It would be my guess that it would be the hope of the English as an Official Languge supporters that their new law would supersede the relevant portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1973. Supporters would tend to see those sections of the Voting Rights Act as a problem to be removed by legislation rather than a bar to new legislation.
I don’t think you have found an effective argument against passing an Official Languge law for the folks who support one.
There are already states and territories where English is an official language. Doesn’t this portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1973 still apply to them?
State law cannot override fedral law. Alabama (a state where I believe English is “official”) cannot refuse to implement the federal Voter Rights Act of 1973 simply because the official language of Alabama is English.
No laws can stop illegal immigration.Not federal.stae or local. Enforcing the law is another thing. If employers hire them to undercut the American labor cost, they should be prosecuted. If it becomes financially a los the jobs will dissappear. Then there is no reason to come. As long as we employ them ,they will come.A 20 foot high fence across Texas will teach them how to buils a 21 foot ladder.
Not market forces,price fixing.An efficient capitalistic system eliminates competition. The energy companies are an Oligarchy. They control the prices and extend profits. The only wy to impact them is by not using them. If enough people rode bikes it would help but only in the short term. We have to replace them. Wind energy etc.
Not only will the Feds not help, they are actively providing information on the location of the Minutemen to the Mexican government who in turn posts it on the internet.
Or to put it a different way, Federal time and money is spent on an early warning system for illegal Mexicans.
I just read that. Unfuckingbelievable. There’s got to be some fallout from this.
Even before that, the Minutemen where recently in Crawford, Texas protesting and saying the President should be impeached.
Now if only Tancredo had the same guts…
Please, please, please 
Aww who I’m kidding, since only about 500 appeared in the protest, Tancredo will show his true colors and ignore the calls for impeachment from his heroes.
The Minutemaids can’t find their ass with both hands. They have a miserable understanding of the border, are lazy, and stick out like a sore thumb. But if the US government wants to supply the Mexican government with the location of an armed vigilante groups on the border that hate both their government and their citizens, then more power to them. It’s not like they are giving up anything on professional law enforcement that’s been vetted of bigots and psycopaths.
You’re right! If the Federal Government knows where these yahoos are, they shouldn’t be telling on them, they should be trying to arrest them, or at least the Arizona authorities should (fair warning - PDF): http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Documents/AZ/SheriffDeverLetter.pdf
Plus, both the U.S. and Mexico have an interest in limiting encounters between illegal immigrants and armed idiots who will inevitably break the law if they ever meet them. Dead people really aren’t going to solve the problem.
Say, magellan01 (odd choice, I must say), what exactly is the difference, harm-wise, between the guy who comes illegally from Mexico to take your job or place in line at the school/DMV/ER/grocery store and the guy who came in a U-Haul from New Hampshire and does exactly the same thing?
If one or more of them actually break the law they should be arrested. Just like people who break the law by sneaking in to the country.
I thought about this and there is some sense to it. But given the Mexican governement’s actions (producing a “how to” pamphlet facilitating sneaking in to the US) and the armed attacks by drug groups and, obstensibly, Mexican law enforcement officials, it seems clear that Mexico is not simply trying to limit dangerous encounters. They are helping people circumvent our laws and those who enforce them on the border—official border patrol and Minutemen alike.
But as far as your aspersion, just how many times have the groups encountered each other. And just how many Minutemen have been arrested for breaking the law? Or even accused of breaking the law. Keep in mind that your article was written before the fact.
Funny you ask the question when part of the answer is right there in your question: “illegally”. This nation (as any nation) has a right to set its immigration policy in a way that makes sense for it. Social services and our taxes that pay for them are designed to accomodate a country’s citezenry and those it allows to be here. When 12 million people just decide to sneak in (or overstay their visas), things get thrown out of whack. For instance, hospitals become over burdened and become bankrupt and closed. Schools become overburdened and the quality of education drops because such a large percent of kids who don’t speak English well slows up the class and need bilingual resources, putting further financial strain on the system.
If that person in front of me is illegal, he has not been given a clean bill of health and may have a disease that I can catch. During the mass immigrations through Ellis Island, imigrants were checked. Some were quarantined. Some were sent back.
That person from NH who takes my job theoretically left a job in NH for me or another American to take. If you want to say that he didn’t have a job and that’s why he left, then the discussion is really an unemployment and job creation discussion. Both of which are exacerbated by illegals coming in taking jobs.
Assuming this is true, you do realize that the Minutemen are volunteers, right? And are only doing the job because the degree to which the flood of illegals overwhelm’s the resources currently allocaterd by our governement?
Why are they vigilantes? They don’t mete out justice, they bring illegal activity to the attention of the authorities. In your opinion, are members of Neighborhood Watch Groups vigilantes?
Funny, indeed: I just can’t see how, if person X has just come to town and taken the job you would have gotten, enrolled his special-needs child in the local school, and dropped his uninsured wife off at the hospital, the impact on you isn’t exactly the same whether he broke any laws or not.
Yes, but many of us delegate that sort of thing to the federal government, as it involves national and foreign-policy issues. Both the policy and its enforcement should be handled by experts, and I’d just as soon the good but extremely unofficial citizens of Herndon and Maricopa counties didn’t have a lot to do with it.
They are? So the only reason social services are ever inadequate, or have to be funded through emergency appropriations or deficit spending, or are occasionally wastefully overfunded, is illegal immigration? I thought it was because for any given time and place the available social services and the taxes assessed to pay for them are the result of politics, not mathematics.
Except that twelve million people (no more authoritative a figure than half that amount, as far as I can tell) did not show up yesterday right after lunch. Immigration, even the illegal kind, is a predictable phenomenon. You can plan for it, if you’re not too busy digging a moat around the continent. As far as taxes go, any job will create a certain amount of tax revenue as well as a certain amount of value to the economy as a whole. At higher wages, the tax revenue goes up, and so does the purchasing power of the worker. At lower wages, tax revenues go down, so the rates might rise, but goods and services become more affordable, new businesses are attracted, etc. No matter which, the thing to remember is that the effect is the same no matter what the citizenship status of the workers is.
I’ve heard the story but I can never remember the name of the hospital that closed due to illegal immigration. Of course the real problem isn’t their undocumented status, it’s the fact that they’re uninsured and unable to pay, which is something they share with 60 million other people in this country. As for schools, the assumption seems to be that hiring some bilingual teachers benefits no one except the children of illegal immigrants, which doesn’t seem sound. Also, failing to educate them adequately just perpetuates most of the problems you have with their parents into the next generation. This makes sense only if you don’t really care about the drain on societal resources as much as you want to hit back by punishing children. Besides, education has never been allotted solely on the basis of cost per child. If you want it to be, you can start with the deaf kid in the third grade.
Oh, my. Then I don’t know what you’re going to do about the millions of Americans who have traveled abroad in the last few years, picking up who knows what, not to mention the germ-filled hospitals we carelessly allow right in the middle of our cities.
You know, The Grapes of Wrath is a good book.
So, so close. It’s an economic discussion anyway, always has been, and eventually we’ll run out of identifiable groups to blame instead, so why not dispense with all that and have it now? U.S. population growth, even including immigration, is slowing, and the population is rapidly skewing older. Our biggest problem might be not a lack of wealth (we’ll be the richest folks around for quite a while) but a lack of labor. Immigration has always been a source of strength for this country, and I’ll bet it becomes even more important in the future. And we can have it for the price of first-class health care and public education systems, which we should be willing to pay for anyhow. Hell, we can have it even without, it just won’t be as nice a place to live.
Here’s a thought experiment: if illegal immigrants were all given backdated citizenship papers, anglicized names, and blue contact lenses, so you couldn’t point at them and say “See? There’s the problem!” then what would you blame for inadequate education and health care and employment? Or, if everyone competing for these resources looked the same, would you even see a problem at all?
It’s not really relevant to the debate, I guess, but the thing that has always struck me about this argument is that it usually involves a U.S. native telling someone that immigrants are a strain on available resources. As a proud consumer myself of roughly 5-20 times the resources people elsewhere in the world get to use, I’d be ashamed to hear myself say that.
Do you simply ignore the rest of my answer?
We elect people to make decisions on our behalf. And the people who made the original decision in Herndon were voted into office, and then out of office, when they fucked up. Do you have a problem with our system of elected officials?
Read again:…“designed to accomodate”. And are you really of the opinion that mathemeatics is divorced from budgetary decisions? You;ll have to expolain that one to me.
Please show me a cite for the number of illegals beiing six million. I don’t thing it exists.
Okay…you seem to be arguing for higher wages for workers. And?
Do you deny that the incidence of being uninsured is not greater among illegals than the legal population at large?
There might be some minor benefit in exposing children to another language. But most schools already do that. But when illegals need special language classes and slow down the other classes because of the trouble they have mastering the subject matter in a foreign tongue, the costs far outweigh the benefits.
Which is why we shuld seal the borders and send every illegal home. (Through attrition, ideally.)
My goal is not to punish or reward any illegal child. My goal is to do what is best for American children. As far as the deaf kid, every society has those with special needs. That goes into the equation. And that child enjoys special education as benefit of being a citizen. It is part of the social contract that no one seems to have trouble with. I don’t know what beariing this has on things. I know what bearing you want it to have, but it doesn’t. Therre are benefits available to citizens and our guests only. That is true of any country.
So, let’s say that people travel and come back with germs and disease, and our hospitals can be more sterile. Is that any argument for allowing in people with no health check. Come on, if anything we should be more careful all around, not more careless.
Another cryptic point. Feel free to explain.
If we need more immigrants we can always open the border. Once we have complete control over it we can allow millions in if we need them or allow none in. The difference is that they will be legal. And we will know who they are.
I’d blame the illegal aliens who snuck in or overstayed their visas. You seem to believe this is a race thing. For me, it is a legal thing, a quality of life thing, and a cultural thing.
The illegal aspect is unfair to all those waiting in line legally. The quality of life has to do with our hospitals and our schools and jobs. The cultural thing is not so much the number of immigrants but the large percent who share a common culture other than ours. But this is my most minot consideration.
I don’t follow you. Natural resources? Feel free to explain.
So, you think “there might be some minor benefit” to teaching U.S. kids a foreign language? Intriguing idea, I’ll say in this forum.
Let’s say, as the Center for Immigration Studies(1) (hardly an “open borders” crowd) does, that illegal immigrants impose a net cost of $10 billion/year at the federal level, and about twice that or a little more overall. That’s about where the rabidly anti-immigration City Journal(2) pegs it , also, so we’ll call the mostly non-partisan NRC(3) guess of $22 billion about right. This is approximately two-tenths of a percent of U.S. GDP(4) or, to put it in agricultural terms (many illegal immigrants become agricultural workers here), about what we give away in subsidies for corn alone(5). Or, bombastically, four percent of our military budget(6) , two years’ worth of Missile Defense research(7), or a fourteen week run for the Iraq war extravaganza(8). Or a third of a $70 billion tax cut. Money to pay for things we really care about is just everywhere.
So the cost of illegal immigration is not high at all in terms of what we can actually afford, and you know what? We’re not even counting such ancillary benefits as the lower cost of goods and services, and the economic impact of immigrants’ own consumerism. Nor are we counting the benefits gained from the descendants of illegal immigrants who were either properly educated (or managed to learn anyway) and improved their lot, by inches at a time or by leaps and bounds, and are now paying the kind of taxes you expect your neighbors to pay, and wouldn’t be here if …. but let’s continue to ignore that for now. Let’s assume that illegal immigration will cost us $22 billion/year, fifty bucks per, just so we can look at the Statue of Liberty without thinking about how much we could get for it if we sold it for scrap. Maybe I’m too sentimental about the history and civics classes I took, but my God what a bargain, to be the country that takes those the rest of the world doesn’t want and through freedom and tolerance and sheer brass forges them into the greatest nation (yes, in spite of recent missteps) in the history of the planet, for an expenditure equaling two one-thousandths of our wealth.
Here’s the problem: people lie about the problem. If the problem were really that school budgets were overextended, people would increase funding for the schools. If the problem were really that hospitals couldn’t provide care profitably, we’d fund universal health care. If the problem were really a lack of jobs, we’d actually compete for them (the thesis that there are a host of uneducated, non-English-speaking, disease-ridden people against whom we native-borns just cannot compete for jobs is not a fact, it’s an expression of self-loathing). But we go to the polls and vote against taxes to fund schools, we don’t support universal health care, we don’t apply for jobs picking grapes and mowing lawns, and we certainly don’t learn Spanish just because it might help us get a better job. And nobody yelling for sealing the borders (that’s a fun idea, by the way: seal the border and place a low-paid guard along it every three feet, allocate a few for the major ports, and you’ve got a project that will employ every single illegal immigrant in the country, plus a few, forget about the twenty-year construction project – hey, we’ll need to increase illegal immigration in order to stop it!) seems also to be yelling for more money to be spent on health care or education. Hey, Magellan001: What percentage of money currently spent on illegal immigrants should be spent on public education, what on health, and how and where?
I get the strong impression that our childrens’ education, or public health, or tax burdens, are being cited as problems only because the proffered solution is to “seal the borders” and “send every illegal home.” Easier solutions (it wouldn’t be cheaper and easier to find another 20 billion dollars than to scour the country for 12 million illegal immigrants and their children and secure and patrol a five-thousand mile border forever?) do not interest FAIR and company. Health and education and crime are not, for them, problems worth solving except insofar as the solution involves punishing and preventing and deporting people from the wrong side of the border. And there’s no conceivable solution otherwise. If I ask, “If you can’t blame illegal immigrants, what do you do?” the answer comes, “I blame illegal immigrants.” This makes it hard to believe that their concern is social services, as opposed to getting rid of certain people they don’t like.
These people are the guy at the picnic with a big pie. He doesn’t care what kind of pie, he doesn’t care how big it is. He won’t lift a finger to help make or buy another pie. The only thing he cares about is protecting it from those guys over at the next table. The pie, no matter how big or small, is always enough for him and his, and never enough to share with anyone else.
Don’t be that guy.
And let’s also dispose of “cultural reasons” to be against illegal immigration. Are illegal immigrants interfering with our TV reception, or talking too loud at the Met, or are they violating our right never to be exposed to other cultures? The least stupid answer, unfortunately, is also the wrong one.
(1) http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscaltranscript.html
(2) http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_do_we_want.html
(3) http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/kouri/051007
(4) http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy
(6) http://www.slate.com/id/2135553/
(7) http://www.slate.com/id/2135553/
(8) http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-08-26-iraq-war-clock_x.htm
As our schools already teach foreign languages. More would be better, hence the “minor benefit” I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take quotes out of context and shift their meaning. Thank you.
I supplied a point by point answer to your entire post. You ignore all that and the questions. If you’d like to continue, I’d appreciate you responding in kind. But I will make a few quick comments.
I’m sure you can compare the number to the cost cost of bullets the cost of text books or the cost of oreos. What’'s the point. The goal is to provide for the best quality of life for our citizens and the lowest cost.
The goal should be to get it to zero. It wonj’t get there, but that is the goal. ANd the closer we get to zero illegals, the closer we get to our goal.
See above
People who break the law should expect to be punished. That’s the idea behind having laws, so people don’t break them.
I can blame others. Our Presidents and other elected officials that have allowed our laws to be broken for so long and allowed our borders to be so porous. I also blame the media for not shedding light on the problem. I also blame every proponent of this illegal invasion over the years, forgeting that we are supposed to be a country of laws and that their are people waiting in line and paying by the rules. And I blame the illegals themselves. They have knowingly and wilfully broken our laws.
I guess you simply decided to ignore every reason I’ve given so you could deliver what you think little homily. It’s lame. Don’t just ignore the reasons provided and create a scenario that is inapt.Don’t be that guy.
Of course. Every culture from around the world and is rich and wonderful. But the American culture, ah, fuck it.
magellan01, I really don’t think it’s necessary to construct every post as a sentence-by-sentence refutation of the previous post: there aren’t that many arguments involved. Besides, it has often been demonstrated that point-by-point contradiction of everything someone says doesn’t necessarily answer anything they’ve said, much less constitute a coherent position. Be patient with me: the fact that I don’t map everything I say onto something that you’ve said doesn’t mean I’m ignoring your arguments. I’ll try harder this time to make it clear how my ideas on the subject relate to yours. As I understand them, yours are (in boldface) as follows:
-
It’s Illegal! Why yes, it is. But when the topic you’re discussing is if and how a certain law should be enforced, with a side order of whether it should exist at all, this kind of begs the question. To say that we need a law because the people who break it are criminals doesn’t get us anywhere. Your thesis that “That’s the idea behind having laws, so people don’t break them,” is unsound. We don’t make laws to give people something to obey, we make them because they are necessary or useful and are just and enforceable. I don’t think a lot of immigration law passes that test. The fun thing is, it fails yours even worse – if laws exist only to be obeyed, and people don’t obey this one, maybe it’s not a very good law.
-
**Unspecified Cultural Threats. ** I don’t know: you’ve declined a couple of opportunities to explain what you mean by this. Arts & entertainment? Most culture here is consumer-oriented, which means you can buy or rent what you want and leave the rest. You can view an Edward Hopper painting or go to the opera or the bowling alley or recite Hiawatha or rent the complete set of Hee-Haw episodes and watch only the Grandpa Jones bits. Food? You can eat what you want as long as you pay for it, and you have the right to complain that you haven’t had a decent vichyssoise since Oscar left the Waldorf. Sports? Basketball was invented right here in the U.S., or you might prefer tennis or hockey. Clothing? Feel free to wear your most colorful native garb as you go out to bother the tourists. Who is this “Stupid” whom you are with? What’s left? Language? English is pretty universal, but one of the coolest things about the U.S., at least in the cities, is that no matter what language you speak you can probably find somebody who will understand you, maybe a lot of people. Then you can get in a fight.
-
**Public Health. ** You’ve demonstrated no threat other than to your own peace of mind, and since you can’t tell the difference between illegal immigrant, legal immigrant and native-born just by looking you’re doomed to be nervous. Even if you could, there are other, greater sources of germs. Besides, the best way to get people screened is to allow them legal access, and the way to do that is to liberalize entry. Finally, to just assert that foreigners are crawling with disease germs without even bothering to check out the facts is plain creepy.
-
Public Resources. Here, I feel that not only am I not ignoring your arguments, having gone so far as to provide much-needed documentation for some of them, I think they’re suffering from a serious lack of attention on your part. Postulating that the drain on resources is $22 billion/year, I say, pay the man and let’s have education and health and support systems that can stand the strain of that extra three percent of our population. If that’s what it costs to live up to the words of Emma Lazarus, we spend more every day for causes I approve of less (or not at all). You say that the goal is to provide only for our citizens and keep costs down, but that’s just your goal: it doesn’t reflect any kind of Platonic ideal and it certainly doesn’t connect in any way with reality. We spend lots of money, purposely and with full knowledge and consent of the governed, to benefit non-citizens, and we certainly don’t do everything the cheapest way possible. So your “goal” isn’t really an argument in support of your conclusion, it’s just another conclusion in dire need of support. But the troubling thing is how little you seem to know or care about the institutions you’re ostensibly defending from illegal immigration, and how resistant you are to the notion that there can be any solution other than sealing the border and deporting as many undocumented persons as you can catch. Invitations to discuss the extent of problems in overstressed schools and hospitals, and how they could be fixed, just don’t interest you. This is what prompts the question: if the problems in our schools and hospitals, etc., were just as bad but not caused by illegal immigrants, would you even care? My impression is that you don’t even care now, except insofar as it provides a platform from which to attack illegal immigrants.
Most sensible folk have left this thread, and I guess I will too, now. I don’t imagine I’ve convinced you. Perhaps I can still serve a purpose though, if any of this helps explain why you might continue having trouble persuading people that the issue is not at all about race.
Never said it. And you are right, there are two different issues that should not be conflated, as hard as it might be. One is what the laws should be, the other is what we do given the laws we have.
The quote you attribute to me is taken out of contest. It was a commentary on “punishment”, in response to your “… insofar as the solution involves punishing and preventing and deporting people from the wrong side of the border.” My full response was:
"People who break the law should expect to be punished. That’s the idea behind having laws, so people don’t break them. "
If it helps, add the words “—with punishments attached to them—” after “laws”. I would have thought it was clear in context. And still do, so I don’t know why you chose to mischaracterize it. Maybe it was you could denegrate my position and then add this oh-so-insightful explanation and appear smart:
Being that this is based on a mischaracterization of what I said, “smart” was not my take away.
- **Unspecified Cultural Threats. **
- **Public Health. **
- Public Resources.
Here are some of the reasons I see the issue the way I do. This should answer your questions.
1) Loss of national identity. Unlike large immigration waves in the past, the current one from south of the border is not assimilating into our society the way previous groups did. The reasons:
•There exist large Spanish-speaking populations in many cities, so the need to assimilate in order to function is not so great as for say, Russian-Jews at the beginning of the last century.
•They are not as eager to be “American” as previous immigrants were. This is due to the fact that their native countries are so close, they plan to go back to visit, if not to live. This, combined with the previous bullet, means there is very little to gain and something to lose by embracing a new country fully and completely.
•Language: America, by virtue of it’s being a conglomeration of people from so many diverse places benefits from having one language. A very large group that adheres to their old language and culture too strongly begins to balkanize the country. This can be seen in many large cities where all signs for blocks are in Spanish.
Additionally, excessive accommodation of one culture leads to an argument for all cultures. Right now, Canada is having to make accommodations for Sharia law, as Muslim’s insist that their legal traditions be recognized along with those of other laws. While the existence of other cultures make for a rich societal experience, the society needs a dominant culture to unite all the diverse groups. (This is also one of the reasons I am in favor of the U.S. having an official language.)
2) Dilution of citizenship. It should be self-evident that the more “rights” and privileges the country bestows upon non-citizens, the less meaning citizenship has. In San Francisco (and, I think, other areas) this pendulum has swung so far that illegal immigrants are voting in school board elections.
3) Cost. Illegal immigrants are a drain on services and our coffers. As of now, they are legally entitled to emergency medical care (which they abuse, treating ERs as doctors’ offices), education (with the added cost of language instruction), and welfare.
Although I have seen in stated on these boards that Illegal immigrants contribute more to the U.S. than they get out of it, the information I’ve found indicates the opposite.
General
In California during 2004, illegal immigrants were responsible for $10.5 billion in government outlays, while paying $1.7 billion in taxes, for a net drain of $8.8 billion. (FAIR)
In Florida during the same year, illegal immigrants were responsible for 1.8 billion in outlays, while paying .9 billion in taxes, for a net drain of $.9 billion. (FAIR)
The Center for Immigration Studies looked at the national picture for 2002. They found costs to the federal government to be $26.3 billion, tax receipts to be $16 billion, for a net drain of $10.4 billion.
Center for Immigration Studies:
California study:
http://www.fairus.org/site/DocServe...s.pdf?docID=141
Florida study:
http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServ...lcoststudy_html
National numbers
http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServ...ch_researchf6ad
Education
Florida spends $1.5 billion a year to educate illegal immigrant children and their U.S.-born siblings. California spends $7.7 billion, enough to buy computers for half the legal school children in the state. (FAIR)
In 2004, illegal alien students and U.S.-born children of illegal aliens cost California $7.7 billion, Texas $3.9 billion, New York $3.1 billion. The bill to all 50 states is over $26.6 billion. (FAIR)
Healthcare
Taxpayer-funded, unreimbursed medical outlays for health care provided to the state’s illegal alien population cost Floridians about $165 million a year. In California, the number is $1.4 billion. (FAIR)
BrainBlutton, I was still trying to find specific information about hospital closings due to unreimbursed care given to illegals. The only information I have right now is that illegals are responsible for 84 hospital and emergency room closings in the past 10 years or so.
Wages
This from this article: http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/policy_cost.htm, (which has links to original research done by a Harvard economist and the National Research Council) states that:
“…The 1995 findings of Harvard economist George Borjas [George Borjas, “The Economic Benefits from Immigration,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring, 1995] were confirmed by the National Research Council’s 1997 report The New Americans: essentially all the increase in Gross Domestic product [GDP] brought about by immigration is captured by the immigrants themselves, in the form of wages. Virtually no benefit accrues to native-born Americans.
(And once transfer payments like welfare, education and healthcare are factored in, immigration becomes a net cost—for example, over $1,000 in annual extra taxes per native-born household in California. Americans are financing their own dispossession.)
Even less publicized: the Borjas model reveals the true economic consequence of immigration: a massive redistribution of wealth within the American native-born community—basically, from labor to capital, because of immigration’s impact on wages.
The key variable: the rate at which native-born wages fall as the total number of workers rises—the so-called “price elasticity” of labor. Borjas estimates that each 10% increase in immigrant workers reduces native wages by about 3.5%. About 14% of employed workers in 2002 were immigrants. So the reduction in native wages attributable to immigrants that year was approximately 4.9% (35% of 14%).
As our reader told his dinner companions, it’s true that immigrants don’t do work Americans won’t do—they just do it for less.
But, more importantly, immigrants do indeed do one dirty job: make it easier for Americans to exploit each other.
I’ve recalculated this immigration impact on the basis of the latest government data. This is how it came out:
Net economic gain from the immigrant presence to native-born Americans, before transfer payments: just 0.2 percent of GDP (that is, two-tenth of one percent!) in today’s 10.4 trillion economy – that comes to a mere $84 per native-born American.
Native-born capital-owners’ gain as a result of immigration: about 3.1% of GDP, or $323.8 billion. This goes to employers and, for example, upper-income owners of stocks and employers of servants.
Native-born workers’ loss as a result of immigration: about 2.9% of GDP —$302.9 billion in a $10.4 trillion economy, or a remarkable $2,578 for each native-born worker every year.”
Warning: the original research done by Borjas is true egghead economics. Not for the faint of heart. Admittedly, I was lost through much of it.
Other
Then there’s also money taken out of the economy and sent to the illegal immigrants’ native countries. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that the amount, which does not capture all remittances to Latin America, will go beyond $18 billion for 2005.
Not all “costs” are monetary. The drain on services is creating major problems for our education and medical infrastructures. Schools in border states are becoming overcrowded and are saddled with the increased expense of language instruction. The general student population suffers, as well, because classes have to be slowed down to accommodate so many non-native speakers. Many parents find the need to move their children to private school, increasing the burden on them.
I’ll end with an interesting anecdote that illustrates the problem well. It is from this article: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/a...RTICLE_ID=43275
“Cristobal Silverio emigrated illegally from Mexico to Stockton, Calif., in 1997 to work as a fruit picker.
He brought with him his wife, Felipa, and three children, 19, 12 and 8 – all illegals. When Felipa gave birth to her fourth child, daughter Flor, the family had what is referred to as an “anchor baby” – an American citizen by birth who provided the entire Silverio clan a ticket to remain in the U.S. permanently.
But Flor was born premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator and cost the San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, oldest daughter Lourdes married an illegal alien gave birth to a daughter, too. Her name is Esmeralda. And Felipa had yet another child, Cristian.
The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding for the family. Flor gets $600 a month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. While the Silverios earned $18,000 last year picking fruit, they picked up another $12,000 for their two ‘anchor babies.’”
4) National Security. The more porous our borders are the greater the risk that terrorists can sneak across. In September 2004, The Washington Times reported that a top al Qaeda lieutenant had met with the Salvadoran street gang Mara Salvatruch (MS-13) to access their network of alien smugglers. In June of 2005, two Iraqis were apprehended in a border town near San Diego, along with two suspected alien smugglers.
Link (password necessary, but free): http://insider.washingtontimes.com/...30-124933-1494r
5) National Health. In addition to being a drain on our healthcare system to the point that hospitals have had to close their doors, illegals are responsible for resuscitating deadly diseases we’ve eradicated, as well as bringing us new ones. From a report in the Journalal of American Physicians and Surgeons (http://www.jpands.org/vol10no1/cosman.pdf):
“Many illegals who cross our borders have tuberculosis. That disease had largely disappeared from America, thanks to excellent hygiene and powerful modern drugs such as isoniazid and rifampin. TB’s swift, deadly return now is lethal for about 60 percent of those infected because of new Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDRTB). Until recently MDR-TB was endemic to Mexico. This Mycobacterium tuberculosis is resistant to at least two major antitubercular drugs. OrdinaryTB usually is cured in six months with four drugs that cost about $2,000. MDR-TB takes 24 months with many expensive drugs that cost around $250,000,with toxic side effects. Each illegal with MDR-TB coughs and infects 10 to 30 people, who will not show symptoms immediately. Latent disease explodes later.
TB was virtually absent in Virginia until in 2002, when it spiked a 17 percent increase, but Prince William County, just south of Washington, D.C., had a much larger rise of 188 percent. Public health officials blamed immigrants. In 2001 the Indiana School of Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR-TB, and traced it to Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ascribed 42 percent of all new TB cases to “foreign born” people who have up to eight times higher incidence. Apparently, 66 percent of all TB cases coming to America originate in Mexico, the Philippines, and Vietnam….
Chagas disease…is transmitted by the reduviid bug, which prefers to bite the lips and face. The protozoan parasite that it carries…infects 18 million people annually in Latin America and causes 50,000 deaths. This disease also infiltrates America’s blood supply. Chagas affects blood transfusions and transplanted organs. No cure exists. Hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected. After 10 to 20 years, up to 30 percent will die when their hearts or intestines, enlarged and weakened by Chagas, burst. Three people in 2001 received Chagas-infected organ transplants.Two died.
Leprosy… was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy. Leprosy now is endemic to northeastern states because illegal aliens and other immigrants brought leprosy from India, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Mexico.
Dengue fever is exceptionally rare in America, though common in Ecuador, Peru, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Mexico. …
Polio was eradicated from America, but now reappears in illegal immigrants, as do intestinal parasites.
Malaria was obliterated, but now is re-emerging in Texas. About 4,000 children under age five annually in America develop fever, red eyes, “strawberry tongue,” and acute inflammation of their coronary arteries and other blood vessels because of the infectious malady called Kawasaki disease. Many suffer heart attacks and sudden death.
Hepatitis A, B, and C, are resurging. Asians number 4 percent of Americans, but account for more than half of Hepatitis B cases.”
6) Crime. Illegal aliens are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime committed. (Mind you, even if it was at the same rate as native born it would still be a valid reason.) According to an article by Jim Kouris.
In the population study of 55,322 illegal aliens, researchers found that they were arrested at least a total of 459,614 times… Nearly all had more than 1 arrest. Thirty-eight percent (about 21,000) had between 2 and 5 arrests, 32 percent (about 18,000) had between 6 and 10 arrests, and 26 percent (about 15,000) had 11 or more arrests. Most of the arrests occurred after 1990. ??They were arrested for a total of about 700,000 criminal offenses, averaging about 13 offenses per illegal alien. One arrest incident may include multiple offenses, a fact that explains why there are nearly one and half times more offenses than arrests. …??More than two-thirds of the defendants charged with an immigration offense were identified as having been previously arrested. Thirty-six percent had been arrested on at least 5 prior occasions; 22%, 2 to 4 times; and 12%,1 time.?? Sixty-one percent of those defendants had been convicted at least once; 18%, 5 or more times; 26%, 2 to 4 times; and 17%, 1 time. Of those charged, 49% had previously been? convicted of a felony: 20% of a drug offense; 18%, a violent offense; and 11%, other felony offenses. Twelve percent had previously been convicted of a misdemeanor.?? Defendants charged with unlawful reentry had the most extensive criminal histories. Nine in ten had been previously arrested. Of those with a prior arrest, half had been arrested on at least 5 prior occasions. ??Fifty-six percent of those charged with a reentry offense had previously been convicted of a violent or drug-related felony. By contrast, under half of those charged with alien smuggling, a third of those charged with unlawful entry, and just over a quarter those charged with misuse of visas and other charges had previously been arrested. The criminal histories of these defendants were generally less extensive: more than 70% had been previously arrested fewer than 5 times."?
This article was also interesting, particularly the opening quotes from the Mexican press.
http://www.desertinvasion.us/articles/art2005jul12.html
Onward.
A few links about illegal immigration and hospital closings:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,150750,00.html
http://www.scpr.org/considerthis/illegalimmigration/2yes.html A quote from this link (emphasis added) : "The 2004 FAIR report put the number for overall healthcare at $1.4 billion annually. “What is unseen is [illegal aliens’] free medical care that has degraded and closed some of America’s finest emergency medical facilities and caused hospital bankruptcies: ** 84 California hospitals are closing their doors,” Madeleine Peiner Cosman, Ph.D., wrote in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. ** "
http://www.nshp.org/?q=node/717
http://www.capsweb.org/newsroom/press_releases/hospital_crisis.html
If nothing else, will you guys at least stop pretending that illegal immigration isn’t straining our health care system?
Well done, LonesomePolecat. But I doubt this will stop the pretending.