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The Real Immigration Issue Is Jobs
Since the costs will come due only after Obama has left the White House, I guess he doesn’t care how high are those costs. But the costs are horrendous, as added up by our country’s foremost authority on such things, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation.
Rector told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare benefits paid to the millions of illegal aliens to whom Obama is granting legal status will be about $1.3 trillion. Rector’s calculation is based on his assumption that at least 3.97 million illegal aliens will receive legal status under DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents), and the average DAPA beneficiary has only a 10th grade education.
DAPA recipients, according to Rector’s calculations, would receive $7.8 billion every year once they get access to the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the refundable Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC). Those EITC and ACTC recipients will also be allowed to claim credit for three years of illegal work, which would sock the U.S. taxpayers for another $23.5 billion.
This was confirmed by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who told Congress on February 11 that illegal immigrants who didn’t pay any taxes, or who used fake Social Security numbers, will nevertheless be able to claim back-refunds under EITC once they get new Social Security numbers under Obama’s amnesty. Koskinen said he didn’t know how much these tax refunds will cost and the White House never checked with him before announcing the amnesty.
The average DAPA-eligible family already receives about $6,600 a year in means-tested welfare benefits. That includes food stamps, school lunch (and breakfast), Medicaid, S-CHIP, and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children).
Many Americans labor under the false assumption that, since most legal and illegal immigrants are hard-working, they therefore do not depend on welfare assistance. In fact, as Rector patiently explains, most welfare benefits go to households with children headed by a low-income employed adult. Rector estimates that the combined cost of means-tested welfare benefits the illegals now receive, plus other goodies such as EITC and ACTC cash, will encourage increased illegal immigration in the future. The average American, whose children and grandchildren will end up burdened with this enormous debt, must ask themselves whether someone is trying to destroy America.
The Government Accountability Office has already reported that even the debate over legalizing illegals was “a primary cause” of last summer’s surge of Central Americans crashing our southern border. Even if those teenagers were not eligible for asylum or legal status when they arrived, they knew that deportations could take years, giving them the chance to disappear into the shadows.
Look at California for a preview of our future under Obama’s illegal immigration plan. The Hispanic population is now almost equal to the white population and almost 50 percent of all California births are now Hispanic.
Nearly a third of all “English learners” in U.S. public schools are third-generation Americans who still are not speaking English at home, and the Hispanic illegitimacy rate is 53%. The cheap labor welcomed by employers is not only a huge impediment for American job-seekers, it’s also a big expense to taxpayers who are hit with new costs of schools, hospitals and prisons.
The agency charged with approving the applications for Obama’s amnesty is getting ready for more than 800,000 applications in the first couple of months. This agency is facing the prospect of trying to process at least four million pieces of mail. Obviously, we need a new bureaucracy for this awesome task, and USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) has already started to hire several hundred new employees and train them.
Luke Bellocchi, a former deputy ombudsman for USCIS, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in February, “It’s going to be hard to tell how much fraud there is.” Kenneth Palinkas, president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council, said, “How you could have proper adjudications this way is beyond my scope of reason. They want to cleric-alize the job, and they’re really not concerned about whether the documents entered are fraudulent or not. They just want to push the papers along.”
The two factors that Americans are most concerned about are jobs and vote fraud. The United States has accepted two new immigrants for each additional job created since 2000, according to federal data, and expert witnesses have testified that once the amnestied illegals are given Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses, there is no way to stop them from registering to vote.
It’s not news that the Democrat party, led by Barack Obama, hopes to encourage many grateful illegal aliens to vote in support of big liberal government in the next Presidential election and beyond.
As former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams explained to Judge Jeanine on Fox News, “The Obama administration is doing everything it can to inject new voters in the 2016 election. In DHS, for example, they’ve issued orders to get all nine million green card holders converted to citizenship before the 2016 election. And the Justice Department has tried to block states from making sure that only citizens are registering to vote.”
The argument that immigrants do jobs that Americans won’t do is as phony as a three-dollar bill. As Thomas Sowell pointed out, “Virtually every kind of ‘work that Americans will not do’ is in fact work that Americans have done for generations,” and “most of the people doing that work today are Americans.”
The United States gives permanent legal resident status (called a green card, which means lifetime residency plus the option of citizenship) to about one million people a year. In addition, the U.S. gives out a half million student and exchange visas, admission tickets to tens of thousands of aliens claiming to be refugees, and 700,000 visas to temporary workers and their families.
After a speech in Cedar Rapids, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker answered a question by saying he would make sure that our “legal immigration system is based on making our No. 1 priority to protect American workers and their wages.”
That’s music to the ears of the grassroots, but Walker seems to be the only candidate who gets it. It was at least the third time that Walker had made the same point, using almost identical language. This time, in response to a questioner, Walker stressed, “I don’t know how anyone can argue against that.”
If you notice, the critics of Walker’s immigration remarks don’t address or try to refute his facts, but instead seem offended that he connected jobs and wages to immigration. In fact, the numbers are compelling.
According to a new report from the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. has admitted 51 million immigrants in the last eight years and, as immigration expanded, the incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans dropped and then went flat. Republicans will be the big losers in 2016 in the face of headlines such as: “Middle class incomes drop as immigration surges.”
Despite these numbers, the big corporations are demanding the right to bring in even more foreign labor. A group of corporations invited Senators to a closed-to-the-press briefing dedicated to “improving” the H-1B program by tripling the number of visas. As Rutgers professor Hal Salzman pointed out, that would enable the tech industry to fill 100% of its job openings with people brought in from China and India.
You have to watch the language and the choice of words. “Comprehensive immigration reform” means giving citizenship to the estimated 12 million illegal aliens now living in the United States.
I think everyone admitted to the U.S. should be informed at the border that you can never become an American citizen unless you swear a solemn oath to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic . . . and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”
Americans not in the labor force now exceed 93 million for the first time. With a labor force participation of 62.7%, we are at a 37-year low, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Today we have a record 12.2 million black Americans who are not in the labor force.
For black teens age 16 to 19, unemployment is a whopping 25%, which means that one in four black teens does not have a job and is actively seeking one. According to former Cincinnati Mayor Ken Blackwell, Obama’s giving work permits to millions of illegal aliens is an unlawful attack on American workers at every skill level.
Some in Congress are starting to talk about reforming Social Security. But no one is addressing the financial burden that Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty caused the Social Security Administration to issue 541,000 Social Security numbers to illegal aliens.
Where Are New Immigrants Coming From?
Do you know where millions of immigrants are coming from whom Obama is bringing into America? We can thank researcher Daniel Horowitz for reporting the answer to this question as gathered from the DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. The Obama Administration issued more than one and a half million (1,628,854) green cards to immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries from 2001 to 2013. You can read the breakdown by country in the chart on this page.
Many of these new immigrants come from Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh, Pakistan, or Somalia. Yes, I said Somalia. Those immigrants have caused some of our recent troubles with so-called homegrown terror, particularly in Minneapolis.
Over 866,000 green cards have been issued to nationals of India. Since it’s assumed that 13.4% of immigrants from India are Muslim, that would add another 116,000 Muslim immigrants to the total. The Muslim population in the U.S. is expected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050.
Of course many come from India to seek a better life and a better job, but if even 10% of these Muslim immigrants have radical Jihadist tendencies, just think how many ticking time bombs have been brought here by Obama since 9/11. Remember, the Boston Bomber came here under the phony claim of asylum and his family immediately cashed in on generous U.S. welfare handouts.
Even if it’s a small percentage of bad eggs in the barrel, the numbers are still awesome. Even a small percentage adds up to thousands who share belief in Sharia law. A 2007 Pew survey found that 26% of young Muslims in America support suicide bombing in pursuit of Jihad.
Muslim immigration has given us a rapid growth of mosques in the United States, many of which are funded by terror-supporting countries and teach radicalism.
Americans never voted for this dramatic change in our population that is producing such a radical transformation of America. Daniel Horowitz asks the question: How many Americans would have voted post-9/1l to double the rate of Islamic immigration? Yet, this immigration has been going on without any approval from the American people.
As Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has written, “Legal immigration is the primary source of low-wage immigration into the United States. In other words, as a matter of federal policy, millions of low-wage foreign workers are legally made available to substitute for higher-paid Americans.
Sessions continued: “Any political party that wants to win needs to demonstrate that it is willing to go to bat for working Americans. Real hourly wages are lower today than in 1973. Labor force participation is at its lowest level in four decades. In that time, the total level of immigration has more than quadrupled from under 10 million to over 40 million. And the percentage of the country born abroad has risen from fewer than 1 in 21 to almost 1 in 7, soon eclipsing the highest level ever recorded.”
Let’s Get On a Pro-American Track
Congress, led by Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), is preparing to betray American workers, and the grassroots should rise up and say “No, you don’t.” The secretive underhanded deal is called Fast Track, and that’s an appropriate title because, indeed, it puts Americans on a fast track to lower wages and fewer available jobs.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), one of the few Members of Congress who have actually read and studied Fast Track plus its companion trade bill called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), has compiled a list of objections to it that are downright frightening. They should be read by all who care about their own future and the future of our once-prosperous nation. Here are some of the ways that Fast Track and TPP will betray us.
The text of TPP emphasizes that it is a “living agreement.” Translated out of bureaucratese code language, that means the text of TPP can be changed in major and minor ways by executive action after Congress passes the document. TTP could, for example, add additional countries such as Communist China which for years has been cheating America coming and going.
TPP will facilitate the expanded movement of foreign workers into the United States. TPP opens the door to more waves of illegal immigrants and allows Obama to make future changes without any congressional oversight or expiration date.
Kevin L. Kearns of the U.S. Business and Industry Council calls this “another power grab” that will let Obama and his employees rule by executive action. By the device of not calling TPP a treaty (even though it involves twelve countries on three continents), the globalists induce the Senate to abandon the 67-vote threshold for treaty ratification and even the 60-vote threshold for important legislation.
Fast Track consolidates power in the executive branch and eliminates Congress’ constitutional power to amend or even debate trade legislation. Fast Track allows only a specified up-or-down vote on this momentous international agreement without any public oversight or ability to amend it or filibuster it.
Fast Track will increase our trade deficits, which reduce economic growth. Economists have estimated that the last trade deal, which we made with South Korea and which is the template for TPP, wiped out 50,000 American jobs.
Fast Track turns over some of our authority as a sovereign nation to international authorities, which is a major longtime goal of the internationalists, the so-called kingmakers, and big business lobbyists. The code language that hides this in TPP is the statement that calls it a “living agreement.” This means Obama and his executive-branch pals can take all kinds of actions that Article I of the U.S. Constitution reserves to the legislative branch, such as ratifying or changing a treaty and controlling immigration.
Why should we trust the Obama Administration and its foreign partners to rewrite international agreements without congressional approval? Is Congress simply giving away its constitutional authority to global busybodies? Is Congress using secret agreements to cede our once-remarkable American prosperity to Asia? As former Nucor Steel Chairman Daniel DiMicco said, free trade is really “unilateral trade disarmament and enablement of foreign mercantilism.”
Most presidential candidates are trying to avoid this issue, but Mike Huckabee was blunt, warning of “dire consequences if we let Obama have this victory.” Huckabee said he opposes trade agreements that push wages “lower than the Dead Sea.”
Huckabee also reminded us that “The last time we really fast-tracked something was Obamacare. Why do we want to believe that the government fast-tracking something without thoroughly understanding the implications is the best way to go?”
Another possible presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who literally wrote the book on The Art of the Deal, tweeted that TPP is a “bad, bad deal” in part because it fails to address Japan’s outrageous currency manipulation, which has caused many U.S. steel plants to shut down this year, idling thousands of American steelmakers. Yet Japan’s prime minister was recently honored with the rare privilege of addressing a joint meeting of Congress (at which he openly lobbied for the TPP), and was entertained at a White House State Dinner.
Another likely presidential candidate is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who declared, “I’m for free trade, but I am not for giving more authority to a president who ignores the Constitution, the separation of powers, and will of the American people. This particular president must not be given any more power to do anything else to harm this country. He cannot be trusted.”
