I'm not one to shy away from a good debate, and I don't always take the popular sides of a story. That's sort of the point of having a blog - but I'm going to attempt to back up my article here with some factual data, and draw some information together in a way that I believe makes sense.
Today over at Bacon's Rebellion, Jim Bacon wrote a bit discussing his take on an article in the Washington Post by Amy Gardner. He took issue with the way information was presented, but I believe he twisted a key fact in the article. He translated "foreign-born families" to "Illegal immigrants". This is a common problem I'm seeing more often in the debate on illegal immigration. The post article is about the migration of 759 students out of the Prince William County ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) classes to other Northern VA communities. PWC is claiming this saved them $6M in education costs.
The article specifically states that these are just foreign-born families, not illegal immigrants. It goes on to state later in the article that several families may have one member that is illegal, but nowhere does it state that the students, nor the immediate parents are illegal. Which brings me back to my dislike of a number of posts and media statements by officials. At some point, emphasising illegal immigration offends the legal population to a point that disenfranchises a group of the population. Obviously PWC has created an unfriendly environment for a group of residents, who thankfully are doing something about it, they are pulling their children from the schools and probably taking their business elsewhere. As that population migrates to other localities, they take with them their legally earned incomes, will frequent businesses in those locals, and work to reinforce development outside of PWC. Just looking at the finances of PWC, this article talked about $6M in education expenses, while on April 6th, PWC staff stated that the enforcement costs were already $6.9M. A net loss of 900k, without even looking at the retail or income tax revenue. One division is being shortsighted by considering offset costs as savings, and the county is using spin to only point to savings while ignoring expenses.
On April 7th, the Daily Press reported that long time crab picking operations in VA, MD and NC are suffering from not being able to get visas for their long time migrant help. These are workers that have legally worked in these small businesses for years, many who return to the same job year after year. These businesses have advertised their $14 per hour jobs and simply haven't been able to make up for the missing workforce.
I grew up in the farmland of Virginia (yes, it really exists - I have many more stories for other posts). This area was also very dependent on migrant labor. Many of these folks became family. It was their families and children that made up a large percentage of the local ESOL classes. It was those parents that helped the farms be profitable. The farms in turn paid a significant portion of the business taxes for the county, the county and state received income taxes, the families returned money to the community for good and services, which generated more jobs. This work was geared toward the migrant community, that would work south in the winter months, and move North as the growing season expanded. When I go to the farmers market, and I see reasonably priced produce, I know that it's affordable because of the likely help of those immigrant workers. Some find jobs that allow them to stay in town year round, others still move around with the seasons. Luckily for them, a variety of opportunities now exist for them to become more settled (how did you like that wine you had the other night). I could go on but you get the picture.
Ok, so I know that a number of people are going to post comments, or think of comments about the expense of supporting an illegal portion, that this isn't following the law. I didn't say that either, I said that we can't alienate a society of contributing humans. Teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime! Shouldn't we be expending energy trying to get those people that want to contribute, those that want to be part of American culture, to do the things they need to do to be legal? My friends have heard my harp on the talk of in state tuition for illegal immigrant children. These young adults who were brought here and worked hard enough to qualify for college, who have the financial capacity to pay for college, and people want to turn them away? If we educate them, and graduate them, they become part of the solution, not part of the problem. A wise solution would be to require them to take a freshman class that gets them citizenship (yes, laws would be needed to allow them to gain citizenship). They would have to pay for the class and pass the citizenship tests, but then they would be set for the remaining 2-4 years of college.
The current way of handling illegal immigration ala PWC is broken (yes, that's my opinion, but I'll admit to it being an opinion). It's time to get creative, stop thinking in-the-box.
Thankfully, Fredericksburg has not put this in the forefront, especially considering it's an election year. My wife and I are considering an Au Pair, and today I wondered if the country they came from would make a difference in how they were treated once here. Would they get hassled? If I lived in PWC, I would start to wonder when I might be called to bring a visa to the courthouse after a traffic stop.
FYI - I started to write about the whole prejudiced treatment, but being a caucasion guy, some would say I have no standing to talk about it. It pisses me off to see the way illegal and immigration are lumped together, I see comments and words in replies that bring back reminders of growing up in a racially divided local. I read about profiling (note the minimal requirement of suspicion for PWC cops). For anyone that wants to read more, start here. Maybe one night when I feel like imparting more VA history on folks I'll talk about growing up near Farmville VA.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Illegal Immigration Costs - The Other Side
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9 comments:
"but I'm going to attempt to back up my article here with some factual data"...
What is this "factual data" you speak of?
I get real nervous when I see posts on FredTalk and other places where immigration... not illegal immigration... but immigration is blamed for all sorts of issues that are completely unconnected. How did we get here to America?
For awhile I honestly bought the argument that this movement had nothing to do with racism, but the more I read the more disconcerted I become. What century are we in?
The history degree that Chris O'Donnell thinks is so overrated tells me that this kind of language is scary.
Good thoughts... I look forward to your musings on Farmville/Prince Edward and the history of Massive Resistance. That's a part of Virginia history that should never be forgotten as it never needs to happen again.
Bryan, you raise a legitimate point that I did not address in my blog post. You are right, we do not know how many of the ESOL students who migrated from Prince William County to neighboring jurisdictions reside in the U.S. legally and how many are here illegally. We should not assume that all of them are illegal.
For purposes of that blog post, I assumed that most of those who moved were illegal only because Prince William is cracking down against illegal aliens, not legal residents.
The counterpoint, I suppose, is that the crackdown and general hostility is driving off Hispanics generally, whether legal or illegal, and that a large number of legals may be mixed in with the illegals who moved out. Maybe, maybe not.
Bottom line -- and this was the main thrust of my post -- we need more objective data so we can make judgments based on facts, not emotions.
Nathan, thanks for pointing out that I needed more emphasis on what facts I was trying to show - that 'savings' aren't really savings at all, that PWC has lost money on this enforcement.
Jim,
You're right on the money about needing real data.
Liberals, bleeding hearts, anarchists and illegal aliens huggers twist themselves into knots spewing false propaganda that illegal aliens are a benefit to our country and economy. Study after study after study proves just the opposite. Let’s call a spade a spade…illegal aliens are a huge NET COST LOSS to America. Each and every one of them is an economic drain and burden on our country. The sooner we build the fence, secure the border, restore lawful order and rationality to our immigration system and deport those who are here illegally, the better off America will be.
I didn't realize I turned on anonymous, that has now been corrected. If you want to post a prejudiced comment, now you have to at least have an OpenID to do so. I'll refrain from deleting the comment above, because I believe it makes my point about people jumping on the bandwagon and becoming prejudiced against a whole section of society.
Now back to the comment by zeezil. Edwin Rubenstein's study only compares taxes paid to services used. You could make that same argument for a lot more citizens than just immigrants. Taxes are not levied equally among everyon in this country. Never were, never will be. We have always had welfare programs (whether they were called welfare or services) that were funded by people making more money than those that use the program.
Suck it up - that's the fact of taxes.
If you don't like that answer, consider this - Edwin Rubenstein's study did not include the state and local revenue generated by the corporations his study participants worked for. The state and local governments are financed by the products produced. The farms require this labor pool. If you go to the extreem like "anonymous", then you're supporting the idea that we should move our farming industries (agri and fisheries) all overseas. I do not believe this country would be better if we had to purchase a majority our foodproducts overseas. The next time you go to the grocery store, look at the prices you're paying, and consider what those would look like in the extreem. Not to mention the other services provided by the immigrant population.
Whats more, if you read Rubenstein's report, the largest % allocated to "Cost per immigrant" is a value for wage reduction to natives - now when I point out that native born workers won't do the job's advertised, this means that you can't count that as a cost. The articles on picking crabs talked about companies closing, rather than raising salaries to an unprofitable rate. Businesses will do what they can, and efficiency and cost control are the way they do it.
I was in a rush earlier. To refute the single study zeezil posted, I point to "The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration" where James Smith, a senior economist at the Rand think tank in Santa Monica, states that GDP per us-born citizen actually goes up due to immigration. "Since 1980... all immigrants, both undocumented and legal, have boosted GDP by $10 billion per year"
The point is, none of those "studies", which were really analysis of data from gov agencies, considered the economic benefits of immigration like the one I pointed out before.
I have no doubt the tax code is broken. If you were to study any group of the population making less than the average US household, you will find a redistribution of wealth as far as taxes (think about it, in general everyone above the average tax payer contributes more than their share of the tax revenue, subsidizing services for those paying less than the average).
So stop using our welfare tax code as an excuse for prejudicial treatment of one group of the population. If you're going to use that argument, who's your next target going to be? Single parent families? Elderly? Homeless? Injured Veterans? Get my point?
Now, if you want to fix the problem instead of just complaining about how your taxes go to pay for someone else, how about putting out some ideas other than just closing the borders and not letting anyone step off a plane.
Take a look at Virginia and see how immigration has bouyed industries that otherwise would have failed.
Stop preceeding immigration with "illegal" at every turn and start to think of the humans involved. Lets start to fix the illegal, but lets not discriminate against the legal immigrant in the process.
If the illegality of illegal immigration and the tremendous cost burden to American taxpayers, our economy, our society and our culture doesn’t infuriate you, then look over just a few studies that put illegal alien crime in focus:
(1) Violating the immigration law is a CRIME
(2) Forging documents is a FELONY CRIME
(3) Passing forged documents is a FELONY CRIME
(4) Stealing ID is a FELONY CRIME
(5) Using stolen ID is a FELONY CRIME
A US GAO study found in a study population of 55,322 illegal aliens incarcerated, on average, each had been arrested 8 times for a total arrest figure of at least 459,614 times. If that isn't astounding enough, these 55,322 illegals in the study population had been arrested for committing 700,000 criminal offenses, which averages 13 crimes per illegal alien. So, each illegal alien incarcerated had been arrested 8 times and had committed at least 13 crimes.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, in 2005, 25% of prisoners in federal prisons were illegal aliens, and 4% were legal aliens. This proportion has not gone down; if anything, it has gone up markedly. Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Institute states that today, illegal aliens make up twenty nine percent of the U.S. prison population. Bill O'Reilly is on record more recently stating that illegal aliens account for 32% of the federal and state prison population.
The US Justice Department reported that in 2003, alone, 270,000 illegal immigrants had served prison time. The Federation for American Immigration Reform reports: "In March 2000, Congress made public Department of Justice statistics showing that, over the previous five years, the INS had released over 35,000 criminal aliens instead of deporting them. Over 11,000 of those released went on to commit serious crimes, over 1,800 of which were violent ones; including 98 homicides, 142 sexual assaults, and 44 kidnappings. In 2001, thanks to a decision by the Supreme Court, the INS was forced to release into our society over 3,000 criminal aliens who collectively had been convicted of 125 homicides, 387 sex offenses, and 772 assault charges." http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/3/27/114208.shtml?s=ic
According to the well-respected U.S. Center for Immigration Studies (www.cis.org), incarcerated convicted illegal aliens make up 29 percent of federal, state and local prisons at a cost of more than $1.6 billion annually. This number doubles when the costs for apprehension, the justice system, public defenders, interpreters, prosecutors and the courts add to the total.
Illegals represent about 8 percent of Arizona's population and the Arizona Department of Corrections reports that Mexican nationals make up 12 percent of the state's 37,200-inmate prison population.
Undocumented aliens, mostly from Mexico and Central America, now total 1953 inmates in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s jail system. That number represents 21 percent of the overall inmate population of men and women housed in the nation’s third largest jail system. Sheriff Joe Arpaio says that is just small part of the story about those incarcerated in his jails. He says that recent figures show that serious crime (class four felonies and above) are committed substantially by illegal aliens. During two recent surveys, between 27 and 53 percent of all suspects booked into the jail on serious felonies had immigration holds placed on them. The vast majority of those with holds were in the United States illegally. According to the Sheriff’s figures, illegal alien inmate population numbers have grown steadily in Arizona and other border states over the last several years. In March 2005, the illegal alien population in Arpaio’s jails totaled approximately 700. (Borderfire Report 2/28/08 )
A new study shows one in five inmates in North Carolina metropolitan jails were not born in this country. The Sheriff’s Association believes a large number of those inmates are here illegally as well. (News 14 Carolina 2/21/08 )
Members of Utah’s Congressional delegation contacted DHS Secretary Chertoff requesting an additional 22 ICE agents for deportations and to investigate crimes perpetrated by undocumented immigrants. "Our jails are full. The crime rates continue to increase, and we can no longer let this problem escalate," reads one of the letters, signed by Utah's two senators and three representatives. Numerous illegal aliens are committing crimes in Utah communities with virtual impunity," The state now has 25 such agents. (Salt Lake Tribune, 03/05/2008 )
The conservative Federation for Immigration Reform contends that while illegal immigrants made up 3 percent of the total U.S. population in 2003 they made up 5 percent of the total prison population. http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=research_illegalsandcrime
The Violent Crimes Institute conducted a study in 2006 that determined there were more than 100 sex offenders crossing our southern border daily. Data indicates that there are approximately 240,000 illegal immigrant sex offenders in the United States who have had an average of four victims each, totaling over one million sex crimes.
Illegal aliens are killing more Americans than the Iraq war, says a report from Family Security Matters that estimates some 2,158 murders are committed every year by illegal aliens in the U.S. The group says that number is more than 15 percent of all the murders reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the U.S. and about three times the representation of illegal aliens in the general population.
The report from FSM estimates that the 267,000 illegal aliens currently incarcerated in the nation are responsible for nearly 1,300,000 crimes, ranging from drug arrests to rape and murder. Such statistics debunk the claim that illegal immigration is a victimless crime. http://www.gopusa.com/news/2007/february/0222_illegals_report.shtml
Crimes committed by alien criminals costs U.S. taxpayers $1.6 billion in prison costs alone. The figure doesn’t include the cost of lost property, medical bills of the victims, lost work time for injury recovery, higher insurance costs, etc. –Tom DeWeese, President of American Policy Institute.
In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens. The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave: City Journal, winter 2004 http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_illegal_alien.html
One thing that is never even mentioned by the champions of the illegal aliens nor is factored into any crime studies is the fact that ALL illegal aliens have a 3 – 5 crimes committed head start on American citizens (see the 5 point list above).
Do you ever hear an acknowledgement from the illegal alien facilitators of the more than 50,000 Americans that have been killed by illegal aliens through murder, manslaughter and drunk driving just since 9/11/01? Of course not, that doesn't fit within their pre-determined conclusion that illegals are only hard working economically displaced ‘migrants’ that regardless of the laws they break by entering, remaining and operating in America, are only here for a better life at the expense of no one. Excuse me for being cynical but I’ve seen the data, read the studies, considered the facts and seen the reality. If you haven’t done the same, I urge you to do so without delay.
Furthermore, legalizing an illegal alien’s presence in America by rewarding their illegal behavior through amnesty is not the way to build a good system of law and order. It only invites more criminal activity and non-compliance with our laws.
The central question for everyone, including the facilitators, illegal alien advocates, the ‘no human being is illegal’ compassion crowd, every legislator and RESPONSIBLE MEDIA REPORTERS is this…Why should even ONE American suffer a crime OF ANY SORT at the hands of an illegal alien? With border security and zero tolerance for illegal immigration, these crimes against our citizens are essentially 100% preventable.
I urge you to view this video that puts the tragedy of illegal alien crime victims into perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpomTIkv0V8&feature=PlayList&p=4EED1264205A2408&index=3
Isn’t it about time that we engage in Comprehensive Immigration Enforcement rather than allow amnesty with Comprehensive Immigration Reform?
"Isn’t it about time that we engage in Comprehensive Immigration Enforcement rather than allow amnesty with Comprehensive Immigration Reform?"
Enforcement is only a 1/3rd of the answer - it's time to pass laws incentivising illegals to become legal, that don't require impossible acts such as returning to their native country just to attempt to reenter. If we continue down the enforcement methods as currently proposed by ie PWC, without combining that with the flip side of making it easier to become a citizen, AND adding a comprehensive GUEST WORKER program with the correct caps - ONLY THEN do you have a complete plan.
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