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.
< SNIP >
The legalization movement is gaining new allies in other organizing networks, such as the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, a coalition pushing for restoration of safety net programs cut by the 1996 welfare law. "A new legalization policy would be one of the most important antipoverty policies we could enact," says Deepak Bhargava of NCJIS. "Since most undocumented immigrants live in families with legal immigrants or citizens, the impact would be really broad. If we're serious about building a strong multiracial economic justice movement, then legalization has to be on the table."
Someone help me out here. Xena's Guy and I bought a three-bedroom house last November. How does what we paid differ from that paid by a married couple with one or two kids who bought a similar house? Property value is property value, or am I missing something? (Leaving aside the assessment question, of course.)
I think the point is that a single person buying a house can be much more flexible, and thus not fall prey to predatory realtors. 1. He can take a smaller house (1-2 BR); and even more importantly, 2. He's indifferent to the quality of the school district where the house is.
Let me give you a local example, from where I live (Queens, NY). My wife and I could afford a house or co-op in a certain neighborhood 40 blocks east of where we live. A bunch of nice co-ops have sprouted up there of late, and more continue to sprout up along the same tract of oceanfront land. (The area is prime real estate, but had been in decline for 35 years, due to the city using it as a welfare dumping ground, and due to its concentration of violent, black racism). Housing pressures brought it back.) However, the area's public schools are comprised of 70% genocidally racist blacks, 20% vicious Hispanics, and 5% cowering Asians. (Heck, even the Catholic schools there have a lot of racist, minority kids.) To send our child to those schools would constitute child abuse, and could lead to his death. I know of 7-year-old Asian kids who have gotten their noses broken on a regular basis in those schools, by 7 and 8-year-old black kids.
White and Asian people from that area engage in all sorts of dishonesty, or just plain BEG school officials (I know one lady who says that what she did), in order to get their kids into the schools in the ditrict where we live. And I know Hispanics and blacks who will not send their kids to those schools, either.
And so, owners selling homes in the good school district can get whatever they want from families with school-aged children, who are the only people you see moving in there. (You see some pretty unprepossessing homes here selling for $500K+.) Meanwhile, singles who drive back and forth from work, and need never (or so they think) come into contact with the local school kids can buy those nice, relatively reasonable co-ops in the less desirable school district.
Is this guy a Persian rug, or what? If you're family to a citizen, he can sponsor you right now. If you're family to a legal immigrant, he can sponsor you a couple of years down the line. Guy sounds like a commie, using illegals as his substitute proletariat.
Ummmmm.......Would you care to rephrase that, X-Bob?
I represent that remark.
(Well, except for the bitter, racist, selfish and cowardly part.)
(And especially the "self-hating"....Most Cuban Americans have a problem in the other end of that spectrum. Just ask my wife ;-) ...)
I am Cuban-born myself and came to the U.S. as an exile.
Between my uncle (Bay of Pigs, Green Berets, two Vietnam combat tours, two Bronze Stars with "V" and two Purple Hearts), my brother (U.S. Army, 10th Mountain Division), my sister (U.S. Army Nurse Corps) and myself (Commander, USNR) we have about 46 years of combined U.S. Armed Forces service.
I could go into a long tactical, strategic, logistical and geopolitical treatise as to all the reasons why Cuban liberation is not a militarily feasible option for Cuban exiles. Suffice it to say that fighting for the United States is a far wiser use of your life than certain and meaningless suicide in a hopeless Quixotic quest.
In regards to "pre-Castro aristocracy", that is Socialist class-warfare rhetoric. Like every society, Cuba had rich and poor. Before Castro, however, Cuba had the largest per capita middle class in Latin America.
Now, from what gawd has written, there is no doubt in my mind that gawd is an idiot and, as I posted to him in Post 245, "a 'holier-than-thou' trash-talking troll'".
Be that as it may, he is not an idiot because he is Cuban American any more that Al Sharpton, Howard Dean or Al Gore are idiots because they are native-born Americans.
Gawd is an idiot simply because every demographic group has it's fair share of idiots and he happens to be one of the idiots in my demographic group.
FreeRegards,
Polybius
It's a cultural thing.
Not at all.
It has been my experience that those less traveled have a rather myopic view of the world. Especially US citizens with regard to pride in our equally myopic nationality moniker.
On more than one occasion the insulting personal antics of US citizens in other parts of the Americas were emphasized by the reminder that we "weren't the only Americans".
The critics point was that while national pride is expected, it should be used judiciously while a guest is another's country. The critic's point was well taken and gawd's pompous characterizations reminded me of the small minded attitudes of these less traveled. He has apparently become what he professes to despise.
Free Kobe!
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