Illegal Immigration and Crime
By James R. Edwards, Jr.
Posted November 22, 2004 (FIGURES ARE VERY DATED)
Immigrant criminality represents perhaps the worst abuse of the liberty aliens enjoy in the United States. Increasingly, the government closest to the people either finds its hands tied or cravenly abrogates its responsibility to fellow Americans within its jurisdiction. Moreover, the illegal element exacerbates the economic and other burdens caused by legal immigration.
The current high rate of sustained, mass immigration—more than one million legal immigrants plus half a million illegal aliens every year—forces many states and localities into turmoil. The illegals certainly live outside the obligations that those who live under the "consent of the governed" owe to each other: While the principles of the Declaration of Independence guarantee all human beings certain natural and unalienable rights, only parties who have consented to our government deserve the full rights of citizenship. Illegal immigrants are not part of the social contract giving legitimacy to this government. American citizens have not given their consent to higher taxes, crowded schools, jammed emergency rooms, clogged roads, unlawful turning of single-family homes into hotels or apartments into tenements, forced multicultural amenities such as bilingual education and multilingual ballots, or welfare and other services subsidizing poverty-prone immigrants. Above all, they never consented to higher crime rates.
While anyone who decries illegal immigration is required to distinguish it from legal immigration, the effects of legal immigration should first be noted. Robert Samuelson recently wrote in his Washington Post column that "Hispanics account for most of the increase in poverty" since 1990. "Compared with 1990, there were actually 700,000 fewer non-Hispanic whites in poverty last year . . . . Meanwhile, the number of poor Hispanics is up by 3 million since 1990. The health insurance story is similar. Last year 13 million Hispanics lacked insurance. They're 60 percent of the rise since 1990." And of course a growing proportion of the Hispanic population is immigrants poorer than their predecessors. Samuelson remarks that the black poverty rate in this period has actually dropped, from 32 to 24 percent.
To add to Samuelson's observations, consider the reports from the Center for Immigration Studies by its Steven Camarota and Harvard's George Borjas detailing the negative economic impact of recent immigrants on native-born wages and employment. Illegal immigrants impose an even greater burden, because they pay few taxes and they drain public services such as health care, education, and other benefits of the welfare state. While many federal programs deny assistance to illegals, many state and local programs and privileges are open to them. The National Academy of Sciences found in a 1997 landmark study that immigrantheaded households in 1994-1995 placed a net annual fiscal burden on California native-born residents of $1,178 per native household.That is, each American family in California subsidized that state's immigrant population by nearly $1,200 a year.
The NAS report also said fiscal impacts tend to benefit the federal government and drain state and local government resources. "Much like anyone else in the population, immigrants use services that are costly to provide, or that others can use less freely—so-called congestion costs. Examples include services from roads, sewers, police and fire departments, libraries, airports, and foreign embassies." Therefore, having a much larger immigrant population (29 percent of the U.S. foreign-born, a fourth of the State's population) bloats California's budget significantly.
The national government has exclusive power over immigration, and it has mandated certain public benefits for immigrants, legal or illegal, such as public education (see the 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe). States and localities then bear the costs and consequences of all immigration.And they respond differently, with differing consequences for their people.
The Florida legislature rejected a bill issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens. Kansas state legislators voted to give illegal aliens instate college tuition. Alabama and Florida state police work closely with federal immigration enforcers. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago have "sanctuary" policies that keep city employees, even police, from asking about immigration status. An Idaho county commissioner billed Mexico for the $2 million illegal aliens owe for county services.
The impact is seen particularly in crime: Record-high auto thefts in Arizona, drug trafficking in Salt Lake City, human smuggling rings in Los Angeles, D.C. sniper Lee Malvo, money laundering, prostitution, gang murders, and even slavery. Immigration authorities estimate that 84,000 state inmates are aliens, though state and local figures on foreign-born prisoners are hard to come by. At least three quarters of these immigrant state inmates are in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas—the top immigrant destinations.
Police officers at the local or state level are the law enforcement officials most likely to encounter illegal aliens. Local residents are the crime victims of these aliens. Local, county, or state jails house many of the foreign criminals. Local, county, or state criminal justice systems try these lawbreakers. And local, county, and state taxpayers pay the costs of law enforcement and criminal justice associated with the crimes that immigrants, legal and illegal, commit.
Figures for 1999 State Criminal Alien Assistance Program compensation show claims of $1.5 billion in documented costs incurred by state corrections and local jails for covered aliens. County governments face a special burden, a 2001 report by 24 Southwestern border counties calculated. They spent, from general funds, $894 million on law enforcement and criminal justice in fiscal year 1999. Many of the costs that criminal aliens impose on all state, county, and municipal jurisdictions are not represented in such figures. To cite just one California example, San Diego now spends $50 million a year to handle illegal criminal aliens.
The underworld network built up by millions of alien lawbreakers, who by and large have no fear of capture or of being held accountable, enabled the September 11 terrorists to operate undetected. Latino illegal aliens in Northern Virginia helpfully showed several of the terrorists the ropes on how to secure Virginia driver's licenses fraudulently.
The advancement of "political correctness" and multiculturalism has caused politicians to be less willing to challenge limitations on their authority over resources. Local and state politicians in heavy immigrant-receiving areas have instead expanded immigrant eligibility for public benefits, welfare, assistance programs, health care programs for those without private insurance, and driver's and other licenses. Some states and localities have begun to accept the Mexican matricula consular ID card, though it has been determined to pose a great risk to U.S. national security. Even before the recently reported crossing of 25 Chechens into Arizona, authorities knew that the illegal aliens pose a national security problem.
Dealing with current levels and quality of legal immigration is an immense problem by itself. But it is clear that until alien criminality of every kind is punished, swiftly and surely, Americans who must live with the consequences will continue to suffer higher taxes, lower quality of life, higher threat and fear levels, and less actual safety.
* * *
James R. Edwards, Jr., a 1998 Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont Institute, is also an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute and coauthor of The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform (1999).Return to the Fall, 2004 edition of Local Liberty
COST OF MEXICAN OCCUPATION FOR ALL THAT “CHEAP” LABOR:
1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state 20 governments.
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
Verify 20 at! : http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are cause d by the illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US .
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html
11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://.com/t9sht
12. The National policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.'
Verify at: http://www.nati onalpolicyinstitute.org/publications.php?b=deportation
13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.
Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm>;
14. ' The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration:! Nearly One million sex crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States .'
Verify at: http: // http://www.drdsk.com/articles.html
The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.
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