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.
If you went the ER and were sent home four times you got seen four times. You may have had incompetent doctors but you did get seen which is the opposite of what the complaint was. How about you have your personal doctor get you admitted to the hospital. BTW, where I live the doctors call ahead and have a bed set aside for you. It pays to have a doctor actually affilated with the hospital.
The ER costs the same whether its busy or quiet and regardless of who is being served.....Dave S
Dave S , you are not taking into account that E.R.'s are built and staffed to accomodate the patient population they serve.
Our E.R. has the size and staff to serve the number of patients living in our County at the current time. Our County demographics is such that there are enough patients who pay their bills to keep our E.R. financially solvent.
If the population of our County were doubled by individuals who used our E.R. services but paid little or nothing in return, the E.R. staffing, equipment and medication costs would double but E.R. income would stay the same. Our E.R. would then go from a financially viable entity right into bankruptcy.
Your assumption is correct. I would still have a problem with this solution.
The problem is the volume. A volume that robs the recent immigrant of his chances to prosper and profit. A volume that robs our society of it's ability to assist the less equipped to prosper.
Immigration is the lifeblood of our society and culture. It brings diversity and a competitive spirit. Massive, unregulated migration victimizes both the immigrant and the society. It Balkanizes the immigrant leading to hysterical, unwarranted bigotry and robs our existing society of its ability to sustain the values and traditions that have served us so well.
Have you ever been to an ER in Southern California? I doubt it. A cursory glance doesn't count as being "seen". I didn't get more than a cursory glance because they were so busy. I have been to ERs in different areas of the country and it's nothing like SoCal.
You need to read more carefully. My personal doctor SENT me to the ER. Three times. He told me the ER should see me withing 20 minutes of my getting there, and he did "call ahead". The DOCTOR'S OFFICE IN IS THE HOSPITAL, NOT JUST AFFILIATED WITH IT. The regular doctor's office was very frustrated with the crowded ER situation. The surgeon they called in at 3AM to do emergency surgery so I wouldn't die was also frustrated with the situation. I highly suspect that one of the ER doctors was incompetent, but the others were just too busy to look at anyone properly unless blood was actively spewing out of them. Everyone else just gets antibiotics.
Think this is an isolated incident? It's not. There are many others who have the same experience. Did you read the thread last week about CA cutting Healthy Families or whatever the program is called? The illegals threatened to just use the ERs more often. They use it as their primary care. My father almost lost a leg after being sent to the ER by his doctor. He had a blood clot. They waited about 6 hours to see him, even though his doctor called ahead and said the situation was an extreme emergency because every minute counts when your leg is going without blood circulation. His doctor even called several times to yell at them because they hadn't even looked at him yet. His doctor's office is across the street from the hospital. The hospital is also considered by many to be a "good hospital". Neither of us went to public hospitals, where the situation would have been even worse! The ER was crammed with people speaking Spanish again in his case. My mother, who also speaks Spanish, didn't inquire as to legal status. My parents live in an area where small middle-class-style houses cost $600,000+, but the influx of illegals to the area hospitals is still enormous. At least they didn't send my dad home to die like they did with me.
You need more? My cousin is a doctor in the San Fernando Valley. He's quite frustrated with the amount of illegals who come in with the sniffles, preventing him from seeing people with real emergencies. One of my good friends is a new doctor down in San Diego, and she tells the same story. She's also an immigrant, as are many in my family. My mother didn't speak English when she started school. The difference is that we immigrated legally, had no help and expected no help from the government, got educated, followed the rules like good citizens, and in general feel grateful for what the US has provided, rather than greedy over what the US should "give us".
I'm assuming St. John's is a private hospital, too. I could believe this stuff coming from a county hospital in the heart of L.A., but we're talking affluent suburbs and private hospitals here. Unbelievable, but true.
It's the California socialist welfare state that has brought this attitude about. They feel entitled to everything. I recently moved to Indiana, and I teach ESL here. The immigrants (some legal, some not) that we get here have different attitudes. The ones straight from Mexico or coming from most of the states have pretty good attitudes, attend ESL classes, get educated, follow the rules, and try hard to make it. The ones from California and sometimes Colorado have learned one word very well in English..."Gimme". I teach in the part of the state with the highest concentration of hispanics, but it's still only 4%. They learn quickly that there are no programs here for them like that. They look at me and expect me to be sympathetic with them, but I'm not and I don't know any hard working people who are, immigrants or not. If things keep going the way they're going in all states, it's only a matter of time before entitlements are in place in all 50 states and we are all taxed to death to pay for people who are greedy yet don't want to work or get educated to earn money for the lifestyle they envy. 4% is a whole lot better situation than 40%, so people here for the most part still either assimilate or move somewhere else. I agree with others on this thread that it's not immigration that's the problem, it's the deluge of unskilled, welfare-state-wanting, unassimilating illegal immigrants who put a drain on society.
Social security was ok when it was started because there were so many more workers compared to retired people then. Now, when there are too many retired and not enough workers, it's a burden. Same with the immigration of low-skilled people. A small percentage is supportable by the working public, even though it still sucks. A larger percentage, like it is now in California, is a HUGE burden. If anyone doubts, look at California.
Anyone pretending that we can have free immigration of unskilled workers without a huge welfare state is absurd. What are we going to do with these people? Let them all live in tents on the hillsides of SoCal? Never going to happen, not with all the social advocacy groups out there. Would you really want people living in tents near your neighborhood, anyway? Crapping in buckets and dumping it in the gutters? That IS what would happen if we had completely open borders. Let them all cram together in garages and apartments, with 4-6 people to a room? Can you imagine the crime that will go along with having that many people envying what others have gotten through hard work? Wait, nobody has to imagine. Read Mexifornia, that describes the situation as it is already.
Wow, I am writing books on this subject today.
I'd say it is more like they are throwing fuel onto the fire.
Here in Phoenix and suburbs, a middle class neighborhood can hold it's own for 15 years, approximately. After 15 years, it's rental city, break-ins, car theft, full extended family from some third world cess pool, etc.
WHY can't you?
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