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.
Duh!!! these people did not rely on welfare, they actualy worked and died working here.
Immigration laws have changed over the years. From approximately 1923 to 1965 immigration was practically stopped to allow for the assimilation of earlier immigrants.
Remember, immigration is supposed to benefit the accepting country first and foremost. The benefits to the foreign nationals is secondary.
At least back then the mafia was considered rogue and illegal. Nowadays the mafia is considered to be legalized.
Funny how you do not attack Vincente Fox's racism and human rights violation in Mexico, and his willful support of blackmailed human trade. We are not talking about mere bootleging here, but terrorism and entire families owing debts of allegiances to their border human passers.
Too funny ! Ihaven't heard that word used in over 20 years !! ;-)
The law is the law of the represented, and by this it is a just law. The law the illegals want is a law that does not represent us but is only aimed at looting us. It is so obvious.
just like that you reduced the views of perhaps 10 million people in America to a single sentence. you must have a bigger brain than Einstein (who immigrated from Germany BTW).
Sounds like a few bricks fell off the back of your unregistered truck.
DOES IT OCCUR to you that 100 years ago there weren't ANY prohibitions on the Italians and Irish immigrants, other than passing basic medical exams so they wouldn't be a BURDEN on the taxpayer? [Nah, I'm sure THAT thought never crossed your mind.]
DOES IT OCCUR to you that 100 years ago we weren't giving virtually FREE access to people who had no legal right to be here...and charging them less than we would from AMERICAN citizens from out of state. [Nah, I'm sure THAT thought never crossed your mind.]
DOES IT OCCUR to you that 100 years ago people didn't expect free womb to the tomb help from the government? That they relied on family and friends when times got tough and if they couldn't make it here, they went back to wherever the hell they came from if they couldn't hack it? [Nah, I'm SURE that thought never crossed your "mind."]
DOES IT OCCUR TO YOU that 100 years ago people that came here tried to learn English as quickly as possible and try to assimilate into the culture rather than expect the REST of us to learn THEIR language and coddle to them for their every need in their native language? [Hell, NO, that thought never passed between your ears.]
DOES IT OCCUR to you that in most states you had to pass an English literacy test to vote? People actually took citizenship classes and were expected to pass minimum competency tests before being allowed to become citizens and vote?
DOES IT OCCUR to you their was no "gravy train" of "free" medical care, "free" food, "free" housing etc.?
All an illegal needs do is slip across the border, show up for a public handout, whine the one English word they DO know "racist" and uncle Sucker bleeds OUR cash for the miserable, ungrateful dreck who are only going to send it a lot of it back to Mexico. They depress our labor market, steal from us, expect "free" education, healthcare, they laugh in your face, and you expect the rest of us to act stupid and sit there and take it just because you bleat "racist." Forget it, toots, not happening...we're not bobbing our heads in time just because YOU say so. You want to pi$$ your own money away? FINE. But not MY nickle.
Illegal immigration supports slavery system and trade.
We help those willing to help themselves and us, not illegals who engage in deceptive tactics and who use our care to finance projects and people who are not doing any good.
The article is clear about the racism of the migrating nationalists. They hate their host and generaly easy going America.
that's cause there was no welfare back then to reply upon in the first place! so why is everyone here obsessing about immigration when they should be dismantling the welfare state instead?
SO this person is in favor of a group of people (no matter who they are) whose agenda is to usurp the SWest.
Good point, then we'd kill 2 birds with one stone.
The welfare state and illegal immigration support go hand in hand. You end up supporting illegals at the expense of legals who go through the paper work and pay the INS to be investigated. You want to do away with the welfare state, fine, then do away with illegal immigration because it is part of the travesty of the welfare state.
you really believe that?
FYI, Gringos can buy property in Mexico (just not w/in 100km of the border or 50? km of the coast). Adequate health care is about $250/mo but ya gotta habla to communicate w/ the DR.
Why aren't AMERICANS taking these jobs?
Is it because AMERICANS are DEMANDING too much money for a job that doesn't warrant it?
The only reason these jobs are available is because they typical AMERICAN believes they are TOO GOOD for the job and hence the job is available to someone else - ILLEGALS who don't believe they are too good for the job and take it.
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