Illegal Immigrants or Public Employees: Who’s the Bigger Problem?

by Bruce Bialosky
Monday, February 22, 2010

Recently I delivered a speech that reviewed the first year of the Obama Presidency. While I tried to cover all the relevant topics over the past 12 months, a friend who attended later wrote me to express surprise that I had not spoken about illegal immigration.

He stated that he felt it was the nation’s most critical issue, and wondered why the subject seems to have been put on the backburner by many Republicans. I replied with sympathy for his position, but ultimately I’ve come to the conclusion that the most critical issue facing America – and the one driving our budget problems at the local, state and federal level – is public employee unions and their related costs. The debate began.

There is no question that the issue of illegal immigration has multiple aspects to it, many of which give rise to significant costs to the taxpayers. First, there is the overarching fact that even though laws are clearly being broken, our government passively condones the illegalities with very little enforcement. Second, illegal immigrants generate enormous public expenses: Public hospitals are stretched by emergency rooms being flooded with illegal immigrants, our school systems are fiscally challenged to educate their children, and our prisons are disproportionally populated by “undocumentedâ€