Face it: Legalizing millions will cost trillions


By STANLEY CROUCH
DAILY NEWS COLUMNIST

Posted Wednesday, June 13th 2007, 11:31 AM

The federal immigration bill has been sent into legislative limbo for now - but we cannot ignore the high drama and even higher melodrama that accompanied the fight. They revealed many ugly and irrational aspects of what our politics has become.

Those aspects always arise when any group not considered "white" is thought to benefit or suffer from federal policy. In this case, we were talking about undocumented immigrants - mostly Mexican - who, for decades, have been coming through our Swiss cheese borders, finding unskilled jobs and taking advantage of better living conditions that can include welfare and medical treatment.

If we step back, we see that we have been standing in a drama determined, at least partially, by the history of prejudice that Mexicans have experienced in this country ever since losing Texas. Some of those prejudices included the belief that they were innately incompetent, frivolous, lazy and given to irresponsibly having large families.

If those stereotypes didn't do, religious prejudice against Catholics took over.

Above all else, they were not white, being some sort of inferior mixture of American Indians and Europeans.

It is, therefore, understandable that we should cast a skeptical eye on any criticism of a policy - like this immigration bill - that might do them some good. But, alas, there are real reasons to suspect those who so self-righteously defend the comprehensive immigration bill as either the best thing to do or, at least, as better law than no law at all.

Only the most naive Republican could believe that their support of the bill will magically turn Mexicans, who tend to vote 2 to 1 for Democrats, into a minority ready to elect more elephants. Others have pointed out that unskilled Mexicans serve as cheap labor for Republican employers, who make use of many who have come across the border illegally, proving that the GOP can remove the mantle of "the party of business" at will.

But the truth - and what makes the proposed reforms so troubling - is this: The bill, which would make millions of undocumented immigrants eligible for all kinds of benefits, would bear a monumental cost to the taxpayers of the United States, no matter what their color or background. How much? By some estimates, $2.5 trillion.

Some Republicans have ignored this cost because their business constituency assumes that though they, too, will have their taxes raised - it won't be that bad since the bulk of tax money will come from the rest of us.

For their part, it seems Democrats are ignoring the cost to the taxpayer because the cause seems a good liberal one, so damn the taxes, full speed ahead.

Give us a break!

In the end, many of these 12 million undocumented immigrants will become United States citizens - but our legislators need to figure out the very best way to limit the burden of the taxes that the mass of Americans will have to pay in order to bring this about. For good or for bad, it is always about the Benjamins, and no amount of self-righteous grandstanding will change that.

But it should also be about legislating policy that's good enough for undocumented immigrants and the American taxpayer at large. That is the challenge we always have to meet.

scrouch@nydailynews.com

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