Too Many Illegal Aliens
By Alan Caruba (05/17/07)
Here's one of those statistics that sums up everything you need to know about America's immigration crisis. The May 14 edition of US News & World Report had a small item noting that, "Mexico has lost more people to migration to the United States than to death since 2000."
“An average of 577,000 people moved to the United States annually during the 2000-2005 period, while 495,000 people died in Mexico.” The U.S. agency providing this data estimates that about 11 million Mexicans are living, legally or not, in the United States.
This is not about disliking Mexicans. Many have come here legally, become citizens, and have risen in our society to contribute in business, academics, and government. This is about saving America from a wholesale and entirely illegal invasion, and its consequences.
Mexico has an entirely different view of people who would move there. The Center for Security Policy points out that Mexico prohibits foreigners from owning land within 100 kilometers of the Mexico border and within 50 kilometers of the Mexican coastland, prime real estate. Mexican law permits the government to revoke the naturalized citizenship of anyone who chooses to live in his country of origin more than five years.
Foreigners are admitted only after proving they have “the necessary funds for their sustenance” and they can be fined or jailed if they show false papers. Any Mexican who helps an illegal alien is breaking the law there. On the average, annually Mexico grants citizenship to just 3,000 people, compared to the U.S. rate of almost 500,000.
Compare this with the insidious and stupid immigration law, S. 1348, that Majority Leader, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and other members of the U.S. Senate are trying to fast-track to passage with the support of President Bush. Co-sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Ken Salazar (D-CO), this bill would provide amnesty to those who are here illegally and invite a whole new rush to the border by more Mexicans and others.
By way of illustrating why the virtually uncontrolled flow of Mexican and other aliens represents a problem that cannot and must not be ignored, let me share some facts about its impact on just one State, New Jersey, where I live.
In a recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform on the “Cost of Illegal Immigration to New Jerseyites”, the executive summary notes that, “The illegal alien population residing in New Jersey is costing the state’s taxpayers nearly $2.1 billion per year for education, medical care, and incarceration.”
Bear in mind that New Jersey is essentially broke thanks to the huge debt it has been incurred under several governors. When you add in the costs of an estimated 372,000 illegal aliens, you just exacerbate a bad situation. In sum, the “annual tax burden amounts to about $800 per New Jersey household headed by a native-born resident.” Even if you subtract the sales, income, and property taxes that might be collected from illegal aliens, you still have net costs of $1.6 billion per year.
New Jersey is small, but when one extrapolates such costs to a State like California, you begin to see why illegal aliens pose an enormous cost to educational, medical, and other institutions and agencies trying to cope with people who have absolutely no right to be here. It is estimated that 40% of all workers in Los Angeles County are working for cash and not paying taxes. In Los Angeles, 95% of warrants for murder are for illegal aliens and more than two-thirds of all births in LA County are illegal aliens. And that’s just for one county.
Then there’s the issue of national security. In November, a report from the inspector general’s office of the Department of Homeland Security revealed that half of the 91,516 illegal aliens from terror-sponsoring countries and those of ‘special interest’ apprehended at the border between 2001 and 2005 were released into the U.S. population. I grant you that Mexico is not a sponsor of terror, but it provides an avenue for access to America from nations where the drug industry rivals all others.
In addition to the high-risk aliens who were released, the report notes that authorities also released 27,947 known criminals over a period of five years between 2001 and 2004. When you consider that only one in four aliens attempting to enter the U.S. during this period were caught, the actual numbers of those who were not are some 350,000 from high-risk nations and an estimated 400,000 criminal aliens.
A 2006 study by Edwin S. Rubenstein, a former contributing editor for Forbes, commissioned by the National Policy Institute last year stated that, “Illegal aliens cost the American taxpayer $25 billion more than they pay in taxes.” Titled “The Economics of Immigration Enforcement”, the study concluded that they cost U.S. citizens an estimated $81 billion per year. “Amnesty would make things worse,” stated the study, “by adding another $44 billion to government spending for services.”
Something is very wrong when, given just these few facts, there are members in Congress seriously considering the granting of amnesty—no matter how they mask the true intent of the legislation—and that the President of the United States is one of its leading advocates.
The tyranny of numbers is that they cannot be ignored. The U.S. faces a new torrent of illegal aliens; seeking to absorb them despite ample evidence we are endangering and burdening current native-born and naturalized citizens. The proposed legislation is a demographic time bomb.
Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com/ His book, “Right Answers: Separating Fact from Fantasy”, is published by Merril Press.
© Alan Caruba, May 2007
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