from the four states that border Mexico spent more than $108 million on law enforcement activities involving undocumented immigrants. San Diego County in California spent nearly half of that, with more than $50 million going into law enforcement activities involving undocumented immigrants.


*
By Robert Rector .............Heritage.org | May 16, 2006 (dated figures THE LA RAZA DEMS HAVE EXPANDED THE MEXICAN OCCUPATION FOR CHEAP LABOR IN CALIFORNIA ENOUGH TO ALONE DOUBLE THESE FIGURES!
VISIT HERITAGE.org for more info on Mexican invasion and occupation
This paper focuses on the net fiscal effects of immigration with particular emphasis on the fiscal effects of low skill immigration. The fiscal effects of immigration are only one aspect of the impact of immigration. Immigration also has social, political, and economic effects. In particular, the economic effects of immigration have been heavily researched with differing results. These economic effects lie beyond the scope of this paper. Overall, immigration is a net fiscal positive to the government’s budget in the long run: the taxes immigrants pay exceed the costs of the services they receive. However, the fiscal impact of immigrants varies strongly according to immigrants’ education level. College-educated immigrants are likely to be strong contributors to the government’s finances, with their taxes exceeding the government’s costs. By contrast, immigrants with low education levels are likely to be a fiscal drain on other taxpayers. This is important because half of all adult illegal immigrants in the U.S. have less than a high school education. In addition, recent immigrants have high levels of out-of-wedlock childbearing, which increases welfare costs and poverty. An immigration plan proposed by Senators Mel Martinez (R-FL) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) would provide amnesty to 9 to 10 million illegal immigrants and put them on a path to citizenship (THERE ARE PROBABLY NEARLY 40 MILLION ILLEGALS HERE NOW). Once these individuals become citizens, the net additional cost to the federal government of benefits for these individuals will be around $16 billion per year. Further, once an illegal immigrant becomes a citizen, he has the right to bring his parents to live in the U.S. The parents, in turn, may become citizens. The long-term cost of government benefits to the parents of 10 million recipients of amnesty could be $30 billion per year or more (CALIFORNIA PUTS OUT $20 BILLION A YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES OF ILLEGALS).

In the long run, the Hagel/Martinez bill, if enacted, would be the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years.

IMMIGRATION FRAUD - Let's Just Pretend We Are PROTECTING OUR BORDERS....he he he

U.S. Immigration Agents Fell Short of Probe Goal
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 15, 2007; A02
U.S. immigration agents investigated only 139 suspected fraud cases referred by the main anti-fraud unit of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last year, or less than 1 percent of 1 percent of about 6 million applications for citizenship, green cards and other benefits, federal investigators reported yesterday.
The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, Richard L. Skinner, blamed a DHS policy set in February 2006 requiring that 100 percent of suspect applications be investigated, saying it overwhelmed claims officers and immigration investigators with work, rendering the policy all but useless.
"The current USCIS strategy for addressing immigration benefit fraud yields little measurable return," Skinner's office reported. Instead, agents diverted resources to higher priority national security and criminal background checks. DHS officials want to change the blanket policy but have not decided how, Skinner said.
Agency spokesman Christopher Bentley said that "USCIS remains committed" to improving anti-fraud efforts along with its sister investigative agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Neither ICE nor USCIS can help the fact the volume of potential fraud cases significantly exceeds the capability of both agencies," USCIS Director Emilio T. Gonzalez wrote Skinner in a formal response.
The inspector general's report, dated Oct. 29 and released yesterday, underscores problems dating to the March 2003 launch of DHS, which reorganized U.S. immigration agencies and expanded their duties. The report also highlights one of myriad hurdles to tougher U.S. immigration enforcement, a subject of heated national debate since Congress failed to pass a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws this summer.
USCIS's 315-member Fraud Detection and National Security office was created in May 2004 with the goal of tracking all applications with any sign of fraud. But in practice, not all 3,500 USCIS claim adjudicators turn in such forms, because doing so counts against their productivity.
FDNS referred less than 1 percent of applications to ICE for investigation in fiscal 2006, about 2,425 cases. ICE investigated less than 1 percent of them, or 139 cases, the inspector general reported. By comparison, in 2004 ICE conducted 53,376 investigations -- of which 5,351 were benefit fraud-related -- leading to 533 convictions.
Immigration officials say without massive new resources, they have to set priorities. ICE mostly targets conspiracies, fraud rings, security and safety risks, the report said. USCIS wants to target cases involving lawyers, third-party preparers and individuals from countries designated as posing terrorism risks.
The report noted other complaints with FDNS systems, which early this year had a backlog of more than 15,000 fraud referrals and security-related checks.

OBAMA & LA RAZA DEMS promise FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ILLEGALS - They Already Get It!

From the Los Angeles Times
Q & A
Sorting out claims about healthcare legislation
How would an overhaul really affect senior citizens? Abortion funding? Illegal immigrants?
By Noam N. Levey

August 10, 2009

Reporting from Washington — With lawmakers home for their August recess, a fierce battle has broken out over what precisely is in the mammoth healthcare bills being pushed by congressional Democrats. There has been no shortage of misinformation, much of it advanced by critics of President Obama's overhaul effort who have made sometimes outlandish claims. Here is a look at a few of the most contentious points.

Would illegal immigrants get free healthcare benefits?

Provisions in the House and Senate bills explicitly prohibit people who are "not lawfully present in the United States" from getting federal aid to help them buy health insurance in the new exchanges.

Congressional Democrats have resisted Republican efforts to put tougher documentation requirements on those applying for aid, arguing that that could discourage many poor people from signing up for health insurance.

No matter what happens with the legislation, illegal immigrants would almost certainly still be able to get care in emergency rooms, a major burden in some parts of the country.

THESE LA RAZA ENDORSED POLITICIANS, FEINSTEIN, BOXER, PELOSI are well trained to speak out of both sides of their mouths!

From the Los Angeles Times
Debate heats up on healthcare for illegal immigrants

House Speaker Pelosi has said that they would not be covered under overhaul proposals, but activists say medical care should not be denied to the sick, no matter their status.


By Antonio Olivo

August 11, 2009

Reporting from Chicago — Pushing around a cart filled with steamed corn, sliced cucumbers and other street food, Omar Castillo is the embodiment of what has become a third rail in the healthcare debate.

The 19-year-old, who received a kidney transplant last year, is in the U.S. illegally and has no ready access to long-term medical care. So peddling snacks is how he pays for the expensive drugs he needs to stay healthy.

To cover the needs of an estimated 6.8 million uninsured illegal immigrants, some advocates have proposed broadening the healthcare overhaul legislation now before Congress.

But fierce opposition has kept the idea off the table.

Castillo received his transplant and a year of free medicine as part of a hospital study at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago after lobbying by Latino activists and a call from the governor's office. With the study over, his last free prescription is running out.

"We don't know what we'll do when the medicine is gone," said Castillo, holding two nearly empty bottles of the immunosuppressants he takes to ward off an organ rejection.

It is immoral, immigration activists say, for hospitals and doctors -- as well as a nation -- to deny healthcare to the seriously ill, no matter their legal status. But proponents of tougher immigration enforcement and others fighting to contain runaway costs fear that providing such services would encourage more illegal border crossings.

Given spotty healthcare in countries such as China and Mexico, "health insurance alone might be worth people coming here . . . especially if you've got a family that's got a lot of illness in it," said Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, which has pushed for tighter restrictions on medical aid to illegal immigrants.

The issue is so sensitive that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has made a point of emphasizing that illegal immigrants would not be covered under the current healthcare proposals. And the Congressional Hispanic Caucus issued a statement backing coverage only for "legal, law abiding" immigrants who pay their "fair share" for healthcare.

Under federal law, illegal immigrants are entitled to receive emergency healthcare, although some states offer assistance to cover uninsured children.

For some, a struggle

Some illegal immigrants have used stolen Social Security numbers to qualify for health programs -- a form of medical identity theft increasingly on hospital radars. Many more scramble to pay for their medicine and doctors visits in cash, a challenge in an economy where day-laborer work has dried up.

"A lot of people are living with things that are easily treatable [and] that those of us with good health insurance just don't have to live with because we can go get the medication," said Jennifer Tolbert, a policy analyst at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

"If those individuals have communicable diseases," Tolbert said, "there may be a risk [of] spreading that condition."

Castillo's prescriptions for mycophenolate mofetil and tacrolimus can cost as much as $750 a month.

After about six hours of selling snacks in the hot sun on a recent day, he and a cousin took home $20, money that also must go toward food and other needs.

Castillo arrived from Mexico City in 2005.

He worked in construction for about six months, but he began growing weak and had trouble breathing, family members said.

A doctor discovered Castillo was born with a partly developed kidney.

Lucky break

Compared with others who are uninsured and facing chronic illness, Castillo has been lucky.

Last summer, the medical center assumed the cost of his kidney transplant after a group of activists rallied outside the hospital and persuaded then-Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich to make an appeal on Castillo's behalf.

Concerns over the financial burden -- an organ transplant can cost upward of $150,000, not counting follow-up care -- have led other hospitals to deny treatment, said Julie Contreras, an organizer with the League of United Latin American Citizens in Chicago.

"These people, some of them are going to die," Contreras said. "When a hospital denies treatment to any human being . . . this is flat-out immoral."

In Chicago, about a dozen immigrants in need of organ transplants have formed an informal support group.

They sat recently inside one patient's home, comparing kidney dialysis regimens and worries over mounting hospital bills. Within the group, sharing medicine is common.

In cases where pills are running out, so is rationing: one pill a day instead of three.

Asked about returning to Mexico or other home countries to receive more comprehensive care, the group broke into laughter.

"Over there, it's a thousand times worse," said Juan Zavala, a legal immigrant from Mexico and a transplant recipient. "Here, you may get treated poorly by some nurse or doctor. There? They'll give you a kick and tell you you're out of luck."

Sitting nearby was 16-year-old Liliana Cruz. After she was diagnosed with kidney failure, her family came to the U.S. illegally from Mexico in 2005 to seek help in getting a transplant.

But the operation is still beyond their reach. Cruz's age qualifies her to receive a transplant paid for by Illinois' All Kids health subsidy program, and she has a willing donor in an adult sister. But the University of Illinois Medical Center has declined the procedure because the sister's part of the surgery would not be subsidized.

"I just want a normal life," Cruz said during a recent round of kidney dialysis paid for by the state. "Right now, this machine is my life."

MEXICAN PRISONS LET GO MEXICAN DRUG MAFIA - What Did You Expect?

New York Times

August 11, 2009
WAR WITHOUT BORDERS
Mexico’s Drug Traffickers Continue Trade in Prison
By MARC LACEY
MEXICO CITY — The surveillance cameras captured it all: guards looking on nonchalantly as 53 inmates — many of them associated with one of Mexico’s most notorious drug cartels — let themselves out of their cells and sped off in waiting vehicles.
The video shows that prison guards only pulled out their weapons after the inmates were well on their way. The brazen escape in May in the northern state of Zacatecas — carried out in minutes without a single shot fired — is just one of many glaring examples of how Mexico’s crowded and cruel prison system represents a critical weak link in the drug war.
Mexico’s prisons, as described by inmates and insiders and viewed during several visits, are places where drug traffickers find a new base of operations for their criminal empires, recruit underlings, and bribe their way out for the right price. The system is so flawed, in fact, that the Mexican government is extraditing record numbers of drug traffickers to the United States, where they find it much harder to intimidate witnesses, run their drug operations or escape.
The latest jailbreak took place this weekend, when a suspected drug trafficker vanished from a Sinaloa prison during a party for inmates featuring a Mexican country music band. The Mexican government is considering isolating drug offenders from regular inmates to reduce opportunities for abuse.
The United States government, as part of its counternarcotics assistance program, is committing $4 million this year to help fix Mexico’s broken prisons, officials said. Experts from state prisons in the United States have begun tutorials for Mexican guards to make sure that there are clear ethical guidelines and professional practices that distinguish them from the men and women they guard. “There’s no point in rounding all these characters up if they are going to get out on their own,” said an American official involved in the training, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
Although Mexican prisons call themselves Centers for Social Rehabilitation, “Universities of crime would be a better name,” said Pedro Héctor Arellano, who runs the prison outreach program in Mexico for the Episcopal Church.
Mexico’s prisons are bursting at the seams, with space for 172,151 inmates nationwide but an additional 50,000 crammed in. More arrive by the day as part of the government’s drug war, which has sent tens of thousands to prison since President Felipe Calderón took office nearly three years ago.
Inside the high concrete walls ringed by barbed wire, past the heavily armed men in black uniforms with stern expressions, inmates rule the roost. Some well-heeled prisoners pay to have keys to their cells. When life inside, with its pizza deliveries, prostitutes and binges on drugs and alcohol, becomes too confining, prisoners sometimes pay off the guards for a furlough or an outright jailbreak.
“Our prisons are businesses more than anything else,” said Pedro Arellano Aguilar, an expert on prisons. He has visited scores of them in Mexico and has come away with a dire view of what takes place inside. “Everything is for sale and everything can be bought.”
Guards Work for Inmates
For drug lords, flush with money, life on the inside is often a continuation of the free-spirited existence they led outside. Inmates look up to them. Guards often become their employees.
For more than a decade, Enrique, a strapping man with a faraway look in his eyes, worked in one of the roughest prisons in Mexico, imposing his will. He assigned prisoners to cell blocks based on the size of the bribes they made. He punished those who stepped out of line.
“I was the boss,” he declared. Not exactly. Enrique, whose story was corroborated by a prisoner advocates’ group, was actually an inmate, serving time inside Reclusorio Preventivo Oriente prison in Mexico City for trafficking cocaine. “It shouldn’t work the way it does,” said Enrique, now released, who asked that his full name not be published so he can resume life after his 12-year sentence.
Miguel Caro Quintero, a major drug trafficker wanted in Arizona and Colorado on charges of supplying multi-ton shipments of marijuana and cocaine to the United States, was jailed for 10 years in Mexico. Federal prosecutors accused him, like many drug lords, of continuing illegal activities from behind bars, using smuggled cellphones to maintain contact with his underlings on the outside and recruiting prisoners who were nearing the end of their sentences.
When his sentence in Mexico was up, he was sent off to the United States to face charges there, becoming one of more than 50 Mexicans, most of them drug offenders, extradited this year.
“When we keep a criminal in a Mexican prison, we run the risk that one way or another they are going to keep in contact with their criminal network,” Leopoldo Velarde, who heads extraditions for the federal attorney general’s office, said. “The idea is to stop criminals, not just jail them.”
Life in Reclusorio Preventivo Oriente prison’s Dormitory No. 9, where many top drug traffickers are held, shows the clout that influential inmates enjoy. The prisoners are a privileged lot, wearing designer clothing and enjoying special privileges ranging from frequent visits by girlfriends to big-screen televisions in their spacious cells, federal prosecutors told local newspapers after one of the inmates recently bought his way out.
Traffickers continue to run their operations through their lieutenants inside the prison as well as outside, using supposedly banned cellphones.
The government says it is moving aggressively to ship off dangerous criminals who are wanted in the United States and are likely to restart their criminal enterprises from jail. Once the legal requirements are met by both governments, the handcuffed suspects are flown by American government agencies to face trial in the United States. Usually the country that requests extradition pays expenses, but American officials said that who pays depends on individual cases.
Since Mr. Calderón came to office in December 2006, his government has surprised the United States by extraditing more than 200 criminal suspects, more than double the rate of predecessors. Based on the legal battles they begin to avoid extradition, it is clear that inmates fear going to the United States. Their support network, prison officials in both countries say, is considerably weaker there.
For years, the Justice Department lobbied Mexico to allow more criminal suspects to face trial in the United States. But until 2005, Mexican court rulings limited extradition to those cases in which neither the death penalty nor life in prison was sought, and Mexican pride about sovereignty made Mexican officials drag their feet. That changed with Mr. Calderón’s resolve to embark on a tougher drug war.
American officials say they are thrilled with the Mexicans’ more aggressive extradition policy. “The best way to disrupt and dismantle a criminal organization is to lock up its leaders and seize their money — so we will work with our Mexican counterparts to locate and extradite, when appropriate, cartel leadership to the United States for prosecution,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in July.
A Wave of Escapes
The jailbreak in May at the Cieneguillas prison in Zacatecas was just one of several escapes that showed how porous Mexican jails are. The Zetas, a paramilitary group known for its ruthlessness in protecting its drug turf, planned the escape, and have organized jailbreaks in at least four states, Mexican law enforcement officials said. Zacatecas prison has had at least three escapes in recent years.
The situation there is so bad, according to a local lawyer, Uriel Márquez Valerio, that inmates managed to invite a musical group into the prison in 2005 to celebrate the birthday of a drug trafficker, who several weeks later found a way to escape.
In recent weeks, the authorities have managed to catch three of the 53 escapees from May and have thrown 51 prison officials, including the director, into jail while the investigation into collusion in the escape continues. The prime piece of evidence against the prison employees was the surveillance system they were supposed to use to monitor inmates. The video, leaked by law enforcement officials and now available on YouTube, recorded the jailbreak in detail.
It was clearly an inside job, one that prompted Interpol to issue an international alert for 11 of the escapees, who were deemed “a risk to the safety and security of citizens around the world.”
One of the escapees, Osvaldo García Delgado, a 27-year-old trafficker with the nickname Vampire, said after he had been re-arrested that the Zetas planned the breakout. Carefully plotted for weeks, the operation was designed to release some top Zeta commanders. Scores of lower-level Zetas were taken along as well.
The Vampire told police interrogators that the prisoners were awakened early one morning and told to dress in their best clothes. He expressed surprise that the guards were doing no guarding that day but instead had become instrumental players in the escape plan.
The men carrying out the escape were dressed in federal police uniforms and drove what appeared to be police vehicles, with lights, sirens and official-looking decals affixed to the sides. There was a helicopter flying overhead as well, giving the operation the air of legitimacy. Since drug cartels frequently recruit law enforcement officials as allies, it is never clear in Mexico whether they will in fact enforce the law — or whether they are impostors.
In this case, the authorities later disclosed that the uniforms worn by the gunmen who carried out the escape were either outright fakes or outdated outfits. The vehicles, which screeched away from the scene with sirens blaring, were not actual police-issue either, the authorities said. All that said, investigators have not ruled out the possibility that corrupt law enforcement officials helped carry out the operation.
After the latest escape, federal authorities have begun interviewing prison workers to determine how Orso Iván Gastélum Cruz, who was arrested by the army in 2005, disappeared Sunday from jail in Sinaloa, where one of Mexico’s major drug cartels is based.
Last July, Luis Gonzaga Castro Flores, a trafficker working for the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, bought his way out of Reclusorio Preventivo Oriente prison, where he was described by the local media as the godfather of Dormitory No. 9, the area where many drug prisoners are kept.
Other detainees escape before ever getting to prison or while being transferred to court, often with the aid of their cartel colleagues as well as complicit guards. In March, an armed group opened fire on a police convoy outside Mexico City, freeing five drug traffickers who were being taken to prison.
The government acknowledges it does not have full control of its prisons, but it attributes part of the problem to its aggressive roundup of drug traffickers. Escapes are on the rise, a top federal law enforcement official, Luis Cárdenas Palomino, told reporters recently, because the government was locking up so many leading operatives that it was getting harder for the cartels to function.
A Space Crunch
Mexico’s prison system is a mishmash of federal, state and local facilities of varying quality. The most dangerous prisoners are supposed to be housed in maximum security federal facilities, but there is nowhere near enough space. So the federal government pays the states to take in drug traffickers and other federal prisoners in their far less secure lockups.
From August through December 2008, in the most recent statistics available, state prisons across Mexico reported 36 violent episodes with 80 deaths, 162 injuries and 27 escapes, the government said. There was no breakdown in those statistics of how much of the violence was linked to traffickers, but experts said prisoners involved in the drug trade tend to be the most fierce and trouble-prone of all.
“These are clear signals that the penal system, as it is currently organized, is not meeting its primary obligation of guarding inmates efficiently and safely while they serve their sentences,” the federal government’s recently released strategic plan on prisons said of the string of assaults and escapes.
To relieve the congestion and better control the inmates, the government is planning a prison-building spree that will add tens of thousands of new beds in the coming years. One goal, officials say, is to keep drug lords separate from petty criminals as well as the many people who have been imprisoned but never convicted, thus reducing their ability to recruit new employees.
The government is also focusing on personnel, boosting guards’ pay, putting them through a newly created training academy and screening them for corruption. Mexico recently sent several dozen of its guards to beef up their skills at the training academy used by the New Mexico Department of Corrections.
All of the trainees, even guards with 15 years’ experience, had to start with the basics, shining their boots, cleaning out dormitory toilets and listening to lectures on how conniving inmates can be in trying to win over weak-willed guards.
Some of those Mexican guards who are now active participants in Mexico’s deeply flawed penal system say they welcome the moves toward professionalism.
One prison guard acknowledged, “We have guns, but we know it is them, not us, who really control things.”

THE STAGGERING COST of all that "CHEAP" ILLEGAL LABOR!

cost of illegals

You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:

Boy, was I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. .

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.


2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!

Verify at:

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.HTML

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.

Verify athttp://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.

Verify at:http://transcripts.cnn.com/%20TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.

Verify at:http://transcripts.CNN.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.

Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.HTML

9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.

Verify at:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSC%20RI%20PTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

10. The illegal aliens in theUnited States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US

Verify at:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.HTML

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U.. S from the Southern border..

Verify at: Homeland20Security Report
12. The National policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually = 20 over a five year period.'

Verify at:http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/PDF/deportation.PDF

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.

Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14. 'The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States .'

Verify at: http: // www..drdsk.com/articleshtml

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR AND IF YOU'RE LIKE ME HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS AMOUNT OF MONEY; IT IS $338,300,000,000.00 WHICH WOULD BE ENOUGH TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY FOR THECITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY.

HANDING 1.5 BILLION TO NARCOMEX TO FIGHT DRUG CARTEL, Then Leaving Our Borders Open For MORE ILLEGALS?!?!?!?!?!?

Mexico's Drug War
Why U.S. funding to help the government should stay on schedule
Thursday, August 13, 2009
OVER THE past three years, thousands of Mexican citizens have been slaughtered, kidnapped or threatened by drug cartels intent on fighting back against government efforts to rein in their increasingly ferocious trade. The United States agreed to provide Mexico and neighboring countries with $1.4 billion in aid to help combat the cartels, yet tens of millions of dollars could be lost because of a standoff between the State Department and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.).
Mr. Leahy chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the State Department, which administers the Mexican aid program known as the Merida Initiative. The program calls for the United States to provide training and equipment, including helicopters and surveillance planes, to the Mexican government; the plan does not include direct cash aid. Fifteen percent of the aid must be withheld until the State Department issues a report on Mexico's progress in a number of areas, including "transparency and accountability" of the federal police force and military; investigation and prosecution of government actors who have been "credibly alleged to have committed violations of human rights"; and a ban on the use of testimony elicited through "torture or other ill-treatment."
The State Department was poised to submit a progress report last week but pulled back after an aide to Mr. Leahy was briefed and expressed dissatisfaction with the thoroughness and accuracy of the findings. Some $62 million in aid is hanging in the balance and could revert to the Treasury unless the report is submitted by Sept. 30.
Human rights abuses by the Mexican police and military continue. More must be done to eradicate these crimes and hold perpetrators accountable. But the State Department, while acknowledging problems, makes a compelling case that Mexico has made important advances, including increased dialogue with the human rights groups and creation of civilian oversight of the federal police. Mr. Leahy and human rights groups clearly hope to use the Merida funds as leverage in their quest to expedite such progress. But withholding aid would be counterproductive.
The Merida Initiative is barely a year old; entrenched problems of police and military corruption and abuses cannot be solved overnight. The United States can best assist by providing all of the aid promised -- and promptly.

LOS ANGELES COUNTY Press Release - LA RAZA DEMS BANKRUPT STATE FOR ILLEGALS

CONTACT:
Tony Bell, Communications Deputy
Office: (213) 974-5555
Cell: (213) 215-5176
tbell@bos.lacounty.gov

WELFARE COSTS FOR CHILDREN OF ILLEGAL ALIENS IN L.A. COUNTY OVER $48 MILLION IN JUNE

August 11, 2009—Figures from the Department of Public Social Services show that children of illegal aliens in Los Angeles County collected nearly $22 million in welfare and over $26 million in food stamps in June, announced Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. Projected over a 12 month period – this would exceed $575 million dollars.

Annually the cost of illegal immigration to Los Angeles County taxpayers exceeds over $1 billion dollars, which includes $350 million for public safety, $400 million for healthcare, and $500 million in welfare and food stamps allocations. Twenty-four percent of the County’s total allotment of welfare and food stamp benefits goes directly to the children of illegal aliens born in the United States.

“Illegal immigration continues to have a catastrophic impact on Los Angeles County taxpayers,” said Antonovich. “The total cost for illegal immigrants to County taxpayers exceeds $1 billion a year – not including the millions of dollars for education.”

ILLEGALS & CRIME - They Come to Pillage!

hispanics 2x as violent than whites and blacks (facts aren't racist)

First I'd like to point out that whites in America kill more but that's cause they account for 74% of the US population and hispanics account for 15%


In California roughly 60% are white, and thirty percent hispanic. Illegals make up roughly 33%. So the numbers are pretty much even, right?

Am I missing something here?

So, please have a look at crime statistics in California. They almost double the crimes of blacks and whites.

http://stats.doj.ca.gov/cjsc_stats/prof07/00/22.htm





TABLE 22
ADULT AND JUVENILE ARRESTS REPORTED, 2007
RACE/ETHNIC GROUP BY SPECIFIC OFFENSE
STATEWIDE

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ADULT JUVENILE
OFFENSE TOTAL TOTAL WHITE HISPANIC BLACK OTHER TOTAL WHITE HISPANIC BLACK OTHER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL 1551900 1315044 492208 520595 224101 78140 236856 61357 119897 40882 14720

FELONY TOTAL 523276 457085 149740 183202 98812 25331 66191 14534 32339 15150 4168
HOMICIDE 2017 1782 359 865 447 111 235 14 157 48 16
MURDER 1920 1689 318 830 437 104 231 12 156 47 16
MANSL N/VEH 97 93 41 35 10 7 4 2 1 1 0
MANSL VEH 212 205 74 99 19 13 7 5 1 1 0
FORCIBL RAPE 2164 1923 434 990 386 113 241 61 105 62 13
ROBBERY 21614 14734 2840 5873 5368 653 6880 664 2552 3317 347
ASSAULT 101838 91231 29301 38447 17659 5824 10607 2311 5182 2513 601
KIDNAPPING 1800 1713 387 825 409 92 87 5 42 29 11
BURGLARY 54316 40376 14262 15581 7911 2622 13940 3770 5971 3163 1036
THEFT 52325 46174 16366 17566 9102 3140 6151 1531 2733 1406 481
M-VEH THEFT 22582 18069 5149 8601 3370 949 4513 740 2560 940 273
FORG-CKS-AC 11405 11042 3250 4661 2411 720 363 118 159 55 31
ARSON 1378 646 299 199 110 38 732 355 244 73 60
NARCOTICS 55070 53313 12449 15269 23850 1745 1757 478 574 599 106
MARIJUANA 16124 14080 4545 3825 4805 905 2044 550 879 453 162
DANGER DRUGS 71143 69484 29086 31772 4872 3754 1659 489 935 116 119
OTH DRUG VIO 1355 1316 545 442 284 45 39 15 14 8 2
LEWD OR LASC 3382 2632 620 1576 278 158 750 233 346 153 18
OTHER SEX 5363 4770 1728 1730 1022 290 593 132 297 142 22
WEAPONS 26284 19777 5130 9205 4426 1016 6507 1053 4167 900 387
DRIVE U/INFL 6330 6257 2427 2977 468 385 73 36 27 3 7
HIT-AND-RUN 1624 1542 436 866 130 110 82 20 46 12 4
ESCAPE 253 227 85 93 37 12 26 2 13 7 4
BOOKMAKING 3 1 0 0 1 0 2 0 0 2 0
OTH FELONIES 64694 55791 19968 21740 11447 2636 8903 1952 5335 1148 468

MISD. TOTAL 992588 857959 342468 337393 125289 52809 134629 39406 65664 20734 8825
MANSL-MISD 114 111 56 38 5 12 3 1 2 0 0
ASSLT-BATT 91150 68813 24818 26328 13182 4485 22337 5358 10988 4716 1275
BURG MISD 623 332 115 131 65 21 291 107 105 46 33
PETTY THEFT 63134 38951 13139 16065 5996 3751 24183 7049 10097 4564 2473
OTHER THEFT 4751 4078 1569 1338 723 448 673 186 277 151 59
CKS/ACC-CDS 891 772 271 213 156 132 119 59 31 17 12
MARIJUANA 57995 43419 17084 14394 9205 2736 14576 5069 6986 1814 707
OTHER DRUGS 91646 89363 37625 32329 15188 4221 2283 917 1116 146 104
INDECENT EXP 1423 1292 546 455 221 70 131 66 41 18 6
ANNOY CHILD 907 696 228 344 80 44 211 46 123 24 18
OBSCENE MATT 97 67 44 12 7 4 30 13 10 6 1
LEWD CONDUCT 4059 3718 1369 987 1166 196 341 68 123 125 25
PROSTITUTION 12540 11970 2926 2973 4837 1234 570 104 75 372 19
CONT DEL MIN 1904 1805 754 772 150 129 99 50 44 2 3
DRUNK 115239 110569 54771 40537 9625 5636 4670 2036 2108 232 294
LIQUOR LAWS 21349 15706 7782 5254 1233 1437 5643 2855 2179 272 337
DISORD COND 4047 3734 2248 713 628 145 313 113 129 56 15
DISTURB PEAC 16759 4832 2012 1732 755 333 11927 1746 6735 2735 711
VANDALISM 18441 7110 2614 2900 1174 422 11331 2480 7271 1002 578


TABLE 22
ADULT AND JUVENILE ARRESTS REPORTED, 2007
RACE/ETHNIC GROUP BY SPECIFIC OFFENSE
STATEWIDE

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ADULT JUVENILE
OFFENSE TOTAL TOTAL WHITE HISPANIC BLACK OTHER TOTAL WHITE HISPANIC BLACK OTHER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAL MISCHIEF 552 377 149 158 55 15 175 41 79 37 18
TRESPASSING 17150 13448 6085 3900 2740 723 3702 1176 1709 640 177
WEAPONS 6344 4279 1505 1766 718 290 2065 560 1107 266 132
DRIVE U/INFL 199866 198296 78889 91002 14351 14054 1570 894 560 43 73
HIT-AND-RUN 7124 6550 2200 3372 459 519 574 177 304 39 54
SEL TRAFFIC 22597 21860 7995 8913 3448 1504 737 385 239 37 76
JOY RIDING 336 219 54 106 47 12 117 21 81 13 2
GAMBLING 686 610 6 452 95 57 76 2 10 61 3
NONSUPPORT 140 138 53 58 24 3 2 1 0 0 1
GLUE SNIFF 1439 1193 473 578 77 65 246 34 200 7 5
CI/CO ORDIN 71131 61639 22115 24401 11712 3411 9492 2955 4777 1265 495
FTA-NON TRAF 104290 103347 38895 39562 20743 4147 943 273 478 160 32
OTHER MISD 53864 38665 14078 15610 6424 2553 15199 4564 7680 1868 1087

STATUS OFF TOTAL 36036 0 0 0 0 0 36036 7417 21894 4998 1727
TRUANCY 6047 0 0 0 0 0 6047 1017 4109 437 484
RUNAWAY 4035 0 0 0 0 0 4035 1684 1847 333 171
CURFEW 21134 0 0 0 0 0 21134 3254 13433 3547 900
INCORRIGIBLE 1213 0 0 0 0 0 1213 574 443 131 65
OTH STAT OFF 3607 0 0 0 0 0 3607 888 2062 550 107

ARIZONA SAVES MILLION CUTTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT PERKS - CA adds even more! WHO PAYS?

GET ON JUDICIAL WATCH.org emailing list!

JUDICIAL WATCH



Ariz. Saves Millions Cutting Illegal Immigrant Perks

Last Updated: Mon, 08/10/2009 - 2:48pm

A U.S. border state that stopped giving illegal immigrants discounted public college tuition a few years ago reports saving millions of dollars after terminating the program that essentially subsidized illegal behavior with public money.
Fed up with the toll that illegal aliens were having on its state, Arizona voters overwhelmingly passed a law in late 2006 to deny them heavily discounted resident college tuition and other state-funded benefits draining the budget. Approved by more than 70% of voters, the measure also requires state agencies to verify the immigration status of applicants for public services such as child care and adult education as well as financial aide for college students.
Regardless, thousands of illegal aliens continue to annually apply for the costly perks which used to cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year. Since the law passed more than 3,400 community college students and nearly 300 university students paid the much higher nonresident tuition because they couldn't prove they were in the country legally.
This represented a savings of nearly $8 million for one of the state’s community college districts (Maricopa County Community College District) alone. Combined with Arizona’s other junior college districts and its three public universities the savings are estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
Arizona’s State Treasurer says the money is being appropriately used for programs that benefit legal residents rather than to subsidize the education of those who live in the state illegally. A handful of other states—including Texas, California, Utah, Maryland and Wisconsin—offer illegal immigrants discounted tuition at public colleges.
Earlier this month, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott ruled that allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition breaks federal law though the state annually grants the coveted benefit to thousands of undocumented students. The opinion was a no brainer considering that a 1996 immigration reform law forbids states from giving illegal aliens in-state tuition unless it provides the same for all students regardless of residency.
It was that law that led a group of out-of-state students to successfully challenge the practice in California. The students argued that California’s public university and community college system violated the law by charging them higher tuition and fees than undocumented immigrants. A state appellate court ruled in favor of the American students and the case is pending before the sate Supreme Court.

JUDICIALWATCH.org - AMERICAN BORDER GUARDS SELL US OUT - Is Mexican Corruption Also Spreading Over Our Borders Like ILLEGALS & MEX DRUGS?

Last Updated: Mon, 08/10/2009 - 11:49am
Corruption among U.S. law enforcement officials who work along the Mexican border is at an all-time high with unprecedented numbers of local, state and federal officers charged or convicted with crimes relating to drug and illegal immigrant smuggling operations.
Local police, elected sheriffs and officers with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the key Homeland Security agency patrolling the border, are collaborating in record numbers with Mexican smugglers who bribe them with cash, gifts and sometimes sexual favors.
This unprecedented corruption along the southern border was made public by a national media outlet that obtained government files through the Freedom of Information Act, interviewed convicted agents and reviewed court records. The probe reveals that the number of officers charged with corruption nearly tripled in one year at the principle agency guarding the U.S.-Mexico border (CBP).
In fact, in the last 10 months alone, 20 CBP agents have been charged with corruption-related crimes, according to the probe. At that rate the agency, which currently has 63 open criminal investigations against officers, will set a new in-house corruption record. This is hardly earth shattering news at the relatively new agency.
Corruption was so rampant last year that the government created an internal web site devoted to recently convicted border agents and the agency began administering lie detector tests to ensure future applicants didn’t already work for Mexican smuggling organizations.
It marked a shameful chapter for CBP, the nation’s largest law enforcement organization, created after the 2001 terrorist attacks to be the unified border agency. The idea was to combine the inspectional and border forces of U.S. Customs, U.S. Immigration, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services and the U.S. Border Patrol to create a powerful force that would effectively protect America's borders.
Crooked law enforcement officials are rampant at the state, county and local levels as well. In the last few years more than 80 have been convicted for corruption relating to Mexican drug trafficking, immigrant smuggling and other contraband. Some have been caught red handed taking wads of cash and others receiving sexual favors.
Not surprisingly, the state that shares more than half of the nation’s border with Mexico has the largest number of corrupt local law enforcement officials. In the last two years alone, criminal misconduct cases have been opened against more than 1,000 officers in Texas and two sheriffs—in Cameron and Starr counties—pleaded guilty to federal drug trafficking charges for helping Mexican cartels that bribed them.

AN AMERICAN WITNESSES this NATION GIVEN AWAY TO ILLEGALS

Do something with taxes you have paid: Guest workers are loitering
________________________________________

Bush claims that Guest Workers do work that legal
Americans won’t. If that were true, then in the 35
states with few illegals (87 percent of illegals
reside in just 15 states), lawns wouldn’t get mowed,
hotel rooms wouldn’t get cleaned, buildings wouldn’t
get built, and crops wouldn’t get picked. In those
states, employers simply have to pay a living wage and
provide decent working conditions to get people to do
that work.



As mentioned earlier, John Kerry proposes an even more
radical plan. He has promised—without specifying
details—that within 100 days of his inauguration, to
forward a “path to legalization” for nearly all
illegals



Gutted unions. Unions protect workers against
exploitation. Flooding the job market with illegals
erodes unions’ power to negotiate. Bush’s Guest Worker
proposal and Kerry’s “path to legalization” would add
millions of non-unionized workers. That would, of
course, exacerbate the problem.



Worse public schools. America’s public schools already
suffer under severe budget constraints, causing large
class sizes, textbook shortages, and leaky ceilings.
Yet, US law requires that all illegals receive free
public education K-12. The Federation for American
Immigration Reform estimates that this costs $7.4
billion dollars each year.



The birthrate among illegals is more than double that
of legal US residents. The Pew Hispanic Center
calculates that within seven years, the children of
immigrants, legal and illegal, will account for one in
nine school-age children in the US. The Urban
Institute estimates that already, 15% of all school
children in California are illegals, many of whom
speak little English. These students are usually
mainstreamed in classes with native English speakers.
This means that teachers must slow down instruction,
denying native English speakers their right to an
appropriate-level education.



The challenge is even greater because not all those
students’ native language is Spanish: For example, in
my nearest major school district, San Francisco, it
would not be unusual to find a class that had native
speakers of Chinese, Russian, Tagalog, Spanish, and
English. Imagine the challenge of trying to educate
them all. If your child were in that class, would you
be confident that he or she would receive a quality
education?



Immigrant children pose less obvious challenges to the
schools. Barbara Nemko, the Napa County Superintendent
of Schools, points out examples: “Unless she speaks
Spanish, we have a hard time justifying hiring an even
an excellent teacher… So much of our staff development
time must now be allocated to dealing with the needs
of ‘English Language Learners.’ Our immigrant kids
also come to school with serious health problems that
we must address. For example, dentists now visit our
high-immigrant schools providing dental services at no
cost to the student.”



Immigrant advocacy groups such as the Mexican-American
Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) and La Raza have
additionally burdened the public schools by demanding
that schools provide special controversial programs
such as bilingual education, in which students are
taught in Spanish for much of the day. Bilingual
education programs exist throughout California even
after longitudinal research has not demonstrated their
effectiveness and after a voter-approved ban on those
programs.



MALDEF and La Raza also pushed through legislation
that allows, in 19 states, illegal immigrants to not
only attend any public university in those states, but
to pay in-state tuition, while legal residents of
neighboring states must pay the out-of-state rate
which is three to eight times more. It’s quite an
injustice, for example, that a legal resident can be
denied admission to taxpayer-supported Berkeley and
must attend community college so an illegal foreign
national can attend Berkeley—at in-state rates! And
often, because of reverse discrimination admission
policies, the illegal is admitted with B grades while
the rejected legal resident may have A grades.



And Senator Dick Durban (D-Illinois) is spearheading
legislation to extend the in-state tuition privilege
to illegals in all 50 states.



MALDEF’s and La Raza’s lobbying and legal power is
remarkable.

§ Worse health care. US law
states that all illegals and their families are
entitled to free emergency health care, and many
jurisdictions provide non-emergency care to illegals
for free.

Our health care system is already overwhelmed. For
example, thousands of Americans die each year because
of lack of adequate nursing and other medical care.
Illegal immigrants, coming from poor countries, have
great health care needs.

And in addition to common diseases, illegals bring
challenges not normally faced in the US, for example,
7,000 new cases of leprosy in the past three years
came in from Mexico, India, and Brazil, 16,000 new
cases of multiple-drug-resistant, incurable, and
communicable(!) tuberculosis. The Centers for Disease
Control reports that illegal immigrants account for
over 65 percent of communicable diseases (TB,
hepatitis, leprosy, AIDS, etc.,) in the US.
Immigration officials are supposed to screen out
immigrants who are carrying diseases, but there is no
health screening for illegal immigrants.

Illegals’ further burden the health care system
because they disproportionately do heavy physical
work, which causes their bodies to fall apart faster,
and because the violent crime rate among illegals is
staggering (See below).

The burden of providing health care to illegals
extends beyond disease and saving crime victims. For
example, because of illegals’ high birthrate, in
Colorado, which has a mere (?) 100,000 illegal
immigrants, taxpayers in 2003 alone paid for 6,000
illegals to have their babies. That’s 40% of the
births Medicaid paid for in the state. To get
immediate care, the illegal only must say “I am
undocumented."

The Washington Times reported that dozens of hospitals
in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California have
either closed their doors or face bankruptcy because
of losses caused by uncompensated care given to
illegal immigrants. Heretofore, most of the closings
have been in hospitals near the Mexican border. But
the problem is extending northward as illegals move
northward. This week, a hospital in San Jose (400
miles north of the Mexican border) had to close
largely because it was overrun by illegals who would
not pay for services.

Brenda Walker, in the same publication writes, "More
than 40 million American citizens do not have health
insurance while they pay in their tax bills for free
medical care for Mexican nationals, many of whom are
illegally working at American jobs - a double-dip rip
off. Furthermore, hospitals closing and emergency
rooms crowded with illegal aliens mean that an
American needing speedy treatment may have to wait far
longer to receive it. Such delays can mean the
difference between life and death."

US House of Representatives member Mark Foley has
persuaded the General Accounting Office to study the
financial costs that illegals impose on hospitals. He
says "we need to remedy this problem before we can no
longer afford to take care of Americans."



The impact of legalizing millions of illegals, their
spouses, and children, to our already creaking health
care system would be devastating.

I wonder what George Bush or John Kerry would say to a
legal resident whose family member died because of an
overwhelmed health care system: “Sorry, we allow the
illegals because it enables corporations to avoid
raising wages.”?



§ More Dishonesty. Bush and Kerry
would give legal status to millions of people whose
first act in this country was to commit a
crime—sneaking into the US to evade immigration
laws--and who soon committed a second crime-- applying
for a job when only legal residents are allowed to.
Countless illegals soon go on to commit yet another
crime: obtain false documents so they can, from US
taxpayers, steal (that is the correct albeit
unvarnished word) food stamps, housing subsidies,
unemployment insurance, Medicare, and other government
benefits intended for legal residents.

Obtaining false documents couldn’t be easier. A fake
identity package including birth certificate, Social
Security card, passport, green card, and driver's
license is widely available on the street for $50 to
$70. For a similar price, illegals can borrow the real
thing. Legal immigrants simply rent their IDs to
illegals who want to apply for a job, welfare, or
Social Security.

Can we ask legal residents to be honest--for example,
to pay their income taxes—while we reward lawbreaking
illegals with legal status, an array of services for
themselves and their families, plus full US
citizenship for all subsequent offspring? In
officially welcoming millions of acknowledged at-least
two-time lawbreakers into the US, we would exacerbate
America’s already declining honesty.



And the impacts of a dishonest society are profound.
Already, we hear of endless examples of rampant
dishonesty from corporate malfeasance to welfare
fraud, from student cheating to elder scams. A viable
society requires that we able to trust what people say
and do.

§ More violent crime. The violent crime rate
among illegals is horrific. I wish I could present the
most germane statistic: the violent crime rate for
legal versus illegal residents, but for reasons I
can’t understand, most law enforcement agencies are
prohibited from collecting those data. Nevertheless,
related statistics are available.

According to the US Transportation Department, nearly
half of California's drunk driving arrests in 2001
were Latino men. (Data for later years is not yet
available.)



An article in City Journal reports, “In Los Angeles,
up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants
(17,000) are for illegal immigrants. A confidential
California Department of Justice study reported in
1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street
Gang in southern California is illegal; police
officers say the proportion is actually much greater.
The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia,
the dominant force in California prisons, on complex
drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by
assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery
every day in L.A. County.” One in seven inmates in
California state prisons are illegal immigrants,
serving time for crimes other than being in the US
illegally. California taxpayers alone spend $500
million a year on incarcerating illegals.

Astonishingly, because of so-called sanctuary laws,
police in illegal-saturated cities such as L.A., San
Diego, Houston, Austin, Chicago, and New York are
prohibited from reporting even felons’ immigration
violations to federal authorities.

Even an illegal alien who has committed murder rarely
gets deported! According to statistics from the former
Immigration and Naturalization Service and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, 80,000 illegals who have
served prison time for felonies including murder,
rape, drug smuggling, and armed robberies, are roaming
our streets. This is frightening indeed because,
according to Bureau of Justice statistics, within
three years of prison release, 62% commit another
crime.

I wonder what Bush or Kerry would say to the family of
a person who was murdered by an illegal.

And if Bush or Kerry’s legalization proposals are
enacted, the violent crime rate among illegals will
worsen further. Because most illegals have physically
demanding jobs, when they reach their 40s, their
bodies are typically no longer capable of doing that
work. At that point, with no experience other than in
manual labor, most of these people will not be able to
earn a living wage, and hopeless people (or their
children) disproportionately turn to crime. So, as
time goes on, the already devastating crime rate among
illegals will rise further.

§ Endangered national security.
All 19 of the 9/11 terrorists were in the US
illegally. Peyton Knight, Director of Legislative
Affairs for the American Policy Center, a Virginia
think tank, writes, “At a time when America is under
attack by Islamist holy warriors, the Census Bureau
estimates that as many as 115,000 illegal immigrants
from Middle Eastern countries are living in the United
States.



§ Higher taxes. Many illegals are
paid off-the-books. Most others earn low salaries and
therefore pay little or no tax. Yet illegals are heavy
users of tax-dollar funded programs: education, health
care, and the criminal justice system, for example.
According to US Census data, immigrants [1] are 75%
more likely to use food stamps, medical benefits, and
housing assistance at a cost of $68 billion per year.
(Compare this with the estimated $84 billion one-time
cost of the war in Iraq.) A recent report by the
Center for Immigration Studies finds that illegals
cost the taxpayer $10 billion more than they
contribute in taxes.



Some argue that illegals contribute to our economy
through their spending. In fact, because illegals’
salaries are low, they have little to spend. In
addition, while American-born workers spend most or
all of their earnings here in the US, creating more
jobs and in turn, more tax revenues, illegals send
much of their earnings back to relatives in their
native country. For example, according to a study by
the Pew Hispanic Center and Inter-American Development
Bank, Latino immigrants in 2002, despite the soft
economy, sent a record $23 billion to relatives and
others in their home countries.



California is already almost bankrupt. Adding millions
more illegals into legal status would likely push
California over the edge. Other states with large
numbers of illegals would likely soon follow, causing
illegals to move to states that still had money to
provide them with services. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV)
called the Bush plan, “lunacy.” The Kerry plan would
legalize far more illegals.



§ Ever more illegal border
crossing. If I were a poor citizen of a poor country
and learned that the US government is not deporting
illegal aliens but instead, providing them with free
health care and education, and that with
easy-to-obtain fake ID, I could get many additional
services, my family and I would be ever more tempted
to sneak into the US.



And a majority of Mexicans, with whom the US shares a
1,000-mile border, believe there’s nothing wrong with
doing so. According to a Zogby poll, 57 percent
believe “Mexicans should have the right to enter the
US without US permission” and 58 percent agreed that
“the territory of the U.S.’ southwest rightfully
belongs to Mexico.”



Many Mexican leaders also hold these beliefs.
Co-founder of MALDEF, Mario Obledo, to whom President
Clinton awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of
Freedom, boasted, “California is going to be a
Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn’t like it should
leave." He added: "Every constitutional office in
California is going to be held by Hispanics in the
next 20 years.” Jose Pescador Osuna, former Mexican
Consul General in Los Angeles, said, "Even though I’m
saying this part serious and part joking, I believe we
are practicing 'La Reconquista' in California." Past
Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, in 1997, speaking
before the national council of La Raza, was not
half-joking when he said: "I have proudly affirmed
that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory
enclosed by its borders and that Mexican migrants are
an important – a very important – part of this." And
Mexico’s current president, Vicente Fox has marched La
Reconquista forward by having convinced President Bush
to provide legal status for millions of illegals.

In Sum

As I mentioned earlier, I am far from an American
flag-waver. But despite its flaws, America has,
heretofore, been a land of exceptional opportunity and
innovation. As I get older, I especially appreciate
that America has spawned more life-saving medical
advances and quality-of-life improvements than any
country in the world. America has also provided
trillions in foreign aid, and is the only country in
the world with a worldwide Peace Corps, a tremendous
service to the people of the developing world.