Posted on 12/28/2003 10:49:51 AM PST by mrustow
Legend has long held that illegal aliens give American citizens cheap lettuce and cheap child care. Excepting for agribusiness and the upper classes, that legend is, in reality, a nightmare, in which the American middle and working classes pay and pay and pay for illegal immigration, and get nothing but grief in return.
In states with heavy illegal alien populations, the budget of a middle-class family is full of hidden illegal alien surcharges. As a result, today’s middle-class American family with two full-time working parents has less discretionary income than its traditional forebear, in which the father alone was breadwinner. (Conditions are that much worse for families torn apart by divorce or the death of a parent.) And things are only getting worse. In California, for example, immigration writer Ed Rubenstein estimates that legal and illegal immigration combine to cost American-born California taxpayers $21.7 billion per year, for a 6.6% annual surcharge. And as Rubenstein points out, legal immigrants also have a voracious appetite for social services: “California immigrant households received a net subsidy from combined federal, state, and local programs averaging $6,145 in 1996.”
Compared to previous generations, middle-class Americans today pay outrageous prices, as a proportion of their incomes, for homes, in order to be able to protect their children from “bad schools.” So say the mother-daughter writing team of Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, and journalist Steve Sailer.
In Warren and Tyagi’s new book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke, they write that "The brunt of the price increases has fallen on families with children. Data from the Federal Reserve show that [after inflation] the median home value for the average childless individual increased by 23 percent between 1983 and 1998 … For married couples with children, however, housing prices shot up 79 percent—more than three times faster."
And yet, the white American working class can only dream of such headaches. For its members, home ownership - in any neighborhood - is increasingly an impossible dream. And when economists talk about what illegal immigration costs the typical American worker, the averages (see below) include millions of workers who have been locked out of entire industries by employers who refuse to hire Americans, or by illegal immigrant workers who will not tolerate Americans in their midst. This is the ugly truth behind the propaganda of immigration enthusiasts, who insist that illegal aliens are doing "Jobs that Americans won't do."
In 1968, Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act (aka Title VII), which mandated teaching Hispanic children in Spanish and English, which in practice has meant in Spanish only. (The BEA was officially “eliminated” by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, yet NCLB did not eliminate bilingual education, which radical U.S. Department of Education officials force more aggressively than ever on the public schools.)
In states buffeted by high levels of illegal immigration, including the entire American Southwest, Florida, New York, and Illinois, the public schools are being inundated by unassimilable, illegal immigrants and the children of illegal immigrants, including foreign street gangs. Such schools are typically dominated by incompetent, racist, Hispanic (in Florida, often by Haitian) nationalists at the staff, faculty, and administrative level, who increasingly dispense with the teaching of English. And the foreign nationalist “educators” get paid more than do their English-speaking counterparts!
In California, which has approximately four million illegal immigrants (out of 9 million-13 million nationally), illegal immigrants have destroyed a public school system that for generations was the envy of the nation. For middle-class, American parents to leave their children in such hostile environments would constitute neglect. And so, while some parents have placed their children in often expensive private schools, others have sought safe public school districts. Realtors have cashed in. Thus must middle-class Americans pay exorbitant taxes to maintain public schools from which they have been disenfranchised, or buy overpriced homes, while people who are here illegally use the schools for free.
Throughout the American Southwest, public and private hospitals alike face the prospect of shutting down, because of the onslaught of illegal immigrants. State and local laws prohibit hospital emergency rooms from turning away any patient, based on his inability to pay, or from inquiring into a patient’s citizenship status. Exploiting such laws, illegal immigrants use emergency rooms for primary medical care, including for the common cold, so as to get out of paying for their care. Meanwhile, American patients with real medical emergencies, whose taxes maintain those hospitals and who pay for their own medical care, are turned away.
News reports tell of Californians with medical emergencies who are forced to drive from hospital to hospital, since facilities close their emergency rooms to new patients as early as noontime. Bizarrely, such reports never mention the role of illegal immigration in causing the medical crisis. Instead, one hears only of “uninsured” patients, amid suggestions that the system needs massive transfusions of tax dollars, and that America needs European or Canadian-style socialized (“universal”) health care. None of the stories this reporter has seen, has told of illegal aliens ever being turned away from medical facilities, no matter how trivial their complaint. Thus are Americans disenfranchised by the very medical system they pay so much to maintain.
And Americans pay higher auto insurance rates, to make up for illegal aliens who drive illegally and without insurance, and cause accidents.
Illegal immigrants’ defrauding of California’s generous welfare system has long been a scandal. Such welfare fraud is now a national scandal, as state and local governments operating stealth amnesty programs violate the Constitution, in negotiating directly with Mexico and other foreign governments, to accept the “matricula consular,” an insecure form of ID used exclusively by illegal aliens, and in issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. Illegals may then use either the matricula consular or state driver’s licence to receive welfare benefits from officials who are not permitted to ask an applicant his citizenship status. Meanwhile, a driver’s license can be used to illegally register to vote.
Increasing numbers of states are following New York’s example, and granting in-state tuition to illegal aliens, at the same time that they charge law-abiding, American citizens from other states two and three times the in-state rate. And as illegal aliens are taking the initiative, suing colleges in Virginia for the right to break the law, illegals in the other states will surely follow suit. Thus do those who, as a matter of law, have no civil rights, demand and receive such rights at the expense of Americans, who are robbed of theirs. Meanwhile, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Ut.) seeks to make the lawsuits moot, as his DREAM Act would repeal the federal law prohibiting the granting of in-state tuition to illegals.
Again, it is the citizens who must pay for the illegals. And via affirmative action, unqualified, illegal college applicants are admitted ahead of qualified Americans, foreclosing on the already limited opportunities for the children of the white, working poor to improve their lot. (A multitude of programs exist for such children's black and Hispanic counterparts.)
But that isn’t the half of it. As columnist Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, unqualified immigrants – including illegals – enjoy affirmative action privileges, in getting jobs in place of qualified, American citizens.
It is no wonder that for years, Americans have been fleeing California, whose population has been buoyed exclusively through incoming illegal immigrants.
But flight is just a stopgap. Today, California; tomorrow, Idaho.
As economist George Borjas has shown, America’s immigration policy costs every American worker an average of $2,578 in annual income, in the form of depressed wages, in addition to all the hidden surcharges I listed above. And with every stealth amnesty, more illegals stream across America’s borders to all her states. And as the unfortunate American residents of far-flung Lewiston, Maine have learned, the federal government is inviting foreigners to come here LEGALLY, to partake of welfare programs that disenfranchised Americans must pay for.
Finally, as Steve Sailer has reported, illegal immigration is disenfranchising Americans through the unconstitutional creation of “rotten boroughs,” in which only a small portion of the populace may legally vote. Rotten boroughs arise because congressional districts are created based on numbers of “residents,” rather than citizens.
Unlike the wealthy liberals who support every sort of handout for immigrants, Middle Americans who actually have to work for a living, cannot afford an unlimited number of hidden, illegal immigration taxes and surcharges. Like the classic science fiction movie, the current situation could be called, Invasion of the Citizen Snatchers. Or simply, as in the title of Michelle Malkin’s book, Invasion.
we used to have many names for lily-white Irish immigrants in the 19th century... I'm sure I'll think of something.
Like most illegal immigration apologists, gawd, you deliberately erase the distinction between legal immigrants of the 19th and 20th Centuries and the illegal aliens flooding across our borders right now.
Go to Mexico, as a non-Mexican citizen, and try to set up housekeeping and get a job in violation of Mexican immigration laws and see how far you get before Mexican law falls on your head like a ton of bricks.
I'm talking about unconditional, free immigration for all able-bodied persons without a criminal record. everyone has a right to the American Dream.
And you can have that, AFAIC, as long as it doesn't include stealing from me to provide >insert whatever< for the immigrants. The American Dream in my book does not include free medical, dental, food stamps, power subsidies, extra security etc... to the tune of close to 50%, from the sweat of MY brow. Since pigs will fly the day that your unconditional immigration comes without those encumberances you might not want to count me as a supporter yet...
Also, we already have too many people -- we certainly do not need more criminals. Our historic battle fields are being destroyed, traffic jams growing, etc. In the D.C.-Northern Virginia-Maryland, for example, thousands of illegals have formed violent gangs, many involved in home invasion.
And lets not forget the illegal aliens sociopathic sense of entitlement.
There is absolutely no benefit for this country to let illegal aliens remain. They should be and can easily be deported.
Kinda limits Mexico's immigration policy to well heeled retirees.
Based on your criteria, why shouldn't we bring in 300 million untouchables from India, 100 million Banglideshis, 400 million Chinese, and 400 million from the continent of Africa?
You would proudly spit in the face of every foreigner who is obeying the immigration laws in their attempt to come to America. Also, you would encourage more illegal immigration with your rancid idea.
Great idea...but w/ the provision that they all must register & vote Democrat.
Those who wants to give amnesty to illegal aliens and/or encourage more of them to migrate would fall into one or more of the following categories:
1. They are bribed, blackmailed, or have other vested interest.
2. They are members of terrorist organizations, drug dealers, or engaged in other criminal activities.
3. They hate this country or are sleeper agents.
4. They suffer from mental illness such as delusions that there is something wonderful about illegals aliens.
5. They want to change this country into a Third World country.
<"the law itself is inherently unjust.">Really? Why don't you come visit my neighborhood, one that used to be well-kept and peaceful? Now, in place of beauty and peace, broken beer bottles on my sidewalks, in my garden beds, loud music, ten people living in one house next door to me--bare-chested Mexicans who spit on my sidewalks and steal the pecans from under my tree and wake me up at 5:30am with their loading their trucks with plumbing supplies and throw cigarette butts for me to sweep up, never once speaking a word of English--yes, come tell me why the law is inherently unjust.
We have laws for law-abiding citizens. Illegal aliens are usurping what legal citizens have paid for with their lives and property.
I can only assume one reason that you carry such empathy for law-breakers. Every nation has the right to set its border/immigration policies. If you don't like ours, find another country that will assume responsibility for you.
Penny
Perhaps we should return the thought.
It's not about race, it's about the law.
so why is everyone here obsessing about immigration when they should be dismantling the welfare state instead?
Oh, COME ON! Don't be disingenuous, you'd be on here carping about that if it was the case.
I wonder if there is a way to get the moderators to understand this. Perhaps then my personally written threads on illegal immigration wouldn't be automatically assigned to the Smokey Backroom then.
Changing Our Country,Can You Change America? Part 2, and Can You Help America?
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