Saturday, January 30, 2010

OBAMA'S POPULIST JOBS PLAN: In English It's Called AMNESTY FOR 38 MILLION ILLEGALS

ACTOR BARACK OBAMA AND HIS NEW STAGED PRODUCTION OF “THE POPULIST”.
JOBS?
WASN’T THIS THE GUY THAT SERVICED THE BANKSTERS FOR A YEAR WITH NO-STRINGS BAILOUTS, THEN CAME OUT AND DECLARED THERE WAS NO MONEY LEFT FOR JOBS?
SINCE RECONSTRUCTION, NOTHING HAS HURT BLACK AMERICANS MORE THAN THE INVASION, OCCUPATIONS AND EVER EXPANDING MEXICAN WELFARE STATE. THERE IS A REASON WHY THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO THE RACIST POLITICAL PARTY FOR MEXICAN SUPREMACY OF LA RAZA “THE (MEXICAN) RACE”. IT’S ALL ABOUT STAGGERINGLY EXPENSIVE “CHEAP” MEXICAN LABOR.
THERE ARE 38 MILLION ILLEGALS MEXICAN HERE, AND THEY’RE BREEDING LIKE BUNNIES. THE LA RAZA DEMS CAN’T SEND OUT INVITATIONS FAST ENOUGH TO ASSURE MORE ILLEGALS ARE VOTING DEMPSTER!
JOBS? HOW ABOUT OBAMA’S GREEN JOBS? OR REBUILDING THE NATIONS’ INFRASTRUCTURE? NOPE, CONSTRUCTION JOBS ALL GO TO ILLEGALS! WHEN IN THE LAST 20 YEARS HAVE YOU SEE A CONSTRUCTION JOBS WHERE THERE WERE ANY AMERICANS, OR TRADESMAN THAT COULD SPEAK ENGLISH?
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Obama taking populist tone in fight over jobs
By CHARLES BABINGTON and JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writers 1 hr 29 mins ago
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is shifting his administration's emphasis to battling unemployment, the scourge that is hurting households nationwide and threatening to inflict heavy losses on Democrats in November's elections.
In the process, he and his allies in Congress intend to force Republicans, through a series of upcoming votes, to choose between Wall Street's high fliers and Main Street's middle-class workers. With Democrats struggling to deliver on big promises such as overhauling health care, they hope their increasingly populist tone _coupled with Republican resistance to Democrats' budget-cutting proposals_ will prevent wavering voters from drifting to the GOP.
The White House has pushed a job-creation agenda for months. But it wasn't supposed to reign as the top priority until Democrats achieved their much-touted health care revisions.
That trouble-plagued campaign still drags on, however, leaving Obama little choice but to make it clear that creating jobs is his chief concern.
The shift in focus is not necessarily a death knell for the health care push. House and Senate Democratic leaders are trying to persuade colleagues to pass the contentious package despite fierce GOP opposition and polls that show substantial public dislike.
For now, at least, the legislative leaders seem content for Obama to remain fairly quiet while they work behind closed doors. If they can move the health care package close to the finish line in the next few weeks, they may call on him to buttonhole enough lawmakers for a final push.
That gives Obama leeway to focus heavily on trying to whittle down the nation's 10 percent unemployment rate. In Wednesday's State of the Union address, he declared, "Jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010." On Friday he rolled out details of a $33 billion, one-year tax incentive plan to encourage more hiring.
Underscoring the administration's concern, Obama's top economic adviser said Saturday that while the U.S. economy is recovering, job losses remain painfully high.
"What we're seeing in the United States, and perhaps in some other places, is a statistical recovery and a human recession," Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
White House senior adviser David Axelrod said in an interview that the administration also hopes Congress will approve a new stimulus bill in the next couple of weeks. The other most immediate priorities, he said, are votes on a bailout fee on big banks and a financial reform package, including a new consumer finance agency.
Congressional Republicans have opposed these and other proposals, saying Obama wants to slap stifling regulations on the nation's still-struggling financial sector.
Some Democrats view the GOP stance as a policy and political miscalculation.
White House officials and Democratic lawmakers described a strategy to put Republicans on the spot by scheduling regular votes on jobs, financial regulation and other matters that fall in line with the Democrats' populist message.
The strategy is meant to put Republicans in a box. They can vote with Democrats on items such as imposing a fee on big banks that received public bailout money. Or they can oppose such measures and risk being painted as protectors of big banks and stock traders rather than working-class Americans.
Many congressional Republicans, riding high after their stunning victory in the Jan. 19 Massachusetts Senate race, think the Democrats' strategy won't work. They appear almost united in their willingness to oppose Democrats on numerous measures that arguably might appeal to the public, calling them irresponsible, unworkable or overly intrusive.
Senate Republicans recently helped kill a proposed bipartisan commission meant to reduce the deficit, even though some originally had embraced it.
They also unanimously opposed an increase in the allowable level of federal borrowing. The measure, which Democrats passed on a party-line vote, includes requirements that the government pay up front for many new programs rather than finance them through borrowing. Republicans say the pay-as-you-go plan encourages higher taxes.
Many House Republicans, meanwhile, criticized Obama's call Friday for a $5,000 tax credit for each new worker hired this year, capped at $500,000 per employer. They said previous efforts proved ineffective.
Obama himself hinted at the strategy in a recent interview with Time magazine.
"It'll be interesting to see how some, who have tried to exploit legitimate anger at the big banks this year by trying to put it on us, are going to position themselves — whether in fact they're going to want to protect all these financial institutions from the regulations that will prevent the kind of disaster that we've seen over the past couple of years," Obama said.
"They're going to have to vote yea or nay, aren't they?" the reporter said.
"Right," said the president.
Both parties have made some nods at bipartisanship in recent days. But chances for meaningful accords before the November elections seem remote.
Obama and House Republicans engaged in a freewheeling exchange Friday in Baltimore, but the most energetic portions involved each side sharply defending its positions and pointedly criticizing the others'.
House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio thanked Obama for coming. A short time later he issued a lengthy, point-by-point rebuttal of the president's comments, under the headline, "President Obama repeats discredited talking points during dialogue with House GOP."
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47% OF THOSE WITH A JOB IN LOS ANGELES ARE ILLEGALS. GO INTO VIRTUALLY ANY RETAIL STORE AND SEE. MANY DON’T KNOW ENOUGH ENGLISH TO SAY HELLO! ARE WE TO BELIEVE THEIR EMPLOYERS DIDN’T KNOW THEY WERE ILLEGAL?

SURE!

Illegalemployers.org
Hireamericansfirst.org


FORTUNE

Can I sue rivals for hiring illegal immigrants?
A contractor suspects he's losing jobs to competitors that undercut pricing by relying on illicit labor.

By Adriana Gardella
February 5 2008: 11:49 AM EST
(FORTUNE Small Business) -- Dear FSB: I recently read one of your stories that hit home ("Blowing the Whistle on Illegal Immigrants," January 2007 ). I'm a contractor who loses half of all residential jobs to firms that hire illegal laborers. They pay them less than I pay my workers and save on taxes plus all the types of insurance I must maintain as a law-abiding business owner. How can I pursue a lawsuit against my competition?
-Name Withheld
Dear reader: Right now, you've got a suspicion - which may be well founded - that you're losing business because of your competitors' shady hiring practices. But to clear the first hurdles in a lawsuit, you'll need to show a link between your losses and a rival's employment of illegal labor, says David Klehm, a Santa Ana, Calif., lawyer who specializes in this area of the law.
"You can't just sue someone because they hire illegals," he says.
The best way to prove damages is to demonstrate that you and your scofflaw competitor bid on the same job, and that you lost out because your estimate was higher. As a residential contractor, you'll have a tougher time showing that. When you're dealing with homeowners, there's less likely to be a paper trail of bids. So you'll need to get the homeowners involved - ask why they chose the other guy.
"Very few attorneys have handled this type of case," says Klehm. "The book is still being written on how to prosecute these claims using state unfair-competition and tort statutes."
Your best bet is to find a good business attorney. Possible places to find referrals: your city, county, and state bar associations. You might also visit illegalemployers.org, a network of law firms (including Klehm's) and other organizations tackling this problem.
Have a business law question for Adriana Gardella, a lawyer and FSB editor? Drop us a line and ask.
Have you struggled with immigration issues in your business? Join the discussion.

From the archives:

My competitors keep hiring illegals!

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OBAMA’S REAL JOBS PLAN: THE LA RAZA “THE RACE” AMNESTY FOR 38 MILLION.
UNEMPLOYMENT IS NOT HIGH ENOUGH! WAGES ARE NOT LOW ENOUGH! BANKSTERS’ PROFITS ARE NOT HIGH ENOUGH! MEXICAN CRIME NOT HIGH ENOUGH!
THE LA RAZA DEMS- SELLING US OUT IS ALL THEY DO!

Rep. Gutierrez Introduces Amnesty Legislation
Call your Representatives and SAY NO to Amnesty!
This week, long-time amnesty advocate Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) is introducing a massive amnesty bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. According to various news sources, the bill will grant amnesty to the 11-12 million illegal aliens in the U.S.; dramatically increase legal immigration; include the AgJobs amnesty for illegal alien farm workers; and, through the DREAM Act amnesty, authorize in-state college tuition for illegal aliens.
The unveiling of this legislation is considered to be the opening move in the latest battle to enact “comprehensive” immigration reform, one that the White House has promised to support. “Everything’s going very well. Full steam ahead,” Gutierrez said about today’s unveiling of his bill. (Roll Call, Dec. 12, 2009) “We’ve said that this bill will be to immigration what the public option was to health care. It will be progressive, it will be expansive, it will be compassionate and it will be comprehensive.” (Id.)
Battle lines on Capitol Hill are being drawn and we need your help! Please make two phone calls today: one to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (202-225-0100) and the other to your U.S. Representative. Tell them:
• Our immigration system is badly broken and you want it fixed.
• Illegal aliens and foreign guest workers take jobs from Americans and drive down wages in an economy that is already suffering the worst unemployment in decades.
• You want our immigration laws enforced not mass amnesty.
• Amnesty violates the rule of law and is fundamentally unfair to those who come legally.
• Amnesty will cost taxpayers billions and billions of dollars—a price tag we can’t afford.
• Amnesty threatens our national security as it will be impossible Homeland Security to thoroughly check the millions of applications that will swamp government agencies.
• Increasing legal immigration—when all new arrivals will need jobs—makes no sense when the nation is suffering record unemployment.
We need to send a forceful message to Capitol Hill TODAY that the American people oppose destructive immigration policies that grant amnesty to illegal aliens and bring in more foreign workers.
Call your Representatives TODAY! To find your Representative's phone numbers, click here.
You can also fax your Member of Congress! and tell them you oppose the Gutierrez bill.
When you’re done, please reach out to your family and friends and ask them to call/fax too.
Stay tuned to FAIR for more information on the Gutierrez amnesty legislation.
Click here to unsubscribe from action alerts or update your preferences.

COST OF ILLEGALS TO CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

Illegal Aliens in Federal, State, and Local Criminal Justice Systems
Summary
REBECCA L. CLARK, SCOTT A. ANDERSON
Publication Date: June 30, 2000
Permanent Link:
http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=410366
The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

This research was funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, grant number 96-DD-BX-0036. The views expressed are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect those of other staff members, officers, or trustees of The Urban Institute or any organization supporting The Urban Institute. The authors would like to thank Bill Sabol, Harvey Meyerson, Bill Adams, and Jeff Passel for their assistance. Any errors are those of the authors.
________________________________________
Overview of Problem
With the rising concern about the numbers and impacts of illegal aliens in the United States—as evidenced by the sweeping passage of Proposition 187 in California, the immigrant provisions in 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), and Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA)—criminal illegal aliens have become a subject of particular focus. These individuals have not only entered or resided in the United States without the knowledge or permission of the U.S. government, but, while here, they have also violated the laws of the nation, its states, or municipalities.
At state and local levels, the costs of arresting, prosecuting, sentencing, and supervising criminal illegal aliens has become a major issue. Six states have filed suits to force the federal government to reimburse them for criminal justice costs associated with illegal aliens. They have argued that it is the federal government's responsibility to keep illegal aliens out of this country and to expel illegal aliens who have gained entry, and that, therefore, the federal government should offset any fiscal impacts that these illegal aliens have on lower levels of government through direct reimbursement. None of these suits has been successful.
The federal government has taken some steps to reimburse states for some of the costs associated with criminal illegal aliens. Section 510 of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) authorized the Attorney General to reimburse states for the criminal justice costs attributable to undocumented persons. No appropriations for illegal aliens were made until 1994, when the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (Public Law 103-317 or the Crime Act of 1994) authorized $1.8 billion over six years to reimburse states for criminal justice costs associated with illegal aliens. The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) was established to allocate and distribute these monies.
This research describes the characteristics of illegal aliens in the criminal justice system at federal, state, and local levels. A goal of this project is to be as nationally representative as possible, given the limits of existing data sets. The federal-level analysis is based on two data sets, from the Pretrial Services Act Information System (PSAIS) and the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), which are representative of individuals involved in the federal criminal justice system. (The PSAIS contains information on defendants charged with federal offenses whom pretrial service officers interview, investigate, or supervise. The USSC Monitoring Data Base contains information on criminal defendants sentenced according to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984.) The state-level analysis is based on data collected for the SCAAP on the seven states with the most illegal aliens, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas (Warren 1997). All of these states except Illinois filed suits to force the federal government to reimburse them for criminal justice costs associated with illegal aliens. The local-level analysis is limited to one site, Cook County, Illinois, and is based on data collected from the INS District Office and the Cook County Department of Corrections.

MEXICAN PRESIDENT CLAIMS AMERICA WILL BEG FOR MORE ILLEGALS - WE ARE MEXICO'S WELFARE AND PRISON SYSTEM!

Former President Fox of Mexico to BBC:

"I dare say that in 10 years, the U.S. will be begging, will be pleading with Mexico to send it workers."

"Mexico is one of the countries where illegal immigrants are highly vulnerable to human rights violations and become victims of degrading sexual exploitation and slavery like practices, and are denied access to education and health care."

“Do Mexicans appreciate the way America has allowed so many poor, Mexican illegals to enter the United States? No. According to a recent Zogby poll, 73 percent of Mexicans call Americans "racist"!

LOS ANGELES - Mexican Gang Land ANOTHER WAR WE'RE LOSING

Los Angeles Times

Council's criminal negligence on gangs
As violence rages on L.A.'s streets, City Hall is deadlocked in a turf war over money. Tim Rutten

March 12, 2008

Let's talk about the surge not the one in Baghdad but the one on the streets of Los Angeles, where a recent spate of particularly horrific gang shootings has killed and wounded more than a dozen people.

So what's City Hall doing as the body count grows?

Well, as Times staff writer Duke Helf and reported Monday, "city leaders are locked in a turf battle of their own over who should control gang prevention programs and the millions of dollars to pay for them."

City Controller Laura Chick recently completed an audit of the programs and recommended consolidating all anti gang initiatives and their funding under a single official in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office. The programs currently are overseen by the City Council. Though he didn't seek the assignment, the mayor has endorsed the proposal, as have Police Chief William Bratton and Sheriff Lee Baca. A massive study of the gang problem commissioned by the City Council and conducted by civil rights attorney Connie Rice included a similar recommendation.

So what's the problem?


City Councilman Tony Cardenas, who chairs the Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development, doesn't like the idea. He thinks the council should retain control of the programs and their funding. Friday, his committee will hold a hearing on the controller's proposal, and the odds are that nothing will happen.

Cardenas isn't entirely alone here. Even the council members who claim to be sympathetic to giving the mayor's office responsibility have consigned the proposal to parliamentary limbo by referring it to no less than 15 different committee hearings. How long do we suppose that will take?

This is more than dithering as usual. This is the council standing in the way of desperately needed civic change purely out of institutional self interest.

To understand why, it's useful to ask a seemingly unrelated question: Why, after all these years, and in defiance of repeated attempts at reform, does the council insist on maintaining its power to act as the court of final appeal for every zoning decision in the city of Los Angeles? Why, moreover, does the council almost always defer to the wishes of the member in whose district the project at issue sits when it exercises that appellate power?

It's all about money. As long as individual council members maintain the ultimate power to approve or veto construction of everything from a new fence to a new hotel in their district, every developer, contractor and lobbyist with an active neuron knows that they'd better ante up with the requisite campaign contributions or move to a game at another table.

Apologists for this system like to pretend that it's an important legislative check on the city bureaucracy and the appointed board of zoning appeals. Actually, it's a genteel shakedown operation.

The city's ramshackle network of gang prevention and intervention programs operates in the same general way, although the sums involved are smaller. Right now, millions of dollars every year are spent on the so called LA Bridges initiative, which operates under council oversight and doles out money to programs and projects on a district by district basis. It's a safe bet that each council member signs off on the expenditures in their district. The council also supervises the millions of dollars in individual contracts currently let for various gang prevention and intervention efforts.

You can be hard nosed and call it patronage, or you can be charitable and call it "constituent service" (though the fact is that the ineffective LA Bridges program reaches less than 1% of the 300,000 Los Angeles children who live in gang infested neighborhoods, according to the Rice report). You can be realistic and acknowledge that it's a little of both, but the fact of the matter is that it isn't working, and because it isn't, the body count is growing. Moreover, it's being allowed to grow for reasons that ought to shame everyone in City Hall.

Unless the victims of gang violence happen to be small children or a promising student athlete, as they have been recently, the killings and day to day terror pass unnoticed because they occur in neighborhoods where few people vote or contribute to campaigns. Often, both assailant and victim are gang members.

As Rice pointed out Monday on National Public Radio, "Three weekends ago, we had 27 separate shootings in a spark of Grape Street Crip mayhem, and it barely made the paper. If you had a 27 shooting shootout in any other American city, it probably would have made '60 Minutes.' "

Shame on us, and shame on the council if it continues to delay consolidating the city's anti gang efforts under a single official who can be obliged to conduct business transparently and who can be held accountable for results. Obstruction as usual is intolerable when its cost has to be calculated in murdered children.
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FBI DIRECTOR: Violent MS-13 GANGS SPEAD OVER COUNTRY

FBI DIRECTOR:
"The violent MS-13 - or Mara Salvatrucha - street gang is following the migratory routes of illegal aliens across the country, FBI officials say, calling the Salvadoran gang the new American mafia. MS-13, has a significant presence in the Washington area, and other gangs are spreading into small towns and suburbs by following illegal aliens seeking work in places such as Providence, R.I., and the Carolinas, FBI task force director Robert Clifford said. "The migrant moves and the gang follows," said Mr. Clifford, director of the agency's MS-13 National Gang Task Force."

CAR SMUGGLING ON THE MEX BORDER

ANYONE KNOW WHAT THE FIGURES ARE FOR 2009?


With crossings between the ports of entry becoming so difficult, Tijuana has become the major staging ground for car-smuggling trips on the Southwest border.The number of illegal migrants caught inside vehicles at the San Ysidro gateway has quadrupled since 2000, from 10,600 to 40,033 in 2005.

MEXICAN VIOLENCE ALONG OUR OPEN & UNDEFENDED BORDERS

THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN 2006. SINCE THEN MILLION MORE ILLEGAL HAVE POURED OVER OUR BORDERS, INTO OUR JOBS, WELFARE LINES, AND PRISONS.
MEXICAN GANGS HAVE SPREAD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY, AS HAS THE NARCO DRUG CARTEL.

MEANWHILE, THE LA RAZA DEMS PUSH FOR AMNESTY, MOVE BORDER PATROL OFF OUR BORDERS AND LEAVE THEM OPEN AND UNDEFENDED.

IT’S ALL ABOUT ASSURING THEIR CORPORATE PAYMASTERS THAT THERE IS A HEAVY BREEDING CLASS OF MEXICANS TO PROVIDE STAGGERINGLY EXPENSIVE “CHEAP” LABOR.

THERE IS A REASON WHY MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS OF LA RAZA,” THE (MEXICAN) RACE”



NEW YORK TIMES
February 11, 2006

U.S. Cites Rise in Violence Along Border With Mexico

By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — Mexican criminal syndicates are stepping up their attacks on American agents patrolling the border as officials of the Homeland Security Department intensify efforts to stem the flow of immigrants and drugs into the United States, American officials said this week.
In recent months, scores of Border Patrol agents have been fired upon or pelted with large stones as well as with cloth-covered stones that have been doused with flammable liquid and set ablaze. Since October, agents have been attacked in more than 190 cases, officials said on Thursday.

Most of the attacks have occurred along the Mexican border near San Diego, but shootings have also been reported along the border in Texas near the cities of Laredo and McAllen. In the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, there were 778 attacks on agents, up from 374 in the previous fiscal year, Homeland Security Department officials said.
One stone struck an agent in the eye; a gunshot hit an agent in the leg. The officials could not say precisely how many officers had been injured in the attacks, which have originated from both sides of the border.
"This is what we're facing," said David V. Aguilar, the Border Patrol chief, who played a videotape at a news conference on Thursday that featured a patrol car riddled with bullets and agents scrambling for cover as stones rained down on them. "This is a very serious type of situation."
The homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, who led the news conference, said officials planned to continue their efforts at securing the United States-Mexico border.
This week President Bush asked Congress to increase the Homeland Security Department's budget by nearly 6 percent. The Border Patrol would receive an extra $459 million to hire 1,500 new agents, bringing the total force to about 14,000. An additional $410 million would be allocated to add 6,700 beds for detainees so fewer illegal immigrants would have to be released before being deported. Another $100 million would be spent on cameras, sensors and other detection technology.
Mr. Chertoff said the department planned to focus on illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico, who have typically been released after apprehension because of shortages of beds. Last fall, he expanded the use of summary deportations, a process known as expedited removal, in which illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico are detained and then deported without seeing an immigration judge.
But officials have struggled to find space for family groups and remain unable to process illegal immigrants from El Salvador because of a court ruling from the 1980's, when civil war wracked that country, that requires officials to allow Salvadorans to see judges before deportation.
Nationwide, 18,207 illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico, nearly 60 percent of the total apprehended, were released on their own recognizance in the first three months of this fiscal year.

ANCHOR BABIES - 10% OF ALL BIRTHS - Ever Expanding Mexican Welfare State

Sept. 24, 2006,
'Border baby' boom strains S. Texas

More illegal immigrants are pouring into the state to give birth

By JAMES PINKERTON
Houston Chronicle

RIO GRANDE CITY — First it was a trickle, now it's a flood.

Rising numbers of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America are streaming into Texas to give birth, straining hospitals and costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, health officials say.

Doctors and health officials say they are overwhelmed by both the new arrivals and those immigrant mothers who already are in the state. Even Houston's feeling the pinch. An estimated 70 percent to 80 percent of the 10,587 births at Ben Taub General Hospital and Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital last year were to undocumented immigrants, administrators say.

Also feeling the strain is Starr County, an already poor South Texas county that has the region's only taxpayer supported hospital district.

Immigrants "want a U.S. born baby" and know that emergency room staffers don't collect any money up front, said Dr. Mario Rodriguez, an obstetrician in Starr County.

"The word is out: Come to Starr County and get delivered for free. Why pay $1,000 in Mexico when you can get it for free?" Rodriguez said.

'Unfortunately, doctors say, Starr County isn't alone.
“OUR LITTLE SNAPSHOT IS DUPLICATED IN ALL THE MUNICIPALITIES BETWEEN HERE AND CALIFORNIA.....” how about every muni in all 50 states? Know of a state not overrun by illegals?

''Our little snapshot is duplicated in all the municipalities between here and California," said Tony Falcon, a Rio Grande City physician who was appointed to the U.S. Mexico Border Health Commission in April. ''What you see here is what is happening in Brownsville, McAllen, El Paso and San Diego."
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THE WASHINGTON POST

Anchor babies account for roughly 10% of all US births. In 2003, anchor babies accounted for 70% of all births in San Joachim General Hospital in Stockton, California.

US taxpayers spent an estimated $7.4 Billion in 2003 to educate illegal immigrants.
34% of students in the Los Angeles school system are illegals or children of illegals.
Two thirds of Illegal Immigrants adults DO NOT have a high school degree or equivalent. The illiteracy rate for Illegal Immigrants is 2.5 times higher than that of US Citizens.

HOW MANY ILLEGALS? LA RAZA DEMS DON'T WANT THEM COUNTED IN CENSUS

HOMELAND SECURITY OFFICE.... THERE ARE 38 MILLION ILLEGALS HERE, NOT 12 MILLION!

Illegal alien population may be as high as 38 million

A new report finds the Homeland Security Department "grossly underestimates" the number of illegal aliens living in the U.S.

Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Studies released a report August 31 that estimates the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. is between 8 and 12 million. But the group Californians for Population Stabilization, or CAPS, has unveiled a report estimating the illegal population is actually between 20 and 38 million.

Four experts, all of whom contributed to the study prepared by CAPS, discussed their findings at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington Wednesday. James Walsh, a former associate general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said he is "appalled" that the Bush administration, lawyers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and every Democratic presidential candidate, with the exception of Joe Biden, have no problem with sanctuary cities for illegal aliens.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the sanctuary cities and the people that support them are violating the laws of the United States of America. They're violating 8 USC section 1324 and 1325, which is a felony [it's] a felony to aid, support, transport, shield, harbor illegal aliens," Walsh stated.

Walsh said his analysis indicating there are 38 million illegal aliens in the U.S. was calculated using the conservative estimate of three illegal immigrants entering the U.S. for each one apprehended. According to Walsh, "In the United States, immigration is in a state of anarchy not chaos, but anarchy."
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THE LOOTING of AMERICAN Under Mexican Occupation - BY KIM PRESTAP

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

THAT SUCKING SOUND. THE LOOTING OF AMERICA BY THE MEXICAN OCCUPIERS

LEGISLATORS FROM MEXICO STATE ANGRY AT INFLUX OF MEXICANS RETURNING TO THEIR HOMELAND

Posted by Kim Priestap

Can you believe the nerve of these people? Nine state legislators from the Mexican state of Sonora traveled to Tucson to complain about Arizona's new employer crackdown on illegals from Mexico. It seems many Mexican illegals are now returning to their hometowns and the officials in the Sonora state government are ticked. A delegation of nine state legislators from Sonora was in Tucson on Tuesday to say Arizona's new employer sanctions law will have a devastating effect on the Mexican state. At a news conference, the legislators said Sonora - Arizona's southern neighbor, made up of mostly small towns - cannot handle the demand for housing, jobs and schools it will face as illegal Mexican workers here return to their hometowns without jobs or money. The law, which took effect Jan.1, punishes employers who knowingly hire individuals who don't have valid legal documents to work in the United States. Penalties include suspension or loss of a business license. They're teed off because their own citizens are returning to their hometowns, placing a huge burden on their state government. They want to tell them how the law will affect Mexican families on both sides of the border 'How can they pass a law like this?' asked Mexican Rep. Leticia Amparano- Gamez, who represents Nogales. 'There is not one person living in Sonora who does not have a friend or relative working in Arizona,' she said in Spanish. 'Mexico is not prepared for this, for the tremendous problems' it will face as more and more Mexicans working in Arizona and sending money to their families return to hometowns in Sonora without jobs, she said. ' We are one family, socially and economically,' she said of the people of Sonora and Arizona. Wrong!!! The United States is a sovereign nation and its states and its citizens are not responsible for the welfare of Mexico's citizens. It's time for the Mexican government to stop parasitically feeding off of the United States and start taking care of its own citizens. Too bad all the states don't pass a law just like it. Maybe that's the answer since congress will not do anything.

MEXICAN LOOTING... THAT SUCKING SOUND

“I know that many aliens who come here to work want to remain here, yet all too many come to the United States with a "looter" philosophy, giving the lawful immigrants who want to share in the “American Dream” a bad reputation.” Recently I wrote a commentary about the movement of cash out of the United States through remittances and other methods by illegal aliens who came here with the single-minded focus of securing illegal employment to send money home to assist their family members. The amounts of money that are consequently drained from our economy are huge and do not include the other costs our nation incurs because of the 40 million illegal aliens who are estimated to be residing and working in our country illegally. This article, originally published in the Christian Science Monitor, focuses on the impact of the reduction in the value of the dollar on the illegal aliens who are draining billions of dollars out of our nation's economy – but nothing is said about the impact of this loss of money on the economy of the United States and on the ability of the average American to meet his expenses. So-called "man in the street" interviews of lottery ticket purchasers (that broadcast journalists frequently conduct when lottery jackpots soar into the stratosphere) often include a person with a distinctive foreign accent (not necessary Spanish) and the question is asked, "If you win the $120 million prize what will you do?" In so many of those cases, the answer is quick and to the point, "I am going home to my country!" In my former INS experience, it was not uncommon for the illegal aliens I arrested to make it clear that they were here for one purpose: to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible and send it all home. I know that many aliens who come here to work want to remain here, yet all too many come to the United States with a "looter" philosophy, giving the lawful immigrants who want to share in the “American Dream” a bad reputation. Part of the problem is that the relationship that businesses have with the United States is one of greed. These companies couldn't care less about the damage that they do to this country or the average working American. They are happy to exploit the illegal aliens and in so doing, get a lucrative piece of the action. And the bankers and money wire services like Western Union have become the silent partners of the illegal aliens. Of course, if the American dollar plummets far enough many illegal aliens will probably just head home, leaving this country in financial disarray. But when you read about the amounts of money being sent out of the United States that is lost to our economy, you must realize that the money you are reading about is not being earned by Americans or by lawful immigrants, because they have been displaced by illegal aliens who are willing to work for substandard wages. Unfortunately, Congress has just passed what has been billed as an "Economic Stimulus Package." This bill will undoubtedly be signed into law by the President and will call for taxpayers to be mailed one-time rebate checks that (it is hoped) will be used to spend on consumer goods that – get this – for the most part are not even produced in the United States. A large part of the problem we are having right now is that Americans are not saving enough money. Our citizens have been cashing in the value of their homes with second mortgages and huge credit card debts and now, the value of most of those houses has fallen into the basement! There is an utter lack of fiscal responsibility in abundant evidence in Washington and around kitchen tables across the United States and meanwhile, the front runners in the Presidential elections are eager to provide amnesty and thus more incentives for still more illegal aliens to drain still more money out of our economy. They will do this through remittances and other means of sending money back home. They will do this when they show up in the emergency rooms of hospitals across our nation demanding medical treatment without medical insurance. The criminal element of this massive influx of illegal aliens will injure and kill more victims in our country, destroying lives and the lives of family members of the victims of those crimes. Some of the crimes will also result in property losses and in fraud. Identity theft is the fastest growing white collar crime in America today and is often motivated by organized rings that sell these stolen identities to illegal aliens seeking illegal employment. The Congressional Budget Office has recently done a study that concludes that contrary to the assertions of the open borders / pro-amnesty crowd, illegal aliens represent a net drain on the economy. Finally, the attacks of September 11, 2001, in addition to the death and destruction they wrought, hammered our economy and the economies of other countries. Trade suffered, travel and tourism suffered – yet the travel and hospitality industries are pushing a program known as "Discover America" wherein they are attempting to have the United States government expand the Visa Waiver Program beyond the current 27 participating countries to as many as 39 countries.

THE AMERICAN WORKING POOR AND MIDDLE CLASS SHOULDER THE GREATEST BURDEN OF OPEN BORDERS

In the end, the United States and its working poor and middle class that is shouldering the greatest burden of the open borders and cash movement mess. Interestingly, with all of the interviews that were conducted in the article linked above, not a single interview was conducted to find out what the impact of the decline of the dollar has had on the average American family. ................

FRANK BORELLI - OFFICER.com - AN AMERICAN SEES & SPEAKS

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

FROM FRANK BORELLI
OFFICER.com

Illegal Immigration

With this entry I decided to tackle a problem that has no easy solution: illegal immigration. Now before you good readers get your dander up, please understand a few things: first, this is all my opinion (unless I cite facts and references); second, we all have different opinions; third, we aren’t all ever going to agree about everything. With all that said, let’s take a look at a few statistics I was provided via email and let me share some of my outlook with regard to them. Let me specify this up front: I haven’t confirmed or qualified any of the numbers quoted in the article I received via email. Taking them “on faith” - even if they aren’t accurate - I’ve made comments about each. The comments would still apply even if the numbers were reduced by fully 50%. First number: approximately 20 million illegal immigrants in the United States. I had once read the number was closer to 30 million, or 1-in-10 since we’ve got more than 300 million people living in the United States now. Hmm 20 million OR 30 million. Let me see what I can find to compare that to in an effort to put it into some type of perspective. According to the 2005 census numbers: The city of New York had approximately 8.1 million residents. So, the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. is somewhere between 2.5 – 4 times the number of people living in New York. Can you imagine? EMPTY NEW YORK at least 2.5 times, and maybe some more. Los Angeles: 3.8 million. The number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. is 5 – 7.5 times more than the entire population of Los Angeles. Chicago: 2.8 million. Illegal immigrants in the U.S. equal as much as TEN TIMES the number of people living in Chicago. Houston: 2 million. Number of illegal immigrants in the U.S.? Ten to fifteen times more than the number of people in Houston. Here’s what I find scary: We could EMPTY New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Antonio JUST TO EQUAL THE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES. That’s seven of the largest cities in the county. That’s just to get to the 20 million number. To get to the 30 million number we have to add the next THIRTEEN largest cities in the United States. That’s the twenty largest cities in the United States. We have enough illegal immigrants in the United States to populate our twenty largest cities. Does that cause concern to anyone else? Second Number: If the estimated 3.5 million illegal aliens living in California were moved back to Mexico, the state would save approximately $10.2 BILLION dollars PER YEAR in school costs, hospital services and prison maintenance. Given a recent news article about a Mexican state/district that is complaining about the financial impact it’s absorbing as illegal immigrants leave the U.S. and go back to Mexico, I have to think there is some credence to this. Third Number: In Denver approximately 12,000 gang members would be taken out of the population if the illegal aliens were caught and sent back to their own country or countries. What does 12,000 less gang members translate into in saved police labor dollars? Fourth Number: If no more employers hired illegal aliens to work “off the books” or “under the table” the income taxes paid on the legitimate incomes earned by American Citizens would increase federal government revenue by approximately $401 BILLION dollars. ANOTHER approximately $4 Billion would be further collected by state, county and local governments. Fifth number: Approximately 15,000 MS-13 gang members who are responsible for distributing about $130 Billion worth of illegal drugs EACH YEAR would be gone. In Los Angeles alone about 20,000 members of the 18th Street Gang would be removed. Final number: If we didn’t have 20 to 30 million illegal aliens living in the United States, earning money (non-taxed), and sending that money OUT of the country, we’d keep an additional $80 Billion dollars within our own economy. So, let me recap: IF we could get the 20 – 30 million illegal aliens out of the United States we could change our economy for the better by approximately $890 Billion (just short of ONE TRILLION dollars). We could keep about $130 Billion worth of illegal drugs off the streets (and away from our children). More than 47,000 gang members would be invited to leave our country. BILLIONS (pure guess) of dollars spent on enforcement and public safety labor would be saved. Does anyone still think that illegal immigration doesn’t present a problem for our country? More importantly, does anyone believe that we should just grant that (almost) TRILLION dollar illegal community amnesty and invite them to stay legally? If you said, “Yes,” then I encourage you to reconsider the 47,000 gang members and their (more than) $130 Billion in illegal drugs, some of which are surely being sold / distributed to our CHILDREN. Now, lest someone accuse me of being prejudiced, let me say this: I firmly believe that America was built by immigrants and that we should continue to encourage those seeking a dream to come here LEGALLY and pursue that dream. They should be required to have a sponsor; a waiting job; and a place to live. They should have a criminal background investigation to make sure they aren’t simply escaping justice in their own country. They should be tested for contagious diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis. Our citizenship laws should be changed so that the child of an illegal alien that is born in the United States is NOT a citizen. “Anchor” children present huge issues for our country (remember, this is just my opinion). Another option is that immigrants wishing to become citizens could come to our country and enlist in our armed services. All members of our armed services should be required to speak English FLUENTLY. I believe that we SHOULD continue to see our country grow. That growth should occur through births and legal immigration. However, when 10% of our current population is here illegally and costs our country almost one trillion dollars, it’s obvious that we need to do something. That something does NOT include happy-happy joy-joy speeches made by politicians hoping to get votes from those related to illegal immigrants, or benefiting from their presence in our country. That something should be the proper adjustment of laws; the careful enforcement of immigration controls; and, above all, the aggressive tracking and removal of illegal aliens from within our borders. Your thoughts? The only thing I have to add to Frank’s piece is that legal immigration numbers should be reduced. Nobody ever asks the most important question there is. What should the total
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How Did Eisenhower Deal With Mexican Invasion?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0706/p09s01-coop.html
How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico

By John Dillin

WASHINGTON – George W. Bush isn't the first Republican president to face a full-blown immigration crisis on the US-Mexican border.

Fifty-three years ago, when newly elected Dwight Eisenhower moved into the White House, America's southern frontier was as porous as a spaghetti sieve. As many as 3 million illegal migrants had walked and waded northward over a period of several years for jobs in California, Arizona, Texas, and points beyond.
President Eisenhower cut off this illegal traffic. He did it quickly and decisively with only 1,075 United States Border Patrol agents - less than one-tenth of today's force. The operation is still highly praised among veterans of the Border Patrol.
Although there is little to no record of this operation in Ike's official papers, one piece of historic evidence indicates how he felt. In 1951, Ike wrote a letter to Sen. William Fulbright (D) of Arkansas. The senator had just proposed that a special commission be created by Congress to examine unethical conduct by government officials who accepted gifts and favors in exchange for special treatment of private individuals.
General Eisenhower, who was gearing up for his run for the presidency, said "Amen" to Senator Fulbright's proposal. He then quoted a report in The New York Times, highlighting one paragraph that said: "The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican 'wetbacks' to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government."
Years later, the late Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower's first attorney general, said in an interview with this writer that the president had a sense of urgency about illegal immigration when he took office.
America "was faced with a breakdown in law enforcement on a very large scale," Mr. Brownell said. "When I say large scale, I mean hundreds of thousands were coming in from Mexico [every year] without restraint."
Although an on-and-off guest-worker program for Mexicans was operating at the time, farmers and ranchers in the Southwest had become dependent on an additional low-cost, docile, illegal labor force of up to 3 million, mostly Mexican, laborers.
According to the Handbook of Texas Online, published by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association, this illegal workforce had a severe impact on the wages of ordinary working Americans. The Handbook Online reports that a study by the President's Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas in 1950 found that cotton growers in the Rio Grande Valley, where most illegal aliens in Texas worked, paid wages that were "approximately half" the farm wages paid elsewhere in the state.
Profits from illegal labor led to the kind of corruption that apparently worried Eisenhower. Joseph White, a retired 21-year veteran of the Border Patrol, says that in the early 1950s, some senior US officials overseeing immigration enforcement "had friends among the ranchers," and agents "did not dare" arrest their illegal workers.
Walt Edwards, who joined the Border Patrol in 1951, tells a similar story. He says: "When we caught illegal aliens on farms and ranches, the farmer or rancher would often call and complain [to officials in El Paso]. And depending on how politically connected they were, there would be political intervention. That is how we got into this mess we are in now."
Bill Chambers, who worked for a combined 33 years for the Border Patrol and the then-called US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), says politically powerful people are still fueling the flow of illegals.
During the 1950s, however, this "Good Old Boy" system changed under Eisenhower - if only for about 10 years.
In 1954, Ike appointed retired Gen. Joseph "Jumpin' Joe" Swing, a former West Point classmate and veteran of the 101st Airborne, as the new INS commissioner.
Influential politicians, including Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D) of Texas and Sen. Pat McCarran (D) of Nevada, favored open borders, and were dead set against strong border enforcement, Brownell said. But General Swing's close connections to the president shielded him - and the Border Patrol - from meddling by powerful political and corporate interests.
One of Swing's first decisive acts was to transfer certain entrenched immigration officials out of the border area to other regions of the country where their political connections with people such as Senator Johnson would have no effect.
Then on June 17, 1954, what was called "Operation Wetback" began. Because political resistance was lower in California and Arizona, the roundup of aliens began there. Some 750 agents swept northward through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day. By the end of July, over 50,000 aliens were caught in the two states. Another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country.
By mid-July, the crackdown extended northward into Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and eastward to Texas.
By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 illegals had left the Lone Star State voluntarily.
Unlike today, Mexicans caught in the roundup were not simply released at the border, where they could easily reenter the US. To discourage their return, Swing arranged for buses and trains to take many aliens deep within Mexico before being set free.
Tens of thousands more were put aboard two hired ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried the aliens from Port Isabel, Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles south.
The sea voyage was "a rough trip, and they did not like it," says Don Coppock, who worked his way up from Border Patrolman in 1941 to eventually head the Border Patrol from 1960 to 1973.
Mr. Coppock says he "cannot understand why [President] Bush let [today's] problem get away from him as it has. I guess it was his compassionate conservatism, and trying to please [Mexican President] Vincente Fox."
There are now said to be 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the US. Of the Mexicans who live here, an estimated 85 percent are here illegally.
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BORDER PATROL VETS OFFER TIPS ON CURBING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
One day in 1954, Border Patrol agent Walt Edwards picked up a newspaper in Big Spring, Texas, and saw some startling news. The government was launching an all-out drive to oust illegal aliens from the United States.
The orders came straight from the top, where the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, had put a former West Point classmate, Gen. Joseph Swing, in charge of immigration enforcement.
General Swing's fast-moving campaign soon secured America's borders - an accomplishment no other president has since equaled. Illegal migration had dropped 95 percent by the late 1950s.
Several retired Border Patrol agents who took part in the 1950s effort, including Mr. Edwards, say much of what Swing did could be repeated today.
"Some say we cannot send 12 million illegals now in the United States back where they came from. Of course we can!" Edwards says.
Donald Coppock, who headed the Patrol from 1960 to 1973, says that if Swing and Ike were still running immigration enforcement, "they'd be on top of this in a minute."
William Chambers, another '50s veteran, agrees. "They could do a pretty good job" sealing the border.
Edwards says: "When we start enforcing the law, these various businesses are, on their own, going to replace their [illegal] workforce with a legal workforce."
While Congress debates building a fence on the border, these veterans say other actions should have higher priority.
1. End the current practice of taking captured Mexican aliens to the border and releasing them. Instead, deport them deep into Mexico, where return to the US would be more costly.
2. Crack down hard on employers who hire illegals. Without jobs, the aliens won't come.
3. End "catch and release" for non-Mexican aliens. It is common for illegal migrants not from Mexico to be set free after their arrest if they promise to appear later before a judge. Few show up.
The Patrol veterans say enforcement could also be aided by a legalized guest- worker program that permits Mexicans to register in their country for temporary jobs in the US. Eisenhower's team ran such a program. It permitted up to 400,000 Mexicans a year to enter the US for various agriculture jobs that lasted for 12 to 52 weeks.
• John Dillin is former managing editor of the Monitor.
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The American Legion Takes A Stand Against Illegal Immigration
________________________________________
The American Legion Takes A Stand Against Illegal Immigration

The America Legion recently released a statement on ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, a very pointed statement. The Legion published their policy in a 30 page booklet, spelling their policy out in detail:
The nation’s largest veterans organization released this week a policy bulletin that takes a firm stand against illegal immigration and calls on its members to hold elected officials accountable for implementing and enforcing U.S. immigration law.

The 30-page bulletin is officially titled, “The American Legion20Policy on Immigration: A Strategy to Address Illegal Immigration in the United States.”
It is about time that a group who stands up for veterans of all services, whether they served in peacetime or wartime took a tough stand on a problem that is overwhelming this country. We have roughly 25 million veterans in this country who served honorably to protect the legal residents of this country, not the people who invade our borders nearly unchecked.
More from WND on the American Legion:
“The American Legion members have served in the U.S. Armed Forces throughout the world so that Americans can be safe at home,” the organization’s website explains. “This gives them a unique perspective to the threat that open borders present to their homeland.”
“America is a nation built by immigrants and the American Legion recognizes and celebrates that,” said National Commander David K. Rehbein in a press release. “We do take strong issue, however, with illegal immigration. It’s a matter of national security. The 9/11 hijackers and three of the men who plotted to kill innocent Americans at Ft. Dix were perfect examples of terrorists exploiting our weak immigration laws and our lack of enforcement. This booklet is a good reminder that America has a serious problem that needs to be addressed.”
The Legion’s stance on illegal immigration is clearly stated o n page 1 of the booklet, it stands alone:
“The American Legion is opposed to any person or persons being in this country illegally, regardless of race, sex, creed, color or national origin,” the bulletin states. “We believe the current laws governing immigration should be enforced impartially and equally.”
The America Legion has a long history that dates back to Theodore Roosevelt. The Legion knows something about supporting veterans and the laws of this country. Read on:
Originally founded in 1919 on an idea proposed by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (the president of the same name’s eldest son), the Legion has now grown to a membership of more than 2.6 million wartime veterans organized in more than 14,000 posts nationwide.
The policy bulletin explains, “Legionnaires subscribe to a creed, ‘To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America; to maintain law and order and to foster and perpetuate a 100 percent Americanism.’ These words are recited in unison at Legion meetings and represent a continuing contract of service to benefit America and it is this commitment by Legionnaires that is the fuel for action on illegal immigration and other national security concerns facing this country.”
The Legion hopes the policy booklet will educate the American public on how “the security, economy and social fabric of the United States of America is=2 0seriously threatened by individuals who are illegally in this country.”
“Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime,” the booklet states. “The poor, minorities, children and individuals with little education are particularly vulnerable. It causes an enormous drain on public services, depresses wages of American workers, and contributes to population growth that, in turn, contributes to school overcrowding and housing shortages. Directly and indirectly, U.S. taxpayers are paying for illegal immigration.”
In financial terms, the booklet cites a report by the Center for Immigration Studies that claims the average illegal alien household in 2003 paid approximately $4,200 in federal taxes while, on average, created $7,000 in costs at the federal level.
The booklet does highlight a real problem that the USA faces despite the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. It spells out that it is about educating all people on the dearth of security issues still face this country today. Not only did they publish this booklet for education purposes but it also contains language that discusses ways to prevent these security issues:
In response to what it sees as a contributing factor to crime, terrorism, unemployment and depressed wages, the Legion proposes the following five-point strategy urging the federal government to enact the following steps:
1. Secure the borders and other points of entry in the United States, including construction of a physical barrier and sufficient Border Patrol presence.
2. Eliminate the jobs magnet and social services benefits that draw illegal immigrants to the U.S. by enforcing laws sanctioning employers who hire illegal aliens, implementing employment eligibility verification and eliminating government benefits for illegal aliens.
3. Eliminate amnesty laws that permit illegal aliens to break the law and remain in the U.S.
4. Reduce the U.S. illegal alien population by attrition through workplace enforcement, interagency and interstate cooperation, rejection of driver’s license plans, mandating English as national language and establishing parameters for noncriminal deportations.
5. Screen and track foreign visitors legally entering the United States. The plan further calls for reforms to current legal immigration policy, including alteration of the non-immigrant visa program that allows some nations’ citizens entrance to the U.S. without a visa application, elimination of the visa lottery that randomly approves visas from countries with low immigration rates and expanding visa allowances for seasonal and temporary workers.
The five step program is a good program. It is workable with some change in legislation and enforcement of current laws. It becomes more important when one considers the following report from WND:
Costs for securing the nati on’s borders are expected to increase 20.6 percent in fiscal year 2009. These include expenses for border patrol, electronic surveillance, the border fence and other security needs. President Bush allocated $44.3 billion for the Department of Homeland Security – a 4.5 percent increase from last year’s budget of $42.4 billion.
“While the U.S. builds a fence across much of the border, many illegals are taking a different route. Underground,” Rubenstein reveals. “Authorities have discovered dozens of illegal tunnels across the international border in recent years. Smuggling of drugs, weapons, and immigrants takes place daily through these underground passageways.”
Illegal aliens also use drainage systems to travel across the U.S.-Mexico border – from El Paso to San Diego.
“One tunnel, actually a system of two half-mile passages connecting Tijuana with San Diego, is by comparison a superhighway,” he wrote.
While the Border Patrol attempts to stop these underground incursions with steel doors, cameras and sensors, harsh weather conditions and human smugglers destroy the equipment and barriers.
These costs, and the expenses of providing “enhanced driver’s licenses” as alternative passports for citizens, RFID chips, government databases and watch lists are expected to soar.
In his research, Rubenstein finds that the average immigrant household generates a fiscal debt of $3,408 after feder al benefits and taxes are considered. At the state and local level, the fiscal debt amounts to $4.398 per immigrant household.
“There are currently about 36 million immigrants living in about 9 million households, so the aggregate deficit attributable to immigrants comes to $70.3 billion,” he writes. “… Immigrants could deplete the amount of funds available for infrastructure by as much as $70 billion per year.”
Rubenstein cites figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, projecting that the U.S. population will reach 433 million by 2050 – increasing 44 percent, or 135 million, from today’s numbers.
A full 82 percent of this increase will be directly attributable to new immigrants and their U.S.-born children.
“The brutal reality is that no conceivable infrastructure program can keep pace with that kind of population growth,” he wrote. “The traditional ’supply-side’ response to America’s infrastructure shortage – build, build, build – is dead, dead, dead. Demand reduction is the only viable way to close the gap between the supply and demand of public infrastructure.”
He concludes, “Immigration reduction must play a role.”
The five step program that the Legion proposes is a sound one. It will require the federal government to tighten immigration policies. The policies don’t appear to require bigger government. It does require ou r Democratic-led government to take a tough stand on illegal immigration, one I believe they will never take. Since our government at this point in time will never toughen the laws, this booklet will go largely ignored by our representatives in DC and that is the shame.
The American Legion wants to remind of us the facts surrounding 9/11 and the plot to kill Fort Dix soldiers, nothing more, nothing less. It is time for Congress to listen to the more than 2 million veterans who claim membership in this organization. It is time to secure our borders, it is time that the American people realize our security is at risk as long as our borders are not secure
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MEXICAN GANGS HAVE NOW SPREAD TO ALL OVER CALIFORNIA’S MEXICAN INVESTED CENTRAL VALLEY, AND TO 28 CA CITIES.
THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTEL NOW OPERATES IN 228 AMERICAN CITIES.
FBI DIRECTOR:
"The violent MS-13 - or Mara Salvatrucha - street gang is following the migratory routes of illegal aliens across the country, FBI officials say, calling the Salvadoran gang the new American mafia. MS-13, has a significant presence in the Washington area, and other gangs are spreading into small towns and suburbs by following illegal aliens seeking work in places such as Providence, R.I., and the Carolinas, FBI task force director Robert Clifford said. "The migrant moves and the gang follows," said Mr. Clifford, director of the agency's MS-13 National Gang Task Force."
INS/FBI Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants 2006 (First Quarter) INS/FBI Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants CRIME STATISTICS
95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.
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83% of warrants for murder in Phoenix are for illegal aliens.
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86% of warrants for murder in Albuquerque are for illegal aliens.
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75% of those on the most wanted list in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Albuquerque are illegal aliens.
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24.9% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.
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40.1% of all inmates in Arizona detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.
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48.2% of all inmates in New Mexico detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.
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29% (630,000) convicted illegal alien felons fill our state and federal prisons at a cost of $1.6 billion annually.
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53% plus of all investigated burglaries reported in California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Texas are perpetrated by illegal aliens.
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50% plus of all gang members in Los Angeles are illegal aliens from south of the border.
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71% plus of all apprehended cars stolen in 2005 in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California were stolen by Illegal aliens or “transport coyotes".
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47% of cited/stopped drivers in California have no license, no insurance and no registration for the vehicle. Of that 47%, 92% are illegal aliens.
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63% of cited/stopped drivers in Arizona have no license, no insurance and no registration for the vehicle.
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Of that 63%, 97% are illegal aliens 66% of cited/stopped drivers in New Mexico have no license, no insurance and no registration for the vehicle. Of that 66% 98% are illegal aliens.
BIRTH STATISTICS
380,000 plus “anchor babies” were born in the U.S. in 2005 to illegal alien parents, making 380,000 babies automatically U.S. citizens.
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97.2% of all costs incurred from those births were paid by the American taxpayers.
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66% plus of all births in California are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal whose births were paid for by taxpayers
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CITY JOURNAL - A Handful of Industries Get Low-Cost Labor, Taxpayers Foot the Bill!

SPREAD THE WORD!
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
City Journal
How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy

A handful of industries get low-cost labor, and the taxpayers foot the bill.


Steven Malanga

Summer 2006
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REPORT ILLEGALS TO: 1-866-DHS-2-ICE.
WHAT IS THE REAL LATINO AMERICA? AND WHO REALLY PAYS FOR IT?

ASK YOURSELF WHY MUCH OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO LA RAZA… “The Race”? This is a virulently racist political party to expand the Mexican occupation and for Mexican supremacy.
You may be appalled that you TAX DOLLARS are also handed over to THE RACE POLITICAL PARTY!
Obama, Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi, Waxman, Lofgren, Reid, Baca, Farr, Gutierrez, Becerra ARE ALL LA RAZA ENDORSED HISPANDERING POLITICIANS WORKING HARD FOR OPEN BORDERS, QUICK AMNESTY=ILLEGALS’ VOTES, NO E-VERIFY, NO ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS, NO ENGLISH ONLY (MEXICANS ARE HIGHLY RACIST AND LOATHE SPEAKING THE GRINGO’S LANGUAGE!) AND NO ID TO VOTE. SISTERS LORETTA AND LINDA SANCHEZ, TWO CORRUPT MEXICANS IN ORANGE COUNTY, CA, BOTH WON THEIR LA RAZA PARTY SEAT IN CONGRESS BY THE VOTES OF ILLEGALS!

HOW DO EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS MAKE IT WORK? THE ILLEGALS SUBSIDIZE MISERABLE WAGES WITH WELFARE FROM THE GRINGOS. IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY ALONE, MONTHLY, YES, MONTHLY WELFARE TO ILLEGALS IS $50 MILLION DOLLARS. THIS MEXICAN OCCUPIED TERRITORY ALSO HAS 500 – 1,000 MEXICAN GANG RELATED MURDERS YEARLY. MORE THAN THE ENTIRE MURDER RATE FOR ALL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION. MEXICANS ARE THE MOST RACIST AND VIOLENT PEOPLE IN THE HEMISPHERE!

City Journal
How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy

A handful of industries get low-cost labor, and the taxpayers foot the bill.
Steven Malanga
Summer 2006

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