Hope everyone’s Christmas was a good one.
I’m in South Central Los Angeles at work on the day after Christmas and all is quiet for now. We just left a call where the husband is drunk at 8 in the morning and is harrassing the wife and kids. He doesn’t work and is drunk day in and day out. Their little 5 year old daughter tells me her father told her he doesn’t love her anymore because she is always going places with her Mom. The apartment they live in is about 400 square feet, 1 room which doubles as the livingroom and bedroom, 1 kitchen and 1 bathroom. This is how the family has to live because this guy is constantly drunk and too lazy to get off his ass and go to work.
I see this kind of stuff and wonder why people believe that all illegal immigrants come to this country and work their asses off on job’s American’s don’t want to do.
For a look at how this problem is affecting our lives visit Federation for American Immigration Reform and take a look at some of their studies. Their latest is a study on how much this problem is costing my State.
Analysis of the latest Census data indicates that California’s illegal immigrant population is costing the state’s taxpayers more than $10.5 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration. Even if the estimated tax contributions of illegal immigrant workers are subtracted, net outlays still amount to nearly $9 billion per year. The annual fiscal burden from those three areas of state expenditures amounts to about $1,183 per household headed by a native-born resident.
The more than $10.1 billion in costs incurred by California taxpayers is composed of outlays in the following areas:
Education. Based on estimates of the illegal immigrant population in California and documented costs of K-12 schooling, Californians spend approximately $7.7 billion annually on education for illegal immigrant children and for their U.S.-born siblings. Nearly 15 percent of the K-12 public school students in California are children of illegal aliens.
Health care. Uncompensated medical outlays for health care provided to the state’s illegal alien population amount to about $1.4 billion a year.
Incarceration. The cost of incarcerating illegal aliens in California’s prisons and jails amounts to about $1.4 billion a year (not including related law enforcement and judicial expenditures or the monetary costs of the crimes that led to their incarceration).
Something need’s to be done and it’s not what the President is suggesting.
Institute for Immigration Policy Review has a link to this article from the NY Daily News.
Sometimes it seems that the only people who are expected to comply with the immigration law are nominees for cabinet posts.
Unfair as that may seem, Bernard Kerik’s illegal-alien nanny at least forces us to confront the absurdity at the center of our immigration policy. On the one hand, we have laws that appear tough, banning the employment of illegal aliens, for instance. This is done to satisfy public concerns over uncontrolled borders and mass immigration.The absurdity lies in the fact that these laws are almost never enforced. In 2002, only 13 employers were fined for hiring illegals.
Had he not invited scrutiny by seeking high office, Kerik could have gone to his grave without anyone knowing he had hired an illegal alien.
There are two ways of fixing this. The politically correct approach is to give amnesty to illegal aliens, increase immigration further and loosen the borders even more. This has the virtue of being more honest.
Unfortunately, it also would be a disaster, saddling the middle class with new taxes, undermining assimilation and making it easier for terrorists to enter our country. It wouldn’t even reduce illegal immigration, since foreigners who didn’t qualify under new rules would understand that they could get amnesty if they stuck around.
The other approach is to start enforcing the law, not just against the occasional presidential nominee, but across the board. This is an attainable goal – immigration is not an uncontrollable force of nature, driven mainly by the economy, but rather is sparked and nurtured by government policies.
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