I have spoken on immigration before here, here, here and other places. I have tried to point out how the financial burden for the poverty problem in Mexico will end up being shouldered by the American middle class (the employer gets the benefit, a form of corporate welfare). Well, Phyllis Schlaffly’s piece over at Townhall on immigration makes the point better than I can. She points out concerning the Senate bill that:
… the 795-page bill announces its “temporary guest worker” plan. Those words are lies because the fine print in the bill converts these workers, who are given H-2C visas, into permanent residents with the right to become citizens after five years.
The plan will start by importing 200,000 H-2C workers in the first year. The H-2Cers can immediately bring in their family members on H-4 visas, without any numeric limits and without being required to have a physical, and they will also get permanent legal residence and citizenship.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this bill would import 7.8 million immigrants, and convert another 11 million current immigrants, legal and illegal, into U.S. citizens over the next decade. The Heritage Foundation estimates that 66 million new citizens will be added to the current population over the next 20 years. The number would accelerate as the racket called family chain migration allows more new residents to bring in more and more relatives.
The bill gives these temporary workers some preferential rights that U.S. workers do not have. These new temporary workers can’t be fired from their jobs except for “just cause,” they must be paid the prevailing wage, and they can’t be arrested for other civil immigration offenses if they are stopped for traffic violations.
The bill assures the preference of in-state college tuition (something that is denied to U.S. citizens in 49 states), and certain types of college financial assistance will be available to illegals at the state’s option. As minorities, they might even get affirmative action preferences in jobs, government contracts, and college admissions.
After the so-called temporary workers and their spouses become citizens, they can bring in their parents as permanent residents on the path to citizenship. Although the parents have never paid into Social Security, they will be eligible for Supplemental Security Income benefits, and in 46 states they will be eligible for full Medicaid benefits after five years. Siblings and adult children (and their families) will be given preference in future admissions.
The demographics of the so-called temporary workers are expected to be similar to those of the illegal immigrants already in our country. More than half will be high school dropouts, they will work low-paid jobs that require payment of little or no income tax, they are 50 percent more likely to receive taxpayer-funded government benefits than natural-born households, and they have a 42 percent rate of out-of-wedlock births (all of whom, of course, will be granted automatic U.S. citizenship).
Estimates of the cost to the taxpayers of this gargantuan expansion of the welfare state are at least $50 billion a year over the long term. U.S. taxpayers will pay for entitlements to these tens of millions of low-income families, including Medicaid, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Earned Income Tax Credit (cash handouts of up to $4,400 a year to low-wage households), public schooling and lunches, the WIC program, food stamps, public housing, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.
In the beginning I could not decipher why Bush would spend his political capital on what I call his “loser” immigration policy. Now I see why after reading Phyllis. It is as naked, crass and unadulterated a political move as I think we have ever seen or experienced in America. We have seen some crass moves by the pols, but the problem here is the enormous cost associated with this new class of people. It is a class that the pols know will be the new “minority,” who will eventually have the vote — if the pols have their way — and who will be the recipient of endless give-away programs and subsidies and the subject of countless social engineering experiments. In short, as long as the middle class is funding this whole endeavor, the votes will keep coming to the GOP. Or so the thinking goes.
It might be a jaded and dark view of this administration (to whom I have given the benefit of the doubt), but it appears to me that this is all about the vote. It is as simple as that. As for the Democrats, they see it as all about the vote, make no apologies and just want to go faster. It is a choice between dark and darker.
To make this vision even more bleak, since the middle class American will be shouldering the burden, we might be watching the beginning of the end of the middle class in America. I know this sounds reactionary. If you think so, go back and re-read Phyllis.
