Any guess on what it costs to have illegal aliens in the US? second in a series of essays..stay tuned...workes cited avail on request

Essay 5

The price we pay for illegal aliens

"The business of America is business". -Calvin Coolidge.

And business has been very good.

To feed the great furnace of industry America has mined its natural and
human resources with great efficiency. Too much efficiency perhaps. Beginning
with the industrial revolution, workers have been drawn to work the factories of
the big city. As we move to a service based economy, the requirements of that
work force continued to grow and evolve as well. This continual draw requires
the work force to be replenished as it moves upwards. Just below the level of
unskilled worker is the illegal alien, a bottomless well from which the bottom
of the American workforce is being drawn.

The illegal alien represents a class of employment where there is no step
up, no promotion and unemployment is as close as the end of the day. They work
on our farms; they build our schools, our roads and make our clothes. In April
of 1999, a report to Congress, the General Accounting Office (GAO) tried to,
pardon the pun, account for all of the illegal aliens at work in our country.
By their estimate, of the 133 million Americans at work, three to five and a
half million were illegal aliens. This report continued to break down the
estimates to say 37% of the agricultural workers, 23% of the meat packing
industry, 39% of certain segments of construction and a whopping 41% of the
garment industry workers in the Los Angeles basin are illegal aliens (Removic).
These numbers reveal that there is a significant economic contribution being
made by the illegal alien. The question, what is it costing America needs to be
explored.

A fair argument could be made that the wages paid to the illegal alien is
artificially low, and so only attracts these kinds of workers. However, this
would only be true in a failing economy as competition for employment positions
increases, and we are not in a failing economy. If an employer offers a certain
wage for labor and there aren't any takers then wages would have to be raised
until those positions were filled. Right now, we are in a roughly balanced
economy where wages and inflation and consumer prices are within arms reach of
each other. This also means that employers looking to spend as little as
possible are finding a bargain with the illegal alien.

There are several indices that should be explored in looking into the
economic and social costs of using the illegal alien in the American workforce.
There are some obvious places where one could look, such as the schools systems,
healthcare providers or any state mandated program that provides assistance to
the illegal alien. These places have production costs that are easily measured.
These services the American public provides are an expense supported by tax
dollars. Some items like police and national security are easy to relate to the
costs of the illegal alien. What many don't realize that other, expensive
programs like trash pick up, and public health monitoring are incurring costs
associated with the illegal alien.

In the illegal alien population, there are law abiders and the
lawbreakers. It would appear that one significant cost of the illegal alien is
the burden they place on the court systems. Lets start at the border and work
our way north. In an August 2002 special report from the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, the authors reflecting on the changes the 1996 reform act on
immigration, say the addition of 5 thousand more agents almost doubled the
number of arrests for illegal immigration (Scalia, Immigration Offenders..).
These numbers are from the years before September 11 increased the scrutiny our
borders received. In the last decade, the number of INS and Border Patrol agents
in the southwest has increased to more that twice that.

That's a lot of new federal wages being paid out of the public coffer, and
so has the success of protecting our borders. This also means over worked public
defendants and over crowded prisons. In 2000 over 16 thousand illegal aliens
were processed thru one court system alone. The upside to this increase in court
activity is longer jail terms and higher conviction rates. The balance sheet
shows we're deeply in the red and all we have done is arrest the illegal alien
and begun to prosecute them.

These prosecutions have not concluded without success-- There are upwards
of 70,000 illegal aliens in local, state or federal prisons, all duly prosecuted
for a variety of crimes ranging from, obviously, illegal immigration, to drugs,
weapons and homicide (Scalia, Noncitizens..). Suspiciously, the FBI has not
commented on organized crime nor offered any RICO numbers on the illegal aliens
in this country. With the total illegal alien population hovering around 7
million, the gangs that now operate between Mexico and U. S. major cities are
beginning to get the scrutiny once reserved for European organized crime
syndicates, which will put more illegal aliens in prison.

Sidebar: The careful reader might begin to suspect that some of the source
material used to support this essay is, at best, a bit dated. Admittedly so, and
for two reasons. In the last few years, the Federal and state governments focus
on these issues provides the researcher a new level of detail that is not
available currently, One such detail is increasing border agent numbers and the
resultant increase in arrest and prosecutions rates. The other reason for
looking at data in this range is these extrapolations are based on data that was
collected in the 2000 national census. This is the same information our
legislative and executive branches are look to when making policy decisions.
This writer prefers to use that same information and portray it in a manner
consistent with fairness and still support a view.

Almost 10 percent of the entire illegal alien population is in prison,
costing the taxpayer upwards of 5.8 billion in the last three fiscal years
ending 2004 (Stana. Information on Criminal Aliens). Our prisons are over
crowded with illegal aliens most of whom are repeat offenders. Another study of
55 thousand illegal aliens showed that they were arrested on the average of 8
times each for nearly a half million times the federal, state or local
authorities have intervened in the interest of public safety (Stana. Information
on Certain Illegal Aliens.. ).

The revolving door of local courts and prisons has only served to add to
the cost of the illegal alien in our society by allowing the criminal portion of
the illegal alien population to repeat their crimes multiple times before they
are prosecuted locked away. And lets not forget the victims of these crimes. The
drugs they peddle go to addicts that will need treatment. Victims of larceny and
assault have losses. The events on the other side of the crime have costs
associated with them that are extremely hard to put a dollar amount on, but we
know exist.

So we have taken out that element of the illegal alien, which cannot abide
by any law and placed them in prison. What's left? More than 6 million who
participate in our society in some constructive manner. They draw on our
goodwill and generosity and repay us with their simple labor. Perhaps, simple is
not entirely true. Most illegal aliens seeking employment that pays better than
$4.00 /hr will need a set of documents that identify them and give them a
taxpayer identification number. Unfortunately, there is no mathematical
possibility that the paltry sum of social assessments the illegal alien
contributes is equal to the social benefits reaped by that population.

One of the most expensive items in any ones budget is healthcare. For the
uninsured of Massachusetts, there is a safety net, called the Uncompensated Care
Pool. It's a fairly simple process of the legislature measuring how much each
healthcare provider spent in the previous year to provide care of those who
could not afford to pay. Finding the funding and splitting up the proceeds is
usually conducted at the state level. As you could expect, there is almost
mandatory, inflationary accounting that goes into the reporting process. With
this in mind, understanding that over 450,000 persons in Massachusetts received
healthcare benefits totaling a tic over $701 million via the uncompensated care
pool (Lischko). To be fair, all persons reported in this annual report needed
and received healthcare. To apply this accounting to the national number of
illegal aliens, we would first have to divide them into those that received some
healthcare intervention in the last year and those who remained healthy. A
reasonable, ten-fold increase is more likely the amount spent nationally
providing healthcare to the illegal alien.

The amount spent on providing healthcare for the illegal alien is not a
voluntary expenditure. It is the result of lenient courts, belief in basic human
rights and good old American generosity. And this is not a secret amongst the
illegal population; rather it is another reason for entering this country. Free
treatment for a rare or complex disease is just the tip of the iceberg. Being
barred from asking any applicants residential status also prevents the social
interventionist from withholding any programs reserved for residents. In
layman's terms, when you appear in a clinic for health care, you open the door
not only to free healthcare, you also are made aware of everything that may be
of benefit to you, i.e.: food, shelter, housing, transportation and
translational services if needed. Think of the cost savings in this country if
we were to assign our healthcare dollars to an individual whose residency could
be verified before the first bandaid was dispensed.

On the national healthcare scene, Madeline Cosman, Ph. D., Esq. in a recent
article in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons rails against the
Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. Its intent is to protect
those Americans who present to an emergency room for treatment and is one the
mandate that makes denial of treatment a criminal offence. This act makes no
provision for compensating those who provide it. The individual states are
often left to decide how those fees get covered. From the illegal alien point of
view, this Act means that there is no possibility of being turned down for
presenting to an ER for a hangnail, and getting that treatment in the most
expensive setting possible (Cosman). By the way, this means the illegal aliens
can also have their babies here as well, creating another conundrum, baby
anchors.

In the course of human events, man and woman will get together and produce
a baby. If that baby is born in the US, it is considered a citizen. This also
instantly qualifies the family for welfare, food stamps, housing assistance, in
essence the works. The state of California had over 700,000 illegal aliens on
its rolls because in part by anchor babies. The parents, who can not be deported
at this point, also quality for Supplemental Security Income, and, among other
goodies, respite baby sitters-- should the desire to dine alone arise. Respite
Baby sitters? For illegal aliens? It is truly mind boggling the social
engineering that goes into the design of the programs that provide good and
services to the needy of this great nation. Or perhaps it would be better said,
'It's amazing how many things you can think of when you are spending someone
else's money'.

Baby sitters and free trips to the mall are small potatoes when compared to
the hazardous contribution the illegal alien makes the maintenance of American
health. Infectious disease is the unwanted gift the illegal alien brings the
U.S. Drug resistant strains of tuberculosis that come over the border are lethal
to 60% of those infected. The good news is that we can treat the disease, but it
will cost around $250,000 a person to cure. The bad news is that those same
illegal aliens will infect another 10 to 30 people (Cosman). It's a gift that
keeps on costing the U.S. taxpayer long after the giver is gone.

This might not be so bad if we knew the exact number of persons coming over
the border with the infection. We don't, and probably never will. What we do
know is that in neighborhoods where illegal aliens tend to populate, the TB rate
goes up. In one suburban setting it jumped 17% --Bad; in another the rate of new
cases skyrocketed to 188%- - a crisis on anyone's scale. The Center for Disease
Control claims 66% originates in Mexico, the Philippines or Vietnam (Cosman).
There is no possible way to place a dollar figure on the effects that one
disease like TB has on the national economy, especially when one considers that
all of those infected have not been discovered, let alone treated. But if one
could take the kinds of costs that TB implies, and compound it by all the other
diseases that are infecting law abiding Americans one would easily see a
national healthcare crisis on the horizon

Diseases like Hepatitis, Malaria, Dengue Fever, Leprosy (yes the biblical
scourge is back!) and Chagas is running towards the American healthcare system
like a herd of buffalo on stampede. Problem is, we have nothing to stop it.

Medicine in America is big business. Large medical corporations, insurance
companies, hospital systems that measure numbers of active patients in the
millions-all of these institutions have watched their bottom line sink when
compelled to treat those who can not afford to pay.

Attempts to provide medical care only to those who truly need it, is
usually trumped at the legislative or judicial level. As the system is
configured, every day is open house. Maureen Sullivan-Hahn RN, a case manager at
the Lynn community Health Center in Massachusetts relates a common interview
scenario that clearly demonstrates the attitude the illegal alien carries with
them when being screened. New patients will present themselves to the clinic
with an issue requiring attention. During the induction process, the patient is
asked what brings them here. Invariably, they are told through either their
community or in the native land, that you need to go to Massachusetts if you
want the best doctors. One patient from an island in the Caribbean went so far
as to say that there are signs and handbills posted about the clinics and
hospitals in America. It would appear that word of the healthcare and other
social programs has become so common knowledge that it's being advertised in
other countries. Healthcare for the most part is a very leaky ship. There is no
captain, no one is bailing and the passengers are still being loaded on. The
question is when will it sink.
Illegal aliens arrive not in drips and drabs, but in batches and family
units. Mother and father will most likely go to work, leaving children, thanks
to a 1982 Supreme Court ruling, in the public school system. According to Jerry
Sepers article in The Washington Times, the state of California alone is
estimating the cost of providing a kindergarten to 12th grade education at $7.7
billion a year. This figure only covers the children of illegal aliens.
Considering that California has one of the largest illegal alien populations,
meeting the financial requirements has created a hardship that resulted in
Proposition 187.

Proposition 187 was an attempt to disengage the illegal alien from those
services that were funded at the state and local levels. The added expenditure
the illegal alien imposed on the education and public assistance programs was
cause, in part, of the economic crisis of California in the mid 1990's. The
public spoke in November of that
Year. Unfortunately, this is when the courts began to uphold the wishes of the
state over federal policy. The Supreme Court maintained that the choice of what
to do with the illegal alien falls under the purvey of the federal government,
thus superceding the individual states desire to not bankrupt itself. Needless
to say, the deficit continues to grow in while no court date to settle the
matter is forth coming.

With California spending $7.7 billion -1995- dollars a year on illegal alien
education, Jerry Sepers article in The Washington Times shows they must surely
have the lion's share of that burden, yes? NO. All states are compelled to
provide similar serves to all illegal aliens, given that the federal government
sets that ball in motions and lets it bounce around within each states border as
it sees fit. The above figures are for a large state, but are a decade old. How
much is being spent in California now?

In Minnesota last December, the Department of Administrations prepared a report
for Governor Pawlenty detailing the expenditures that states efforts to educate
the children of illegal aliens. This numbers are a bit flawed in that it used
fairly solid but older estimate of the illegal alien population, then
extrapolated to the present, but arrives at a reasonable number of 80 to 85
thousand illegal aliens in Minnesota at the time of the report. Bottom line on
education costs for 17,000 children is 146 to 158 million dollars a year. Can
that be right? Yes, spending around $8500 per year to educate a child is not an
unreasonable amount. Multiply this per child amount by the number of children
nationally and it becomes clear why the Federal and state governments run
deficits.

Education is arguably one of the most expensive items provided to the illegal
alien. It is not with out soul that we do this, but there is a streak of
self-preservation in it as well.
Poverty is a cycle that only education can break. It is fortunate that America
is in a position to accommodate those less fortunate in our public school
systems, even with a cost that is severe at best. The payoff comes when that
anchor baby, or child of an illegal alien learns a way out of the fruit trees
and towards corporate America. Educating the child is preventing crime,
collecting taxes, and gives hope to those who receive it. From the American
perspective, can the possibility to give back to the country that gave to you
reward enough?

It is sad that even the humanitarian acts of kindness require the coin of the
realm. But that is the crux of this argument. America is not a bottomless
wellspring of golden fountains. All revenues are given to support the
maintenance of government and it's programs. During that era after World War II,
the business of America was doing exceptionally well. So much so that we might
have become a bit too generous with our aid, too lenient with our foreign policy
and a bit lax about our borders.

Enter the illegal alien, the lowest building block of the work force in this
country. They came to help feed the great furnace of industry, but more and
more, they come to feed at the public trough. Perhaps not intentionally, but
they do. By the fact of being here, illegally they are apt to be arrested but
most likely to be arrested for other charges first. Each brush with the law does
not result in a deportation, but a costly court process and return to the
streets. Perhaps on the fourth or fifth or eighth pass thru the court system
will end in a prison term that add still does not address the basic issue of
illegal presence in this country.

The federal government sets policy on handling the illegal alien and that
agenda now has the courts backing. The unending costs continue to escalate and
attempts to curtail those costs have proven futile. America needs to realign
those currently on the bench, so that the wishes each states legislative branch
is supported not stymied. At the Federal level, there is an obvious need to
establish courts to prosecute en masse and any illegal alien arrested, after
prosecution should be returned back to their country of origin. Lets ignore the
leaky border problem for now.

A word on foreign policy is due here as well. Clearly this does not need to
be a one sided effort to control the borders and port of America. What should be
used here is a little carrot and stick diplomacy. There is little documentation
that Mexico is actively patrolling the border to prevent illegal crossing, nor
is any policy present that discourages such immigration. Perhaps a little
assistance from the donor country would go a long ways in suppressing the
arrivals on causing problems once they get here--Legally.

The illegal alien once crossed into America expecting only to get a job and
a decent place to live, Nowadays, after evading the tens of thousands of newly
minted border guards, the illegal alien brings his extended family. The parents
can work; grandparents get free healthcare and the kids an education. It has
become common knowledge that the hospital emergency room has become the modern
Clinica Espanol. You will be seen, treated and given your prescriptions and
follow up visits in a virtual Walmart of healthcare settings. As an added bonus,
the American taxpayer is expected to not only pay for this type of medical
treatment, but they pray they do not get any of the lethal infectious diseases
coming across the border as well.

The cost of the illegal alien goes beyond what we can legislate, what we
can extend in human generosity. The cost of the illegal alien is American pride.
With every evening newscast announcing the reduction in wages and benefits, the
American worker, is hurt. When the American worker see jobs go to the lower paid
illegal alien, they can not compete and their pride is hurt. When the college
kid home for the summer can't find a job mowing lawns because the local
landscaper employs illegal aliens and undercuts his prices, American pride is
hurt.

The business of America is business as Calvin Coolidge once said. What he
never expected was that business greed would supplant American pride and let
profits rule above all else. Business in America is to blame for the illegal
alien in this country. If anyone were to go in search for employment and not
find any, how long before they would move on to continue the search? Business
in America is willing to employ the illegal alien and let the rest of the
country foot the bill.

Unfortunately, business in America is very good.