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The Soaring Cost of the Mexican Occupation in One California County Overrun By Illegals!
Rep. Joe Baca, a LA RAZA MEXICAN RACIST’S EXPANSION OF MEXICAN WELFARE STATE
Sbsun.com
Illegal migrants costly to San Bernardino County
Total spent on illegal immigrants elusive
Stephen Wall, Staff Writer
Posted: 02/20/2010 02:50:10 PM PST
Four years ago, a group of concerned citizens expressed outrage at the cost of illegal immigration to San Bernardino County taxpayers.
The price tag for six county departments to provide services to illegal immigrants was more than $38 million a year, the county Grand Jury found.
Most of the money was spent on emergency health care and law enforcement-related services for illegal immigrants.
But that was just a fraction of the tab.
Fourteen other unnamed county departments had no idea of their costs for illegal immigrant services. If those departments had provided numbers, the bill would have been substantially higher, the Grand Jury's report stated.
The Grand Jury recommended that the county immediately require all departments to start tracking their costs.
The information should be made available to the public as well as to state and federal lawmakers who would take action to solve the immigration crisis if they knew the true cost of the problem, according to the report released in 2006.
In response, the Board of Supervisors directed all departments to track the costs, but not all of them have been complying, officials said.
County supervisors want to find out what happened.
"The public has a right to know who's receiving the services and whether or not they're entitled to them," said Supervisor Neil Derry. "These are dollars that are being used by people who don't belong here that either could be used to provide services to legal citizens or returned to them in the form of lower taxes."
Supervisor Josie Gonzales also wants to know why some departments have not followed through on the board's direction.
"The fact that we continue to incur costs for services that are extremely difficult to recover funds for is of great concern to me," Gonzales said.
Supervisor Paul Biane said he will ask Chief Administrative Officer Greg Devereaux to look into the matter. But he isn't optimistic that tracking the information will make much of a difference.
"It would be great to know," Biane said, "but at the end of the day, I don't think it will mean more revenue to the county of San Bernardino to support us for the services we provide."
Brad Kuiper, who was foreman of the Grand Jury at the time, said county officials should be complaining louder.
"It's very frustrating to me and the Grand Jury," said Kuiper, a 71-year-old Apple Valley resident. "It's all taxpayer money and we don't seem to have a vote on any of this. Until it comes from the grass roots, it's obvious that none of these people that we've elected to office are going to do anything about any of this stuff."
The county is mandated by state and federal law to provide services to illegal immigrants.
Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, the county hospital in Colton, must treat every person that enters the emergency room, regardless of income or immigration status.
The hospital's health care cost for illegal immigrants was nearly $9 million in 2006. Today, that number is about $18 million, said Frank Arambula, the hospital's chief financial officer.
The hospital gets back about $5 million from Section 1011 of the Medicare program, which helps reimburse hospitals for emergency services provided to illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants make up about 1,400 emergency room patients a year, which equates to about 5 percent of total admissions, Arambula said.
"Is it a strain on our resources to provide these services? No," Arambula said. "Our mission is to take care of the sick who can't pay for health care. If someone doesn't have treatment, they could potentially infect others."
The county pays a hefty price to provide other services to illegal immigrants.
The District Attorney's Office spends about $9 million a year to prosecute cases against illegal immigrants charged with crimes, according to the 2006 Grand Jury report.
District attorney's spokeswoman Susan Mickey said she could not provide an updated cost.
"No one here has any idea where that ($9 million) figure came from," Mickey said. "We do not track cases by immigration status. We do not track by ethnicity or race or anything. If they break the law, they're prosecuted, whether they're legal or illegal."
The county Public Defender's Office also spends $9 million a year to provide criminal defense for illegal immigrants who can't afford their own lawyers, the report said.
County spokesman David Wert could not provide an updated cost.
Wert said the numbers provided to the Grand Jury were one-time estimates provided by the county administrative office at the Grand Jury's request. The county does not track costs for the Public Defender's Office because the county must provide services and there is no reimbursement from the federal government, Wert said.
Tracking costs is also extremely difficult because determining immigration status is a separate legal process, Wert said.
The Sheriff's Department does track the cost to jail illegal immigrants. Sheriff's employees undergo special training by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to determine the immigration status of inmates for purposes of reimbursement.
In the 2007-2008 fiscal year, the county spent $15.8 million to jail illegal immigrants but only got back $2.2 million from the federal government.
"It has a huge impact on the county and especially the Sheriff's Department budget," said sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Beavers. "It also taxes our jail population."
In recent years, the department has left more vacant positions unfilled and cut back on some crime-prevention and community programs as a result of not being fully reimbursed for the cost of jailing illegal immigrants, Beavers said.
For the first time, the county is seeking federal reimbursement for probation services provided to juvenile illegal immigrants. County officials are requesting $5.5 million this year to cover that cost.
Assemblyman Steve Knight, R-Palmdale, blamed the federal government and Democrats in the state Legislature for not dealing with the immigration crisis.
"They don't want to take this seriously," said Knight, whose district includes Victorville and Adelanto. "Unfortunately, counties like Los Angeles and San Bernardino are taking the brunt of a lot of this cost. How many of the basic services we provide are being stripped away because we're spending our money on illegal immigrants?"
Rep. Gary Miller, R-Brea, said citizens deserve to know how many of their tax dollars are spent on illegal immigrants.
"It's not the state's job to close down our borders," said Miller, whose district includes Chino and Chino Hills. "It's the federal government's, and we're not doing it. If we're unwilling to do our job, we should at least pick up the cost of the burden we're placing on our states."
Read more: http://www.sbsun.com/ci_14440651?source=most_viewed#ixzz0hPdYYvlH
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County spent millions on welfare for illegal immigrants' American children
Stephen Wall, Staff Writer
Posted: 01/18/2010 05:11:43 PM PST
San Bernardino County spent nearly $64 million in state and federal money last year to provide welfare benefits to the American-born children of illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants aren't entitled to welfare. But their citizen children are.
Nationwide, one in three immigrant-headed households uses at least one major welfare program, compared with 19 percent of citizen households, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates immigration reduction.
In California, 192,660 citizen children are getting welfare checks passed through their illegal immigrant parents. That costs $546 million a year in state, federal and county funds, officials say.
Some lawmakers say it's an expense California can't afford as the state struggles to close a nearly $20 billion budget gap.
"We should never be giving benefits to people in this country illegally," said state Sen. Bob Dutton, R-Rancho Cucamonga.
County officials provided data from August 2009 to show the funding and number of American-born children of illegal immigrants receiving aid in the CalWORKs and food stamp programs.
Information for all of 2009 was not easily retrievable, officials said, but the August figures are an accurate reflection of a monthly total during the year.
The county's Transitional Assistance Department runs the CalWORKs program, which provides cash aid and services to needy families, as well as the food stamp program.
The maximum CalWORKs grant for a family of three in the county is $661 per month. The maximum amount of food stamp assistance that a family of three can get is $526 a month.
The American-born children of illegal immigrants made up 15.5 percent of the CalWORKs caseload and 6.5 percent of the food stamp caseload in the county last year.
About 15,000 citizen children of illegal immigrants in the county received either CalWORKs or food stamps in a typical month last year. More than 11,000 used both programs in an average month in 2009, according to county data.
In August, the county spent nearly $3.3 million for CalWORKs and about $2 million for food stamps for the American-born children of illegal immigrants. The two programs totaled nearly $64 million when multiplied over 12 months.
The county contributes roughly $1.7 million a year of its own funds to run the programs, officials say.
"This is a huge burden on our state," said Assemblyman Steve Knight, R-Palmdale, whose district includes Victorville and northwestern San Bernardino County. "Obviously, these kids are U.S. citizens and that's fine. But when you look at it, these parents should have never been here in the first place."
The welfare expenses don't count pregnancy-related services that were provided last year to about 2,350 illegal immigrant women in the county through Medi-Cal, a health-care program for low-income California residents.
The welfare costs also don't include the roughly $11 billion the state spends annually for education, unreimbursed health care and incarceration of illegal immigrant criminals, said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation of American Immigration Reform, a Washington D.C.-based group that favors strict immigration limits.
"The American people are fed up with illegal aliens depleting our tax dollars by overrunning our schools, our hospitals and our welfare system," said Raymond Herrera, founder and president of We The People California's Crusader, a Claremont-based anti-illegal immigration group.
This month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a nearly 16 percent grant reduction to CalWORKs caseloads, a move that could save the state almost $590 million.
Dutton said the CalWORKs program has failed.
"I don't think it's done a good job," he said. "People are on it too long. They've become dependent. If the program doesn't work, you need to get rid of it and try something different."
There is a five-year time limit for adults receiving CalWORKs. But children are still entitled to their share of benefits after their parents are cut off.
There is no time limit for the food stamp program.
The county did not have data on the average length of time an illegal immigrant parent with an American-born child receives CalWORKs or food stamps.
Supporters of the CalWORKs program say the proposed cuts would have devastating consequences.
"What they're attempting to do is cripple the future prosperity of our community by denying legal benefits to these American-born children," said Gil Navarro, a member of the San Bernardino County board of education.
"You are creating havoc in the community because now people have to survive in a different way," said Navarro, who is running for a state assembly seat in the June Democratic primary against Assemblywoman Wilmer Amina Carter, D-Rialto. "Hungry people are forced to do things they may not normally do."
Not all illegal immigrants take advantage of public services like welfare that are available to their U.S.-born children.
Freddy Munguia, a 34-year-old illegal immigrant from Honduras, said he won't ask for public assistance for his 2- and 3-year-old American-born daughters.
"I don't want my kids to get any help from the government," said Munguia, a day laborer who came to this country four years ago. "Instead of helping the country, I'm taking away from it."
Critics of illegal immigration call the children "anchor babies" whose citizenship allows their illegal immigrant parents to gain a foothold in this country and receive welfare and other benefits for their kids.
"In some cases, people do come here with the intent of having children in this country because they believe it will work to their advantage," Mehlman said.
Others have a different view.
California could reap an economic boon worth $16 billion by legalizing its 1.8 million Latino illegal immigrant adults, helping fix the state's financial problems, according to a report released last week by the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration.
"Our immigrants are an asset economically, politically, religiously and culturally," said the Rev. Patricio Guillen, a retired Roman Catholic priest who is executive director of Libreria del Pueblo, a San Bernardino nonprofit that helps immigrants.
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