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| 7/9 |
| 2003/6/30 [Politics/Domestic/California] UID:28861 Activity:high |
x6/28 Do We Want Mexifornia?
http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_do_we_want.html
Other studies suggest that the average California
household must contribute at least $1,200 each year to
subsidize the deficit between what immigrants
cost in services and pay in taxes.
\_ err... California used to be part of Mexico at first place.
What do you mean by "Mexifornia" anyway? --kngarv
\- what is the per familiy deficit between CA Fed Tax receipts
and what CA gets from the Fed govt? --psb
\_ A few years ago, the Urban Institute released a study claiming
that undocumented workers pay more in taxes than they receive
in government services:
http://archive.aclu.org/library/pbp20.html
\_ Headline at the Urban Institute homepage:
"What we're doing is departing from our historic policy:
first you were elderly, and only second, poor. Under
[the administration's Medicare reform proposal] we're
doing just the opposite, saying first,
you're poor, and then we don't really care if you're elderly.."
Unbiased source of information indeed. |
| 7/9 |
|
| www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_do_we_want.html Victor Davis Hanson 10 email article 11 respond to article 12 print article Thousands arrive illegally from Mexico into California each year--and the state is now home to fully 40 percent of America's immigrants, legal and illegal. They come in such numbers because a tacit alliance of Right and Left has created an open-borders policy, aimed at keeping wage labor cheap and social problems ever fresh, so that the ministrations of Chicano studies professors, La Raza activists, and all the other self-appointed defenders of group causes will never be unneeded. The tragedy is that though illegal aliens come here hoping to succeed, most get no preparation for California's competitive culture. Instead, their activist shepherds herd them into ethnic enclaves, where inexorably they congeal into an underclass. The concept of multiculturalism is the force-multiplier that produces this result: it transforms a stubborn problem of assimilation into a social calamity. Given hard feelings over recent ballot initiatives that curtailed not only aid to illegals but also affirmative action and bilingual education, unlawful immigration has become the third rail of California politics. Yet we all disagree at different times whether open borders are California's hope or its bane. Californians cannot even obtain accurate numbers of how many of the state's more than 10 million Hispanic residents have arrived here from Mexico unlawfully in the last two decades. No one believes the government's old insistence on a mere 6 million illegal residents nationwide; Hispanic population--of which over 70 percent are from Mexico--grew 53 percent during the 1980s, and then rose another 27 percent to a total of 30 million between 1990 and 1996. At present rates of births and immigration, by 2050 there will be 97 million Hispanics, one-quarter of the American population. Nor is there agreement on the economic effects of the influx. Liberal economists swear that legal immigrants to America bring in $25 billion in net revenue annually. More skeptical statisticians using different models conclude that aliens cost the United States over $40 billion a year, and that here in California each illegal immigrant will take $50,000 in services from the state beyond what he will contribute in taxes during his lifetime. Other studies suggest that the average California household must contribute at least $1,200 each year to subsidize the deficit between what immigrants cost in services and pay in taxes. The irony, of course, is that the present immigration crisis was not what any Californian had anticipated. Along with the cheap labor that the tax-conscious Right wanted, it got thousands of unassimilated others, who eventually flooded into the state's near-bankrupt entitlement industry and filled its newly built prisons: California is $12 billion in the red this year and nearly one-quarter of its inmates are aliens from Mexico (while nearly a third of all drug-trafficking arrests involve illegal aliens). The pro-labor Left found that the industrious new arrivals whom it championed eroded the wages of its own domestic low-wage constituencies--the Labor Department attributes 50 percent of real wage declines to the influx of cheap immigrant labor. And while the Democrats think the illegals will eventually turn into liberal voters, the actual Hispanic vote so far remains just a small fraction of the eligible Mexican-American pool: of the 14,173 residents of the central California town of Hanford who identified themselves as Latino (34 percent of the town's population), for example, only 770 are registered to vote. My sleepy hometown of Selma, California, is in the dead center of all this. The once rural San Joaquin Valley community has grown from 7,000 to nearly 20,000 in a mere two decades, as a result of mostly illegal immigration from Mexico. Selma is now somewhere between 60 and 90 percent Hispanic. Some local schools, like the one I went to two miles from our farm, are 90 percent first-generation Mexican immigrants. At the service station a mile away, I rarely hear English spoken; To contrast the Selma I live in today with the Selma I grew up in will doubtless seem hopelessly nostalgic. But the point of the contrast is not merely that 40 years ago our community was only 40 or 50 percent Mexican, but rather that the immigrants then were mostly here legally. Crime was far rarer: the hit-and-run accidents, auto theft, drug manufacturing and sale, murders, rapes, and armed robberies that are now customary were then nearly nonexistent. Fights that now end in semi-automatic-weapon fire were settled with knives then. Yet in the last decade, I have run off at gunpoint three gang members trying to force their way into our house at 3 am. Last year, four patrol cars--accompanied by a helicopter whirling overhead--chased drug dealers in hot pursuit through our driveway. One suspect escaped and turned up two hours later hiding behind a hedge on our lawn, vainly seeking sanctuary from a sure prison term. When a carload of thieves tried to steal oranges from our yard, I soon found myself outmanned and outgunned--and decided that 100 pounds of pilfered fruit is not worth your life. It is a schizophrenic existence, living at illegal immigration's intersection. Each week I pick up trash, dirty diapers, even sofas and old beds dumped in our orchard by illegal aliens--only to call a Mexican-American sheriff who empathizes when I show him the evidence of Spanish names and addresses on bills and letters scattered among the trash. So far I have caught more than 15 illegal dumpers, all Mexican, in the act. In the last 20 years, four cars piloted by intoxicated illegal aliens have veered off the road into our vineyard, causing thousands of dollars in unrecompensed damage. The police sighed, "No license, no insurance, no registration" ("the three noes"), and towed out their cars. Yet I also walk through vineyards at 7 AM in the fog and see whole families from Mexico, hard at work in the cold--while the native-born unemployed of all races will not--and cannot--prune a single vine. By natural selection, we are getting some of the most intelligent and industrious people in the world, people who have the courage to cross the border, the tenacity to stay--and, if not assimilated, the potential to cost the state far, far more than they can contribute. We know what caused the tidal waves of immigration of the last three decades. While Mexico's economy has been in a state of chronic collapse, California has needed workers of a certain type--muscular, uneducated, and industrious--to cut our lawns, harvest fruit, cook and serve meals, baby-sit kids, build homes, clean offices, and make beds in motels and nursing homes. The poor from Armenia, Japan, China, the Azores, and Oklahoma had all begun their odysseys of success in California doing just these menial tasks, albeit in far smaller numbers. But despite mechanization, California today demands more, not less, stoop work than 30 years ago, because of the state's radically changed attitudes and newly affluent life-style. When I was ten in 1963, all suburbanites mowed their own lawns--many with push mowers. Nannies for toddlers and grannies, unheard-of then, are now ubiquitous from Visalia to Palos Verdes. Rural schools used to begin in mid-September to ensure that we natives could pick grapes to earn our school clothes and shoes. Today not a single student in California would do such hot, dirty work, now considered demeaning. With demand for such workers high and the supply of native-born citizens willing to do it low, Mexico came to the rescue of California. Young people between ages 15 and 30 arrive here illegally and for a while stay single. Over decades, many live hard and toil at menial jobs, earning perhaps $8 an hour, usually paid in cash, which is a bargain for everyone involved. Without state, federal, and payroll taxes, the worker earns the equivalent of a gross $10-an-hour rate, while the employer saves 30 percent in payroll contributions, audits, and paperwork--even as such cash payments force other Americans and legal immigrants to pay steeper taxes, in part to... |
| archive.aclu.org/library/pbp20.html In fact, with the exception of Native Americans, everyone living in this country is either an immigrant or the descendent of voluntary or involuntary immigrants. Yet every wave of immigration has faced fear and hostility, especially during times of economic hardship, political turmoil, or war: * During the depression of the 1840s, mobs hostile to immigrant Irish Catholics burned down a convent in Boston and rioted in Philadelphia. During the same period, many Jews fleeing Nazi Germany were excluded under regulations enacted in the 1920s. The situation today differs little from that of years past. Fanned by anti-immigrant extremists, and based largely on myths about immigration's effects on the nation's economy, a virulent anti-immigrant movement has been seeking to curtail the rights of many individuals living in the United States. In 1994 California voters adopted "Proposition 187," which denied most basic services to anyone suspected of not being a citizen or legal resident including education, health and social services. In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (the new welfare law), which took a wide range of federal benefits and services away from both undocumented and legal immigrants, including food stamps and Supplemental Security Income. That same year the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) was adopted, foreclosing immigrants from challenging abusive practices and policies of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in court. But once here, it protects them from discrimination based on race and national origin and from arbitrary treatment by the government. Laws that punish them violate their fundamental right to fair and equal treatment. The Immigrants' Rights Project of the ACLU was established in 1985 to challenge unconstitutional laws and practices, and to counter the myths upon which many of these laws are based. The Project has become one of the nation's leading advocates for the rights of immigrants, refugees and non-citizens. Borders are Out of Control Fact: Much of the anti-immigrant sentiment in this country is based on the unfounded fear that illegal immigrants are pouring over our borders in unprecedented numbers. In fact, the vast majority of immigrants in our country have entered legally under the strict standards imposed by the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Act allows approximately 800,000 people to settle here each year as permanent residents including about 480,000 who are admitted to reunite with their spouses, children, parents and/or siblings; Department of Labor has determined no American workers are available; During his 1996 presidential bid, for example, Patrick Buchanan claimed that the undocumented Mexican population was growing by a million or more a year. They do this by forming new businesses, raising the productivity of already established businesses, investing capital and spending dollars on consumer goods. In fact, immigrants pay substantially more in taxes every year than they receive in welfare benefits. Border Patrol agents against unarmed Mexican nationals are far too common. She was stopped by a Border Patrol agent who abducted Gomez in his official vehicle and raped her. In 1994, 37-year-old Mario Fernandez was spotted by a Border Patrol agent near the Mexico-California border. He was handcuffed, thrown to the ground, kicked in the jaw, and then denied medical treatment for two days while in detention. He later required three operations to repair his badly damaged jaw which had become infected. Abusive Border Patrol agents are rarely held accountable for their actions, and, fearing reprisals, few victims file complaints. When complaints are filed, they are often ignored, inadequately investigated, or simply abandoned. One recently adopted Border Patrol tactic, Operation Gatekeeper, seeks to deter migrants from traditional passage routes. Although some anti-immigration zealots extol Operation Gatekeeper's success at border control, the human toll has been very high: In the first ten months of 1997 alone, at least 72 people have died trying to traverse treacherous alternative passages over 5,000-foot Tecate mountains or through the 120-degree heat of the Imperial desert. The ACLU and other human and immigrants' rights groups have long advocated greater government accountability as the only way to deter border violence and abuse. Supreme Court ruled that the INS could not deport someone without a hearing that meets constitutional due process standards. Since then, procedural rights for undocumented immigrants have evolved so that today, in spite of Congress' attempts to curtail these rights, most people facing deportation are entitled to: * a hearing before an immigration judge and review, in most cases, by a federal court; They are also unnecessary and sometimes even dangerous to both individuals and the public. Currently enforced in eighteen states, some "English Only" laws are written so broadly that they forbid non-English government services such as assistance to recipients of benefits, applications for drivers' licenses, and bilingual education. Current "English Only" laws are based on the false premise that today's immigrants who come from Asian and Spanish-speaking countries will not learn English without government coercion. In fact, the vast majority of Asian and Latino immigrants are acquiring proficiency in English just as quickly, if not faster, than earlier generations of Italian, Russian and German immigrants. The problem is not that immigrants are unwilling to learn English, but that there are not enough available educational resources for them. Today, many thousands of immigrants throughout the country are on the waiting lists for adult English classes. English-only laws do nothing constructive to increase English proficiency, they simply discriminate against and punish those who have not yet learned English. IN SEARCH OF ASYLUM Every year, men, women and children come to our shores seeking safe haven from political and social persecution. The politicization of the asylum process reached a peak during the Reagan years. During the 1980s, the government denied 97% of Salvadoran and 99% of Guatemalan asylum applications, in spite of the fact that there were civil wars raging in both countries. At the same time, the government routinely granted applications from people fleeing countries whose governments the Reagan Administration opposed, such as Nicaragua and Cuba. The ACLU and several religious and civil rights organizations challenged the discriminatory handling of asylum claims in a class action lawsuit. Eventually, the government agreed to give new asylum hearings to 240,000 Salvadorans and Guatemalans. In the early 1990's, after years of violent dictatorship followed by a short-lived period of democratic rule under Jean-Bertrand Aristide, thousands of Haitians, fearing new tyranny, fled their country. In response, President Bush issued the so-called Kennebunkport Order, ordering the Coast Guard to forcibly return all Haitian refugees intercepted in international waters. Under the immigration law, the challenge to the discriminatory treatment of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees would have been impossible, because class action lawsuits are now banned. And for the first time in this country's history, the government can deport someone without any federal court review of a deportation order. The antiterrorism law allows the government to deport aliens based on evidence they cannot effectively challenge because it is secret. |