Those who oppose President Clinton’s tax increase are usually challenged by reporters to say which federal programs they would cut. Here’s an answer: cut out or reduce the billions of dollars spent on immigrants, both legal and illegal.
A new study by Donald L. Huddle, professor emeritus of economics at Rice University in Houston, reports the sensational fact that immigrants residing in the United States cost U.S. taxpayers at all levels of government $45 billion annually above the taxes the immigrants paid. He projects that the net cost to the U.S. taxpayers of all immigrants in the United States in the 1993-2002 period will total over $450 billion.
That would be quite a savings! Congress should declare a moratorium on all immigration until we cut the deficit.
Professor Huddle’s study discovered that, in 1992, elementary and secondary education for immigrants cost us $12.8 billion, public higher education $2.4 billion, and bilingual education $2.8 bilLion.
When he examined the portion of the costs that is due to the 4.8 million illegal aliens, Professor Huddle says that U.S. taxpayers coughed up $12.5 billion in “major outlays” in 1992. That includes $4 billion for elementary and secondary education, $820 million in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), $828 million for teaching English to illegals, and $7 billion in unemployment assistance.
Professor Huddle estimates that more than two million Americans were displaced from their jobs in 1992 by the 18 million legal, illegal and amnestied immigrants. The U.S. taxpayers had to pony up $15.7 billion in Medicaid, AFDC, food stamps, unemployment compensation, and general assistance for these displaced Americans.
The watershed event in causing Americans- to lose control of our borders was the 1965 Immigration Act, which overturned the McCarran Walter Immigration Act and completely changed the strategy and tactics of our national immigration policy. Those dramatic changes were accompanied by considerable deception on the part of the sponsors of the 1965 law.
For example, Senator Edward Kennedy, purporting to describe “w hat the bill will not do,” said, “First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset. Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.”
All his promises proved false. In the 1950s, about 230,000 immigrants arrived each year, and they were mostly legal. By the 1990s, one million immigrants a year are coming in, and the ethnic mix has changed dramatically.
Between 1971 and 1980, 85 percent of legal immigrants were from the Third World. In 1960, the U.S. population was 88.6 percent white; by 1990, it was only 75.6 percent white, a drop of 13 percentage points in 30 years. In 1990, only 8 percent of the legal immigrants came from Europe.
Congressman Elton Gallegly has been forced to confront the immigration issue because he is a member of the House International Law, Immigration, and Refugee Subcommittee. He says that “our borders are a revolving door for anyone who really wants to come here, including international terrorists.”
In 1987, 20 percent of the total arrests in our six largest cities were foreign nationals. Nearly a third of the first 6,000 arrested in the 1992 Los Angeles riot were illegal aliens, and no effort was made to deport them.
Today’s immigrants don’t assimilate. Thanks to the bureaucracies of bilingualism, multicultural education, and easy welfare, far too many immigrants remain part of an alien subculture.
According to Daniel James, a specialist in Latin American affairs and author of a 1991 study called Illegal Immigration — An Unfolding Crisis, one of the many problems with illegal immigration is “the development of a foreign underclass with its implications of non assimilable ethnic enclaves and unlawful acts in association with criminal elements including drug traffickers.”
James believes that there is a “conspiracy of silence” that is closing off serious debate about the ramifications of immigration. He believes that the illegals “already constitute a threat – to our very sovereignty.”
On all sides we hear the demand for such Politically Correct policies as “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” and “ethnic solidarity.” But making those values ends in themselves is what has broken up Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Russia, India, Canada, and South Africa.
America needs a public debate about the consequences of large scale immigration and how our laws should deal with it. We should consider such proposals as calling “time out” on legal immigration, closing our borders to invading illegals, and toughening our asylum laws.
