Trickle Up Poverty (29 page)
That’s an average of eight arrests per prisoner.
That means these 55,000 illegal aliens collectively were arrested and released back into the general population of the United States more than 400,000 times. Eighty percent of the arrests occurred in California, Texas, and Arizona. Ninety-eight percent of those arrested had more than one arrest. More than a quarter of these prisoners had been arrested more than eleven times, and nearly three thousand of them had been arrested more than twenty times.
Twelve percent of the illegal aliens in American prisons have been arrested for violent offenses such as murder, robbery, assault, and sex-related crimes. That works out to more than 6,600 violent offenses, assuming no more than one arrest for a violent felony per prisoner. Given the lax attention paid to the immigration status of prisoners, though, that’s not an assumption we can make.
The number is undoubtedly much higher than that.
The report notes that the 459,614 figure represents the minimum number of arrests for this population, since not all arrests of illegals are captured in the Homeland Security database. If we had deported these criminals after their first arrest, and if we had secured our borders so we could be even reasonably effective in keeping them in Mexico—most of the incarcerated illegals are Mexicans—we would have saved American taxpayers billions of dollars and our law enforcement officers at all levels the dangerous job of making nearly half a million arrests that shouldn’t have needed to be made.
You may be thinking, “Come on, Michael, isn’t that an exaggeration?”
Actually, no. According to a report by the nonpartisan Urban Institute, “Mexicans made up the largest share of illegal aliens sentenced in federal court. The second largest group was Colombians, followed by Dominicans, Jamaicans, and Nigerians. Mexicans dominated in most of the major immigration states, but Colombians were the largest group in New York, Florida, and New Jersey.”31
It’s a travesty of justice at best.
It’s a travesty this president refuses to do his job to secure the border.
The criminal activity that is most prevalent among illegal aliens is drug trafficking. According to the GAO, nearly a quarter of all arrests of illegal aliens in American prisons were for drug offenses. Drug cartels in Mexico have become so powerful that they control many of the provinces bordering the United States. More than six thousand people, including Mexican police and military personnel as well as innocent Mexican citizens, were killed in the war between the Mexican government and those engaging in illegal drug trafficking. The U.S. Department of Justice released a statement saying that drug gangs are the “biggest organized crime threat to the United States.” The threat is so dire that Mexico is in danger of becoming a failed state, an event that would trigger massive floods of immigrants across the border into the U.S.32
The National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), a federally funded organization that gathers information on the effects of drug use in America, cited the cost of illegal drug use in the United States in the mid-1990s at $66.9 billion as a result of increased need for healthcare interventions because of illness, injuries, and deaths; lost productivity; drug-related crime; and extra law enforcement requirements.33
While most of us associate Mexico and South American drug cartels with marijuana and cocaine, the latest “designer drug” being pushed by illegal aliens is black tar heroin, and its purveyors have developed a new business model for getting it into the hands and veins of America’s youth. Rather than go through established gangs in larger metropolitan areas, the black tar heroin entrepreneurs are decentralized, preferring to peddle their wares in smaller American cities and suburbs where the threat of competition and takeover by rival gangs is minimal. It’s a problem that hasn’t received nearly the attention given to methamphetamine trafficking.
This form of heroin comes almost exclusively from a region of Mexico called Xalisco, and its purveyors have developed a distribution system in which dealers come to the customers rather than the other way around. If you’re living in a small town in Ohio, for instance—one area which has been particularly devastated by this drug—you call a number and the person at the other end of the line tells you where you can meet your supplier. Then that person calls one of his drivers, and he meets you there and makes the sale.
It’s much more difficult for law enforcement to shut down these operations because these dealers will meet you at shopping malls or in residential neighborhoods in the suburbs. The dealers generally carry small amounts of the drug with them at any given time, so even if they’re caught they usually face only possession charges. They rarely carry guns, and they don’t engage in “turf wars” with other large organizations for control of territories. Their network has expanded in the past ten years to cover virtually every state in America.
In Ohio, where the effects of black tar heroin have been particularly devastating, deaths from heroin overdose have tripled from 70 in 1998 to 229 in 2008. Similar increases in heroin-related deaths have occurred in Denver and in rust belt and Appalachian states where statistics are available. Those dying from heroin overdoses are overwhelmingly whites, since the Xalisco networks, because they avoid doing business in inner cities, do not sell to blacks and Latinos.34
This influx of illegal aliens selling illegal and lethal drugs must be stopped!
The Shadow Economy: How Obama Uses Illegals to Further His Attack on the Middle Class
Among the mistakes most people make when they analyze Barack Obama’s policies is to assume that he’s not a deceitful, power-mad subversive. That’s number one. Second, they assume he wants the American economy to grow and for America’s small businesses to be successful. The president pays lip service to the idea of economic recovery, but, in fact, in order to gain control over Americans’ lives in a manner worthy of a third-world dictator, he’s more than willing to cede global economic supremacy to China. Exploiting the shadow economy, which is fed by off-the-books illegal immigrant labor, is one of the ways he plans to realize this traitorous goal.
Ultimately, the whole process leads to the ballot box.
In order to disguise the left’s true immigration agenda, shillegals—those people who shill for immigrants’ rights—will exhort you, as Obama himself did during the presidential campaign, to think of the families you’re breaking up by heartlessly sending illegal aliens back to their home countries. They’ll also tell you that violence by illegal immigrant gangs is not a serious problem in U.S. cities. And they’ll tell you that Americans aren’t willing to do the work that illegal immigrants do.
They’re wrong on all counts.
In the meantime, the underground economy in the United States, built on the backs of illegal immigrant labor, is helping to suck the American economy dry. Writing in Barron’s, Jim McTague notes that the economic output of the shadow economy might well be over a trillion dollars a year, with estimates of lost tax revenues reaching $400 billion. And this is not to mention the tens of billions of dollars illegals send back to family members in their home countries.35
A study conducted by Bear Stearns found that “undocumented immigrants … hold approximately 12 to 15 million jobs in the United States (8% of the employed).” In addition, “four to six million jobs have shifted to the underground market, as small businesses take advantage of … illegal residents.”36 The enormous influx of illegals has put a severe strain on the availability of housing in many localities, driving up the cost of education, and making planning for such things as school enrollment difficult, this though only about half of illegal immigrant children attend school.
As the number of illegals entering the United States continues to rise, their presence here has increasingly disastrous economic and security consequences. In the wake of this, Obama and his shamelessly incompetent and unqualified Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, have put on hold one of the primary tactics used by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) to thwart illegals in the workplace. Among ICE’s jobs is going into businesses suspected of employing illegal aliens and checking IDs. Those who don’t pass muster are removed from the workplace and detained.
But when a recent successful raid on a business in Bellingham, Washington, netted twenty-eight illegals, Napolitano stepped in to put a stop to this practice. Her reasons? In her view, immigration enforcement needed to focus not on the criminals themselves but “on employers who intentionally and knowingly exploit the illegal labor market.”37
Of course the real reason Napolitano wants to change the rules of enforcement is that it’s much tougher to prove that a business was aware that it was hiring an illegal alien than it is to prove that a person is in the country illegally. It means that ICE is likely to virtually suspend the kinds of workplace raids that might restore jobs for Americans by eliminating illegal aliens from American payrolls. When they do conduct such raids, it will be to penalize the companies themselves and not the illegals who fraudulently obtain work there.
Incidentally, the day after the story of the Bellingham raid hit the papers, hundreds of people showed up at the plant to apply for jobs. Did you really think that illegals are only doing work Americans don’t want to do?
Let me connect the dots. As the number of American citizens who are unemployed increases, that means the number of people relying on the government for support will increase. This, of course, brings Barack Obama closer to his goal of total control. That’s the Marxist-Leninist state-controlled view of America Obama envisions.
The idea is to build a large majority of potential voters who are on the dole and who are not motivated to get out and look for work. As Senator Jon Kyl pointed out in debate on the Senate floor, “continuing to pay people unemployment is a disincentive for them to seek new work.” The longer they receive these benefits—they’re eligible to get them for up to ninety-nine weeks in many areas now—the less motivated they are to go to work. Demoncats constantly push to extend the length of time those out of work can receive unemployment, which is one of the primary ways they try to make American citizens more and more dependent on the federal government for their livelihoods.
It shouldn’t be a secret that Obama is out to hobble private business in the interest of centrally managing the economy and putting more and more power into the hands of the government. Allowing illegals to siphon off taxable income furthers that. But taking over the economy also helps him expand the Democratic voter base. Because of this, the Obama administration has a vested interest in maintaining high unemployment rates.
Anyone who believes Obama wants or needs to see unemployment rates come down to achieve his ends hasn’t been paying attention. While the deaf and blind people who pass for journalists in this country wail about how Obama’s policies aren’t working and cite increasing joblessness as evidence, they’re only demonstrating how little they understand about what this president is out to do.
It’s not, and it never has been, Obama’s intention to reduce unemployment.
Having an illegal do a job that rightfully belongs to a citizen is one way for Democrats to drive citizens out of the labor market and accomplish their goal of making Americans beholden to them. It also translates to more workers in the shadow economy where they don’t contribute to tax revenues, thus hastening America’s economic decline.
The shadow economy extends to the area of healthcare services as well. Here our population of illegal immigrants affects us economically in a number of ways. Because medical treatment is rudimentary or nonexistent in many third-world countries, including Mexico and other Central and South American countries, people entering the United States illegally carry with them diseases that have been wiped out in our country or have mutated into strains of diseases that are nearly impossible to treat. People who enter the country illegally are not screened in any way.
They’re certainly not screened medically.
This is no small matter.
Take, for example, the outbreak of Dengue fever which hit Key West, Florida in August, 2009. Keep in mind Florida hasn’t seen a case of Dengue since 1930. But over a nine-month period, more than several dozen cases have rocked the town. How did this happen? We know that Dengue is a viral infection that, for the most part, is transmitted by mosquito bites. However, it’s also spread when illegals enter our country from Mexico or when a tourist visits Mexico, the Caribbean, and countries to the south where there have been “an estimated 4.6 million cases from 2000–2007.”38
To be redundant, there have been zero cases in Florida for the last 80 years. But according to a report by public health officials in Florida teaming up with the Centers for Disease Control, during the last 30 years a number of “locally-acquired cases have been confirmed along the Texas-Mexico border.”39 That’s code language. What they’re really saying is that illegals who are breaking into our country aren’t just breaking the law—they’re introducing a disease which has been long eradicated from this country.
I warned you about this years ago in my bestseller, The Savage Nation. I told you that your grandparents and great-grandparents were screened for diseases at Ellis Island on the East Coast and Angel Island on the West Coast before they were permitted to enter. If they had a disease, guess what? They were quarantined until they could recover or were even sent back to where they came from. I realize the faaaairness police of today wouldn’t stand for that. But that policy of prevention prevented an avalanche of diseases from infecting our people.
Tuberculosis, for example, was almost wiped out in the United States until it was reintroduced by immigrants who were no longer screened or who entered here illegally. Left unchecked, it’s possible we’ll see cases of Dengue fever spread from Key West to the heartland of America. We’ve already learned about one woman visiting Key West who fell ill with Dengue fever and then transported the disease to Rochester, New York.40 That’s the first domino in this deadly game of unscreened illegal immigrants and the spread of epidemics.