Report says immigration costly

More than 37 million immigrants in the United States, both legal and illegal, cost the federal government more than $346 billion last year, twice as much as the nation's fiscal deficit, according to a report released yesterday.

"This is another nail in the coffin of economic growth," said Edwin Rubenstein, director of research and president of ESR Research, which released the report. "There is absolutely no reason immigration policy shouldn't be discussed on its economic merits."

Mr. Rubenstein, a former director of research at the Hudson Institute, a nonpartisan policy research organization, said U.S. taxpayers paid more than $9,000 for each immigrant in the country, a third of whom are believed to be in the U.S. illegally.

The Financial Collapse and the Myth of Today’s Cheap Labor 4/9/2008
Carlini’s Comments, MidwestBusiness.com’s oldest column, runs every Wednesday. Its mission is to offer the common man’s view on business and technology issues while questioning the leadership and visions of “pseudo” experts.

Carlini’s Comments CHICAGO – The lack of jobs for American citizens is reflected with this latest, multibillion-dollar financial collapse that reaffirms my economic observations. Many financial experts and economists have yet to connect the dots while analyzing financial indicators and determining why things are happening in the economy.

The economy is interrelated. That couldn’t have been better expressed in the recent Congressional hearings where Federal Reserve Chairman Bob Bernanke emphasized the grave consequences if Bear Stearns wasn’t bailed out. Though he didn’t explain all the details, he stated that the Fed had to step in and prop up Bear Stearns so there wasn’t a domino effect on other financial firms.

Having said that, why can’t the experts figure out that allowing too many cheap foreign workers upsets the equilibrium of that same economy? How much empirical evidence do they need?

The Myth of Cheap Labor

In a recent column under the American dream hierarchy, I noted:

With companies bringing in cheaper labor, they are upsetting the complex churning of the economy from several perspectives.

They are getting cheaper labor. While this is perceived as good for them, many of those cost savings haven’t been passed onto the consumers. Instead, they have been used to create mega bonuses for executives, fund failing initiatives and in some cases more value for the shareholders.

The drawback is that the cheap labor they bring in isn’t cheap and the costs have become a burden to the consumers. They have put a strain on schools, hospitals and other institutions that require more funding to handle the increased demands.

If we upset the balance of alpha, beta and gamma consumers, we damage the economy. The erosion of alpha consumers has been happening for at least the last eight years. To me, this clearly fuels the acceleration of credit indebtedness.

The strain on institutions like hospitals could not be better exemplified by the recent closure of the 410-bed St. Francis Hospital that had to close its doors due to too many patients not paying their bills. This is from a Chicago Tribune article on April 2:

Saddled with tens of millions of dollars in losses from uninsured patients who could not pay their medical bills, St. Francis would be abandoning its core mission of caring “for the people of its communities regardless of their ability to pay”.

The vortex of declining economic contributors keeps pulling down economic viability both locally and regionally. The hospital closure impacts the health care situation for the Blue Island area. More important, scratch another 1,400 good jobs that contribute to the tax revenues of not only that city but also Cook County. Those jobs are not replaced by opening up a corner Starbucks.

A remarkable note is that no health care association would even consider picking up the hospital (even for free!). Out of 28 potential buyers, all said no. That speaks volumes that a concentration of people with no health care are a real drag on regional viability and a clear negative economic indicator that red flags any health care-related economic development.

So much for the false premise of cheap labor. Cheap labor costs everyone else millions of dollars, and in this particular instance, no health care association wants to pick up the pieces. It’s bad for their bottom line. Those who say we must compete in a global economy are missing the point if they think eroding the standard of living to a third-world status is progress.

Closing a hospital with an economic viability that’s so bad it can’t even be given away to any of 28 potential buyers is a clear proof of concept that putting the burden of providing health care benefits onto the alpha consumers for beta and gamma consumers just doesn’t work. More alpha consumers need to be made. They have good jobs that include health care benefits.

http://illinois.midwestbusiness.com/news/viewnews.asp?newsletterID=19078

Now.................

I hope the following 14 reasons are read so many times that the readers get sick of reading them. I have included the URL’s for verification of the following facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year.
http://tinyurl.com/zob77

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroine and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.

Homeland Security Report
http://www.house.gov/mccaul/pdf/Investigaions-Border-Report.pdf

12. The National Policy Institute, ‘estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.’
http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/publications.php?b=deportation

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin.
http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14. ‘The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States’.
http://www.drdsk.com/articles.html#Illegals

The total cost is a whooping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR !

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.