Just before Christmas last year, Jill Biden figuratively stepped over
the huddled masses of homeless on the streets of America, and
headed across the border for a high-profile campaign photo-op.
Her destination was a camp for migrants who had entered the US
illegally and were awaiting adjudication of their cases in Mexico.
PAULETTE VARGHESE ALTMAIER
The Tired and Poor Are Already Here
Just before Christmas last year, Jill Biden figuratively stepped over the huddled masses of homeless on the streets of America, and headed across the border for a high-profile campaign photo-op. Her destination was a camp for migrants who had entered the US illegally and were awaiting adjudication of their cases in Mexico.
Twelve thousand children are homeless here in California, and our homeless population has risen to 151,000. Last year, California was single-handedly responsible for the national increase in homelessness.
Homeless camp on a street in front of a school in Los Angeles (YouTube screen grab)
Adjusted for cost of living, Census Bureau data show that California is also by far the highest-poverty state in the nation.
But it was not to the tired and poor in California that the Biden campaign sent its emissary for a high-profile Christmas-season media event.
As a private citizen, Jill Biden unquestionably has the right to choose the beneficiaries of her charity. But this was no private outing, this was a campaign event. Clearly, the Biden campaign had calculated that bypassing America’s needy in favor of a Lady Bountiful appearance across the border would be a winning campaign strategy.
In the same vein, California’s legislature recently imposed a state penalty on residents who cannot afford the Affordable Care Act’s sky-high premiums, while approving free health care for young adult immigrants who lack legal status. My home county of Santa Clara has set aside millions for legal services for unauthorized immigrants, while the homeless shiver under our freeway underpasses, and food banks send out pleas for donations.
What does it say about our leaders, and our nation, that a closed fist for struggling Americans and an open hand for those who break our immigration laws is a winning political strategy?
In the four decades since I immigrated to the US from India, I have often observed that we immigrants think more deeply about the meaning of citizenship than our native-born peers. This is not surprising - we are here by conscious choice, not by chance. As part of our oath of citizenship we explicitly renounce “all allegiance” to the land of our birth and enter into community with a new people and a new nation. When we take that oath, we recognize that we are entering into a solemn compact of duty and loyalty to America’s Constitution and laws, as well as to the well-being of the American people, with whom we are now joined in nationhood.
Civil rights leader and Texas Democrat Barbara Jordan eloquently expressed this ethos: “A nation is formed by the willingness of each of us to share in the responsibility for upholding the common good… a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny.”
This has never been a partisan position. It should not be one now.
Another core truth that we immigrants have reason to understand better than most is that this nation of immigrants cannot absorb all who wish to gain entry -- 150 million people, by Gallup’s recent analysis. That being the case, our adopted country has a clear moral responsibility to put the well-being of its own citizens front and center when deciding who should be admitted, and the indisputable right to ensure that admittance is in accordance with its laws.
This, too, has never previously been partisan or controversial. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were both forthright about the importance of an immigration policy grounded in adherence to the law. Yet today, presidential candidates are engaged in a bidding war for votes by promising de facto uncontrolled admission to the US, coupled with commitments to extensive government services for those who enter illegally.
Given the chaos at our southern border, and the enormous number of visa overstays, a serious review of immigration policy and enforcement is clearly required. Unfortunately, what we are getting instead is divisive demagoguery about nativism and xenophobia, and a menu of false choices with heavily loaded framing: inclusive vs exclusive, pro-immigrant vs anti-immigrant, welcoming vs unwelcoming.
But as the Biden vignette illustrates, this rhetoric skirts the core moral question: do we “welcome” and “include” struggling Americans, and make their advancement and well-being our first concern, or do we callously pass them over in favor of unauthorized immigrants, who are in direct competition with Americans for already inadequate resources? At the national level, services for unauthorized immigrants impose a net fiscal burden of over $50B on taxpayers.
The moral problem does not end with government services. There is strikingly little attention paid to the inconvenient truth that uncontrolled entry of low-skill immigrants most impacts the wages of the poorest working Americans. As Harvard’s George Borjas has shown, unauthorized immigration reduces the wages of American workers by more than $100 billion a year. The poorest American workers, and those with the least education, are the most affected.
Tellingly, American immigrants and minorities hold views that are sharply at variance with those of their self-appointed spokespeople. Immigrants in Maryland strongly opposed state sanctuary policies. Zogby’s survey found that Hispanics and blacks overwhelmingly feel that there are plenty of Americans available to fill unskilled jobs. They are also strongly in favor of immigration enforcement. That is unsurprising -- they are directly impacted by the negative consequences of large-scale unauthorized immigration, unlike elite progressives living in gated communities and doorman apartments.
When trouble strikes Americans abroad, our nation comes together as a community, and exerts extraordinary efforts to bring our citizens home to safety. With the Wuhan epidemic and quarantine making headlines, we read that the US government has evacuated Americans from the affected areas by special charter. We cheer the sustained high-level efforts by the State Department that have successfully brought Americans home from North Korea, Iran, and other trouble spots.
We can and should harness the same spirit of national solidarity, national community and national priority to address the needs of Americans here at home. America’s workers, as well as its tired and poor, deserve no less.
Paulette was a senior tech executive responsible for billion-dollar high-tech businesses in leading Silicon Valley companies. She immigrated to the US from India in 1978. Linkedin
Study: More than 7-in-10 California Immigrant
Welfare
More than 7-in-10 households headed by immigrants in the
state of California are on taxpayer-funded welfare, a new study reveals.
The latest Census Bureau data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that
about 72 percent of households headed by noncitizens and immigrants use one or
more forms of taxpayer-funded welfare programs in California — the number one
immigrant-receiving state in the U.S.
Meanwhile, only about 35 percent of households headed by
native-born Americans use welfare in California.
All four states with the largest foreign-born populations,
including California, have extremely high use of welfare by immigrant
households. In Texas, for example, nearly 70 percent of households headed by
immigrants use taxpayer-funded welfare. Meanwhile, only about 35 percent of
native-born households in Texas are on welfare.
In New York and Florida, a majority of households headed by
immigrants and noncitizens are on welfare. Overall, about 63 percent of
immigrant households use welfare while only 35 percent of native-born
households use welfare.
President Trump’s administration is looking to soon implement a
policy that protects American taxpayers’ dollars from funding the
mass importation of welfare-dependent foreign nationals by enforcing a “public
charge” rule whereby legal immigrants would be less likely to secure a
permanent residency in the U.S. if they have used any forms of welfare in the
past, including using Obamacare, food stamps, and public housing.
The immigration controls would be a boon for American taxpayers
in the form of an annual $57.4
billion tax cut — the amount taxpayers spend every year on paying for
the welfare, crime, and schooling costs of the country’s mass importation of
1.5 million new, mostly low-skilled legal immigrants.
As Breitbart News reported, the majority of
the more than 1.5 million foreign nationals entering the country every
year use about 57
percent more food stamps than the average native-born American
household. Overall, immigrant households consume 33 percent more cash
welfare than American citizen households and 44 percent more in Medicaid
dollars. This straining of public services by a booming 44 million foreign-born
population translates to the average immigrant household costing American
taxpayers $6,234 in federal
welfare.
Tom
Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants
13 Jan 20202,348
8:12
Tom
Steyer, the billionaire investor and Democrat 2020 candidate, wants Americans
to provide cheap housing to illegal immigrants.
“A Steyer Administration will …
ensure that all undocumented communities have access to affordable and safe
housing,” Steyer said in his immigration proposal.
Steyer’s offer of housing is combined with promises to provide
illegals with free healthcare, plus workplace training and cultural
celebrations:
A Steyer administration … [will] provide a safe platform for
immigrants to share their culture and celebrate their heritage, foster
opportunities for public service that support new Americans, and coordinate
with Federal agencies and the private sector in order to build workforce
training and fellowship opportunities for immigrants with professional
qualifications from their home nation to help them leverage their specialized
skills in the American marketplace.
Steyer made his promise of cheap housing to illegals even though
housing costs for many Americans forces them to rent or buy cheaper housing far
from work and friends, and are being forced to give up hopes for larger
families.
But those housing costs are high partly because the federal
government welcomes one million new legal immigrants into the nation’s cities,
neighborhoods, and schools. That is a huge inflow — four million young
Americans turn 18 each year.
But Steyer is a billionaire investor, so illegal migrants will
not be moving into his very expensive and well policed neighborhood. The New
Yorker magazine described his house in 2013:
President [barack Obama] flew to San Francisco on April 3rd for
a series of fund-raisers. He stopped in first at a cocktail reception hosted by
Tom Steyer, a fifty-six-year-old billionaire, former hedge-fund manager, and
major donor to the Democratic Party. Steyer lives in the city’s Sea Cliff
neighborhood, in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
Any inflow of migrants will be a
boon to Steyer’s fellow investors who gain from the extra workers, consumers,
and renters. For example, one gauge of real estate investments shows a 50 percent gain since 2015,
even as Americans’ wages and salaries rose by only about 15 percent.
Meanwhile, Steyer’s home state is
experiencing record housing prices and record homelessness as today’s illegals
enjoy the state government’s offer of sanctuary, jobs, and welfare. The federal
housing agency reported January 7 the state has about 108,000 homeless:
This year’s report shows that there was a small increase in the
one-night estimates of people experiencing homelessness across the nation
between 2018 and 2019 (three percent), which reflects a 16 percent increase in
California, and offsets a marked decrease across many other states.
…
In terms of absolute numbers, California has more than half of
all unsheltered homeless people in the country (53 percent or 108,432), with
nearly nine times as many unsheltered homeless as the state with the next
highest number, Florida (six percent or 12,476), despite California’s
population being only twice that of Florida.
In September Breitbart News reported the Census Bureau showed how the state’s housing costs are
pushing Americans into poverty:
The September 10 study shows 18.2 percent of California’s
population is poor, far above the 13 percent poverty rate in Arkansas, 16
percent in Mississippi, and the 14.6 percent in West Virginia.
…
By 2017, for example, the government’s pro-migration policies
had added 11 million people to the state’s native population of 29 million
people. The huge inflow means that one-in-four residents are immigrants.
Numerous studies have shown many
millions of foreigners want to migrate into Americans’ society. For example,
another five million Central American residents want to migrate into the
United States, according to a Gallup survey published
right after the 2018 midterm elections.
Gallup also noted “three percent of the world’s adults — or
nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move to the U.S.”
California's poverty rate is worse than
Alabama & Mississippi, says Census Bureau. The major cause of this huge
change is immigration policy which spikes housing costs & shrinks wages --
and delivers huge gains for investors in real-estate & corp. shares. http://bit.ly/2mgvBlW
California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs
Steyer’s promise to welcome illegals
is echoed by the other investor billionaire in the Democrats’ primary, Mike
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. In January, he promised to make
illegals comfortable with Americans’ money, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Well, it’s a no brainer. You give [a] pathway to citizenship to
11 million people. We’re not going to deport them anyways, it’s outrageous. If
you look in New York City, we make sure that people felt comfortable,
regardless of their immigration status, to come and get city services. I was
always determined that they would not be afraid to come. Somebody could need
like life-threatening things and does not get medical care. This is not a game.
You’ve got to make sure that they’re okay.
Housing costs in Bloomberg’s New
York are very high because it has huge populations of illegal and legal immigrants. The result is that it has
a homeless population of roughly 92,000, and also the nation’s highest rate of homelessness, at 46 homeless for every 10,000 people.
High housing costs also make it
difficult for Americans to move into towns and cities that have better-paying
jobs, according to a 2017 study about the rising wealth gap in the United States. Americans “are frozen where
they live,” said Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at a
January 9 meeting.
But nearly all of the Democrats in the 2020 election have called
for more migrants — without showing any concern for the impact on Americans’
housing costs.
“We could afford to take in a
heartbeat another two million people,” Joe Biden told Democrats at an August event in Des Moines, Iowa. “The idea
that a country of 330 million people is cannot absorb people who are in
desperate need … is absolutely bizarre … I would also move to
increase the total number of immigrants able to come to the United
States.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s
immigration plan, for example,
is titled “A Fair and Welcoming Immigration System.” It says:
We need expanded legal immigration that will grow our economy,
reunite families, and meet our labor market demands … s president, I will
immediately issue guidance to end criminal prosecutions for simple
administrative immigration violations … As President, I’ll issue guidance
ensuring that detention is only used where it is actually necessary because an
individual poses a flight or safety risk … I’ll welcome 125,000 refugees
in my first year, and ramping up to at least 175,000 refugees per year by the
end of my first term.
The impact of federal immigration
policy on Americans’ housing costs is taboo among establishment reporters. But
those costs were touted by a group of investors lobbying Congress to raise
housing prices by importing more immigrants. A booklet by the Economic
Innovation Group says:
The relationship between population growth and housing demand is
clear. More people means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less
demand … As a result, a shrinking population will lead to falling prices and a
deteriorating, vacancy-plagued housing stock that may take generations to clear
…
The potential for skilled immigrants to boost local housing
markets is clear. Notably, economist Albert Saiz (2007) found a 1% increase in
population from immigration causes housing rents and house prices in U.S.
cities to rise commensurately, by 1%
On January 9, Donohue noted New
Yorkers blocked the plan by Amazon and the city government to build a new corporate
headquarters in the city. The residents protested the development plan partly
because it would have driven up rents and housing costs, said Donohue. “It
is a very potent issue,” he observed.
A lobbying group for investors admits mass migration helps investors in
major coastal cities but 'fails' Americans in heartland & rural towns. So
it urges less immigration? No - it urges more migration to spike family housing
prices outside major cities! http://bit.ly/2VCZYUt
NYT Boosts Investors'
Campaign for More Immigrant Workers, Consumers
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as
impoverished Americans wait
Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so
many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free
public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated,
unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those
are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier.
Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold
awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these
emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal
immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is
there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban
Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals
prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do
it yesterday.
The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal
immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing
have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all
applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)
database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other
welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification,
though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our
citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of
past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public
housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens
attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off
of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and
some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member
being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped
across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next
day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on
government housing. Plus lots
of cheesy news coverage about how
heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to
find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these
programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact
being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the
virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice"
for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are
stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal
technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law.
But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as
they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the
impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed
by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the
media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays
Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid
nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That
figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy
population, according to Fox News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other
state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in
California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants
reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with
children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los
Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food
stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9
billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than
60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in
2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior
fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of
the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can
cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things
like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution
making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal
protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor
Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made
California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice
Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A
federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan.
1, 2018.
According to Center for
Immigration Studies, “The new law
does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer
notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the
popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police
from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined
the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants
did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is
just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the
expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One
California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens,
including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities
easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal
Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal
immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116
billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after
deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF
ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY,
THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY
LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million
non-citizens now live in the United States.
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