How Record-High Immigration Exacerbates Our Concerns
Although many immigrants are excellent workers and sucessful entrepreneurs, continued record levels of legal and illegal immigration and another amnesty for 12 - 20 million illegal aliens will seriously exacerbate major issues that concern American-born citizens and legal immigrants already here. Newcomers, white and non-white, will consume water and energy. They will also need jobs, education, health care and many other costly social services. Due to the limited incomes most can expect to earn, the taxes they pay will not be sufficient to cover the costs of those services.
1. Mass immigration exacerbates unemployment and budget deficits:
Legal immigration brings hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals of working age to the U.S every year. According to the estimate of Time Magazine in September 2004, three million illegal immigrants would enter the U.S. in that year alone. In addition, at least 200,000 "temporary workers" are admitted to this country annually. If the U.S. continues to massively export high-tech and manufacturing jobs while allowing millions of professional and low-skilled foreign-born jobseekers to enter our labor markets every year, unemployed Americans and legal immigrants will have great difficulty finding work. Wages will also be depressed based on the law of supply and demand.
More people - even prison inmates and welfare recipients - do stimulate economic activities: They need food, clothes, housing, health care and many social services. However, most new jobs created as the result of population growth in recent years have been low-paid service jobs that generate insufficient tax revenue to offset the costs of social services rendered to low-skilled workers and their families. A January 3, 2005 article "Going Underground" published in Barron's indicated that the U.S. underground economy, estimated then to be $970 billions, was largely due to the "nation's swelling ranks of low-wage illegal immigrants." Consequently, government budget defects will likely to worsen.
2. Mass immigration exacerbates the health care crisis:
According to the March 2007 Current Population Survey (CPS) by the U.S. Census Bureau, 33.80% of all foreign-born lack health insurance. Immigrants and their U.S.-born children under 18 account for nearly 1/3 of all persons in the country without health insurance nationwide and more than 70% of the growth of the uninsured population in the U.S. (47.4 percent of immigrants and their children under 18 are either uninsured or on Medicaid. In comparison, 25 percent of natives and their young children are uninsured or on Medicaid). A study released by Rand Corp. in November 2006 estimated that health care provided to illegal adult immigrants alone costs about $6.4 billion a year nationally. This does not include health care for illegal immigrant children, or children born in the U.S. of illegal immigrants, or legal immigrant families.
3. Mass immigration exacerbates the energy crisis:
The U.S. population exceeded 305 million in January 2009. It was 76 million in 1900 and less than 200 million when the big door for immigration was re-opened in 1965. From 1991 to 2005 alone, 50 million people have been added to the U.S. population -- all of them energy consumers. Another amnesty for millions of illegal aliens can add, within only a few years, tens of millions of people to the U.S. - relatives of amnestied aliens living abroad and their U.S.-born children. Those newcomers will consume energy even though not at the same rate as most more-affluent Americans. Domestic energy consumption must be curbed, but little progress can be achieved if consumption is reduced by half while the U.S. population is doubled. Furthermore, there are no alternative sources of energy that are low-cost and can cope with unlimited population growth: high energy prices do negatively impact all legal residents.
4. Mass immigration overburdens public schools:
According to the data collected by the Census Bureau and Center for Immigration Studies, in 2007 there were 10.8 million school-age children from legal and illegal immigrant families in the United States, representing about 1/5 of the student population from K to 12th grade. Per the English Language Acquisition & Language Instruction Educational Programs (NCELA) and California State Data for 2005-2006, California's school system enrolled about 1.5 million English Language Learner (ELL) students, representing one-third of the nation's ELL. The cost of educating a child a year in the U.S. averages over $8000. In California total K-12 per pupil funding (PPF) was approximately $11,000 for 2007-2008 according to the Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO), California's non-partisan fiscal and policy advisor.
5. U.S. Homeland will remain insecure as long as our borders are porous:
According to news reports, several thousand foreign nationals cross our borders illegally every day and some of them may be members of Islamic terrorist groups posing as Hispanics. Admiral James Loy, deputy secretary of Homeland Security, told Congress on Feb. 16, 2005 that Al Qaeda may have considered using the Mexican border as an entry point. The International Atomic Energy Agency told the London Times in September 2006 that smugglers have been caught 300 times in the past four years trying to sneak in radioactive material, which could be used to make a dirty bomb.
Furthermore, Professor Samuel P. Huntington, Former chairman of Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, has warned that continued large scale Mexican immigration is a threat to American societal security. That threat can be illustrated in part by UC-Riverside Professor Armando Navarro's quote in the L.A. Times on July 7, 2006: "A new majority is forming. Everything will change. The White House will be within our reach. We might have to change the name to the Brown House... We are only doing what any good Jew would do for Israel."
In 1997, Ernest Zedillo, then-President of Mexico, declared in Chicago that "the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders" and that "Mexican migrants are an important - a very important - part of it."
According to the 2000 Census, people who identified themselves as Mexican had increased by 53 percent from 1990 to 2000, while the U.S. population as a whole grew by 13%. Mexico has actively encouraged illegal migration to the United States and vigorously opposed all U.S. measures to secure our borders. It has also worked in tandem with activists here of Mexican descent to lobby for many benefits for illegal Mexican aliens, such as amnesty. If amnestied and naturalized, millions of Mexican nationals here will become potential voters. The relatives they will bring into the U.S. and their U.S.-born children will be able to vote in future elections when eligible. Although many Mexican-Americans are patriotic and most Mexican migrants have no political agenda, many protesters waved Mexican flags during the 2006 massive pro-amnesty demonstrations and pressured the U.S. with immigration demands identical to Mexico's.
President Obama has nominated several individuals actively supportive of Mexico's immigration demands to join his cabinet and appointed many others to very high-level positions. Is Mexico using legal as well as illegal migration to strongly influence American policies and our future elections and, eventually, to extend the Mexican nation?
6. Mass immigration overburdens our prisons:
The federal Bureau of Prisons reported on June 24, 2006, that 27.2 percent of the total of 190,565 federal prisoners are criminal aliens. In May, 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that the federal cost of incarcerating criminal aliens from 2001 through 2004 was approximately $5.8 billion. The federal cost of incarceration per inmate, the U.S. Department of Justice said in 2003, was $25,327 a year.
On October 1, 2010, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (CA) reported that "each inmate in California's state prison system costs the state about $51,000".
In its 1/28/09 article titled "FBI: Burgeoning gangs behind up to 80% of U.S. crime" USA Today reported that "criminal gangs in the USA have swelled to an estimated 1 million members responsible for up to 80% of crimes in communities across the nation... The major findings in a report by the Justice Department's National Gang Intelligence Center ...conclude gangs are the 'primary retail-level distributors of most illicit drugs' and several are 'capable' of competing with major U.S.-based Mexican drug-trafficking organizations. One group that continues to spread despite law enforcement efforts is the violent Salvadoran gang known as MS-13..."