As Illegals Flood In, Some Rich Americans Say 'No Thanks' To Citizenship

Immigration: As a torrent of new illegal immigrants inundates our southern border, some wealthy Americans fed up with a meddlesome federal government seek to abandon their citizenship. Is this any way to run a country?

No joke: Things are so bad on the border with Mexico that U.S. federal agencies are putting up illegal border crossers in hotel rooms because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "processing centers" are so swamped they can't house them all.

A report by Fox News found that dozens of families crossing into San Diego have been put up in $99-a-night hotel rooms. Still others have been released to addresses they gave, some as far away as Texas, Florida and even Brooklyn, N.Y., to await a hearing. Of course, those addresses often turn out to be bogus.

It's the perfect scam to get into the U.S. illegally: Just say you have a "credible fear" of persecution by drug cartels and you can stay, with the promise of a hearing. It's called political asylum. And it can take months.

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On Monday of last week, 200 people sought asylum at Otay crossing, south of San Diego. This is no fluke. U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services estimates that 28,600 people will request asylum this year, up from just 5,369 as recently as 2009.

As for the "hearings" illegals and asylum seekers are entitled to, they are irrelevant. According to ICE's own numbers, some 600,000 to 800,000 immigrants fail to show up for hearings every year.

So a trickle of illegals becomes a flood, while open-borders Democrats just ignore it, hoping to harvest the grateful votes of millions of illegals after amnesty.

"There has to be a policy change, something implemented, an emergency implementation that will stop this, or otherwise we will have thousands coming in," Pete Nunez, a former U.S. Attorney, told Fox News.

If this were all, it would be bad enough. But a separate report in the Wall Street Journal notes that, while illegals flood in, a record number of Americans living overseas, especially in Asia, are renouncing their citizenship.

Why? These are largely wealthy, accomplished individuals who see a tidal shift in the U.S. toward big government, more regulations and, particularly, higher taxes. They're fed up and feel unappreciated.

And it's growing. IRS data show that in the second quarter alone, 1,130 Americans renounced their citizenship — a 66% increase from the then-record 679 in the first quarter, and more than in all of 2012.

So let's see: We're bringing in more low-income, uneducated immigrants while encouraging our most-productive, best-educated and well-off citizens to leave. This is a recipe for demographic suicide.

As we've said before, we're not against immigration, from Latin America or anywhere else. But immigrants must be able to fit in — economically, educationally, culturally — or the nation suffers.

A recent Heritage Foundation study put the net welfare cost of the 11 million-plus illegals in the U.S. at an unsustainable $6.3 trillion in coming decades.

An economy based on low-productivity immigration, low domestic birth rates and high welfare spending cannot last. It's an economic disaster in the making.