I like the idea of charging an “export” tax for all of the $$ sent to Mexico. And maybe a requirement for a form of ID with fingerprints or some such…
“Export” tax funds would go to the State from which the $$ were sent….

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Craig:
Yes, NAFTA is good for Canada because it is run by people with intelligence and common sense with their interest being first and foremost.

No so for our neighbor to the south. the political class there are too busy lining their own pockets…as is ours…fortunately until this past week we had enough money to go around…not so now.

Aside: changing the theme did not work. I downloaded Firefox (I’m on my mom’s computer) and run it as the browser and the problem is solved.

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Suek:

There are different ways of looking at the individual costs of illegal households. While, as you note, these are hard working people, and want to climb the ladder to better conditions for themselves and their families, the fact remains is that the US taxpayers are subsidizing their being in this country. There are several immediate benefits: Direct benefits, which include Social Security, Medicare, and a few smaller transfer programs; Means-tested benefits, including cash, food, housing, social services, and medical care for poor and near-poor individuals; Public educational services, which include the governmental cost of primary, secondary, vocational, and post-secondary education; Population-based services, which are government services made available to a general community, including police and fire protection, highways, sewers, food safety inspection, and parks. Entry of legal or illegal immigrants into the U.S. will generally cause overall necessary expenditures in these categories to rise.

Among the largest costs are Medicaid ($2.5 billion); treatment for the uninsured ($2.2 billion); food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches ($1.9 billion); the federal prison and court systems ($1.6 billion); and federal aid to schools ($1.4 billion). Although Congress supposedly put a stop to the receipt of Medicaid by illegal aliens, illegal immigrants can still get emergency care through Medicaid, the federal-state programs for the poor and people with disabilities. But they no longer can get non-emergency care unless they pay, thus they go to emergency rooms regardless, etc.

In education, as you noted, with nearly two-thirds of illegal aliens lacking a high school degree, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments, not necessarily their legal status or heavy use of most social services. As you noted, legal immigration laws do not favor them, however, what is the purpose of having such law if these laws will not be enforced.

On average, the costs that illegal households impose on federal coffers are less than half that of other households, but their tax payments are only one-fourth that of other households.

Many of the costs associated with illegals are due to their American-born children, who are awarded U.S. citizenship at birth. Thus, greater efforts at barring illegals from federal programs will not reduce costs because their citizen children can continue to access them.

If illegal aliens were given amnesty and began to pay taxes and use services like households headed by legal immigrants with the same education levels, the estimated annual net fiscal deficit would increase from $2,700 per household to nearly $7,700, for a total net cost of $29 billion.

Costs increase dramatically because unskilled immigrants with legal status — what most illegal aliens would become — can access government programs, but still tend to make very modest tax payments.

Although legalization would increase average tax payments by 77 percent, average costs would rise by 118 percent.

The fact that legal immigrants with few years of schooling are a large fiscal drain does not mean that legal immigrants OVERALL are a net drain — many legal immigrants are highly skilled. The vast majority of illegals hold jobs. Thus the fiscal deficit they create for the federal government is not the result of an unwillingness to work.

When I made the comment: “Montezuma’s Revenge”, it stemmed from a report that by 2040, white Americans will be a minority. Whites are not indigenous to the America’s. The white European’s took the land from the native Americans north of the Rio Grande and the Spanish took it from those natives south of it. The whites bought the black slaves from the African slave traders and the Caribbean. Immigration has further diluted white America. White American families generally have controlled the size of their families, Blacks and Hispanics families have exploded.

We look back at the ruins of Greece and Rome and other great civilizations and the two most important points that we can note from them is 1) nothing is forever, not matter how sophisticated 2) man has a total inability to discern exactly where he is on the timeline of history and how to avoid the same calamitous changes and upheavals that happened in the past. The pendulum at some point begins its laborious journey back. The implications: white America is living on borrowed time. We took this land by force , but we are not prepared to legislate what it takes to keep it while we have the power to do so.

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Steve:

Thanks for your reply. I understand your position much better now. But since I am not very familiar with your illegal Mexican immigration problem, I can not comment wisely on it. All I can say is that here in Canada, we are scared to death of Obama wanting to reopen the NAFTA deal. We kind of like the NAFTA… it works very well for us.

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>>“But they don’t get benefits”, people say…oh, yes they do, and these benefits are additional billions that the taxpayers pay out each year…>>

Very good write up. I live in a southern California rural area. I’d echo your evaluation, Steve. Can you elaborate on this (above) statement a bit? Public schooling is obvious. Non-payment of taxes other than sales tax is probably another. The public emergency rooms subsidy is another clear benefit…
What others did you have in mind?

Many of those who come here to work would be good additions to the USA population. They work hard and are eager to climb the success ladder. The legal immigration rules don’t favor them – their education level is often low. They lack the educational background to assist their children in attaining higher educational levels – like the blacks, it will take several generations, and maybe not at all if they continue to undervalue education. I’m not even sure I’d object to those whose goal is to accumulate a nest-egg so that they can return to Mexico to retire – but we need a system that requires them to pay their fair share of the US infrastructure that allows them to achieve their goal.

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Craig:
Pertaining to closing the southern borders; While I believe in free trade, I have huge problems with NAFTA. NAFTA is not free trade. Congress keeps the Farm Bill going which farm lavishes $180 billion and upwards on American farmers over the next ten years. Farmers north of the Rio Bravo are much more heavily subsidised than Mexicans; but our farmers argue, in turn, that their subsidies are piffling compared with those enjoyed by farmers in Europe and Japan. The fact remains that billions of dollars are going out each year to subsidize rich giant conglomerates in the United States regardless of efficiency at the expense of Mexican farmers.

A subsidy war with America is one the Mexican government can never win in terms of hard cash. Neither will it help Mexico’s farmers in anything but the shortest term, since subsidies merely entrench the manifest inefficiencies in the system. One government official in the rural state of Sinaloa, in the north-west, estimates that about 15% of subsidies, siphoned off by corrupt bureaucrats, never reach the farmers and producers in any case.

The 2003 tariff eliminations made almost no material difference. These tariffs had been gradually reduced since 1994; most of them came down from only 1.5% or 2% to zero the last time around. The real problem is not NAFTA and American subsidies, but Mexico’s failure to adapt to trade liberalisation in general since the mid-1980s, when it first acceded to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Since gaining access to all those shiny new markets in America and the European Union, Mexican agricultural production has either declined, collapsed or grown only slightly. For all types of beans, for instance, production fell on average by 0.7% a year between 1980 and 2001. Wheat production has fallen by 57% since 1980, and soyabean production by about one-sixth. NAFTA merely accelerated all this. Mexicans, and world markets, have preferred cheaper alternatives.

Mexican governments failed to take advantage of the ten-year transition period, while the tariffs were being phased out, to invest in infrastructure improvements such as irrigation. It is the high cost of Mexican farming that makes it so uncompetitive. Farming in the state of Sinaloa, as previously I noted, has become almost as efficient as in the United States. But local farmers are still going out of business because their costs—from diesel to electricity to credit—are about a third higher than those north of the border. Poor transport makes a crucial difference: it costs about three times as much to deliver corn by rail from Sinaloa to Mexico city as it does to ship it there from New Orleans via Veracruz.

These are what the Americans week politely, and correctly, called Mexico’s “structural” challenges. While the country’s farmers are being exposed to the full force of world competition, they are saddled with artificially high costs because much of the rest of the economy consists of public or private monopolies sheltering behind legal and constitutional barriers to competition.

The worst moment came this year, when tariffs were eliminated on American corn. Because corn is so central to Mexican agriculture—using about 55% of cultivated land—it was afforded special protection under NAFTA in 1994, with a tariff of 206% on imports over 2.6m tons a year and a 15-year phase-out to zero. But so feebly have Mexican farmers risen to the challenge of feeding their own protected market that, since 1994, Mexican governments have regularly imported much more than the import quotas. Furthermore, they have not collected the revenue from the tariffs, arguing that they need cheap corn to keep the poor supplied with tortillas.

There are about 3m corn-growers in Mexico, with an average of five dependants each. Mexico’s government has squandered the first ten years of NAFTA’s transition period. It now has five years left to make its farms competitive. Don’t hold your breath.

Thus we get to the central point: Illegal immigration. In the context of the point I made, “close the southern border” is for the purposes of eliminating illegal immigration (along with other obvious security threats) on the southern border. When you have the 22% of the Mexican population who were employed in farming slowly displaced by the failure and corruption of the of the Mexican government to come to grips with a trade agreement they themselves championed, these people are going to go where the livelihood is, ie, north of the Rio Grande.

I run a small construction company in Atlanta. I use a lot of Mexicans for things like drywall, clean up, concrete, paint, etc, etc. They are good people, hard working, with excellent results. I don’t know where all the blacks went or what their line of work is not , but they now relatively invisible in construction work comparatively. We try to be certain that all workers have green cards, though this is not always possible as helpers come and go, thus I generally use the same people over and over if possible.

I don’t have any problem with Mexicans being here, but the huge number of illegals is actually far more than we are led to believe. They are, in turn, causing a huge drain on our infrastructure. “But they don’t get benefits”, people say…oh, yes they do, and these benefits are additional billions that the taxpayers pay out each year (however, with the bailout of the financial markets that the government just made, this drain is actually nothing, but I still resent having to pay for it.)

The United States cannot continue to accept this influx. There is a tipping point and it already has been reached. I believe we are now looking at a different ‘Montezuema’s Revenge.’

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This creed is no longer used for behavior any more than the Hippocratic Oath is used by some doctors. Isn’t one of the oaths to preserve life? Abortion doctors regularly break this oath. These journalist (I use that term loosely) are churned out by the liberal colleges and have lost their sense of fairness and accuracy in the name of socialism. The sad thing is that if by some horrible chance we become a socialist state they will be the first to complain once they realize how bad socialism really is. It sounds wonderful in textbooks but in real life it is life destroying and certainly freedom destroying and has never worked.

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You are right Big Papa. Freedom comes with more responsabilities than rights. Freedom is for mature individuals, not for irresponsible teenagers.

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Steve… you are correct.. they have thrown out all pretense and that is my gripe..

Craig.. I appreciate your comment and I find it kind of funny the difference on the last… IMHO the how is less biased than the why?

Regardless,,, the point is still the same about todays media and their obvious bias…

Free speech and many other freedoms I love about this country come with responsibility…

Which unfortunately… many of my fellow countrymen do not understand…

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“We need to close the southern border, and we certainly won’t get that with McCain, especially with a McCain who put his name an immigration bill with Edward Kennedy.” (Steve Rowland)

You want to close borders for security reasons? Or you want to stop illegal Mexican immigration? Or you just want to stop Mexican immigration and trading with Mexico? Can you explain? I always thought immigration was good for a country and I believe in NAFTA. But of course, I also think that borders should definitely be secured.

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