So, now the southern part of the US is being "invaded" by immigrants, mostly from Mexico, but California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and part of Nevada used to be part of Mexico a few decades ago, and before that, were indian territory, and the indians denied the ownership of land, cuz is stupid, borders are just lines drawn in the sand, groups of people have miggrated troughout the history of mankind, for the same reason, they go looking for a better place to live, if the conditions in the US were the same than in most of South America, Central America and Mexico, those people woudn`t move.
Illegal Immigrants are Paying a Lot More Taxes Than You Think
By Shikha Dalmia
The fact that illegal immigrants pay taxes at all will come as news to many Americans. A stunning two-thirds of illegal immigrants pay Medicare, Social Security and personal income taxes. Yet, nativists like Congressman Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., have popularized the notion that illegal aliens are a colossal drain on the nation's hospitals, schools and welfare programs — consuming services that they don't pay for.
In reality, the 1996 welfare reform bill disqualified illegal immigrants from nearly all means-tested government programs including food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid and Medicare-funded hospitalization. The only services that illegals can still get are emergency medical care and K-12 education.
Nevertheless, Tancredo and his ilk pushed a bill through the House criminalizing all aid to illegal aliens — even private acts of charity by priests, nurses and social workers. Potentially, any soup kitchen that offers so much as a free lunch to an illegal could face up to five years in prison and seizure of assets.
The Senate bill that recently collapsed would have tempered these draconian measures against private aid. But no one — Democrat or Republican — seems to oppose the idea of withholding public services. Earlier this year, Congress passed a law that requires everyone who gets Medicaid — the government-funded health care program for the poor — to offer proof of U.S. citizenship so we can avoid "theft of these benefits by illegal aliens," as Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., puts it.
But, immigrants aren't flocking to the United States to mooch off the government. According to a study by the Urban Institute, the 1996 welfare reform effort dramatically reduced the use of welfare by undocumented immigrant households, exactly as intended. And another vital thing happened in 1996: the Internal Revenue Service began issuing identification numbers to enable illegal immigrants who don't have Social Security numbers to file taxes.
One might have imagined that those fearing deportation or confronting the prospect of paying for their safety net through their own meager wages would take a pass on the IRS' scheme. Not so. Close to 8 million of the 12 million or so illegal aliens in the country today file personal income taxes using these numbers, contributing billions to federal coffers. No doubt they hope that this will one day help them acquire legal status — a plaintive expression of their desire to play by the rules and come out of the shadows.
What's more, aliens who are not self-employed have Social Security and Medicare taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. Since undocumented workers have only fake numbers, they'll never be able to collect the benefits these taxes are meant to pay for. Last year, the revenues from these fake numbers — that the Social Security administration stashes in the "earnings suspense file" — added up to 10 percent of the Social Security surplus. The file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year.
Beyond federal taxes, all illegals automatically pay state sales taxes that contribute toward the upkeep of public facilities such as roads that they use, and property taxes through their rent that contribute toward the schooling of their children. The non-partisan National Research Council found that when the taxes paid by the children of low-skilled immigrant families — most of whom are illegal — are factored in, they contribute on average $80,000 more to federal coffers than they consume.
Yes, many illegal migrants impose a strain on border communities on whose doorstep they first arrive, broke and unemployed. To solve this problem equitably, these communities ought to receive the surplus taxes that federal government collects from immigrants. But the real reason border communities are strained is the lack of a guest worker program. Such a program would match willing workers with willing employers in advance so that they wouldn't be stuck for long periods where they disembark while searching for jobs.
The cost of undocumented aliens is an issue that immigrant bashers have created to whip up indignation against people they don't want here in the first place. With the Senate having just returned from yet another vacation and promising to revisit the stalled immigration bill, politicians ought to set the record straight: Illegals are not milking the government. If anything, it is the other way around.
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Facts About Immigration
Category: Life
From SOLO: Peter Cresswell has summarized arguments & facts from a collection of peices dealing with the immigration debate. Great reading if you are wanting to sort out the facts and get the issues straight. Cresswell is a New Zealander, where coincidentally, the same debates are raging! Cresswell writes:
All the articles relate to American immigration, but there is no good reason to think anything but the same or similar facts would be uncovered in NZ should someone be willing to look with more than one eye.
* Immigrants aren't flocking to the States to mooch off the government.
* 'Illegals' are not milking the government; if anything it is the other way around. The National Research Council found for example that most immigrant families "contribute an average of $80,000 more to federal coffers than they consume over their lifetimes."
* Immigrants generally earn more than they receive.
* More than 60% of illegals – illegals – pay income tax, and two-thirds kick in to Social Security (even if they do often get nothing back).
* Immigrants help sustain economic growth and cultural dynamism.
* Even economists who favour restrictive immigration policies admit low-skilled immigrants are a net plus to the economy.
* "Government intervention into the economic system breeds later intervention. Here the application of his principle is, start with the Welfare State, end with the Police State. A police state is what is required effectively to stop substantial illegal immigration that has become a major burden because of the Welfare State." - George Reisman
* Immigrants "are generally less involved in crime than similarly situated groups," and crime rates in border towns "are lower than those of comparable non-border cities."
* Crime rates in the highest-immigration states have been trending significanty downward.
* There's no reason that the North American Free Trade Agreement (or NZ's own free trade agreements) shouldn't apply equally to people as to widgets.
* Unemployment is low and crime is down everywhere, especially in places teeming with immigrants.
* Google, Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems were all founded by immigrants.
* Immigrants are more likely than 'natives' to be self-employed.
* "Sometimes what looks like lousy conditions to us are the best option an employee has… But sometimes the only reason those conditions are the least bad choice is available is because the other possibilities have been cut off by legal fiat. I'm referring not just to illegal immigrants, who for obvious reasons have little recourse if defrauded or enslaved, but to guest workers, who come here under strict rules that prevent them from changing jobs, let alone striking out on their own." - Jesse Walker. [Take note Phillip Field bashers]
* Immigrants tend to create their own work – when they're allowed to.
* The power and reach of Spanish-language media in L.A. for example shows supply of productive people creating its own demand.
* Immigrant labour makes work easier for all of us, and brings new skills to the table.
* Immigrants and low-skilled American workers fill very different roles in the economy.
* Immigrant labour makes all businesses easier to start, thus spurring 'native' creativity.
* "Some argue that we should employ a more restrictive policy that allows in only immigrants with 'needed' skills. But this assumes the government can read economic tea leaves." - Tyler Cowen and Daniel M. Rothschild
* New arrivals, by producing more goods and services, keep prices down across the economy – the net gain to US from immigration is about $7 billion a year.
* Even in the halls of Congress, economic arguments against immigration are losing their aura of truthfulness, so pro-enforcement types are focussing on national security.
* "The only way to actually prevent terrorists from slipping in is to legalize as much 'illegal immigration' as possible. If one is looking for a needle in a haystack, as the saying goes, one has a hell of job. Finding that needle on a relatively clean floor, however, presents an achievable goal." - James Valliant
* Immigration is good for the immigrants themselves.
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How About a Little Common Sense on Immigration
By Tony Snow
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Illegal immigration seems to have spawned a dreary debate about the merits of Mexicans, when it should be drawing attention instead to a very different matter: how to build on the luster and wonder of the American dream.
Immigration is not the pox neo-Know Nothings make it out to be.
Begin with the astounding influx of illegal immigrants, the vast majority of whom hail from Mexico.
Princeton University sociologist Douglas S. Massey reports that
62 percent of illegal immigrants pay income taxes (via withholding) and 66 percent contribute to Social Security. Forbes magazine notes that Mexican illegals aren't clogging up the social-services system: only 5 percent receive food stamps or unemployment assistance; 10 percent send kids to public schools...
On the work front, Hispanic unemployment has tumbled to 5.5 percent, only slightly above the national average of 4.7 percent and considerably lower than the black unemployment rate of 9.3 percent.
Economist Larry Kudlow praises Hispanic entrepreneurship: "According to 2002 Census Bureau data, Hispanics are opening businesses at a rate three times faster than the national average. In addition, there were almost 1.6 million Hispanic-owned businesses generating $222 billion in revenue in 2002."
Skeptics counter that immigrants have clogged our hospitals, which is true -- but primarily in places that offer lavish benefits to illegal immigrants.
As for crime, the picture doesn't quite conform to conventional wisdom. Heather McDonald discovered that illegal immigrants in 2004 accounted for 95 percent of all outstanding homicide warrants in Los Angeles and two-thirds of unserved felony warrants. (Gangs, aided and abetted by laws that prevent local officials from handing illegal-immigrant criminals over to federal authorities, account for much of the mayhem.)
On the other hand, the most comprehensive survey to date of national crime data concludes, "In the small number of studies providing empirical evidence, immigrants are generally less involved in crime than similarly situated groups, despite the wealth of prominent criminological theories that provide good reasons why this should not be the case."
Authors Ramiro Martinez Jr. and Matthew T. Lee note, for instance, that the Latino homicide rate in Miami is three times that of El Paso, Texas, which has one of the nation's largest immigrant populations.
That's not just an anomaly. Another major study, "U.S. Impacts of Mexican Immigration," by professors Michael J. Greenwood and Marta Tienda reports that "crime rates along the border are lower than those of comparable non-border cities."
This doesn't mean immigrants from Mexico are saints -- it just means that they may not be the marauding horde some make them out to be. As it turns out, crime rates in the highest immigration states have been trending significantly downward.
Total crime and property crime in California are half what they were in 1980; violent crime has fallen more than a third. The state's Hispanic population during that time has increased 120 percent.
Similar trends apply in other high-traffic states, with the exception of Colorado. While Arizona's population grew 41.8 percent between
1993 and 2003, for instance, the rates for every major category of crime fell.
Why, then, the fuss? In America today, unemployment remains low, employment is booming, wages have begun to grow in tandem with the economy, tax receipts are exploding at the federal and state levels, and the United States continues to run laps around its European and Asian economic rivals.
The United States somehow has managed to absorb 10 million to 20 million illegal immigrants not only without turning into Animal Farm, but while cranking up the most impressive economic recovery in two decades and the most prolonged period of declining crime in a century -- all in the teeth of the post-9/11 recession, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the double-whammy hurricane season of 2005.
Rather than panicking, the political class might want to take a deep breath and attempt a little common sense. Virtually everyone agrees that we need to secure our borders, deport lawbreakers and slackers among the illegal-immigrant population, and revitalize the notion of citizenship by insisting that prospective citizens master the English language and the fundaments of American history and culture.
The Statue of Liberty symbolizes America's affection for the world's tired and poor, the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
Before someone razes Lady Liberty and decides to erect a wall to "protect"
America from the world, shouldn't we at least spend a little time trying to get our facts straight?
I disagree with with AutoCanibal, saying that the that illegal immigrants are just working jobs that American citizens don't want. With the high percentage of unemployment the American people would love the jobs that the Illegal immigrants have. The problem being the companies who are hiring the illegal immigrants are also underpaying them, and making them work in horrible conditions. The illegals are not complaining because the pay is better than what they were making in Mexico. Who in their right mind is going to work a job for under minimum wage in shitty working conditions when before they were making $8+/hr with benefits? Illegals are simply undercutting the American citizen. The finger should be pointed at the companies who hire illegals in the first place.
The U.S. government says that the MS-13 gang is the #2 threat after Al-Qaeda for the internal national security of the U.S.A. The huge gang infests 33 U.S. states.
The MS-13 is starting "race wars" in California jails, shooting police officers in Texas, has put a bounty for dead border guards, it is "ethnically cleansing" black residents from Los Angeles neighborhoods and is responsible for smuggling 300,000 illegal aliens into the USA a year. Over the last 3 years the MS-13 has killed most mexican "coyote" human smugglers in the state of Chiapas and taken over the illegal alien trade.
MS-13 is also overtaking the prostitution trade in the USA, smuggling cocaine, marihuana and weapons.
Who funds these guys? Who allows them to run wild? Do you think the intelligence agencies are gonna allow competition unless they allowed it.
