This year, the “official” estimate of illegal aliens residing in the United States inched upward to 12 million men, women, and children.
This is the number touted by immigration advocates, the newsmedia, Democrat congressional staffers, the Bush administration, and other supporters of the failed “comprehensive” immigration reform legislation of 2006–2007. A closer look at actual numbers suggests that the population of illegal aliens may be as high as 30 million. Whatever the exact count, this vast ghost population of illegal aliens has begun to reveal itself in violent and vicious ways.
“Comprehensive” immigration reform legislation failed in 2007 because U.S. citizen-voters, when push came to shove, remain committed to their culture, ethos, heritage, society, and the values of the founding fathers. Congress learned that most U.S. citizen-voters want English as the official language, and question whether free speech condones anti-American demonstrations by those in the country illegally.
Congress heard that most U.S. citizen-voters reject the propaganda that parts of the United States ought to still belong to Mexico, and thus that the United States has a humanitarian obligation to offer unfettered entry to any and all Mexicans along with other foreign nationals.
The Liberal Lament
The defeat of the “comprehensive” immigration reform legislation was met by a liberal lament — the sky is falling, chaos is upon us, fewer illegal agricultural workers will mean higher food prices, fewer illegal hotel and restaurant workers will mean higher prices and less travel and eating out, fewer illegal construction workers will mean crumbling roads and bridges, fewer illegal hospital/nursing home workers will mean a public health crisis, and fewer illegal yardmen, maids, and nannies will mean more chores for U.S. families.
The liberal lament chooses not to address the cost to U.S. citizens of the illegal alien ghost population. These uncounted residents increase the consumption of natural resources, including food and petroleum, and thus increase pollution.
Uncounted illegal aliens are overburdening educational systems and public health services, as the ghost population procreates at a rate four times that of U.S. citizens. The ghost population is costing the criminal justice system untold millions of dollars — untold because, until recently, it was politically incorrect to identify the citizenship status of ghost-population criminals, many of them vicious.
The United States also faces tax losses related to the estimated U.S. $36 billion, most of it untaxed, that illegal aliens send home each year to their native lands. Despite liberal claims to the contrary, federal agency reports for the first quarter of 2006 estimated that 62 percent of all illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, thus evading federal and state income taxes. A small percentage of illegal aliens, using stolen social security numbers, do make social security payments.
Identity theft is now the most reported crime in the United States, as illegal aliens obtain ill-gotten driver's licenses and Social Security numbers to fraudulently pursue “legal” hire.
Another cost is the overburdening of entitlement programs by illegal aliens. In 2006, an estimated 43 percent of all food stamps were issued to illegal aliens, and 58 percent of all Welfare payments (more than half) were made to them. In 2006, illegal aliens made up 75 percent (three-quarters) of the Most Wanted criminals in cities such as Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and Phoenix — despite or because of their sanctuary city status.
Counting the Ghost Population
Congress — lobbied by immigration advocates, the liberal newsmedia, and the “New Sanctuary Movement” that includes elected and non-elected officials — has cloaked illegal aliens with protective privacy. For this reason, an exact count of illegal aliens remains out of reach. Illegal alien numbers are mere guesswork, some better than others, but still guestimates. On Labor Day 2007, newspapers reported on federal agency statistics showing 152.8 million persons in the U.S. civilian workforce. Of these, 82.1 million were men, and 70.7 million were women. This being so, of the total U.S. population, which the Census Bureau puts at more than 300 million persons, some 147.2 million (nearly half) are doing something other than working.
A federal estimate of the 2005 U.S. workforce showed the illegal alien population forming 13 percent –15 percent (up from 6 percent in 1995). Applying that percentage to the civilian workforce in 2007 suggests that at least 23 million illegal aliens are working in the United States.
How can this be if the total illegal alien population were 12 million, as the government estimates? Add to the number of employed illegal aliens, the number of illegal-alien non-workers, including children, the elderly, infirmed welfare recipients, drug-pushing gang members, and prisoners. Sanctuary advocates, joined by some police chiefs, mayors, and governors, find illegal alien criminal figures greatly exaggerated. “Sanctuary” devotees use the argument that “we need the help of the illegal aliens to do our job of policing,” but if local police received help from immigrant communities (legal or illegal), illegal-alien crime statistics would be down, and Most Wanted posters would not be dominated by illegal aliens.
The New Jersey attorney general, after the execution of three college students in Newark by illegal-alien gang members, ordered law enforcement officials to notify federal immigration officials when an illegal alien is arrested for an indictable offense or drunk driving. Had this order been in effect before August 2007, three promising college students might be alive today.
Immigration Special Interests
Many U.S. newspapers run editorials demonizing those individuals or groups who call for enforcement of existing immigration laws. Heretofore lethargic enforcement efforts by the Bush administration and failure by the Democrat-controlled Congress to pass border-control legislation suggest an open-borders mindset. The newsmedia, the Democratic Party, immigration advocates, and corporate greed, by failing to recognize the illegal-alien problem, fail to seek a remedy.
The be-all and end-all of immigration legislation, the Immigration Reform & Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), promised Reagan’s “amnesty” to illegal aliens and “employer sanctions” to regulate the flow. IRCA amnesty was designed to legalize and assimilate the estimated 2.7 million illegal aliens then residing in the country, while the counter-balance of border enforcement and employer sanctions would cure all immigration ills. IRCA, though a flop and something of a fraud, remains the law of the land. Over the years, employer sanctions have failed to be enforced either by Republican or Democrat congresses or administrations.
Employer sanctions have not been enforced, and the ghost population has escalated because of the following coalition of powerful immigration special-interest groups:
High-tech industries lobby for more skilled-labor visas and hire skilled illegal aliens — usually visa-overstays. They argue that high-tech industries must have access to educated workers, i.e., engineers and chemists. How does this square with the billions of dollars spent on public education since the Carter administration? Why does the United States need to import educated/skilled workers? Corporate and agricultural businesses, which depend on low-wage, menial-task, semi-skilled and unskilled workers, complain that only illegal aliens will do manual labor in such areas as agriculture, hotels and restaurants, landscaping, nursing homes, and child care. U.S. workers, they say, are too lazy, too welfare-oriented, too undisciplined to get themselves to work on time. Some, they say, are uneducated and unable to do semi-skilled or even unskilled work.Middle-class working families who need child care in and out of the home rationalize their use of illegal-alien nannies, because both parents need to work to afford their lifestyle and to fulfill their professional goals. They rationalize that if they employ an illegal alien, it is merely one person and will not impact the community, the environment, social services, the education system, or the tax base.U.S. churches delude their congregations that the United States is obligated to accept all who would enter the country legally or illegally, with or without health inspections, with or without criminal/terrorist background checks, and with or without access to stable employment or housing. Some of these churches have initiated the New Sanctuary Movement, which advocates both civil and criminal disobedience of U.S. immigration laws. Immigration advocates and open-border proponents with a political agenda include those ultra-rich who seek a monied totalitarianism. Many philanthropic foundations support active disobedience of U.S. immigration laws through their various overt and covert fundings. Foundations such as George Soros Open Society Institute and its many spin-off foundations fund anti-American causes and support disobedience of U.S. laws under the guise of “free speech.” Some of these foundations support anti-American street demonstrators, by funding travel and professional signage for open-border demonstrators.With such powerful special interests acting against the best interests of the United States, what is the immigration prognosis? The survival of the United States of America as a nation depends on national, political, and cultural imperatives. Culture, ethos, heritage, and language are equal parts of the foundation of a nation-state, and fidelity to nation is the foundation of citizenship. The United States is a nation built by legal immigrants who assimilated and accepted this nation as their own, with one Constitution, one ethos, one flag, one language, and one form of government, with a common heritage and a valued citizenship.
Unless the U.S. immigration laws are obeyed and enforce, the nation faces anarchy, with cities currently issuing their own identification cards to illegal aliens in complete disregard for the nation’s existing immigration laws. The U.S. Department of Justice needs to present to grand juries those felonious violations of U.S. immigration laws.
From 1776 onward, this country grew and prospered with a steady flow of legal immigrants, and it is ill-advised for the nation to stray from this path today.
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