Illegal Immigration - Inflated Uproar Over a Single Issue?

With an illegal alien population of about 20 million or so, in a nation of over 300 million, one might ask, why on earth are we so focused on this single issue? After all, 20 million is less than ten percent of our population.

This nation is suffering. The real issues we need to address include joblessness, drug abuse, gang crime, a crippling national debt, an incredibly expensive but ever-worsening education system, rampant vote fraud, severe military threats from abroad… and many more. These are issues that affect everyone in our entire country, not just ten percent of us!

In this context, why on earth have we allowed the problem of what to do about illegal aliens, at most less than ten percent of our population, to dominate our political discourse?

Despite the numerous revisions to the way that “unemployment” is counted, it’s well known that the nation continues to have a severe problem of both joblessness and under-employment. Some 93 million people – almost a third of the nation – are now counted as being outside the labor force. While there aren’t enough new jobs being created – not by a long shot – those that are tend to be in the foodservice industry or other largely low-paying basic industries. Not that we don’t need these too, but they happen to have something interesting in common: over half the new jobs are taken by recent immigrants, both legal and illegal.

The illegal alien employees don’t “live in the shadows” as the Left cries out; no, they have jobs with fake or stolen SSNs. It’s their employers and customers who live in the shadows, terrified that they’re unknowingly employing illegals, and that someday an audit or raid might reveal unwitting violations on their part.

The problem therefore isn’t just that these millions and millions of illegals are taking jobs that would go to Americans if they weren’t here to compete for them… the problem is also that their presence in the workforce depresses our wage rates and introduces both intentional and unintentional criminality into a broad range of businesses.

Solve the immigration problem, and we make some progress toward solving our joblessness problem.

Yes, there have always been illegal drugs. The legalization crowd will remind us that Turks had hashish, and American Indians had pot, and Afghans had opium, hundreds or even thousands of years before the United States even existed.

Yes, they did. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Those other cultures were hardly stellar examples of economic advances. In every country, the more recreational drugs have grown widespread, the more clear is the correlation to economic stagnation. With some admitted but narrow exceptions, the high job applicant doesn’t get the job; the high employee doesn’t keep the job.

Drug abuse brings along so many social ills with it: unnecessary additional medical care needs, worsening child mortality and birth defect rates (Have you ever seen a hospital ward full of crack babies, crying in their bassinets, full of hoses and tubes and monitors? Don’t tell me that drug abuse is a victimless crime)…

Drug addiction drives girls into prostitution and boys into robbery and mugging, in their fruitless efforts to afford to feed their habits. And while it certainly exists in every culture and every community, here in the United States, it is most rampant in the immigrant communities where people arrive already immersed in the drug culture. Coming from a nation in which marijuana, cocaine, opium or hashish use are the norm, rather than assimilating into their new homeland, they bring more of their old homeland here. Shut the borders and stop the inflow of illegals from drug-addled countries, and we make some progress toward solving our drug abuse problem.

It would be easier if the only type of crime advanced by the drug addicts were the one-on-one crimes of users knocking over convenience stores to raid the cash registers, and stealing cars to fence.

But no, along with the pot and cocaine, the immigrants have brought whole crime gang activity, and moved it into our major cities. We had crime gangs before – no one would make the claim that we have ever been completely free of such crime – but immigrant communities have always brought foreign gangland activity along with them, from the Mafia and Comorra of Italy and Sicily to the Mara Salvatrucha and the Medellin Drug Cartel of central and south America.

The hundreds of thousands of alleged “unaccompanied minors” who streamed in from Mexico and beyond over the past few years have included thousands of carriers, recruiters, coyotes and leaders of the numerous gangs that infest Latin America. We were making headway against gangland crime – real headway, thanks to tough national law enforcement and powerful prosecutorial tools like the RICO Act – but as illegal immigration has exploded, this progress was turned on its head; the successful reduction of mafia activity in the 60s and 70s served only to make room for the new arrivals to move in.

The courts are clogged with prosecutions of too many criminals to house in our overcrowded prisons… property and auto insurance rates skyrocket for residents of our big cities due to the dangers posed by their crime gang neighbors… property and business tax receipts plummet as businesses flee and houses crumble into tenements, due to the spread of gang control, the blight spreads across Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, Cleveland, and so many other cities like aggressive cancers.

Shut the borders and stop the inflow of illegals and other unvetted immigrants, and we make some progress toward solving our crime problems and reclaiming our cities.

The American economy is an engine of economic growth utterly unprecedented in world history. Even in recessions, tax receipts grow year-over-year (just not at the pace of expenditures). During the Reagan administration, we halved our top income tax rates and STILL managed to double tax receipts. The engine of the American economy comes as close to perpetual motion as any invention dreamed of on Da Vinci’s notebook.

But even so… our nation is suffering from a crushing and growing debt, because the federal government, many states, and most cities are locked in a fiscal death spiral caused by the massive cost of a permanent underclass.

The only way a capitalist nation can survive is with a strong private sector that can afford to both fund and overwhelm the public sector. When the public sector grows too costly for support by that private sector, then public sector deficit spending becomes a permanent reality, with no possible end but bankruptcy, moral as well as financial.

We hear much about the National Debt – a figure that has more than doubled in just the eight years since the Democrat takeover of the House in 2007 – but the unfunded $100 trillion national liabilities of Social Security, various federal bonds, and pension funds, combined with the several virtually bankrupt states like Illinois and California, dozens of virtually bankrupt cities and counties like Chicago, Detroit, and New York, and the thousands of virtually bankrupt school districts across the country, add up to an intolerable public crisis.

A nation built on the great Protestant Work Ethic has gradually morphed into two nations – one of ever-harder work and one of ever more deeply-rooted dependency. While the working class supported a small percentage of retirees and others on relief, a century ago – and that was sustainable – we now have a third or more of our nation outside the work force. The few who work can simply not afford to support the many who do not, can not, or will not.

The solution is simple: we need to reboost the American economy. Cutting taxes, cutting government regulations, releasing the choke-hold that unions have on our manufacturing community – these steps will create new jobs and get the country working again.

But we still need the pendulum to swing back in favor of the Protestant Work Ethic. We must shrink the welfare state, and the starting point must be to plug the dike that has been filling our welfare state with illegal immigrants on an hourly basis for half a century.

The lack of tax revenue from businesses and workers is only a small part of the cost of a welfare state. There’s the outflow of welfare benefits, supported housing, salaries for caseworkers, food stamps, daycare, grammar schools, high schools, college… It is destroying our nation. We can’t do anything about the native-born American citizens in the welfare state; we must work to educate and promote them to join the real American experience. But we can do something about the illegals, the ones to whom we owe no obligation, the ones whose very presence is unauthorized.

No matter how fast we create new jobs for those willing to work, a planet of six billion people can always replace them with more of those unwilling or unable… unless we shut the gate.

Shut the borders and stop the inflow of illegals and other unvetted immigrants, and we make huge progress toward moving back toward solvency, from the cities all the way to the nation’s capital.

Our cities’ local schools are crippled by having to contend with a host of uninvited non-English speakers, requiring teachers, counselors, and security guards, lowering the quality of education that we can provide to our citizens and legal immigrants. Without the illegals, our cities’ schools would still have challenges, but they would be manageable.

Our elections are stolen by massive vote fraud, as millions of illegals are taught to cast ballots by their La Raza and Acorn sponsors, as Motor Votor provides names for corrupt party workers to mine, as desperate wards of the party machine are driven from polling station to polling station from dawn to dusk, out of fear of losing their patronage jobs, benefits, or protection from the authorities.

Our nation and our allies are attacked daily, all over the world, by islamofascist movements, from single bombers and lone gunmen to ISIS brigades and revolutionary movements from West Africa to South Asia. Their allies and recruiters have entered our nation through our porous borders, spreading their satanic hatred in prisons, madrassahs, islamic community centers, and even the military’s chaplain corps. Don't think all our illegals are Hispanic; far too many are islamofascists, lost to side in the crowd, ready to infect our nation with their demonic ideology.

The matter is beyond doubt: the problem of illegal immigration is a lynchpin to all the problems from which the United States suffers today. Every other issue would find at least a partial solution in the eradication of illegal immigration.

This is not to say that evicting every illegal tomorrow would solve every problem tomorrow… but an immediate and certain termination of new arrivals, and even a slow reduction in the gross number of illegals through encouraging their return to their homelands, would go a long way toward saving the cities, the states, and the country from our current path of destruction.

There is no question: We must not capitulate, we must not minimize the issue. Illegal immigration is strangling the nation, and no other effort matters if we allow this cancer to continue to grow.

John F. Di Leo is an international trade compliance manager. A former president of the Ethnic American Council, he is a proud descendent of Italian, German, Austrian, and Irish immigrants, but he is even prouder of his family’s adopted heritage as citizens of the nation founded by our Founding Fathers, two centuries ago, in the magnificent golden age of freedom at the time of our Framing.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook and LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo, or on his own page at JohnFDiLeo.com.

There was a lot of issues facing the country in late 1941. They included expanding the Social Security Program to start paying benefits to survivors and disabled people, expanding the public works programs to employ more people (remember, this was during the depression and one third of our workforce was idle). There were also highway widening projects that were being hotly discussed, and cars and trucks were getting bigger by the day (almost), causing massive road damage. And on top of all that, the city of Skokie, Illinois was 5% down on their required road salt reserve, coming into what was expected to be a REALLY COLD WINTER.

And then on Dec. 7, the ENTIRE COUNTRY WENT NUTS and dropped all of those issues because of what it perceived as some kind of attack, by a country who’s army was LESS THAN 10% of the US population.

We were a SICK PEOPLE back then, we could have simply LEGALIZED the Japanese Army and put what would become World War 2 “behind us”, and then moved on to the much more serious issues listed above. But instead the TEA PARTY types back then made up stories about the Japanese being horrible occupiers, killing people without mercy...when we all know now that it was simply “multiculturalism” that they (the Tea Party types) feared...they just couldn’t handle the fact that the Japanese looked different and spoke a different language, but otherwise were no different than us.

I’m sure glad we’re not THAT COUNTRY anymore...

“The real issues we need to address include joblessness, drug abuse, gang crime, a crippling national debt, an incredibly expensive but ever-worsening education system,”

Illegal immigration is the root cause of much of the above.
It isn’t a single issue. They affect everything.

Outnumbered by the easily swayed/controlled isn’t much of a threat but I doubt we’re outnumbered by radical left and assorted terrorist support. Any advantage they have would be in their level of organization, practice and ability to lie convincingly.

I’ve been urging folks to organize defensively to protect their neighborhoods for a while now. Smart a$$ responses aren’t a frequent response anymore.

The tens of millions mentioned are just the illegals from the south. This unfortunately is compounded by millions more being annually imported legally from the Muslim world, places like Pakistan, China, Ustinkistan and on and on...

There is no question, we're being incrementally replaced and outnumbered and it's been happening for several decades now.

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