THIS WAS PUBLISHED IN 2004.
DESTROYING THE COUNTRY from
addiction to 'CHEAP MEX LABOR" (THAT COST YOU BILLIONS)
ILLEGALS
COSTING CALIFORNIA BILLIONS
By Jerry Seper 2004
THE
WASHINGTON TIMES Published December 7, 2004 (NOTE THESE FIGURE ARE FROM 2004.
SINCE THEN THERE’S BEEN ANOTHER 10 MILLION ILLEGALS CLIMB OVER THE BORDERS. THE
PEW REPORTS THAT APPROXIMATELY 40 MILLION !MORE! MEXICANS ARE PLANNING TO JOIN
THEM FOR THE AMERICAN GRAVY TRAIN)
Illegal immigration costs the taxpayers of
California -- which has the highest number of illegal aliens nationwide --
$10.5 billion a year for education, health care and incarceration, according to
a study released yesterday. A key finding of the report by the Federation for
American Immigration Reform (FAIR) said the state's already struggling
kindergarten-through-12th-grade education system spends $7.7 billion a year on
children of illegal aliens, who constitute 15 percent of the student body. The
report also said the incarceration of convicted illegal aliens in state prisons
and jails and uncompensated medical outlays for health care provided to illegal
aliens each amounted to about $1.4 billion annually. The incarceration costs
did not include judicial expenditures or the monetary costs of the crimes
committed by illegal aliens that led to their incarceration. "California's
addiction to 'cheap' illegal-alien labor is bankrupting the state and posing
enormous burdens on the state's shrinking middle-class tax base," said
FAIR President Dan Stein. "Most Californians, who have seen their taxes increase
while public services deteriorate, already know the impact that mass illegal
immigration is having on their communities, but even they may be shocked when
they learn just how much of a drain illegal immigration has become," he
said. California is estimated to be home to nearly 3 million illegal aliens.
Mr. Stein noted that state and local taxes paid by the unauthorized immigrant
population go toward offsetting these costs, but do not match expenses. The
total of such payments was estimated in the report to be about $1.6 billion per
year. He also said the total cost of illegal immigration to the state's
taxpayers would be considerably higher if other cost areas, such as special
English instruction, school meal programs or welfare benefits for American
workers displaced by illegal-alien workers were added into the equation.
Gerardo Gonzalez, director of the National Latino Research Center at California
State at San Marcos, which compiles data on Hispanics, was critical of FAIR's
report yesterday. He said FAIR's estimates did not measure some of the
contributions that illegal aliens make to the state's economy. "Beyond
taxes, these workers' production and spending contribute to California's
economy, especially the agricultural sector," he said, adding that both
legal and illegal aliens are the "backbone" of the state's $28
billion-a-year agricultural industry. In August, a similar study by the Center
for Immigration Studies in Washington, said U.S. households headed by illegal
aliens used $26.3 billion in government services during 2002, but paid $16
billion in taxes, an annual cost to taxpayers of $10 billion. The FAIR report
focused on three specific program areas because those were the costs examined
by researchers from the Urban Institute in 1994, Mr. Stein said. Looking at the
costs of education, health care and incarceration for illegal aliens in 1994,
the Urban Institute estimated that California was subsidizing illegal
immigrants at about $1.1 billion a year. Mr. Stein said an enormous rise in the
costs of illegal immigrants in 10 years is because of the rapid growth of the
illegal population. He said it is reasonable to expect those costs to continue
to soar if action is not taken to turn the tide. "1994 was the same year
that California voters rebelled and overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187,
which sought to limit liability for mass illegal immigration," he said.
"Since then, state and local governments have blatantly ignored the wishes
of the voters and continued to shell out publicly financed benefits on illegal
aliens. "Predictably, the costs of illegal immigration have grown
geometrically, while the state has spiraled into a fiscal crisis that has
brought it near bankruptcy," he said. Mr. Stein said that the state must
adopt measures to systematically collect information on illegal-alien use of
taxpayer-funded services and on where they are employed, and that policies need
to be pursued to hold employers financially accountable.
WHAT
PARTICULARLY BOTHERS ME ABOUT THE INVADERS, IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MUCH THEY GET
OUT OF THIS COUNTRY, THE ARRIVE WITH AN ATTITUDE OF ENTITLEMENT. THEY THINK WE
OWE THEM free lunches.
The net cost to the federal government in 2002 for public services
provided to illegal aliens was $10.4 billion or $2,736 per household according
to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies. Estimates for 2005 put the
amount at $11.7 billion or $3,080 per household. Illegal Alien Costs By Social
Service Lost Revenue: The U.S. may be foregoing up to $35 billion in lost tax
revenue because of the growing size of the underground labor market using
illegal workers in the cash economy, according to a January, 2005 report by the
Wall Street firm Bear Sterns. Health Costs: Medicaid costs for illegal aliens
and their U.S.-born children are $2.8 billion annually, according to a study by
the Center for Immigration Studies. Approximately 70% of households headed by
illegal aliens have at least one person without medical insurance, compared to
20% of all other households. The federal government spends $250 million each
year reimbursing states for emergency medical services provided to illegal
aliens, which is less than 10% of the true cost of those services. Education
Costs: The Center for Immigration Studies has shown that federal aid to K-12
public schools for the education of the children of illegal aliens is $1.4
billion annually, not including the cost of free school lunches. The total cost
to state and local taxpayers for educating 3.5 million children of illegal
aliens is estimated at $28.6 billion, according to a Federation for American
Immigration Reform study. Incarceration: Illegal aliens account for less than
5% of the U.S. adult population, but were 17% of the federal prison population
in 2004, imposing a net cost of $1.8 billion in court and incarceration
expenses. Fortunately, Americans have seen through the protestors’ half-truths.
A Rasmussen poll released last week showed widespread disfavor of recent
immigration protests, with 26 percent holding a favorable opinion and 54
percent holding an unfavorable opinion.
Wake up America!!! Illegal Immigration has to be stopped. Take a
look at this website and see where all your tax dollars are going:
*
LOS ANGELES COUNTY ALONE PUTS OUT $600 MILLION PER YEAR IN WELFARER TO ILLEGALS, PRIMARILY THE MEXICAN ANCHOR BABY BREEDING PROGRAM.
ONE OF MEXICO'S BIGGEST EXPORTS NEXT TO DRUGS AND CRIMINALS ARE PREGNANT WOMEN! THEY HOP OUR BORDERS FOR "FREE" ANCHOR BABY BIRTHING = 18 YEARS OF WELFARE. THIS CHILD BORN IN OUR BORDERS IS STILL A MEXICAN CITIZEN!
FEW COUNTRYS ON PLANET EARTH TOLERATE THIS, INCLUDING MEXICO, WHICH HANDS ABSOLUTELY NO "RIGHTS" TO ANY ILLEGALS THAT HOP THEIR BORDERS!
Can Congress repeal birthright
citizenship?
Anti-immigration
lawmakers are pushing the idea, but the 14th Amendment may get in their way.
By James C. Ho
JAMES C. HO, an appellate and constitutional litigator, was formerly a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.
March 10, 2007
GENERATIONS OF Americans have understood that children born in the United States are entitled to U.S. citizenship, regardless of the nationality of their parents. When Congress revisits immigration reform this spring, however, legislation to repeal this historic rule is expected to play a central role in the debate.
Many Americans are angry about illegal immigration and believe birthright citizenship encourages it. Unsurprisingly, then, the idea of eliminating automatic citizenship for the children of lawful and unlawful aliens has gained remarkable traction around the country.
A resolution moving through the Georgia Legislature urges Congress to take such action. A coalition of conservative activists has proposed a grand immigration compromise: amnesty for illegal immigrants with relatives here now, but no birthright citizenship in the future. Texas lawmakers are even weighing legislation that would attack birthright citizenship indirectly by denying state and local government services to so-called "anchor babies" — children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants.
In recent years, this effort has been bolstered by court briefs and congressional testimony from legal scholars. Even Richard Posner, the distinguished federal appellate judge, wrote in a judicial opinion that Congress can, and should, repeal birthright citizenship.
The breadth of support is surprising because the proposed legislation is plainly unconstitutional. Birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, no less for the children of undocumented persons than for descendants of passengers of the Mayflower.
The first sentence of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, puts it plainly: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." The primary purpose of this provision was to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship to U.S.-born people of African descent. But the amendment was drafted broadly to guarantee citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States.
California Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) and other proponents of ending birthright citizenship claim that aliens — lawful and unlawful — are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because they swear no allegiance to the United States. But neither the text nor the history of the 14th Amendment supports this conclusion.
When a person is "subject to the jurisdiction" of a court of law, that person is required to obey the orders of that court. The meaning of the phrase is simple: One is "subject to the jurisdiction" of another whenever one is obliged to obey the laws of another. The test is obedience, not allegiance.
The "jurisdiction" requirement excludes only those who are not required to obey U.S. law. This concept, like much of early U.S. law, derives from English common law. Under common law, foreign diplomats and enemy soldiers are not legally obliged to obey our law, and thus their offspring are not entitled to citizenship at birth. The 14th Amendment merely codified this common law doctrine.
Members of the 39th Congress debated the wisdom of guaranteeing birthright citizenship — but no one disputed the amendment's meaning. Opponents conceded — indeed, warned — that it would grant citizenship to the children of those who "owe [the U.S.] no allegiance." Amendment supporters agreed that only members of Indian tribes, ambassadors, foreign ministers and others not "subject to our laws" would fall outside the amendment's reach.
The U.S. Supreme Court long has taken the same view. In 1898, the court held in United States vs. Wong Kim Ark that the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants was constitutionally entitled to citizenship, noting that the "14th Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory . . . including all children here born of resident aliens."
The court has reiterated this view in subsequent decisions. In Plyler vs. Doe (1982), the majority concluded, and the dissent agreed, that birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment extends to anyone "who is subject to the laws of a state," including the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens. And in INS vs. Rios-Pineda (1985), a unanimous court agreed that a child born to an undocumented immigrant was in fact a citizen of the United States.
Although the Constitution seems clear, Democrats in Congress might nevertheless be persuaded to repeal birthright citizenship as a bipartisan compromise to secure passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill — in the hope that the provision would simply be struck down in court. Perhaps that explains why Senate Democrats quizzed Samuel A. Alito Jr. about the issue during his confirmation hearings. Stay tuned: Dred Scott II could be coming soon to a federal court near you.
*
CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE MONITOR
edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0528/p09s01-coop.html
What will America stand for in 2050?
The US should think long and hard about the
high number of Latino immigrants.
Palo Alto, Calif.
President Obama
has encouraged Americans to start laying a new foundation for the country – on
a number of fronts. He has stressed that we'll need to have the courage to make
some hard choices. One of those hard choices is how to handle immigration. The US
must get serious about the tide of legal and illegal immigrants, above all from
Latin America.
It's not just a
short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment
approaches 10 percent or the number of uninsured straining the quality of
healthcare. Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as
a nation.
The political
realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may
be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by
the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.
Do I sound like a
right-wing "nativist"? I'm not. I'm a lifelong Democrat; an early and
avid supporter of Obama. I'm gratified by his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to
the Supreme Court. I'm also the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants;
and a member, along with several other Democrats, of the advisory boards of the
Federation for American Immigration Reform and Pro English. Similar concerns
preoccupied the distinguished Democrat Barbara Jordan when she chaired the
congressionally mandated US Commission on Immigration Reform in the 1990s.
Congresswoman
Jordan was worried about the adverse impact of high levels of legal and illegal
immigration on poor citizens, disproportionately Latinos and African-Americans.
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.
The healthcare
cost of the illegal workforce is especially burdensome, and is subsidized by
taxpayers. To claim Medicaid, you must be legal, but as the Health and Human
Services inspector general found, 47 states allow self-declaration of status
for Medicaid. Many hospitals and clinics are going broke because of the
constant stream of uninsured, many of whom are the estimated 12 million to 15
million illegal immigrants. This translates into reduced services, particularly
for lower-income citizens.
The US population
totaled 281 million in 2000. About 35 million, or 12.5 percent, were Latino.
The Census Bureau projects that our population will reach 439 million in 2050,
a 56 percent increase over the 2000 census. The Hispanic population in 2050 is
projected at 133 million – 30 percent of the total and almost quadruple the
2000 level. Population growth is the principal threat to the environment via
natural resource use, sprawl, and pollution. And population growth is fueled
chiefly by immigration.
Consider what
this, combined with worrisome evidence that Latinos are not melting into our
cultural mainstream, means for the US. Latinos have contributed some positive
cultural attributes, such as multigenerational family bonds, to US society. But
the same traditional values that lie behind Latin America's difficulties in
achieving democratic stability, social justice, and prosperity are being
substantially perpetuated among Hispanic-Americans.
Prominent Latin
Americans have concluded that traditional values are at the root of the
region's development problems. Among those expressing that opinion: Peruvian
writer Mario Vargas Llosa; Nobelist author Octavio Paz, a Mexican; Teodoro
Moscoso, a Puerto Rican politician and US ambassador to Venezuela; and
Ecuador's former president, Osvaldo Hurtado.
Latin America's
cultural problem is apparent in the persistent Latino high school dropout rate
– 40 percent in California, according to a recent study – and the high
incidence of teenage pregnancy, single mothers, and crime. The perpetuation of
Latino culture is facilitated by the Spanish language's growing challenge to
English as our national language. It makes it easier for Latinos to avoid the
melting pot and for education to remain a low priority, as it is in Latin
America – a problem highlighted in recent books by former New York City deputy
mayor Herman Badillo, a Puerto Rican, and Mexican-Americans Lionel Sosa and
Ernesto Caravantes.
Language is the
conduit of culture. Consider: There is no word in Spanish for
"compromise" (compromiso means "commitment") nor for
"accountability," a problem that is compounded by a verb structure
that converts "I dropped (broke, forgot) something" into "it got
dropped" ("broken," "forgotten").
As the USAID
mission director during the first two years of the Sandinista regime in
Nicaragua, I had difficulty communicating "dissent" to a government
minister at a crucial moment in our efforts to convince the US Congress to
approve a special appropriation for Nicaragua.
I was later told
by a bilingual, bicultural Nicaraguan educator that when I used
"dissent" what my Nicaraguan counterparts understood was
"heresy." "We are, after all, children of the Inquisition,"
he added.
In a letter to me
in 1991, Mexican-American columnist Richard Estrada described the essence of
the problem of immigration as one of numbers. We should really worry, he wrote,
"when the numbers begin to favor not only the maintenance and
replenishment of the immigrants' source culture, but also its overall growth,
and in particular growth so large that the numbers not only impede assimilation
but go beyond to pose a challenge to the traditional culture of the American
nation."
Obama should
confront the challenges by enforcing immigration laws on employment to help end
illegal immigration. We should calibrate legal immigration annually to (1) the
needs of the economy, as Ms. Jordan urged, and (2) past performance of
immigrant groups with respect to acculturation.
We must declare
our national language to be English and discourage the proliferation of
Spanish- language media. We should limit citizenship by birth to the offspring
of citizens. And we should provide immigrants with easy-to-access educational
services that facilitate acculturation, including English language,
citizenship, and American values.
Lawrence Harrison
directs the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School, Tufts University,
in Medford, Mass. He is the author of "The Central Liberal Truth: How
Politics Can Change A Culture And Save It From Itself."
*
WHERE DO YOU GO AND ALL THE JOBS ARE HELD BY ILLEGALS FROM MEXICO AND ONLY SPANISH SPOKEN?
ALIEN
NATION: Secrets of the Invasion
Date: 2007-01-03, 9:46AM
May 2006 – ALIEN NATION: Secrets of the Invasion – Why America's government invites rampant illegal immigration
It's widely regarded as America's biggest problem: Between 12 and 20 million aliens (MOST SOURCES SUGGEST THERE ARE MUCH MORE LIKELY NEARLY 40 MILLION ILLEGALS HERE NOW) – including large numbers of criminals, gang members and even terrorists – have entered this nation illegally, with countless more streaming across our scandalously unguarded borders daily.
The issue polarizes the nation, robs citizens of jobs, bleeds taxpayers, threatens America's national security and dangerously balkanizes the country into unassimilated ethnic groups with little loyalty or love for America's founding values. Indeed, the de facto invasion is rapidly transforming America into a totally different country than the one past generations have known and loved.
And yet – most Americans have almost no idea what is really going on, or why it is happening.
While news reports depict demonstrations and debates, and while politicians promise "comprehensive border security programs," no real answers ever seem to emerge.
But there are answers. Truthful answers. Shocking answers.
In its groundbreaking May edition, WND's acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine reveals the astounding hidden agendas, plans and people behind America's immigration nightmare.
Titled "ALIEN NATION," the issue is subtitled "SECRETS OF THE INVASION: Why government invites rampant illegal immigration." Indeed, it reveals pivotal secrets very few Americans know. For example:
Did you know that the powerfully influential Council on Foreign Relations – often described as a “shadow government" – issued a comprehensive report last year laying out a five-year plan for the "establishment by 2010 of a North American economic and security community" with a common "outer security perimeter"?
Roughly translated: In the next few years, according to the 59-page report titled "Building a North American Community," the U.S. must be integrated with the socialism, corruption, poverty and population of Mexico and Canada. "Common perimeter" means wide-open U.S. borders between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. As Phyllis Schlafly reveals in this issue of Whistleblower: "This CFR document asserts that President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin 'committed their governments' to this goal when they met at Bush's ranch and at Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005. The three adopted the 'Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America' and assigned 'working groups' to fill in the details. It was at this same meeting, grandly called the North American Summit, that President Bush pinned the epithet 'vigilantes' on the volunteers guarding our border in Arizona."
The CFR report – important excerpts of which are published in Whistleblower – also suggests North American elitists begin getting together regularly, and presumably secretly, "to buttress North American relationships, along the lines of the Bilderberg or Wehrkunde conferences, organized to support transatlantic relations." The Bilderberg and Wehrkunde conferences are highly secret conclaves of the powerful. For decades, there have been suspicions that such meetings were used for plotting the course of world events and especially the centralization of global decision-making.
Did you know that radical immigrant groups – including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) and the National Council of La Raza (La Raza) – not only share a revolutionary agenda of conquering America's southwest, but they also share common funding sources, notably the Ford and Rockefeller foundations?
''California is going to be a Hispanic state," said Mario Obeldo, former head of MALDEF. "Anyone who does not like it should leave." And MEChA's goal is even more radical: an independent ''Aztlan,'' the collective name this organization gives to the seven states of the U.S. Southwest – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. So why would the Rockefeller and Ford foundations support such groups? Joseph Farah tells the story in this issue of Whistleblower.
Why have America's politicians – of both major parties – allowed the illegal alien invasion of this nation to continue for the last 30 years unabated? With al-Qaida and allied terrorists promising to annihilate major U.S. cities with nuclear weapons, with some big-city hospital emergency rooms near closure due to the crush of so many illegals, with the rapid spread throughout the U.S. of MS-13, the super-violent illegal alien gang – with all this and more, why do U.S. officials choose to ignore the laws of the land and the will of the people to pursue, instead, policies of open borders and lax immigration enforcement?
The answers to all this and much more are in Whistleblower's "ALIEN NATION" issue.
Is there hope? Or is America lost to a demographic invasion destined to annihilate its traditional Judeo-Christian culture, and to the ever-growing likelihood that nuclear-armed jihadists will cross our porous borders and wreak unthinkable destruction here?
There most definitely is hope, according to this issue of Whistleblower. Although most politicians of both major political parties have long since abdicated their responsibility for securing America's borders and dealing effectively with the millions already here illegally, there are a few exceptions – most notably Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo.
May's Whistleblower includes an exclusive sneak preview of Tancredo's forthcoming blockbuster book, "In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security." In an extended excerpt, Whistleblower presents Tencredo's expert and inspired analysis of exactly how to solve the nation's most vexing problem.
*
Stop anchor baby benefits /300,000 a
year born in US
Most countries don’t even
allow that many LEGAL immigrants per year into their country...
A proposition to stop automatic benefits to children of illegals (anchor babies) is coming soon.
The cost to California is 4 to 6 billion a year. This prop is not driven by racism, but by citizen-ism... to prevent people from taking dollars from legal taxpayers to give to another illegal group of non-citizen parents....
A proposition to stop automatic benefits to children of illegals (anchor babies) is coming soon.
The cost to California is 4 to 6 billion a year. This prop is not driven by racism, but by citizen-ism... to prevent people from taking dollars from legal taxpayers to give to another illegal group of non-citizen parents....
It will also help to prevent illegals crossing our border and having a baby for this purpose (and then later complaining about unfair/exploitation) This also will help stop Birth-Tourism.
Illegal immigration will never stop, as long our laws stay the same, are not enforced, and we act like idiots and give our hard earned taxes, freedoms and citizen rights away.
300,000 illegal babies a year are born here.
97 percent of anchor baby births are paid for by US taxpayers - your money that you need for your own kids.
Ted Hilton with the TAXPAYER REVOLUTION has launched a June 2010 ballot initiative to help solve California's budget deficit crisis. The laws address the problems of "birth tourism," welfare dependency and other benefits used by those here unlawfully which are draining U.S. citizens' tax dollars. Mail all petitions to POB 9985, San Diego, CA 92169.
go to this link to DOWNLOAD the petiton for the June 2010 Ballot initiative:
http://www.taxpayerrevolution.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8&Itemid=20
thank you.
*
City Journal
Hispanic Family Values? Runaway illegitimacy is creating a new U.S. underclass. Heather Mac Donald Autumn 2006 |
|
Unless
the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the
explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of
decades does not bode well for American social stability. Hispanic immigrants
bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were
once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family
breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the
children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a
proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down.
Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher
likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother
households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile
delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in
the future.
The
government social-services sector has already latched onto this new client
base; as the Hispanic population expands, so will the demands for a larger
welfare state. Since conservative open-borders advocates have yet to
acknowledge the facts of Hispanic family breakdown, there is no way to know
what their solution to it is. But they had better come up with one quickly,
because the problem is here—and growing.
The
dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is
twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high
fertility rate—even more than unbounded levels of immigration—will fuel the
rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades. By 2050, the Latino
population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four Americans
will be Hispanic by mid-century, twice the current ratio. In states such as
California and Texas, Hispanics will be in the clear majority. Nationally,
whites will drop from near 70 percent of the total population in 2000 to just
half by 2050. Hispanics will account for 46 percent of the nation’s added
population over the next two decades, the Pew Hispanic Center reports.
But
it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry
policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the
country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half
times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every
1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for
which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white
women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000
unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside
of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian
births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds
the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the
next few decades.
As if
the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing
faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas
the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and
increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility
rate, and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.
The
only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns teen births.
Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 12th year in a row in
2003, having dropped by more than a third since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics
remain a cause for concern. The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who
come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly
outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every
1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for
every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. To put
these numbers into international perspective, Japan’s teen birthrate is 3.9,
Italy’s is 6.9, and France’s is 10. Even though the outsize U.S. teen birthrate
is dropping, it continues to inflict unnecessary costs on the country, to which
Hispanics contribute disproportionately.
To
grasp the reality behind those numbers, one need only talk to people working on
the front lines of family breakdown. Social workers in Southern California, the
national epicenter for illegal Hispanic immigrants and their progeny, are in
despair over the epidemic of single parenting. Not only has illegitimacy become
perfectly acceptable, they say, but so has the resort to welfare and social
services to cope with it.
Dr.
Ana Sanchez delivers babies at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the city of Orange,
California, many of them to Hispanic teenagers. To her dismay, they view having
a child at their age as normal. A recent patient just had her second baby at
age 17; the baby’s father is in jail. But what is “most alarming,” Sanchez
says, is that the “teens’ parents view having babies outside of marriage as
normal, too. A lot of the grandmothers are single as well; they never married,
or they had successive partners. So the mom sends the message to her daughter
that it’s okay to have children out of wedlock.”
Sanchez
feels almost personally involved in the problem: “I’m Hispanic myself. I wish I
could find out what the Asians are doing right.” She guesses that Asian
parents’ passion for education inoculates their children against teen pregnancy
and the underclass trap. “Hispanics are not picking that up like the Asian
kids,” she sighs.
Conservatives
who support open borders are fond of invoking “Hispanic family values” as a
benefit of unlimited Hispanic immigration. Marriage is clearly no longer one of
those family values. But other kinds of traditional Hispanic values have
survived—not all of them necessarily ideal in a modern economy, however. One of
them is the importance of having children early and often. “It’s considered
almost a badge of honor for a young girl to have a baby,” says Peggy Schulze of
Chrysalis House, an adoption agency in Fresno. (Fresno has one of the highest
teen pregnancy rates in California, typical of the state’s heavily Hispanic
farm districts.) It is almost impossible to persuade young single Hispanic
mothers to give up their children for adoption, Schulze says. “The attitude is:
‘How could you give away your baby?’ I don’t know how to break through.”
The
most powerful Hispanic family value—the tight-knit extended family—facilitates
unwed child rearing. A single mother’s relatives often step in to make up for
the absence of the baby’s father. I asked Mona, a 19-year-old parishioner at
St. Joseph’s Church in Santa Ana, California, if she knew any single mothers.
She laughed: “There are so many I can’t even name them.” Two of her cousins,
aged 25 and 19, have children without having husbands. The situation didn’t
seem to trouble this churchgoer too much. “They’ll be strong enough to raise
them. It’s totally okay with us,” she said. “We’re very close; we’re there to
support them. They’ll do just fine.”
As
Mona’s family suggests, out-of-wedlock child rearing among Hispanics is by no
means confined to the underclass. The St. Joseph’s parishioners are precisely
the churchgoing, blue-collar workers whom open-borders conservatives celebrate.
Yet this community is as susceptible as any other to illegitimacy.
Fifty-year-old Irma and her husband, Rafael, came legally from Mexico in the early
1970s. Rafael works in a meatpacking plant in Brea; they have raised five husky
boys who attend church with them. Yet Irma’s sister—a homemaker like herself,
also married to a factory hand—is now the grandmother of two illegitimate
children, one by each daughter. “I saw nothing in the way my sister and her
husband raised her children to explain it,” Irma says. “She gave them
everything.” One of the fathers of Irma’s young nieces has four other children
by a variety of different mothers. His construction wages are being garnished
for child support, but he is otherwise not involved in raising his children.
The
fathers of these illegitimate children are often problematic in even more
troubling ways. Social workers report that the impregnators of younger Hispanic
women are with some regularity their uncles, not necessarily seen as a bad
thing by the mother’s family. Alternatively, the father may be the boyfriend of
the girl’s mother, who then continues to stay with the grandmother. Older men
seek out young girls in the belief that a virgin cannot get pregnant during her
first intercourse, and to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.
The
tradition of starting families young and expand- ing them quickly can come into
conflict with more modern American mores. Ron Storm, the director of the
Hillview Acres foster-care home in Chino, tells of a 15-year-old girl who was
taken away from the 21-year-old father of her child by a local child-welfare
department. The boyfriend went to jail, charged with rape. But the girl’s parents
complained about the agency’s interference, and eventually both the girl and
her boyfriend ended up going back to Mexico, presumably to have more children.
“At 15, as the Quinceañera tradition celebrates, you’re considered ready for
marriage,” says Storm. Or at least for childbearing; the marriage part is
disappearing.
But
though older men continue to take advantage of younger women, the age gap
between the mother and the father of an illegitimate child is quickly closing.
Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties tries to teach young
fathers to take responsibility for their children. “We’re seeing a lot more 13-
and 14-year-old fathers,” says Kathleen Collins, v.p. of health education. The
day before we spoke, Scott Montoya, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, arrested
two 14-year-old boys who were bragging about having sexual relations with a
cafeteria worker from an Olive Garden restaurant. “It’s now all about getting
girls pregnant when you’re age 15,” he says. One 18-year-old in the Planned
Parenthood fathers’ program has two children by two different girls and is
having sex with five others, says health worker Jason Warner. “A lot of [the
adolescent sexual behavior] has to do with getting respect from one’s peers,”
observes Warner.
Normally,
the fathers, of whatever age, take off. “The father may already be married or
in prison or doing drugs,” says Amanda Gan, director of operations for Toby’s
House, a maternity home in Dana Point, California. Mona, the 19-year-old
parishioner at St. Joseph’s Church, says that the boys who impregnated her two
cousins are “nowhere to be found.” Her family knows them but doesn’t know if
they are working or in jail.
Two
teen mothers at the Hillview Acres home represent the outer edge of Hispanic
family dysfunction. Yet many aspects of their lives are typical. Though these
teenagers’ own mothers were unusually callous and irresponsible, the social
milieu in which they were raised is not unusual.
Irene’s
round, full face makes her look younger than her 14 years, certainly too young
to be a mother. But her own mother’s boyfriend repeatedly forced sex on her,
with the mother’s acquiescence. The result was Irene’s baby, Luz. Baby Luz has
an uncle her own age, Irene’s new 13-month-old brother. Like Irene, Irene’s
mother had her first child at 14, and produced five more over the next 16
years, all of whom went into foster care. Irene’s father committed suicide
before she was old enough to know him. The four fathers of her siblings are out
of the picture, too: one of them, the father of her seven-year-old brother and
five-year-old sister, was deported back to Mexico after he showed up drunk for
a visit with his children, in violation of his probation conditions.
Irene
is serene and articulate—remarkably so, considering that in her peripatetic
early life in Orange County she went to school maybe twice a week. She likes to
sing and to read books that are sad, she says, especially books by Dave Pelzer,
a child-abuse victim who has published three best-selling memoirs about his
childhood trauma. She says she will never get married: “I don’t want another
man in my life. I don’t want that experience again.”
Eighteen-year-old
Jessica at least escaped rape, but her family experiences were bad enough. The
large-limbed young woman, whose long hair is pulled back tightly from her
heart-shaped face, grew up in the predominantly Hispanic farming community of
Indio in the Coachella Valley. She started “partying hard” in fifth grade, she
says—at around the same time that her mother, separated from her father, began
using drugs and going clubbing. By the eighth grade, Jessica and her mother
were drinking and smoking marijuana together. Jessica’s family had known her
boyfriend’s family since she was four; when she had her first child by him—she
was 14 and he was 21—her mother declared philosophically that she had always
known that it would happen. “It was okay with her, so long as he continued to
give her drugs.”
Jessica
originally got pregnant to try to clean up her life, she says. “I knew what I
was doing was not okay, so having a baby was a way for me to stop doing what I
was doing. In that sense, the baby was planned.” She has not used drugs since
her first pregnancy, though she occasionally drinks. After her daughter was
born, she went to live with her boyfriend in a filthy trailer without plumbing;
they scrounged food from dumpsters, despite the income from his illegal drug
business. They planned to get married, but by the time she got pregnant again
with a son, “We were having a lot of problems. We’d be holding hands, and he’d
be looking at other girls. I didn’t want him to touch me.” Eventually, the
county welfare agency removed her and put her in foster care with her two
children.
Both
Jessica and her caddish former boyfriend illustrate the evanescence of the
celebrated Hispanic “family values.” Her boyfriend’s family could not be more
traditional. Two years ago, Jessica went back to Mexico to celebrate her
boyfriend’s parents’ 25th wedding anniversary and the renewal of their wedding
vows. Jessica’s own mother got married at 15 to her father, who was ten years
her senior. Her father would not let his wife work; she was a “stay-at-home
wife,” Jessica says. But don’t blame the move to the U.S. for the behavior of
younger generations; the family crack-up is happening even faster in Latin
America.
Jessica’s
mother may have been particularly negligent, but Jessica’s experiences are not
so radically different from those of her peers. “Everybody’s having babies
now,” she says. “The Coachella Valley is filled with girls’ pregnancies. Some
girls live with their babies’ dads; they consider them their husbands.” These
cohabiting relationships rarely last, however, and a new cohort of fatherless
children goes out into the world.
Despite
the strong family support, the prevalence of single parenting among Hispanics
is producing the inevitable slide into the welfare system. “The girls aren’t
marrying the guys, so they are married to the state,” Dr. Sanchez observes.
Hispanics now dominate the federal Women, Infants, and Children free food
program; Hispanic enrollment grew over 25 percent from 1996 to 2002, while
black enrollment dropped 12 percent and white enrollment dropped 6.5 percent.
Illegal immigrants can get WIC and other welfare programs for their
American-born children. If Congress follows President Bush’s urging and grants
amnesty to most of the 11 million illegal aliens in the country today, expect
the welfare rolls to skyrocket as the parents themselves become eligible.
Amy
Braun works for Mary’s Shelter, a home for young single mothers who are
homeless or in crisis, in Orange County, California. It has become “culturally
okay” for the Hispanic population to use the shelter and welfare system, Braun
says. A case manager at a program for pregnant homeless women in the city of
Orange observes the same acculturation to the social-services sector, with its
grievance mongering and sense of victimhood. “I’ll have women in my office on
their fifth child, when the others have already been placed in foster care,”
says Anita Berry of Casa Teresa. “There’s nothing shameful about having
multiple children that you can’t care for, and to be pregnant again, because
then you can blame the system.”
The
consequences of family breakdown are now being passed down from one generation
to the next, in an echo of the black underclass. “The problems are deeper and
wider,” says Berry. “Now you’re getting the second generation of foster care
and group home residents. The dysfunction is multigenerational.”
The
social-services complex has responded with barely concealed enthusiasm to this
new flood of clients. As Hispanic social problems increase, so will the
government sector that ministers to them. In July, a New York Times
editorial, titled young latinas and a cry for help, pointed out the elevated
high school dropout rates and birthrates among Hispanic girls. A quarter of all
Latinas are mothers by the age of 20, reported the Times. With the usual
melodrama that accompanies the pitch for more government services, the Times
designated young Latinas as “endangered” in the same breath that it disclosed
that they are one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. “The time
to help is now,” said the Times—by which it means ratcheting up the
taxpayer-subsidized social-work industry.
In
response to the editorial, Carmen Barroso, regional director of International
Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region, proclaimed in a letter
to the editor the “urgent need for health care providers, educators and
advocates to join the sexual and reproductive health movement to ensure the
fundamental right to services for young Latinas.”
Wherever
these “fundamental rights” might come from, Barroso’s call nevertheless seems
quite superfluous, since there is no shortage of taxpayer-funded “services” for
troubled Latinas—or Latinos. The schools in California’s San Joaquin Valley
have day care for their students’ babies, reports Peggy Schulze of Chrysalis
House. “The girls get whatever they need—welfare, medical care.” Advocates for
young unwed moms in New York’s South Bronx are likewise agitating for more
day-care centers in high schools there, reports El Diario/La Prensa. A
bill now in Congress, the Latina Adolescent Suicide Prevention Act, aims to
channel $10 million to “culturally competent” social agencies to improve the
self-esteem of Latina girls and to provide “support services” to their families
and friends if they contemplate suicide.
The
trendy “case management” concept, in which individual “cases” become the focal
point around which a solar system of social workers revolves, has even reached
heavily Hispanic elementary and middle schools. “We have a coordinator, who
brings in a collaboration of agencies to deal with the issues that don’t allow
a student to meet his academic goals, such as domestic violence or drugs,”
explains Sylvia Rentria, director of the Family Resource Center at Berendo
Middle School in Los Angeles. “We can provide individual therapy.” Rentria
offers the same program at nearby Hoover Elementary School for up to 100
students.
This
July, Rentria launched a new session of Berendo’s Violence Intervention Program
for parents of children who are showing signs of gang involvement and other
antisocial behavior. Ghady M., 55 and a “madre soltera” (single mother), like
most of the mothers in the program, has been called in because her 16-year-old
son, Christian, has been throwing gang signs at school, cutting half his
classes, and ending up in the counseling office every day. The illegal
Guatemalan is separated from her partner, who was “muy malo,” she says; he was
probably responsible for her many missing teeth. (The detectives in the heavily
Hispanic Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, which includes
the Berendo school, spend inordinate amounts of time on domestic violence
cases.) Though Ghady used to work in a factory on Broadway in downtown L.A.—
often referred to as Little Mexico City—she now collects $580 in welfare
payments and $270 in food stamps for her two American-born children.
Christian
is a husky smart aleck in a big white T-shirt; his fashionably pomaded hair
stands straight up. He goes to school but doesn’t do homework, he grins; and
though he is not in a gang, he says, he has friends who are. Keeping Ghady and
Christian company at the Violence Intervention Program is Ghady’s grandniece,
Carrie, a lively ten-year-old. Carrie lives with her 26-year-old mother but
does not know her father, who also sired her 12-year-old brother. Her
five-year-old brother has a different father.
Yet
for all these markers of social dysfunction, fatherless Hispanic families
differ from the black underclass in one significant area: many of the mothers
and the absent fathers work, even despite growing welfare use. The former
boyfriend of Jessica, the 18-year-old mother at the Hillview Acres foster home,
works in construction and moonlights on insulation jobs; whether he still deals
drugs is unknown. Jessica is postponing joining her father in Texas until she
finishes high school, because once she moves in with him, she will feel
obligated to get a job to help the family finances. The mother of Hillview’s
14-year-old Irene used to fix soda machines in Anaheim, California, though she
got fired because she was lazy, Irene says. Now, under court compulsion, she
works in a Lunchables factory in Santa Ana, a condition of getting her children
back from foster care. The 18-year-old Lothario and father of two, whom Planned
Parenthood’s Jason Warner is trying to counsel, works at a pet store. The
mother of Carrie, the vivacious ten-year-old sitting in on Berendo Middle
School’s Violence Intervention Program, makes pizza at a Papa John’s pizza
outlet.
How
these two value systems—a lingering work ethic and underclass mating norms—will
interact in the future is anyone’s guess. Orange County sheriff’s deputy
Montoya says that the older Hispanic generation’s work ethic is fast
disappearing among the gangbanging youngsters whom he sees. “Now, it’s all
about fast money, drugs, and sex.” It may be that the willingness to work will
plummet along with marriage rates, leading to even greater social problems than
are now rife among Hispanics. Or it may be that the two contrasting practices
will remain on parallel tracks, creating a new kind of underclass: a culture
that tolerates free-floating men who impregnate women and leave, like the vast
majority of black men, yet who still labor in the noncriminal economy. The
question is whether, if the disposition to work remains relatively strong, a
working parent will inoculate his or her illegitimate children against the
worst degradations that plague black ghettos.
From an intellectual
standpoint, this is a fascinating social experiment, one that academicians
are—predictably—not attuned to. But the consequences will be more than intellectual:
they may severely strain the social fabric. Nevertheless, it is an experiment
that we seem destined to see to its end. Tisha Roberts, a supervisor at an
Orange County, California, institution that assists children in foster care,
has given up hope that the illegitimacy rate will taper off. “It’s going to
continue to grow,” she said.
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