Alien Nation Redux

In 1986 Los Angeles police officer David Sossaman injured his back in a high-speed chase, which ended his police career. Still eager to work, however, Sossaman found a job on a special Gang and Immigration Project within the Department of Justice. In 1988 that position led to a job as a welfare fraud investigator in San Diego County. Before long the ex-cop was wondering what was his biggest problem--the gangs, criminals and drug smugglers, or the politically correct obscurantism he found in government.

Fellow investigators took him aside and told him about wide-ranging scandals and massive cross-border fraud involving Mexican citizens ripping off the U.S. Treasury. Sossaman found the stories hard to believe. When he asked what was being done about it, he was told, basically, nothing. In fact orders had come from the top directing supervisors not to look into things, and even to cover them up.

Taken aback, the former policeman decided to test these assertions. Fellow investigators told him to go to the welfare office in Chula Vista and report back on what he saw. Sossaman made his rounds and returned to tell them that the only thing he had observed that seemed unusual were the large number of cars in the parking lot, 75 to 100 of them, with Mexican license plates. These, he learned, belonged to some of the thousands of Mexican nationals applying for welfare in the United States.

Mexicans come up and falsely claim that they are homeless, which eliminates the normal waiting period and background check. The credo of the welfare department is, "when in doubt, give it out." Virtually all who applied were accepted and had big checks sent to mailboxes in the border city of San Ysidro. Only during their yearly "reapplication" did these welfare recipients have to meet the department worker face to face. Otherwise they'd just stop by their box and pick up the checks. Those with cojones of adequate dimensions had, count 'em, ten cases going at once.

The scam could not have worked without official collaboration by the agency, whose policy was to accept any photo identification, true or false, as adequate proof of residency. Initially, rumors of what had been discovered were indignantly denied. But then on April 1, 1992, a San Diego grand jury, prompted by Sossaman's work, released a report that substantiated it all: "Supervisors have verbally directed workers to accept knowingly false alien registration, cards as identification." One benefits analyst was caught making photocopies of blank birth certificates, valuable currency in the illegal community. The grand jury later confirmed that the system "appeared to reward moral turpitude" of the welfare staff.

Such revelations unsettled Sossaman's superiors. First they attempted to buy him off with promises of raises. Then one department supervisor named Eddie Gonzalez accused him of racism. Gonzalez's syllogism was a pristine example of PC logic. Sossaman opposed welfare fraud; many Hispanics were perpetuating welfare fraud; opposing Hispanics was racist: therefore Sossaman was a racist. Gonzalez even tried to bait the investigator into a fight, stationing his buddies in the wings as "witnesses." Sossaman found the offer tempting but didn't fall for the trap.

Then came the subtle threats, including one terse note on county letterhead warning that Sossaman might "dry up and blow away and no one will know the reason why." And finally Sossaman started getting bomb threats and calls to his unlisted number telling him to shut his mouth and reminding him that had a family. "Get on out here," he calmly told the callers, racking a round into the 9mm Berreta he carries everywhere, "and we'll Matt Dillon it right on the front porch." They never showed up.

After Sossaman went to the press, the welfare department made it impossible for him to perform his job and he left. He told anybody who would listen that the true rate of welfare fraud was not, as the department claimed, one percent but more like 40 to 60 percent, up to half a billion dollars in San Diego County alone, much of it flowing to illegals. He ran into a version of Stalin's theorem: the plight of the individual immigrant is a tragedy, the fraud of tens of thousands is a statistic.

One thing David Sossaman saw as a result of his experience was that the problem he had encountered stretched far beyond the boundaries of San Diego County. He saw that while all national borders are porous, it is only in the United States that this elementary violation of national sovereignty—illegal immigration—is supported by an infrastructure of corruption and ideology.

Mexico, for example, certainly understands the importance of sound borders in the concept of nationhood, even if it has winked while some Mexican American pressure groups attack the attempts to control immigration as racist. Whatever it may feel about its wealthy Uncle to the north, the Mexican government maintains a tight vigil on its southern frontier and just this January deported thousands of illegal immigrants from impoverished Guatemala. No PC activists complained about that. Early this year a bill was introduced in Puerto Rico that would have made English an official language along with Spanish. Thousands of protesters took to the streets and educator Jose Ferrer Canales warned that the bill threatened "Puerto Rican nationality." Again, not a peep from the P.C. crowd. Why is it, then, that when Americans raise questions about whether massive illegal immigration and schemes of bilingualism threaten American nationality they are accused of racism?

The briefest observation of events anywhere from California to the Gulf cost of Texas will confirm the dirty little secret of our national life: the United States has lost control of its borders. In some areas, describing our borders as a "war zone" is not an understatement. The Border Patrol is hopelessly undermanned and other agencies, as David Sossaman discovered, are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. A federal employee speaking on condition of anonymity says that at some border points both customs and immigration officials have been instructed not to pursue those who burst through.

Estimates of the number of illegal aliens in the United States range from 4-12 million. In 1991, the last year for which figures are available, the number of apprehensions of illegals was 1,997,875 and it is estimated that up to three illegals escape for each one apprehended. It is a cat and mouse game that has economic consequences. The lobby that supports illegal immigration assures us that illegal aliens confer great benefits on the national economy. Their case was bolstered by the emotion surrounding Zoe Baird's dilemma. But it is pure disinformation nonetheless. George Borja, a legal immigrant from Cuba who teaches economics at the University of California at San Diego and is author of Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the U.S. Economy says that he is probably being conservative when he estimates that the cost of servicing illegals, over and above their input into the economy, ranges up to $3 billion annually.

To call the question of illegal aliens a national tragedy is not to engage in hyperbole. Civic structures are rupturing under the load, school curricula are being changed, prisons and hospitals are becoming inadvertent Ellis Islands, and an ecosystem of crime has sprung up around these immigrants. Why is it, then, that the only candidate that made an issue of this problem was Pat Buchanan? And when he did, why did he find himself criticized as a "nativist."

The short answer is that there is a powerful lobby for illegal immigration, a network of organizations that includes the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the Latino Issues Forum, The National Council of La Raza, the Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Services, etc. This special interest believes that the U.S. is a guilty nation that owes something akin to reparations to the people on its borders and that the internal problems of foreign countries can be solved if we accept millions of their citizens in this country. And this is an acknowledged agenda. A hidden one assumes that preventing a stop to illegal immigration will hasten the ethnic and racial reconstitution of America.

Walls and fences "don't solve anything," says Claudia Martinez of MALDEF: "People will come over whatever they have to do." Chicano Studies professor Mike Ornelas claims that building walls is "a huge waste of time and money."

Roberto Martinez of the American Friends Service Committee says that the United States "shouldn't try at all" to stop illegal immigration because "nothing can stop the people coming." Not only will walls and fences not work, he says, but they "send a negative massage to Mexico." Martinez finds "repulsive" the contention that "the so-called quality of life is being threatened by Latinos who want to hang on to their culture and language and all that stuff."

In the view of the illegal lobby, not only is there no immigration problem, but the United States has a moral obligation to provide the illegal population with benefits for which even native citizens and legal residents are not qualified. Relying on the sanctions that accusations of racism and ethnocentricity generate, this lobby has been able to steer public policy on immigration toward a cataclysm.

Official statistics confirm that over the past 11 years, San Diego County, for instance, has spent about two-thirds of its budget for emergency medical services designated for the poor (some $43 million) on undocumented immigrants and foreign citizens. California Medi-Cal benefits analyst Rob Miller said that of the 500 cases he handled per month, 80 percent were illegal aliens, with 50 percent of those receiving AFDC money. His instructions were to give aid to those persons merely "present" in the state. The benefits are retroactive for three months, which means that illegal aliens can claim past eligibility and get a hefty down payment on their version of the American Dream. Miller reports that the illegals come in and seem to know all the answers, as though professionally coached, which in fact they probably were, since the illegal lobby provides "advocates" and "counsellors:'

Some of the abuses would be laughable if their consequences were not tragic. In Texas, cities not only have an obligation to educate the children of illegals, but, according to a recent court decision, also the children of Mexican nationals driven over the border every morning. And one of the things investigator David Sossaman discovered during his disheartening employment with the San Diego welfare department was wealthy Mexican businessmen coming up from Tijuana for heart bypass surgery and other expensive operations, running up bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"When we are cutting off health care to legal county residents," says San Diego County supervisor Brian Bilbray, "but providing money for health care to foreign nationals it is absurd and immoral." Few other officials are so outspoken. For the most part, official discussions of the problem take place in closed session. "Some people don't want the figures made public," said Bilbray. "No one wants to touch the subject, because it is not politically correct."

Another benefit the U.S. is obliged to provide is bilingual education. Americans moving to France, Mexico or Costa Rica would be laughed back across the border if they insisted that their children be educated in English at state expense or demanded ballots in the English language. Legal immigrants to America from Egypt, Haiti and Sweden do not expect instruction in Arabic, Creole and Swedish--not yet, anyhow. But the illegal lobby demands this service for its Latino client group, in spite of the fact that in 1986 over 73% of Californians voted in favor of proposition 63, which made English the state's official language.

The academic arguments over the effectiveness of bilingualism have raged for years. But at this point, the teaching of bilingualism has become such an article of faith for the illegal lobby that the question of its efficacy has become almost irrelevant. The bilingual establishment protects its turf no matter what the cost. In San Francisco this has meant warehousing poor and "disempowered" black and Asian students in bilingual courses to make sure there are enough bodies to justify the program's enormous budget. In a story on the issue in the October 1992 Atlantic, Los Angeles Timesman Jack Miles, a confessed liberal, showed that it involves a zero sum game certain to create racial and ethnic antagonisms. Miles observed that the Los Angeles Unified School District dismissed several monolingual social workers in favor of others who were bilingual and that most of the dismissed social workers were black. He showed too that black welfare mothers are increasingly being turned away from subsidized day-care centers because they have fewer children than most illegals and thus do not qualify on the neediest-first principle. Like other government employees the day-care people don't ask who is legal and who isn't.

Pressed with the statistical and human evidence of the tragedy of illegal immigration, lobbyists like Claudia Martinez of the powerful Mexican American Legal and Educational Defense Fund returns to the tired argument that the economic input of illegals far outweighs the benefits they acquire. The facts not only dispute this claim but prove that it is a sham. According to a California State Auditor General's study released last August, there are 11,000-13,000 illegal immigrant children in San Diego schools alone, and it costs $49.2 million a year to educate them. The cost of illegals just at San Diego State University and nearby San Marcos State was $635,000 before California started charging them the same out-of-state rates that it charges students from Arizona and Oregon, a decision Chicano activists called unjust.

Overall costs in education alone, the study found, offset the roughly $60 million that illegals contribute to the local economy. But in addition to education, there are nearly 4,000 AFDC cases that cost the county another $11.7 million. And there are 16,000 felony and misdemeanor cases involving illegals each year which cost $105.7 million. The overall net annual cost to San Diego taxpayers for illegals, over and above the revenue they generate, is $145.9 million.

A November 6, 1992, study directed by Manuel Moreno-Evans for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors totalled the net costs for recent legals, amnestied persons and "undocumented" persons to be $947 million. The three groups generated revenues, taxes and fees of $139 million, resulting in a net deficit of a whopping $808 million dollars.

When this study was released, as in the case also of the San Diego study, members of the illegal lobby claimed that the data were "methodologically flawed" and contaminated by "racist assumptions." But according to Alan Nelson, former Commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Hispanic activists had in fact been pushing for a study of this type for a long time and MALDEF itself had made a number of supportive suggestions while the work was in progress.

In a document sent to Governor Pete Wilson, a judge in Los Angeles County who requested anonymity relates what he calls a typical incident which shows what is behind the catastrophic increase in costs associated with illegal immigration. In the case this judge described, a Mexican woman ran a red light and slammed into cars., injuring six people. She had no license or insurance and there was therefore no possibility of restitution for the victims. The woman had come to the United States illegally and gained "resident alien" status when one of her children was born here. She now has five children, no job and no husband. Every month she gets AFDC of $535 (it would be $ 1,010 if her other children had been born here), $122 in food stamps, and a $350 housing subsidy. Add free medical services, education for five children, a lawyer and interpreter paid for by the court, and now supervision by a probation officer, and it is clear that this woman never bothered with a green card because she got a gold card just for sneaking over the border.

Multiply such cases by the thousands and $808 million illegal aliens cost Los Angeles County becomes an entirely realistic, probably even an understated figure. According to County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, 63 percent of births in Los Angeles hospitals are to illegals. In a recent paper of the Claremont Institute, former INS Commissioner Alan Nelson and his colleague Lance Izumi point out that only 19 percent of illegals file tax returns and more than half do not have taxes withheld, like the Peruvians who worked for Zoe Baird. The authors show that California prisons house 15,000 illegal immigrant felons at an annual cost of $300 million a year. The total cost to California of illegal immigration is, in Nelson and Izumi's phrase, "a breathtaking 3 billion." Ironically, this is almost exactly the same sum as the state's catastrophic budget shortfall last year.

In response, MALDEF's Claudia Martinez says haughtily that illegals are not even eligible for AFDC and other programs. The idea that immigrants are using up welfare, she says, is therefore "a total myth." This would be true if illegal aliens were not encouraged to break these laws so by their U.S. advisers through techniques that are appall ingly easy. Los Angeles Times writer Jack Miles points out that the state requires no proof of legal residency for a California driver's license. Miles wonders why, instead of bothering to conduct "sweeps" of employers, Immigration officials don't simply visit the Department of Motor Vehicles. Both HUD and comparable California state agencies do not screen public housing applicants to determine their residency status. The INS operates a computer system that lists all legal residents in the United States, but many state agencies that supply benefits do not use it.

Past generations of immigrants were urged to blend in. The illegal lobby and its multiculturalist supporters now urge them to stand apart. Leftist Mexican commentator Jorge Castaneda sees new immigrants being subjected to "ideological bombardment" which "incites rejection, indignation and class hatred." He warns that "any spark can light the fire." It already has.

By the state attorney general's estimate, one third of the rioters in Los Angeles were illegal immigrants. Jack Miles notes that more than half of those arrested were Latino and many if not most of these were either Central Americans or very recent immigrants from Mexico. Forty percent already had criminal records.

Is any concern about crime committed by illegals legitimate? "Absolutely not," snaps MALDEF's Claudia Martinez. "That just doesn't happen. There is a lot of hype about it. They don't commit crimes in any inordinate numbers." During the riots, Martinez says, "the police went after an inordinate amount of undocumented people, people who looked immigrant. Most of those were for curfew violations. They weren't looters. They were people who were going to the corner store to buy milk. Our feeling is that they used that opportunity in order to do some INS investigation, not anything necessarily related to the riots. They abused their power."

Adds Roberto Martinez of the ACLU, "Most of us are upset and angry at the way these people were arrested. The INS and the police took a bad situation to just target Latinos and undocumented people." Chicano Studies teacher Mike Ornelas sees the crime question as "a lot of hysteria. I don't think these people have a whole lot of facts to support them. It's absurd to suggest that illegals are responsible for any measurable amount of crime."

If these responses have the sound of a party line, it is also that they are part of a larger, politically correct ideology about Hispanic immigrants that in effect holds them blameless, whatever they might do, because of what was done to them by the U.S. government. Radical Chicano groups such as the Union del Barrio, Brown Berets d'Aztlan, and Comite Civico Popular Mixto--all of which have a constituency in Chicano Studies departments--want to establish a state called Aztlan in the southwestern United States which is currently in their view " the occupied territories." These groups found support for this position for this concept during a demonstration at the border when then Nicaraguan commandande Daniel Ortega cabled his solidarity.

Voz Fronteriza, Voice of the Border, A a publication funded by the University of California at San Diego. The office sports worshipful posters of Cuba's dictator, Fidel Castro, and the latest issue features two articles promoting aid to Cuba, whose regime shoots those would-be immigrants attempting to leave. The publication's logo is a sombrero-wearing skeleton and headlines include "Amerikkkan Indictment" and "United States of Amerikkka Gets It." The writers are obsessed with "la raza" and only racially pure Latino sisters and brothers qualify for membership. There are similar papers at UCLA and other major universities.

The winter 1992 newsletter of the Colorado based Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional Mexicano exhibits a kind of democrophobia. "We are a national organization of Mexicans and Mexicanos," says the publication, "who struggle for the socialist reunification of Mexico and the,, destruction of the U.S. federal system." An editorial says that "what we should rebuild" in the wake of the LA riots "is the various sectors of the militant nationalist secessionist Mexicano movement." How militant? "We do believe that only a prolonged people's war will ever lead to the socialist reunification of our divided homeland."

That kind of rhetoric certainly excites the largely white Revolutionary Communist Party (RPR), the American affiliate of Peru's Sendero Luminoso. The RCP's Los Angeles bookstores peddle posters of Sendero's genocidal chief, Abimael Guzman. The RCP, like the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional, is not a large group, but the influence of such political gangs is always far out of proportion to their numbers and it would be folly to ignore them. According to LA Times writer Jack Miles, the Revolutionary Communists did "join in" on the first night of the LA riot. That is, they burned, looted, obstructed the police and fire departments, and possibly murdered innocent people. That's the dialectic in play. Before construction of a new state, Aztlan or whatever, demolition must come first. What the RCP and radical Aztlanians seem to want is a new dia de los muertos, their own from of ethnic cleansing.

Partisans of Aztlan claim that farm workers now toil on land stolen from their ancestors, a claim that many liberals, including Jack Miles, find legitimate or simply take for granted. A college textbook presents the following question: President James K. Polk deliberately provoked war with Mexico in order to acquire a) New Mexico, b) California, c) Texas, d) all of the above. The correct answer is “d" and there is no room for wondering if Polk actually deliberately provoked war. Since American imperialism supposedly stole this land of the Southwest, so the PC argument goes, the illegals are exercising a kind of right of return and only re-entering their own country. Guilty, imperialistic Amerikaners, as the real squatters, are therefore obliged to pay them benefits in compensation.

Does the illegal lobby with its radical fringe and academic wing speak for all "Hispanics?" Actually, this supposedly pan-Latino term, which is supposed to convey a universal blood-and-land identity, is not even supported by those it is supposed to identify. The recent ground breaking Latino National Political Survey, directed by University of Texas professor of government Rodolfo O. De la Garza and released late last fall, found that most Latinos think of themselves as neither "Hispanic" nor "Latino." Instead they prefer to be identified by their national origin, such as "Mexican" or "Cuban," usually with the addition of "American."

The survey, the largest and most comprehensive of its kind ever conducted, found no distinct Latino community sharing cultural, political and economic interests. In other words there is no "Hispanic community" and no possibility of an "Hispanic view" of an issue, including immigration. Not surprisingly, de la Garza's most significant finding was that 80 percent of Puerto Ricans, 75 percent of Mexican Americans and 66 percent of Cuban Americans believe there are, yes, too many immigrants in the United States. Less than one-fourth of these people, the survey found, are bilingual and less than one-third consider themselves liberal. The majority described themselves as moderate to conservative. It is no wonder, therefore, that a full 90 percent of those polled did not belong to MALDEF, the National Council of La Raza, or any of the other leftish ethnic organizations which claim to speak them. And therein lies an irony. Garza's study was funded by the Ford Foundation, which has functioned as a kind of PC investment banker, backing a variety of "vanguard" causes but none more faithfully than the Hispanic advocacy movement, which pushes for Chicano Studies departments, bilingual education, and Spanish language ballots. It is safe to say that Ford expected that de la Garza's polling would produce far different results when it decided to back the effort.

This study, which was a stunning repudiation of the illegal lobby by the very people it claims to speak for, was largely ignored in the media. Instead, the "cause" of illegal aliens continues to gain momentum, although it is largely anathema to the Hispanic community. There is even a national movement to let illegal aliens vote. (Actually non-citizens have been permitted to vote in school elections in New York since 1968 and Chicago since 1989.) In 1990, Takoma Park, Maryland passed a referendum giving non-citizens the vote in local elections, with no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. MALDEF wants to try this in Los Angeles, although blacks by and large find the notion insulting and the liberal Sacramento Bee calls it "offensive and absurd." Daniel Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) seems to be expressing common sense when he says, "If you divorce citizenship and voting, citizenship stops having any meaning at all," but rather than confronting this argument the illegal lobby simply calls it racist.

The United States is still a nation of immigrants, accepting more of them that any other nation, oughly half the world's total. American immigration policies remain remarkably open. It was the conservative Ronald Reagan, after all, who in 1986 approved amnesty for 3 million immigrants living illegally in the U.S. What other nation has shown similar generosity to people who had flouted its laws? By contrast, Japan allows virtually no immigration and Switzerland makes prospective citizens find a community willing to accept them. Australia recently cut its immigration rate in half.

It was the longstanding collaboration between the left-wing dogma on race and ethnicity and the policies of the welfare state that transformed immigration from a legal to an illegal process. Thus the hard work of past immigrants to gain entry to the civic structures of America has degenerated into a grievance procedure and assertion for "entitlements" to be paid for, both now and later, by "Anglos," the equivalent of malevolent white males in PC demonology.

The corrupt bureaucrats encountered by David Sossaman and others who want the nation's immigration laws to be obeyed are key allies of the illegal lobby, even though privately they may loathe the immigrants as people. "The more money that went out, fraudulent or not," says Sossaman of his days in the San Diego County Welfare Department, "the bigger their budget, the more administrators they had, and higher salaries and perks." The process of bureaucratic feather?bedding dovetails perfectly with the agenda of PC activists, always eager for more accredited victims for whom they can claim to speak.

The lobby for illegal aliens manufactures misery and creates racism. In this it is no different from other aspects of the pathology that goes by the name of political correctness. But the challenge it poses is made far more significant by the nasty orthodoxies that currently dominate the American campus. As former INS Commissioner Alan Nelson says, "We are a nation where law is king and to openly allow and even encourage a class of people to exist above the law is to subvert one of our dearest constitutional principles."

Someone told me this old thread was being pulled. Re-posting it as an experiment.

Very enlightening. It would be worthwhile getting an updated version. Bookmarked for later.

2 posted on 06/14/2004 3:43:48 AM PDT by Vigilanteman (crime would drop like a sprung trapdoor if we brought back good old-fashioned hangings)

I hope that it was not pulled. I stopped reading before my blood pressure got too high.

Illegal Invasion Ping.

I sincerely believe that if a political party arises that grasps this issue, they can ride it to a landslide. The vast majority of average citizens are sick of this situation. God help the major parties if some terrorist event gets linked to these current policies.

5 posted on 06/14/2004 4:21:16 AM PDT by Kozak (Anti Shahada: " There is no God named Allah, and Muhammed is his False Prophet")

Deserving bump to the top.

6 posted on 06/14/2004 4:22:43 AM PDT by truthkeeper

We need to amend the 14th Amendment so that citizenship at birth is granted only to those who have a parent holding US citizenship. All else is horsefeathers.

Bump to the top.

7 posted on 06/14/2004 5:21:56 AM PDT by brityank (The more I learn about the Constitution, the more I realise this Government is UNconstitutional.)

Bump?

8 posted on 06/19/2004 10:34:13 PM PDT by boris (The deadliest weapon of mass destruction in history is a Leftist with a word processor)

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