Thread: Illegal Aliens' Impact On Society

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Exclusive: Illegal Aliens’ Impact On Society – Part I
The Editors
Author: The Editors
Source: The Family Security Matters Foundation, Inc.
Date: January 10, 2007



Pro-immigration forces have long held that immigrants are the basis of our culture and thus should continue to be welcomed. This is not the case. The immigrants of yesteryear were skilled laborers who brought to our country the skills that were needed to build it, while the vast majority of immigrants today are low-skilled and poorly educated, a recipe for long term disaster here especially when one factors in the mind-boggling, flabbergasting cost to support them. Read this eye-popper that uses only health care costs to prove the point. You won’t believe how bad it is!

Illegal Aliens' Impact On Society – Part I

Take your pick: schools, hospitals, parks, roads, urban sprawl, police force, judicial system, water and sanitation systems, and many other choices. Anything that is impacted as a result of having a lot of people rely on it, is impacted to an even greater degree by illegal aliens because they generally aren’t paying for any of it. One of the most common comments from Americans regarding the May 1, 2006 boycott was how much less traffic was on the highways in cities where the largest boycotts occurred.

The basic problem with immigration of today is it is not your grandparents’ immigration. As noted by Steven Malanga in How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy:

“…Since the mid-1960s, America has welcomed nearly 30 million legal immigrants and received perhaps another 15 million illegals, numbers unprecedented in our history. These immigrants have picked our fruit, cleaned our homes, cut our grass, worked in our factories, and washed our cars. But they have also crowded into our hospital emergency rooms, schools, and government-subsidized aid programs, sparking a fierce debate about their contributions to our society and the costs they impose on it.

...these workers add little to our economy, they come at great cost, because they are not economic abstractions but human beings, with their own culture and ideas—often at odds with our own. Increasing numbers of them arrive with little education and none of the skills necessary to succeed in a modern economy. Many may wind up stuck on our lowest economic rungs, where they will rely on something that immigrants of other generations didn’t have: a vast U.S. welfare and social-services apparatus that has enormously amplified the cost of immigration. Just as welfare reform and other policies are helping to shrink America’s underclass by weaning people off such social programs, we are importing a new, foreign-born underclass. As famed free-market economist, the late Milton Friedman put it: “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

…Hampering today’s immigration debate are our misconceptions about the so-called first great migration some 100 years ago, with which today’s immigration is often compared. We envision that first great migration as a time when multitudes of Emma Lazarus’s “tired,” “poor,” and “wretched refuse” of Europe’s shores made their way from destitution to American opportunity.

…But that argument distorts the realities of the first great migration. Though fleeing persecution or economic stagnation in their homelands, that era’s immigrants - Jewish tailors and seamstresses who helped create New York’s garment industry, Italian stonemasons and bricklayers who helped build some of our greatest buildings, German merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans - all brought important skills with them that fit easily into the American economy. Those waves of immigrants - many of them urban dwellers who crossed a continent and an ocean to get here - helped supercharge the workforce at a time when the country was going through a transformative economic expansion that craved new workers, especially in its cities

…Many of these immigrants quickly found a place in our economy, participating in the workforce at a higher rate even than the native population. Their success at finding work sent many of them quickly up the economic ladder: those who stayed in America for at least 15 years, for instance, were just as likely to own their own business as native-born workers of the same age, one study found. Another study found that their American-born children were just as likely to be accountants, engineers, or lawyers as Americans whose families had been here for generations.”

What the newcomers of the great migration did not find here was a vast social-services and welfare state. They had to rely on their own resources or those of friends, relatives, or private, often ethnic, charities if things did not go well.

….The flood of immigrants, both legal and illegal, from countries with poor, ill-educated populations, has yielded a mismatch between today’s immigrants and the American economy and has left many workers poorly positioned to succeed for the long term. Unlike the immigrants of 100 years ago, whose skills reflected or surpassed those of the native workforce at the time, many of today’s arrivals, particularly the more than half who now come from Central and South America, are farmworkers in their home countries who come here with little education or even basic training in blue-collar occupations like carpentry or machinery.”

The article goes on to note:

…”Because so much of our legal and illegal immigrant labor is concentrated in such fringe, low-wage employment, its overall impact on our economy is extremely small. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences study estimated that immigration’s net benefit to the American economy raises the average income of the native-born by only some $10 billion a year - about $120 per household. And that meager contribution is not the result of immigrants helping to build our essential industries or making us more competitive globally but instead merely delivering our pizzas and cutting our grass. Estimates by pro-immigration forces that foreign workers contribute much more to the economy, boosting annual gross domestic product by hundreds of billions of dollars, generally just tally what immigrants earn here, while ignoring the offsetting effect they have on the wages of native-born workers.

If the benefits of the current generation of migrants are small, the costs are large and growing because of America’s vast range of social programs and the wide advocacy network that strives to hook low-earning legal and illegal immigrants into these programs. A 1998 National Academy of Sciences study found that more than 30 percent of California’s foreign-born were on Medicaid—including 37 percent of all Hispanic households - compared with 14 percent of native-born households. The foreign-born were more than twice as likely as the native-born to be on welfare, and their children were nearly five times as likely to be in means-tested government lunch programs. Native-born households pay for much of this, the study found, because they earn more and pay higher taxes - and are more likely to comply with tax laws. Recent immigrants, by contrast, have much lower levels of income and tax compliance (another study estimated that only 56 percent of illegals in California have taxes deducted from their earnings, for instance). The study’s conclusion: immigrant families cost each native-born household in California an additional $1,200 a year in taxes.

Immigration’s bottom line has shifted so sharply that in a high-immigration state like California, native-born residents are paying up to ten times more in state and local taxes than immigrants generate in economic benefits. Moreover, the cost is only likely to grow as the foreign-born population - which has already mushroomed from about 9 percent of the U.S. population when the NAS studies were done in the late 1990s to about 12 percent today – keeps growing. And citizens in more and more places will feel the bite, as immigrants move beyond their traditional settling places. From 1990 to 2005, the number of states in which immigrants make up at least 5 percent of the population nearly doubled from 17 to 29, with states like Arkansas, South Dakota, South Carolina, and Georgia seeing the most growth. This sharp turnaround since the 1970s, when immigrants were less likely to be using the social programs of the Great Society than the native-born population, says Harvard economist Borjas, suggests that welfare and other social programs are a magnet drawing certain types of immigrants - nonworking women, children, and the elderly - and keeping them here when they run into difficulty.

Almost certainly, immigrants’ participation in our social welfare programs will increase over time, because so many are destined to struggle in our workforce. Despite our cherished view of immigrants as rapidly climbing the economic ladder, more and more of the new arrivals and their children face a lifetime of economic disadvantage, because they arrive here with low levels of education and with few work skills—shortcomings not easily overcome.”

FSM strongly suggests you read the entire article.

A significant portion of rising health premiums is due to subsidizing the medical costs of uninsured illegal aliens.

As detailed in Illegal aliens threaten U.S. medical system between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed because half their services were unpaid. Another 24 California hospitals are on the verge of closure. Both PA and NJ hospitals recently reported that they provided almost $2 billion in free emergency and short term care services, in large part to illegal aliens. Minnesota county commissioners say that the cost of medical care for uninsured immigrants is too high for local governments to bear and they expect a $4.2 billion budget shortfall over the next two years. NC has about $1.4 billion in un-reimbursed hospital expenses annually. The Texas Hospital Association directly spent $393 million treating illegal aliens in 2002. One third of the patients treated by the LA County Health System are illegal aliens and the system is facing a $300 million deficient. In AZ, the Southeast Arizona Medical Center had a $1 billion shortfall and recently filled for bankruptcy.

C’mon America…this is YOUR problem and only YOU can clean it up. Your elected officials will not do this unless you tell them to. Go here to register your complaint. Your thoughts matter.

C’mon America…this is YOUR problem and only YOU can clean it up. Your elected officials will not do this unless you tell them to. Go here to register your complaint. Your thoughts matter.

So true, I am glad that we are all doing this, I just hope the rest of America is speaking out just as loudly !