printLow-wage illegal aliens cost much more ($26.3 billion) than they contribute ($16 billion) to the economy. [See “The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget“] But to make light of their indisputable weight on the American welfare state, open-border libertarians advance a standard non-sequitur: “We don’t care if immigrants use a disproportionate amount of social services, because we believe all social programs should be scaled back or preferably junked,” as one put it.
From the fact that you oppose taxpayer-funded welfare for nationals, it doesn’t follow that extending it to millions of illegal newcomers is financially or morally negligible. (Or that this is congruent with the libertarian aim of curtailing government growth.) The argument is akin to declaring that because a bank has been robbed by one band of bandits, arresting the next lot is unnecessary because the damage has already been done.
It’s hard to imagine how immigration evangelizers would extend this logic to the cost of crime perpetrated by illegals. Let’s see: “We don’t care if illegal immigrants commit more violent crimes than locals, because we believe all violent offences, committed by nationals and non-nationals alike, are wrong and should be phased out.”
In California, some rather high percentage of the outstanding warrants is for illegal aliens (mostly Mexicans).
And whether or not any one of us likes the immigration laws, it’s not fair for some folks to jump through all the hoops and wait for years, while illegals pour over the border by the millions, disregarding immigration laws (and other laws) in the process.
Not to mention their medical bills… I’ve read that some hospitals along the border have closed down from the financial pressure of providing medical care for people who aren’t about to pay for it.
One of the dark and shameful secrets of my past is that, long ago for two miserable months I was a welfare bureacrat. In the Oklahoma DHS, Aged, Blind and Disabled services to be exact.
During that time I noticed both Asian immigrants with high levels of education and income and upper-class Americans living in the Van Gotrocks neighborhoods, bringing in their aged relatives to sign them up for whatever benefits were available to them under the rules.
(You have no idea what a headache it is to try to calculate what granny is eligible for when sonny has a house, two cars, an RV and a boat.)
Once upon a time in America, going “on relief” was regarded as highly embarrassing and putting an aged relative on relief when you were perfectly capable of supporting them was shameful.
I have no idea to what extent this behaviour stresses the system, but I really don’t like what it implies about the loss of morale in our society.
http://rantsand.blogspot.com/
Oh, yes… Since you have VDARE.COM on your blogroll, I will assume you have seen it stated in their articles where our generous welfare benefits actually allow the illegal Mexicans who come here to have a higher per-woman birthrate than many of them did back in Mexico; and that the same phenomenon may be causing native-born Americans to have smaller families (because families are less affordable because of the taxes demanded to subsidize the illegals), thus over time changing the demographics!!
This is partly in response to Mr. Browne: In an article in Reason magazine by Alec Mouhibian, he stated that there were three different waves of Armenian immigrants.
The first two did the “typical” immigrant thing, worked hard, assimilated, and are now mostly well-off.
The third wave, however, was comprised in large part of people who had learned to get ahead by scamming the Soviet system as best they could. This latter wave is apparently the one which is famous for also running scams here in America (insurance scams, fake accidents, Medicare scams, etc.). In addition, many of them apparently get signed up for welfare benefits before they even get to this country. Neat scam for them, but horrible for those of us paying the taxes.
My significant other has an Armenian friend, a member of one of the two previous waves of immigrants (he’s well-to-do and still works very hard), who is embarrassed and ashamed of the scamming members of his ethnicity… gives Armenians in general a bad rep out here in Los Angeles.
Apparently many of the Mexicans streaming across the border have little to no driving experience, making them especially dangerous, and contributing significantly to the carnage on the highways here.
A friend of mine recently lost the second of three of his children to a hit-and-run driver. The police have a description of the van; it is thought that the driver might have been Hispanic (this was in Las Vegas).
His first kid was the victim of a drunk-on-his @$$ Mexican illegal alien a few years ago, on a Los Angeles freeway. Get this: The police never even arrested this bozo; I guess they turned him loose to kill again.