Sunday, November 28, 2010

MISSOURI - A State NOT Under Mexican Occuption

Subject: No Illegals in Missouri! Wow

Missouri has NO illegal Aliens....(THIS IS TRUE) Interesting: Missouri 's approach to the problem of illegal immigration appears to be more advanced, sophisticated, strict and effective than anything to date in Arizona . Do the loonies in San Francisco , or the White House, appreciate what Missouri has done? When are our fearless President and his dynamic Attorney General going to take action to require Missouri start accepting illegal immigrants once again?

So, why doesn't Missouri receive attention?

Answer: There are no Mexican illegals in Missouri to demonstrate.

The "Show Me" state has once again showed us how it should be done.

There needs to be more publicity and exposure regarding what Missouri has done.

Let's pass it around.

In 2007, Missouri placed on the ballot a proposed constitutional
amendment designating English as the official language of Missouri . In November, 2008, nearly 90% voting in favor! Thus English became the official language for ALL governmental activity in Missouri . No individual has the right to demand government services in a language OTHER than English.

In 2008 a measure was passed that required the Missouri Highway Patrol and other law enforcement officials to verify the immigration status of any person arrested, and inform federal authorities if the person is found to be in Missouri illegally. Missouri law enforcement offices receive specific training with respect to enforcement of federal immigration laws.

In Missouri illegal immigrants do NOT have access to taxpayers benefits such as food stamps and health care through Missouri HealthNET. In 2009 a measure was passed that ensures Missouri 's public institutions of higher education do NOT award financial aid to individuals who are illegally in the United States .

In Missouri all post-secondary institutions of higher education are required to annually certify to the Missouri Dept. of Higher Education that they have NOT knowingly awarded financial aid to students who are unlawfully present in the United States .

So while Arizona has made national news for its new law, it is important to remember Missouri has been far more proactive in addressing this horrific problem.

Missouri has made it clear that illegal immigrants are NOT welcome in the state and they will certainly NOT receive public benefits at the expense of Missouri taxpayers!

Here is the link to confirm:
http://www.ozarkssentinel.com/missouri-ahead-of-the-game-in-dealing-with-illegal-immigrants-p1034.htm

Taken from: "The Ozarks Sentinel" Editorial - Nita Jane Ayres, May 13, 2010 .
If the link does not work, just type in "The Ozarks Sentinel - Nita Jane Ayres" in Google. Here is the link that Google gives.

http://ozarkssentinel.com/missouri-ahead-of-the-game-in-dealing-with-illegal-immigrants-p1034.htm.

Calling an illegal alien an "undocumented immigrant" is like calling a drug dealer an "unlicensed pharmacist".

ON BECOMING A MEXICAN STATE - An American Sees & Speaks

We are Mexico now -how do you like it?

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Date: 2010-11-24, 11:48AM PST
Reply to: comm-pc5vc-2078079909@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

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The Mexican illegal immigrants have won.
They have taken over the state of California by the millions, and our government welcomes them. They get free medical care, free food, free education, and I just heard that Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom have now declared California as a "sanctuary state."
You will now HAVE to speak Spanish in order to remain viable in the California job market. Many people who were born here are being denied jobs, even entry-level fast-food jobs, because they don't speak Spanish.
I work in a Central Valley ER and an ER in the Bay Area, and I would say that about 70% of my ER patients are illegal immigrants on Medical. And they do not speak English.
Why should they? It's up to us now to speak Spanish.
This state is being turned into Mexico and everyone seems to be just fine with it. What the hell is wrong with us??? I for one deeply resent having to subsidize these people with my taxes, I have to speak Spanish at work in my own country formerly known as America, and the entire state seems to be on board with it, otherwise why would the same brain-dead open-border politicians keep getting re-elected?

I live in the mission district in SF and let me tell you, Hispanic women have LOTS and LOTS of children.
Hope you like paying for all of them. If you still even have a job.

As Obama Sells Us Out For More Illegals... President Eisenhower Dealt With His Mexican Invasion!

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
Report Illegals & Employers Toll Free... (866) 347-2423
INS National Customer Service Center Phone: 1-800-375-5283.
http://www.ice.gov/ ICE, ice, ICE
http://www.reportillegals.com/
Wehirealiens.com

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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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EMAIL THIS TO EVERYONE!
MEXICANOCCUPATION

what does mexico do to their illegals? ISN'T IT A DIFFERENT TUNE?

AS OBAMA, BOXER, FEINSTEIN, PELOSI and REID CONTINUE TO WORK FOR BACK ROOM BIT BY BIT AMNESTIES…. Mexico is building their own wall to keep THEIR ILLEGALS OUT!!! And the demanding we NOT build a wall and expand Mexican welfare in our own country!

The treatment of immigrants has become a divisive and embarrassing issue for Mexico. A country that has historically sent millions of its own people to the U.S. and elsewhere in search of work, Mexico has proved itself less than hospitable to Central Americans following the same calling.

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Hypocritical Mexico is now building their own wall on border with Guatemala...press ignores
• September 19th, 2010 1:42 pm ET
• By Dave Gibson, Immigration Reform Examiner
The Inter-Press Sevice (IPS) is reporting that the head administrator of the Mexican Superintendency of Tax Administration, Raul Diaz, has confirmed that his government is building a wall in the state of Chiapas, along the Mexican/Guatemalan border.
The official reason is to stop contraband from coming into Mexico, but as Diaz admitted: “It could also prevent the free passage of illegal immigrants.”
According to Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights, 500,000 people from Central America cross into Mexico illegally every year.
Just as Mexican authorities have opposed the construction of a fence by the U.S., along our border with their country, Mexico is now receiving a great deal of criticism from the Guatemalan government.
The executive coordinator of the National Bureau for Migration in Guatemala, Marila de Prince, told a local newspaper: “It is not a correct measure being taken by the Mexican government.”
Erick Maldonado, executive secretary of Guatemala's National Council on Migrants said: “We are watching the Mexican government's initiative with concern because the migrants are in a situation of highest vulnerability, as demonstrated by the massacre in Tamaulipas, where five Guatemalans died.”
Maldonado said the wall “is going to make the migrants' situation worse, because to meet their needs they are always going to find blind points where there are no migration or security controls, which implies greater risks."
Vice-President of Guatemala, Rafael Espada, said: “The walls are not the solution to the problems.”
The Catholic Church has been highly critical of U.S. treatment of illegal aliens, and one priest in Central America used the news of the Mexican wall to take another shot at the American people.
Father Francisco Pellizari, of the Casa del Migrante told IPS: “The dramatic increase in the cost of 'polleros' (human traffickers) and the corruption of the authorities is the result of the walls the United States plans to build and has built along the border. We can transpose the Guatemala case to this situation and the results will be the same.”
Peliizari said border walls “are supposedly intended to halt migration, but that hasn't happened. Instead they have triggered an economic hemorrhage and a shift in the migratory flow to inhospitable routes that lead to thousands of deaths.”
Of course, the U.S. press has completely ignored the story…They excoriate Americans for their desire to simply defend their own borders, but give Mexico a pass for building a wall to keep out illegal aliens.
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“The treatment of immigrants has become a divisive and embarrassing issue for Mexico. A country that has historically sent millions of its own people to the U.S. and elsewhere in search of work, Mexico has proved itself less than hospitable to Central Americans following the same calling.”

latimes.com
FOREIGN EXCHANGE
Mexico town split over Central American drifters
Migrants fall prey to kidnappers and worse while the Mexican government does little to protect them, rights groups say. However, others say the migrants are forming criminal bands and should be deported.
By Tracy Wilkinson
October 15, 2009
Reporting from Tultitlan, Mexico
Gathered below an overpass on Independence Avenue, dressed in the multiple layers typical of homeless travelers, the migrants watched for the next northbound freight train through Tultitlan.

Many of them, mostly young men and boys, prepared to hop aboard, hobo-style, on an ever-more-precarious trip that might get them as far as the United States.

But fewer migrants are achieving that goal. Central Americans who for years have passed through Mexico en route to the U.S. are increasingly cutting their trips short as they run out of cash or become discouraged by fewer opportunities farther away from home.

The lingering presence of the migrants in this town, about an hour's drive outside Mexico City, is tearing the small community apart, with some residents providing migrants with food, clothes and aid and others complaining of their alleged crimes, plus a new local government maneuvering to get rid of them.

The treatment of immigrants has become a divisive and embarrassing issue for Mexico. A country that has historically sent millions of its own people to the U.S. and elsewhere in search of work, Mexico has proved itself less than hospitable to Central Americans following the same calling.

Church and human rights groups say the migrants passing through are falling prey to kidnappers, extortionists and killers while the Mexican government does little to protect them. The national Human Rights Commission says it has recorded, in the last three years, 10,000 kidnappings of migrants, who are most frequently seized by predatory gangs who demand money from the victims' families in their home countries.

In Tultitlan, migrants also complain of being beaten, rousted and robbed, often by police officers.

Jose Juan Hernandez, a state human rights officer, said he is investigating 30 formal complaints from the first half of this year. Hernandez, who regularly visits the migrants in their squalid, temporary encampments, provides water and tips on how not to fall into the hands of kidnappers and thieves.

"Very few want to stay in Mexico," he said, adding that he sometimes sees women or entire families with children as young as 5 trying to make their way north. "They suffer a lot and risk everything. They see the economic situation is bad here and they don't like the way they are treated."

But many migrants stay because they fear that life would be worse in the U.S., where they could be arrested if caught after entering illegally and where job opportunities have withered. Money often is tight and many relatives in Central America or in the U.S. who might have helped are themselves strapped.

Hernandez has seen the number of arriving migrants increase by about 30% in the last year, with a huge uptick in Hondurans after the coup d'etat on June 28 that ousted their president and threw their country into political turmoil.

Among some residents of Tultitlan, there is sympathy. Nearly every day, bread distributor Jose Manzano drives by the knots of men sheltering under the overpass. When he can, he stops and hands out pallets of surplus bread from the trunk of his car.

"I see hunger, I see need, and I see gratitude in their eyes," said Manzano, 55. "If I can help a little, why not?"

Patricia Camarena, an activist who works with the advocacy group Apoyo al Migrante, or Migrant Support, also brings help and basic first aid. She scolded authorities for what she sees as historical inaction.

"I feel angry because how can Mexico ask for immigration reform [of the United States], as well as talk about human rights?" she said as she washed the feet of a young migrant and gave him a pair of fresh socks. "I cannot stay quiet about what's happening."

A new city administration that took office in August, however, feels differently. Mayor Marco Calzada said he wants the federal government to deport the migrants. When they were just passing through, it was a manageable problem, he said, but now large numbers are staying and forming criminal bands.

Officials say the Tultitlan municipality, with a population of more than 432,000, sees hundreds of immigrants arriving each week.

"The numbers are over the top," Calzada said. "They have invaded neighborhoods. They steal, they kidnap, they rape."

City Hall is fielding complaints, the mayor added, but neither he nor his public security director, Jose Luis Medina, could provide statistics. Asked about complaints from migrants about police harassment and robbery, Medina would say only that about 10% of the previous municipal administration's police department was fired for abuse, corruption or other infractions.

Advocacy groups counter that the Central Americans are being made scapegoats for all local crime.

By the overpass, the migrants sit in small groups or around rudimentary campfires. Some beg, some use drugs and some pick up legitimate day labor.

"I don't want to go to the U.S. They arrest you there," said Edil Alberto Perdomo, 24, of Honduras, who gets by on handouts. "We aren't bothering anyone. We only want respect, we don't want problems. I want to remain here but be left in peace."

Douglas Martinez, a 29-year-old Salvadoran with a green bandanna on his head, has stuck around to earn a bit of money working in a junkyard. He seemed to be something of a leader in the group, directing others to stand in line to receive donated water.

Martinez said he's been deported from the U.S. twice but still wants to try to reach Los Angeles to see his wife and children, who live there. "You know the need to see your family," he said.

Like Martinez, Kevin Eduardo, a 13-year-old Honduran, and many others said they were trying to reach the U.S. Whether they will make it is anyone's guess.
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The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.



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MEXICO IS THE MOST RACIST, CORRUPT AND VIOLENT NATION IN THE HEMISPHERE, AND BIRTH TO THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTEL.
HERE’S MEXICO’S POLICY ON ILLEGALS IN THEIR DUMPSTER OF A COUNTRY:
In 2006, we witnessed hundreds of ranting Mexicans march on this nation, waving their Mexican flags and demanding their “rights”.
Here’s the policy in racist Mexico on illegals!
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New Immigration Laws (Stockton)
New Immigration Laws: Read to the bottom or you will miss the message....

1. There will be no special bilingual programs in the schools.

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2.. All ballots will be in this nation's language.

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3. All government business will be conducted in our language.

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4. Non-residents will NOT have the right to vote no matter how long they are here.

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5. Non-citizens will NEVER be able to hold political office.

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6. Foreigners will not be a burden to the taxpayers.. No welfare, no food stamps, no health care, or other government assistance programs. Any burden will be deported.

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7. Foreigners can invest in this country, but it must be an amount at least equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage.

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8. If foreigners come here and buy land... options will be restricted. Certain parcels including waterfront property are reserved for citizens naturally born into this country.

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9.. Foreigners may have no protests; no demonstrations, no waving of a foreign flag, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies. These will lead to deportation.

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10.. If you do come to this country illegally, you will be actively hunted &, when caught, sent to jail until your deportation can be arranged. All assets will be taken from you.

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Too strict?.......

The above laws are current immigration laws of MEXICO !!!

As an American These sound fine to me, NOW, how can we get these laws to be America 's immigration laws??

WAKE UP, AMERICA - We are losing our country.........

What Is the Biggest Threat to this Nation? SAUDI WAHHABIST TERRORIST, OR THE MEX TERRORIST & DRUG CARTELS?

Mexican cartels emerge as top source for U.S meth
By William Booth and Anne-Marie O'Connor
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 28, 2010; 12:37 AM
IN VERACRUZ, MEXICO Exploiting loopholes in the global economy, Mexican crime syndicates are importing mass quantities of the cold medicines and common chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine - turning Mexico into the No. 1 source for all meth sold in the United States, law enforcement agents say.
Nearly three years ago, the Mexican government appeared on the verge of controlling the sale of chemicals used to make the drugs, but the syndicates have since moved to the top of the drug trade.
Cartels have quickly learned to use dummy corporations and false labeling and take advantage of lax customs enforcement in China, India and Bangladesh to smuggle tons of the pills into Mexico for conversion into methamphetamine. Ordinary cold, flu and allergy medicine used to make methamphetamine - pills banned in Mexico and restricted in the United States - are still widely available in many countries.
In the past 18 months, Mexican armed forces have raided more than 325 sophisticated factories capable of producing a million pounds of potent methamphetamine a year. Seizures of Mexican methamphetamine along the southwest border have doubled.
"As hard as everyone is working to stop it, the stuff is just going to continue to flow in massive quantities," said Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration and now with Spectre Group International, a security firm.
In a typical scenario, United Nations investigators say, a legitimate pharmaceutical company in India exports cold pills to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where they are falsely labeled as herbal supplements and shipped to Belize, and then to Veracruz by cargo container.
"Mexico-based trafficking groups have shown tremendous resilience in getting around the precursor chemical prohibitions and controls," said Special Agent Alex Dominguez in the DEA Office of Diversion Control. "They are currently pursuing very sophisticated smuggling techniques. They are trafficking ephedrine-type medicines, just like you would smuggle any high-value contraband such as cocaine or heroin."
Legal ingredients
Ever resourceful, Mexican cartels have begun to manufacture methamphetamine using legally obtained ingredients - such as phenylacetic acid, or PAA, a honey-smelling chemical used in everything from perfumes, soaps and body lotions to food flavoring and antibiotics.
Traffickers prefer methamphetamine made from cold tablets because it is more potent, but they are increasingly relying on PAA, as resilient Mexican cartels revert to old-school recipes developed by U.S. motorcycle gangs in the 1970s that use phenylacetic acid and its chemical cousins.
At least half of all the methamphetamine seized along the border in the past year was made with precursor chemicals such as phenylacetic acid, U.S. agents told The Washington Post.
"For the cartels, the great thing about meth is it is not bound by geography," a senior U.S. law enforcement agent with direct knowledge of the Mexican drug syndicates who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. "You can buy the precursor chemicals off the shelf. You can order them on the telephone."
Mexican mafias have quickly replaced American mom-and-pop domestic producers, who use soft drink bottles to "shake and bake" a few ounces of meth in motel rooms and rural slums, according to DEA officials.
The Chinese government concedes that it has no idea how many cold tablets its state-run companies sell each year. The Mexican government is unsure how much phenylacetic acid is used by legitimate manufacturers, such as Proctor & Gamble, and how much is diverted to the meth labs.
Mexican cartels began to produce ever larger amounts of methamphetamine over the past decade. But under heavy pressure from the United States, Mexico three years ago banned the import and sale of cold, flu and allergy medicines containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the most sought-after chemicals used to make methamphetamine and ecstasy. Most Central American countries implemented their own bans.
Meth production in Mexico plummeted. In 2007, military busted 33 clandestine laboratories and 51 in 2008, compared with the 215 they uncovered in 2009. Street prices spiked and purity dropped in the United States, an indication of relative scarcity. U.S. diplomats and law enforcement officials hailed Mexico's ephedrine ban as a major success.
But Mexican methamphetamine is surging again. After several years of declining production, the 2010 threat assessment by the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center said Mexico was again "the primary source of methamphetamine consumed in the United States." A companion report was not released for fear of embarrassing Mexican President Felipe Calderon on the eve of his trip to Washington in May.
A tough opponent
U.S. diplomats praise Mexico for its fight against methamphetamine. At the port in Veracruz, where more than 1,700 ships arrive each year, disgorging 720,000 containers on the docks, Mexican marines and customs agents work side by side searching for contraband. The metal boxes are scanned with gamma rays and X-rays and sniffed by dogs. Suspicious cargo is unloaded, blue plastic drums opened and the chemicals inside tested.
"But if there are 2,000 containers a day and you can manage to get in just one or two containers with narcotics, that's a lot. That is tons," said a Mexican navy captain at the port, who spoke on the condition his name not be used because of security concerns.
Masked men kidnapped the former director of customs in Veracruz, Francisco Serrano, in June 2009 as he was implementing new scrutiny measures. There have been no arrests, no ransom demands. Serrano vanished.
On the black market, a single allergy pill containing ephedrine can sell for $2.50 in Guatemala. A kilogram of bulk ephedrine from China - about 2.2 pounds of powder - goes for $10,000 on the Mexican black market.
In January, Mexican authorities found three tons of ephedrine concealed in fire extinguishers coming through the port of Manzanilla. In February, agents stopped 120,000 pseudoephedrine pills in Guatemala en route to Mexico City airport. In April, Mexican marines in Veracruz found four tons of ephedrine in jute bags that came from India by way of Europe.
According to investigators with the U.N. International Narcotics Control Board, numerous African countries import quantities of cold remedies that far exceed legitimate medical needs. In Ethiopia, for example, Mexican traffickers and their middlemen used bogus documents to import more than 12 tons of ephedrine. Similar diversions have been uncovered in Argentina, where ephedrine cold pills are still legal. U.N. investigators say most of the suspicious shipments have Mexico as their final destination.
Local victims
As Mexico fights the flow of methamphetamine to the United States, the drug is ravaging citizens here.
At a rehab center in Apatzingan in the western state of Michoacan, a meth-producing hub, two dozen men huddle in a converted garage, sleeping on bunks, sharing meals, making furniture. They were all addicted to drugs, most to methamphetamine.
Francisco Rodriguez is 53 years old but looks in his 70s. Meth almost killed him. His decalcified bones are so brittle that he walks with a cane. He has lost his teeth. He left his wife, his children, his law career.
"I came to Apatzingan on vacation and tried the local crystal meth. I became an addict instantly," he said. "The streets here were filled with people who looked crazy."
Rodriquez said the local mafia - La Familia de Michoacan - blocked all street sales in the city a few years ago. The cartel said it was protecting the people from a scourge. Mexican law enforcement agents confirm that La Familia ordered a halt in local use, though they say it was a cynical ploy, a bit of propaganda.
"Now if you use it, they'll kill you," Rodriguez said. "Now it is just for the foreigners."
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LOS ANGELES TIMES

FORBES NAMES MEXICAN DRUG LORD “WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE”....

So, tell me. Why does Obama and the La Raza dems, Reid, Boxer, Feinstein, Pelosi, Lofgren, and virtually every LA RAZA DEM, want our borders open and undefended against NARCOmex?


November 13, 2009 | 12:01 pm
MEXICO CITY — Mexico decried Forbes magazine’s decision to name the country’s most-wanted drug lord to its “World’s Most Powerful People,” calling it an insult to the government’s bloody struggle against drug cartels.
A spokesman for the Interior Department — which oversees domestic security — described the listing of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman as No. 41 of the 67 most powerful people as “a justification of crime.”
“(This) is a mockery of the struggle the government is waging against organized crime,” Luis Estrada said. “This not only goes against the efforts of the Mexican government, but the international fight to eliminate mafias and organized crime.”
Nearly 14,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels in late 2006.
Some residents in the border city of Ciudad Juarez — which has suffered the highest rate of drug violence, with about 2,000 killings this year — also expressed outrage.
“I think this is bad, because the news media are putting a drug trafficker above people who have legitimate businesses,” said Josefina Ramirez, a Ciudad Juarez accountant.
Guzman is even considered more powerful than Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez — No. 67 — and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy — No. 56 — according to Forbes magazine’s list of the 67 “World’s Most Powerful People.” Guzman was just below Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Another Mexican — telecom magnate Carlos Slim Helu, who Forbes listed as the world’s third-richest man — was named No. 6 on the most-powerful list, just five steps behind No. 1, President Barack Obama.
Guzman’s vast drug-trafficking empire is worth an estimated $1 billion, according to Forbes. Yet unlike other, flashier smugglers, few details are known about the Sinaloa cartel boss and the actual power he wields inside his gang.
He escaped prison by hiding in a laundry truck nearly a decade ago, and his legend and fortune seem to grow with each passing day he eludes capture.
The Sinaloa cartel violently seized lucrative drug routes from rivals and built sophisticated tunnels under the U.S. border to move its loads. Mexican officials blame Guzman’s cartel for much of the country’s staggering bloodshed.
“Of course he’s influential, rich and powerful, but he has cost so many lives, so many youths,” said Gabriela Lopez, a 25-year-old businesswoman in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa. “I wish they would make a list pointing out that as well.”
Forbes said Guzman’s ranking was intended to spark conversation, and asked readers: “Do despicable criminals like billionaire Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman (No. 41) belong on this list at all?”
Last March, Mexican officials also criticized Forbes’ decision to include Guzman on its list of the world’s billionaires.
Without explicitly naming the publication, Calderon said at the time that “magazines are not only attacking and lying about the situation in Mexico but are also praising criminals.”
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UNSKILLED IMMIGRANTS HURT ECONOMY... But Aren't We Mexico's WELFARE, JOBS & JAILS PROGRAM?

THE ARTICLE BELOW WAS PUBLISHED IN 2006. SINCE THAT DATE MILLIONS MORE ILLEGALS HAVE CLIMBED OVER OUR BORDERS AND INTO OUR JOBS. THEN THEY HAND US THE TAX BILLS FOR THEIR WELFARE AND “FREE” ANCHOR BABY BIRTHING!
CA ALONE PAYS OUT $20 BILLION A YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES TO ILLEGALS!

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

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