It's the Taxes, Stupid: Illegal Immigration

The school building orgy I wrote about earlier is but one of the prime drivers for allowing illegal immigrants to not only settle in the U.S. but to enjoy all the benefits of citizenship. To politicians dependent on their votes, and to government employees, more people mean more schools, and a panoply of infrastructure improvements that need to be made to accommodate the foreign born population explosion: sewage, electrical, gas and water plants; hospitals, roads, and bringing us back full circle: housing. And of course government. Lots and lots more government. Twenty million illegal immigrants in the past fifteen years requires a lot more of everything, particularly in our cities. The fact that the great majority were also uneducated and poor meant that - as our tax structure is currently configured - they would pay little or no taxes, and in fact would rely on government handouts for many of the essentials. Thus, the sensible American model of paying for infrastructure improvements through an expanding economy and expanding tax base would be stood on its head.

As I write this, American taxpayers pay at least $30,000.00 every year in the form of welfare, medical care, free education, law enforcement, infrastructure improvements, Social Security, additional principal and interest on our national debt and unpaid taxes for each and every illegal immigrant. Add in the additional social costs for illegitimacy, the underground economy, the export of billions back to their countries of origin, the importation of disease, drugs and crime, and it's easy to justify that Illegals cost even more than $30,000 per head.

The 20 million Illegals that we acknowledge cost America at least $600 billion dollars per year in services. In return, America gets less than 10% of that amount in tax revenues back, because the vast majority of these immigrants stay below the income level at which they would eventually pay taxes, or work entirely "off the books" and are not even reporting their income. That's a $540 Billion dollar drain on the economy each and every year, and it goes up as those immigrants then have children, all of whom become an additional burden on society. And since amnesty didn't work last time, legal immigrants under the poverty line represent another $250 billion burden on society. That's almost $750 billion that immigrants cost in a $14 Trillion economy.

And the notion that Illegals make a dramatic contribution to the economy is pure fiction. They don't take the jobs that "Americans won't do"; they take the jobs of the poor that were already here - mostly the generation of immigrants that got here before them, 50% of all Black people, and 20 million poor Whites.

So, where does the fault lie? Rationalizing the influx of Illegals is a vast Ponzi scheme, as described above, that allows Democrats to remap the electorate into clients beholden to Democrats. A significant element of the Republican party has signed onto this madness as well, led by President Bush and John McCain to allow businesses to profit by exploiting the cheap labor. The true irony of this unholy alliance is that, not only do businesses benefit by paying low wages, they also avoid the payroll taxes that the Federal government depends on to survive, thus forcing the government to borrow more money to pay for all of the social benefits of the immigrants. So, most Democrats, some Republicans and the business community are engaged in a most sinister and nefarious enterprise that is actually worse than a Ponzi scheme.

I do not fault the immigrants. All attempts to protest their lot in Mexico or other countries from Central/South America are ignored. Attempts to organize and resist are met with violence and death at the hands of both the governments and the Mafias that control the countryside. Women are routinely sold into sexual slavery, and peasants are conscripted into the production, warehousing and transportation of drugs. Who wouldn't want to come to a land that is safe, democratic and free? That said, the U.S. can't continue to be the population safety valve for vast narco-terrorist Kleptocracies like Mexico that allow the upper classes to steal all the wealth of the nation, leaving their citizens mired in poverty, with their only hope being emigration to the U.S.

As an example, the U.S. should be supporting the Mexican people against their government, much as they supported the Iraqis against the dictator Saddam Hussein. If Mexico's elites refuse to embrace freedom and democracy, they must be forced to do so. If that can only be accomplished from the barrel of a gun, so be it.