Posted on 02/15/2010 10:29:33 AM PST by AuntB
For those of you whose primary political interest is stopping the growth of government or even shrinking it, you have to contend with national leaders who say they agree with you but who refuse to deal with immigration. They say immigration is a "social" issue that isn't related to government spending and deficit issues. They couldn't be more wrong. . . .
Let's start with this tidbit from government data provided by the Center for Immigration Studies (Table 13: "Immigrant Households with Children Under 18"):
Roughly ONE-HALF of all immigrant households with kids are accessing the welfare system, especially food and Medicaid welfare.
In this case, "immigrant" includes both authorized and illegal foreign citizens allowed by the federal government to settle in our country. Since 2000, that number each year has averaged around 1.3 million a year -- plus another 1 million births to those immigrant households.
With one-half of those households being poor enough to use the federal, state and local welfare systems, is there anybody blind enough to think that adding 2.3 million people a year to immigrant households is not driving huge increases in government?
That is 23 million disproportionately poor and welfare-using people a decade!
NumbersUSA doesn't take a specific stand on whether government should be bigger or smaller. But we do think it is strange that our government has this humongous program that imports massive amounts of poverty into the country each year. And the welfare use is just the tip of the iceberg. If about half of these households are poor enough to qualify for some form of welfare, that means they can't come close to paying the taxes required to provide for all the extra physical and social infrastructure to take care of the presence of these 23 million new residents each decade.
Even stranger is that this gargantuan driver of bigger and bigger government was promoted and continues to be supported by the Republican National Committee and by the Republican leadership of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
Republican leaders every day castigate Pres. Obama for trying to bloat government, but Republican leaders resolutely refuse to even suggest that the government reduce its importation of welfare-using immigrants.
Why?
The reason should be clear: Republican leaders may say they want to shrink Big Government, but not if it gets in the way of pleasing their cheap-labor corporate donors and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Two key drivers of the growth in welfare usage and bigger government are the chain migration and visa lottery categories of our immigration system.
Those two categories would be eliminated by the Gingrey bill and the Goodlatte bill (a couple of Republicans who are sincere in their concerns about the size of government and the burden on taxpayers).
Click on their names above to see if your U.S. Representative has signed on.
Not a single U.S. Senator -- Republican or Democrat -- has cared enough to even introduce a bill in that chamber.
But Republican leaders in Washington will not allow these immigration reductions or any other to be pushed to the top of their agenda. The word from the leaders is that Republicans are to ignore immigration altogether this year. The intent of the Republican leaders is to ensure that 23 million people continue to be added to the heavily welfare-using immigrant households each decade. That is one form of bigger government that the Republican leaders love.
ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA
PLEASE sign the petition to congress which now has 34051 signatures:
http://www.numbersusa.com/hub?action=route&rid=698&jid=351674&tid=301656&lid=9&ID=61
Text of petition
Half of all immigrant households with children are on welfare. HALF! These are supposed to be people doing "jobs Americans won't do." Sounds more like they're collecting government benefits U.S. citizens can't get!
President Obama, Senate Leader Reid, and Speaker Pelosi, we call on you to SUSPEND all future non-essential immigration.
The federal budget deficit$1.4 Trillion and risingcan't afford to pay out Medicaid and food stamp benefits to more poor immigrants that America obviously does not need.
And yet, all of you are calling for INCREASED immigration and even an AMNESTY for illegal aliens! Your judgment is badly flawed! Higher immigration and amnesty will cause taxes and deficits to rise.
It's time for you to admit that your ideas about immigration are out-of-date and destructive. Suspend non-essential immigration now!
It's ILLEGAL Immigrants that are a problem.
“here is nothing wrong with immigrants.”
How many? And there is that ‘chain migration’ thing...where they can bring in any and all relatives.
Do you realize we are allowing 4 million or more in ‘legally’ now? Add up the visas, etc. and the millions we allow in on asylum. Last year we gave the citizenship oath to over a million people, and that doesn’t even touch the rest of the ‘legal’ ones. Why would anyone want to see this nation become more populated...we’re having water and infrastructure wars now...what will it be like when we have 400 million people??
Do you really want this nation over populated...why??
If you haven’t seen it, take a look at this.
IMMIGRATION GUMBALLS
This is a MUST SEE video for anyone interested in the immigration debate, whether you are a citizen, an illegal alien or a Congressman. This clip from the longer video, Immigration by the Numbers, features Roy Beck demonstrating the catastrophe of the huge numbers of both legal and illegal immigration by Third World people into the modern nations. He uses standard statistics and simple gumballs to show this disaster in the making
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5871651411393887069#
I agree with you. This nation was built on the vitality and ingenuity of immigrants looking to make a better life.
I object to the legal immigrants who are allowed to come here and access all the benefits of the welfare state — welfare, food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, housing subsidies, much, much more. We are importing parasites, legal and illegal. When they get their visas, they are asked to sign a form that says they will never become a public charge, or those who sponsor them in are asked to sign a similar pledge. But it is never enforced. How does this, pray tell, help our country and benefit its citizens? We need a time out on all immigration to give the ones who are here a chance to assimilate, and to give American taxpayers a break.
“This nation was built on the vitality and ingenuity of immigrants looking to make a better life. “
No, this country was built on the vitality and ingenuity of the founding fathers and other colonists who were BORN here, who were NOT immigrants. Only 9 of the 56 signers of the declaration were ‘immigrants’.
If your theory were true, this nation would not decline every time there is a huge wave of immigration and there would be no need for we ‘natives’ at all. We had the sense to stop it before. We’ll see if we’re that smart again.
I will ask this question again...which I have NEVER gotten an answer to...
HOW many legal immigrants would you allow into this country each year?
If Republicans were smart, they would insist on Feb. 25 that any further discussion of expanding government subsidized health care is off the table until and unless Congress secures the borders and provides a bulletproof guarantee that none of the 12 million illegal immigrants in this country will qualify for taxpayer-financed health benefits.
Put Obama in the position of either publicly pledging to such a guarantee (which will enrage nearly all Dems in Congress) or publicly defending rewarding illegal immigration by making illegals eligible for such largesse (which will enrage nearly all taxpayers). This is what in political parlance would be known as a “win-win” situation for Republicans.
Follow up on this article:
Frank Sharry in Huffington Post Can’t Stand The Truth About Immigration & Welfare
http://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusablog/beckr/february-15-2010/frank-sharry-huffington-post-cant-stand-truth-about-immigration-welf
By Roy Beck, Monday, February 15, 2010, 10:37 AM EST - posted on NumbersUSA
I seem to have struck some nerves among the open-borders crowd with my reminder to Tea Party activists around the country that our immigration policies drive a lot of the increases in the size of government. The open-borders folks are especially howling that I said immigration policies drive growth in welfare use. To say such a thing, is “immigrant bashing,” according to Frank Sharry in the massively read HuffingtonPost.com.
But is what I said about welfare and immigration true?
Here’s what Frank said (he is head of the the pro-amnesty, pro-foreign-worker-importation, pro-forced-population-growth America’s Voice):
Tancredo then joined anti-immigration activist Roy Beck for an immigrant-bashing breakout session, focused on spreading the kind of lies about immigrants that would make Lou Dobbs proud. . . . so-called experts such as Beck know better than most that immigrants tend to be hard-working family people who eschew welfare when possible (not to mention that undocumented immigrants don’t qualify for welfare and legal residents have to pay taxes for a decade before becoming eligible for most benefits).
— Frank Sharry in the Huffington Post, 10FEB2010
Wow, I guess he told me!
Except what exactly DOES government data show about the use of welfare by immigrant families?
Turns out that if Frank is trying to say that few immigrant families use welfare, he is wrong.
And it turns out that I was about as correct as correct can be when I told the Tea Party people that half of all immigrant households with kids make use of welfare systems.
The latest government data (for the 2008 year) show that 53 percent of all households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) with one or more children under age 18 used at least one welfare program that year.
The source is the public use file of the March 2009 Current Population Survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. (You can read an analysis of that data by Dr. Steven A. Camarota at http://cis.org/Camarota/WelfareUseByImmigrants.)
How could Frank Sharry, a regular columnist with the Huffington Post, be so wrong?
Part of the reason is that supporters of high immigration, when talking about costs, like to pretend that immigrants don’t have children. In fact, if you don’t count the costs of children, the costs of immigration to taxpayers are quite low.
But that is a fantasy world. Immigrants have more than 1 million children born in the U.S. each year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Every penny of their costs to the government are attributable to federal immigration policies.
Frank can try to explain why there shouldn’t be welfare use in immigrant households, but the government data show that in reality it happens. And it happens in just over half of all immigrant families.
To Frank, it is “immigrant-bashing” to report that fact — even if it is true.
But in my presentation to the Tea Party Convention in Nashville I immediately followed my comments about welfare with my usual admonition that the immigrants are not to be blamed for the costs they impose on U.S. taxpayers. I told the audience that if any fact I delivered to them made them angry that they should not be hostile toward immigrants, or even toward illegal aliens. I urged them to channel any anger toward elected officials who set immigration policies.
I don’t think you can get any farther from immigrant bashing than that.
Immigrants as a whole put a lot of pressure for larger government programs and impose a lot of costs on taxpayers because they are disproportionately poor. Our immigration policies import poverty, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they drive up the costs of all anti-poverty programs.
The question for voters is whether it makes sense to continue to import so many new users of government welfare services. As Frank says, most of these immigrants are hard-working. But they make so little at their jobs that their children still qualify for welfare. And the cost to the government is even greater because the presence of these millions of foreign workers means millions of Americans don’t have a job at all and require even more government services.
I understand that to people who aren’t concerned about the size of government or taxpayer burdens, none of this matters.
But I was making my comments to a movement of voters for whom the size of government is their central concern. For them, the role of immigration policy in driving welfare use is a totally appropriate subject. I thought they ought to know. And they seemed overwhelmingly thankful to me for providing the — accurate — information.
The welfare use that Frank apparently didn’t know about comes in the form of eight major welfare programs surveyed by the Census Bureau: TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), WIC (Women Infants and Children food program), free school lunch, food stamps (now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), SSI (Supplemental Security Income for low-income elderly and disabled), Medicaid (health insurance for those with low incomes), public housing, and rent subsidies.
Dr. Camarota provides this further explanation that would be useful to Frank and his Huffington Post readers:
High immigrant welfare use is partly explained by the low education level of many immigrants. Of immigrant households with children, almost one in three is headed by someone who did not graduate high school, compared to one out of ten for native headed households with children. Most of the immigrant households accessing the welfare system have at least one person who worked during 2008. However, because such a large share of immigrants have relatively little education, their incomes tend to be low and they or their children still qualify for one or more welfare programs.
Although most new legal immigrants are barred from using certain welfare programs for the first five years, this provision has only a modest impact on household use rates for several reasons: most immigrants have been in the U.S. for longer than five years; the ban only applies to some programs; some state governments provide welfare to new immigrants with their own money; by becoming citizens, immigrants become eligible for all welfare programs; and perhaps most important is that the U.S.-born children of immigrants (including those born to illegal immigrants) are automatically eligible for all welfare programs at birth.
Examining welfare use by household is very common among researchers. See for example figures 20-1, 20-2, and 21-3 in Census Bureau publication “Profile of the Foreign-Born Population” and “Immigration and the Welfare State: Immigrant Participation in Means-Tested Entitlement Programs” by George Borjas and Lynette Hilton.
— Dr. Steven A. Camarota, “Welfare Use By Immigrant- and Native-Headed Households with Children”, 12FEB2010
In fairness to Frank, some of his off-base comments about me in the Huffington Post were based on an inaccurate report he cited from The Washington Independent which claimed that I had made the case that stopping illegal immigration was the key to solving most of America’s economic problems.
Look, anyone with half a brain knows that the collapse of the economy had more to do with the “masters of the universe” on Wall Street and in Washington than the people who clean their offices.
Frank Sharry, Huffington Post
In fact, I do have at least half a brain and I agree with what Frank said there. Immigrants did not cause the collapse of our economy. I never said they did. But what I told the Tea Party Convention and what I tell any other group left, right and center is that reducing immigration (more importantly the legal numbers even than the illegal numbers) would significantly reduce government costs (infrastructure far more even than welfare) and would reduce American unemployment.
We're importing VOTES for the Rat party of entitlements. It's obscene.
sw
I am so TIRED of hearing that we are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of SETTLERS! Our forefathers came here when there was NOTHING - no armies,roads, buildings, stores, churches, hospitals,schools,farms, or businesses - and they BUILT A COUNTRY.
The statement that the illegals are here to do jobs Americans won’t do is ridiculous. There are NO jobs that Americans won’t do. We built a country, won our freedom, kept our Union together and won 2 world wars. Don’t tell me that there are jobs Americans won’t do.
Obama understands none of this because he was not brought up here. Also he was raised by people who did not love our country. Our founders understood the importance of “natural born”.
“
I am so TIRED of hearing that we are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of SETTLERS! Our forefathers came here when there was NOTHING - no armies,roads, buildings, stores, churches, hospitals,schools,farms, or businesses - and they BUILT A COUNTRY.
The statement that the illegals are here to do jobs Americans won’t do is ridiculous. There are NO jobs that Americans won’t do. We built a country, won our freedom, kept our Union together and won 2 world wars. Don’t tell me that there are jobs Americans won’t do.
Obama understands none of this because he was not brought up here. Also he was raised by people who did not love our country. Our founders understood the importance of “natural born”.
_________
Well said. Also see:
http://towncriernews.blogspot.com/2010/02/one-more-time-we-are-not-nation-of.html
Let’s say these people come as ‘tourists’. All the health care, SS use, goods and services uses and costs, everything being done, is explainable according to the descriptions of carrying capacity:
“APPENDIX 1. Framework guidelines for assessing carrying capacity”
http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5626e/x5626e0e.htm
The social, economic and physical plant’s carrying capacity is overloaded. Mass illegal immigration has caused a societal ‘traffic jam’ through overuse and sheer numbers.
“
Let’s say these people come as ‘tourists’. All the health care, SS use, goods and services uses and costs, everything being done, is explainable according to the descriptions of carrying capacity:
“APPENDIX 1. Framework guidelines for assessing carrying capacity”
http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5626e/x5626e0e.htm
The social, economic and physical plant’s carrying capacity is overloaded. Mass illegal immigration has caused a societal ‘traffic jam’ through overuse and sheer numbers.”
Interesting. One thing...many of them do come as ‘tourists’, drop their anchor babies, and never leave.
This is interesting....LINDA CHAVEZ, open border rino, strikes again. We better all learn who these people are with an ‘r’ behind their names...because they are sure not conservatives!
Book Burning
By Mark Krikorian, February 12, 2010 Center for Immigration Studies
Linda Chavez and I have had our disagreements, so take this for what it’s worth, but a paragraph in her column today was deeply disturbing, all the more so for its casualness. In listing lessons she learned from weathering the snow storms, she wrote:
” Third lesson: Don’t give away old books; they burn better than artificial logs. I was glad I had a few left-wing tomes to throw in the fireplace, along with my collection of reports from the Center for Immigration Studies. I’m not sure which threw off more hot air, but they kept us warm for a few hours.”
I don’t even care about the snarky comment about CIS’s work; it’s sophomoric, but such is life. But the very idea of burning books fills me with disgust — I wouldn’t burn “Mein Kampf” or “Das Kapital,” for heaven’s sake, let alone Michael Moore’s “Dude, Where’s My Country” or the tendentious, open-borders dreck from the Center for American Progress. Sure, some stuff you eventually have to throw away or recycle, but book-burning just gives me the creeps. Maybe this was an attempt at humor, but if so, it failed.
http://www.cis.org/krikorian/book-burning
I would end all immigration except for people we actually want to let in, with great educations and enormous potentail. This would cut down immigration to a trickle. Then we should start pushing out the illegal, ignorant, tax-sucking peasantry we’ve allowed in for decades to run up our welfare bills.
“I would end all immigration except for people we actually want to let in, with great educations and enormous potentail. This would cut down immigration to a trickle. Then we should start pushing out the illegal, ignorant, tax-sucking peasantry we’ve allowed in for decades to run up our welfare bills.”
Well said. I agree wholeheartedly.
“I would end all immigration except for people we actually want to let in, with great educations and enormous potentail. This would cut down immigration to a trickle. Then we should start pushing out the illegal, ignorant, tax-sucking peasantry we’ve allowed in for decades to run up our welfare bills.”
Tancredo caught all sorts of hell a couple years ago when he suggested stopping all immigration except asylum seekers. What most people don’t realize is that we let in about a million a year as asylum seekers. (the somalians, el salvadorans, guatemalans,etc who never leave) Then they get their families here on chain migration. AND few of them ever become productive ‘citizens’.
I disagree. This country and it's success was made possible by the genius of the founding fathers, but it owes much of it's success to immigrants. Where would America be without the likes of:
Alexander Graham Bell - born in Edinburgh, Scotland
Andrew Carnegie - born in Dunfermline, Scotland
Jacob W. Davis - born in Riga Latvia
and Jacob's more famous partner...Levi Strauss born in Buttenheim, Germany
Albert Einstein - born in Ulm, Germany
Without these immigrants America would not have been the birthplace (and exploiter of) items such as the telephone, a vital steel industry, blue jeans and I just tossed Einstein in there for good luck. And this is just in the realm of invention. The railroads were built largely by immigrants for example. If you think America would have been nearly as successful without these individuals and others like them then you aren't paying attention to history.
If your theory were true, this nation would not decline every time there is a huge wave of immigration and there would be no need for we ‘natives’ at all. We had the sense to stop it before. We’ll see if we’re that smart again.
You make an unsupported claim. Prove this nation has declined with "every" wave of immigration. And remember, I'm talking legal immigration...I do not support illegal immigration in the least.
I will ask this question again...which I have NEVER gotten an answer to... HOW many legal immigrants would you allow into this country each year?
How many legal immigrants do we let in currently? Do you know?
But to offer my personal opinion...I believe it should be indexed to the nation's population of citizens. I say this because an entirely unrestrained influx would cause issues of assimilation...which is one of the biggest problems with our current influx of illegal immigrants who aren't in the least interested in assimilating and becoming part of this nation. Their first loyalty is not to this nation but to a home nation, a family in a home nation, working and getting paid to send money back to another nation etc.
But back to your question, I'd say under 1% of the total US population of citizen. How far under would be open to debate in my opinion. I believe that if they did the full 1% that'd be significantly above the current rate. But remember, I'd be in favor of deporting all illegal "immigrants" and replacing them with this larger influx. And I'd be in favor of a more diverse spectrum of immigrants, such as more from Africa, Asia etc instead of primarily just one or two central American countries...although they would be welcome as well if they came in legally.
Does that answer your question?
” I disagree. This country and it’s success was made possible by the genius of the founding fathers, but it owes much of it’s success to immigrants. Where would America be without the likes of:
Alexander Graham Bell - born in Edinburgh, Scotland
Andrew Carnegie - born in Dunfermline, Scotland
Jacob W. Davis - born in Riga Latvia
and Jacob’s more famous partner...Levi Strauss born in Buttenheim, Germany
Albert Einstein - born in Ulm, Germany”
Swell....we aren’t currently getting any of those kinds of immigrants, are we??? We’re getting all 3rd world poverty, uneducated socialist leaning migrants. Tell me what any of them have ‘contributed’.
“But back to your question, I’d say under 1% of the total US population of citizen”
Okay...1% of 300,000,000 (current population)is 3 million...which is about what we’re letting in now EVERY YEAR. They are too numerous to assimilate, instead just forming nations within a nation.
Right now the percentage of foreign born in this country is
11.8 percent. Most of them are in California (wonder why we’re broke!) By your 1% figure, we need to get rid of millions.
U.S. Foreign-Born Population Hits 33 Million
Now fastest growing segment of population
[snip]The foreign-born population of the United States exceeded 33 million in 2002, slightly more than the entire population of Canada, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey (ACS).
Of the total U.S. population, 11.8 percent were foreign-born and accounted for 44 percent of the nation’s population growth in 2002. A majority of the foreign-born residents live in four states: California (28 percent), New York (11.8 percent), Texas (9.8 percent) and Florida (8.9 percent).
http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/foreignborn.htm
I agree, but I would go a bit further. I would not let any Muslims immigrate here.
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