Costs of illegal immigration

FrontPage illustrates the financial and social costs of illegal immigration to the United States:

Once in the U.S., the "migrant" goes from wages of $5 per day, to $60 a day for manual labor. Mexico gets to export its surplus population. And the nation receives $15 billion annually in remittances. This exceeds its combined income from tourism and foreign investments, and is second only to oil exports as a source of national wealth.

Mexicans here constitute a growing constituency for whatever Mexico City wants from Washington -- due to the latest fashion in political pandering: courting the Hispanic vote – and a fifth column which could eventually wrest California, Texas and the Southwest away from America (La Reconquista).

And there’s never a penalty. After wiping the spittle from our face, we continue to shower benefits (like NAFTA) on those who mock our laws and undermine our sovereignty, Mexico City’s modern-day Pancho Villas.

Within days of his re-election, the president dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell to Mexico to re-start talks on the size and scope of the latest proposed amnesty (which, of course, isn’t being called an amnesty) and guest-worker program.

Illegal immigration doesn’t work quite as well for the importing nation as it does for the exporters, despite the pleading of Fortune 500 Republicans about the "jobs Americans won’t take." In reality, illegal immigration artificially depresses the wages of certain jobs, making them unattractive to Americans.

Cheap immigrant labor is really quite dear. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, illegal aliens cost the state of California $10.5 billion annually, or almost $1,200 per year for every native-born family.

Included in that cost is $7.7 billion to educate the children of illegal aliens (who now constitute 15 percent of the state’s K-12 enrollment), $1.4 billion for health care for illegals and their families and the same amount to incarcerate alien lawbreakers.

In 1980, fewer than 9,000 criminal aliens were held in our state or federal prisons. That number grew to more than 68,000 in 1999. In Orange County, California alone, there are 275 street gangs, with 17,000 members – 98 percent Mexican or Asian. Not only do our uninvited guests get to rob, rape, murder, and deal drugs, but we get to pay for the incarceration of those who are caught.