ILLEGALS COSTING CALIFORNIA BILLIONS! And Now the Illegals Are Electing LA RAZA SUPREMACIST To Expand the Occupation!

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:

 http://immigrationcounters.com/

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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.

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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

 from the May 28, 2009 By Lawrence Harrison

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."

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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.

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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....

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.

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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.