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.
What's wrong, slick? Things look different when there's a chance of personal impact? Why am I not shocked and surprised?
Come on down here to the border in Cochise County, Arizona. I'll be more than happy to give you the VIP tour. Did you ever see the movie "Apocalypse Now"? I can show you scenes here that make it look like the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland.
Let's discuss the sacred concept of private property.
Does your fence impede illegals? It will be cut.
Do you have a well system? Its pipes and valves will be smashed to top off water bottles.
Does your house contain food? It will be broken into and pilfered.
Does your dog bark at trespassers? Start digging his grave.
Are you allergic to shellfish? Oops, wrong movie...
Is Paco running late for his appointment at the pick-up site for his ride to Phoenix? Your car will be stolen out of your yard or your sweet old gray-haired mother will get her wrinkled fanny car-jacked on the road.
Hyperbole? (Hint: that's a fancy foreign word that we urbane sophisticates here in the Cultural Center of the Universe use in place of the gauche term exaggeration.) Not hardly. It happens here all the damn time.
(That's it. That's all I have to say. Over and out.)
For one he just makes an assertion. He provides no details and no documentation. As far as we know he is counting as a cost of immigration the cost of providing K-12 schooling to all children in the state (Many costs are sunk costs - You expand the class size rather than build new schools) or the cost of staffing an ER regardless of who is being served. Hell, he could even be counting the cost of unemployment benefits for the American worker who cant find a job and blames his failure to find a $150,000 a year computer programming gig on the immigrant crossing over from Mexico.
You write as though he just conjured numbers out of thin air. He cites other writers, and he cites the circumstances of costs. I've noticed that it is a common ruse of people who don't like certain facts top demand a book-length disquisition supporting a brief article. Then the complaint would be that the writer is so prolix as to be unreadable. And one of your "complaints" is obviously specious: If an ER is taken over by immigrants, to the exclusion of American citizens, then the cost of the ER is a cost of immigration. The American taxpayers in the area are paying for it, but are denied its services. Whether the ER is funded any better than when Americans were permitted to use it is irrelevant to calculating it as a cost of immigration. As for the case of public schools in areas with heavy illegal immigrant populations, any halfway informed person would know that, without needing to read this article.
Of course, no one is stopping you from following up on the writers the author cites. Someone who demands such Herculean effort of others must be willing to do some work himself, if does not wish to be outed as a hypocrite.
For one there was land to homestead, today there is no land available ---- another there was an Industrial Revolution going on making lots of jobs for low-skilled labor who would soon become middle class --- instead of NAFTA which is sending millions of jobs out of the USA and to Mexico. Plus today there is Welfare which is drawing many of the immigrants today.
Pregnancies Concern Gadsden School Officials
Forty of the pregnant girls this year are freshmen, seven are in middle school and two are in elementary school. Sixth-grade is elementary school in the Gadsden district.
Changing schools to meet the needs of the Hispanic students admits they're not up to learning what an American typically can learn ---- you've got to drop English and bring in Mexican teachers to teach in Spanish, you drop most of the harder courses and all standards. You don't teach about American history --- teach them about heroes like Pancho Villa, add a day care on the high school and middle school campuses and allow gangs to run the halls.
It's scary to think some people believe that anyone from any country in the world has a right to move to the USA, regardless of their skill and education levels, to seek some better life --- and of course if they can't make it on their own abilities, the American taxpayers is going to be expected to provide for them. We'd be better off leaving them at home and just sending out welfare and Social Security checks, food stamps to all the poor people of the world.
Funny how the reverse of that is true also. Still --- the WOD is the US government going after American citizens ---- it isn't about keeping foreigners from flooding over the border for whatever reasons they wish to be here.
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