Illegal immigration is driving our health care problems
August 23, 2009

Read Comments(3)Recommend(2)

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, immigration is fueling our healthcare crisis. Since 1989, the overall number of people without healthcare insurance increased by 14.62 million, standing at 47 million in 2006.


From 1990 onward, more than 9 million uninsured immigrants arrived here. This is equal to about 62 percent of the increase in the number of uninsured. Those post-1990 uninsured immigrants bore 1.12 million children, increasing our uninsured population to 71 percent.

Without legal and illegal immigration since 1989, our uninsured population would have grown by only one-quarter of the increase that actually occurred. Clearly, it is immigration, legal and illegal, that is driving our healthcare problems to crisis proportions.

Most immigrants are low-skilled workers whose earnings generate little in taxes to help pay for their perquisites. According to Paul Krugman, esteemed economist, for every dollar they pay in taxes, they use $10 in government services. Washington Democrats, catering to greedy businesses and hoping to attain a permanent majority by flooding this nation with immigrants, want to give them free healthcare insurance at taxpayers' expenses.

Our unemployment rate at about 15 million indicates we have too many workers. This figure does not include those who lost their jobs to NAFTA years ago; their benefits expired, forcing them to work two and three part-time jobs to support their families. Eight million illegal aliens have good-paying U.S. jobs. By reducing immigration numbers we reduce our healthcare costs, our deficit and free-up jobs for U.S. citizens, including our troops returning from Iraq who can't find jobs.

If Democrats were serious about reducing national medical costs, they would pass the SAVE Act to encourage people here illegally to return to their homelands and reduce the number of low-skilled foreign workers brought here legally.

Scarcely anyone begrudges a poor man a job. But charity begins at home. We must vote out Democrats in 2010, Sherrod Brown in 2012.

Jacqueline I. Ruhl

http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/art ... /908230319