DISEASES

Legal immigrants are required to have medical screening to ensure that they do not bring any contagious diseases into the United States.  Illegal aliens are not screened and many are carrying horrific third world diseases that do not belong in the USA.  Many of these diseases are highly contagious and will infect citizens that come in contact with an infected illegal alien.  This has already happened in restaurants, schools, and police forces. 

Malaria was eradicated from the USA in the 1940s but recently there were outbreaks in southern California, New Jersey, New York City, and Houston.  Additionally, Malaria tainted blood has been discovered in the blood supply.

Dengue was first recognized in the 1950s, affects most Asian countries and has become a leading cause of death among children in the infected areas.  Heretofore unknown in the US, Dengue outbreaks have now occurred in the United States.

Leprosy, a scourge of Biblical days, is caused by a bacillus agent and is now know as Hansen’s Disease.  In the 40 years prior to 2002, there were only 900 total cases of leprosy in the US.  In the following three years there have been 9,000 cases and most were illegal aliens. 

As noted in the article Leprosy in America: new cause for concern by Dr. William Levis, head of the New York Hansen’s Disease Clinic.  “It’s creeping into the U.S. …This is a real phenomenon.  It’s a public health threat.  New York is endemic now, and nobody’s noticed.”  In the same article, Dr. Terry Williams, who runs a Houston-based clinic serving leprosy patients across southern Texas, said that the bulk of the cases treated by his clinic were immigrants.  “A lot of our cases are imported,” he said.  “We see patients from everywhere--Africa, the Philippines, China, South America.” (emphasis added)

Hepatitis A-E is a viral infection that primarily attacks the liver.  In 2004, more than 650 people contacted Hepatitis A at a single Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurant in Pennsylvania.  Four latter died.  Hepatitis B is one of the major diseases of mankind and is a serious global public health problem.  It is estimated that 2 BILLION people are infected and about one million persons die each year.  The new vaccine is only 95% effective in preventing an infection and will not cure a person who already has Hepatitis B, which results in a lifelong infection, cirrhosis (scarring) of the liver, liver cancer, liver failure, and early death.  An estimated 1.3 million people in the US are currently infected.  No vaccine is currently available to prevent Hepatitis C-E and treatment for chronic Hepatitis C costs about $1,500 per person.

Tuberculosis (TB) kills approximately 2 million people each year.  It is estimated that between 2002 and 2020, approximately 1,000,000,000 people will be newly infected, over 150 million people will get sick, and 36 million will die.  TB is a highly contagious disease.  Like the common cold, it spreads through the air.  When infectious people cough, sneeze, talk or spit, they propel TB germs, known as bacilli, into the air.  Each person with active TB will infect on average between 10 and 15 people every year. 

The United States currently has one of the lowest rates of TB in the world.  Mexico has 10 times the rate of prevalence and many African countries along with Afghanistan, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Indonesia have rates that are 100 – 150 times higher.  Making matters worse, a few years ago a Multi-Drug-Resistant (MDR) strain of TB has emerged that is resistant to all standard anti-TB drugs.  Treating a single case of MDR TB costs over $250,000 and as much as $1,200,000 per person, and even with treatment about half of the patients with MDR-TB prematurely die.

In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., Dr. Reuben Granich, a lead investigator for the CDC commented on MDR-TB:

“Evidence of it has surfaced in 38 of 61 California health jurisdictions, and it could ‘threaten the efficacy of TB control efforts,’ Granich said.  The infected were said to be four times as likely to die from the disease and twice as likely to transmit the disease to others….Reluctant to label the infected as ‘illegal’ or even ‘undocumented’ aliens, the report notes that of the 407 known cases of MDR-TB, 84% were ‘foreign-born’ patients, mainly from Mexico and the Philippines who’d been in the U.S. less than five years.  The percentage of TB cases among the ‘foreign-born’ jumped from 29% in 1993 to 53% as of last year.”  

Recently, there was a TB Outbreak In Oklahoma City in a hospital affecting thousands. 

Hopefully, this will not be the new extensively drug-resistant XDR strain just being brought in by illegal aliens (now 4% of US cases) and which is currently impossible to cure at any cost.  In any case, it would not be surprising to find that the source of the outbreak is an illegal alien working in the hospital or an infected resident worker who became infected through contact with an infected illegal alien since the TB rate for residents in the USA is very low.  

For more information on TB and the link to illegal aliens, see:

·  Is CDC covering up skyrocketing TB rate?

·  Immigration helps diseases spread in Valley

·  Mayor favors tougher stance against illegals.

Chagas Disease (American Trypanosomiasis), endemic to South and Central America, is spread by infected triatomine bugs, known as the “kissing bugs,” that bite people.  It was unknown in the United States until fairly recently.  It is now estimated that between 100,000 and 500,000 people in the US have Chagas Disease.  Who is infected?  Mostly illegal aliens. 

Since Chagas Disease is basically unknown outside of the illegal alien community most doctors won’t recognize it and the blood supply just started being screened for it.  Most cases of Chagas Disease that occur in patients other than illegal aliens are thought to be contracted from tainted blood – blood sold by illegal aliens with Chagas Disease before the blood supply started being tested for it as of August of 2006.

HIV  The number of illegal Mexican and Central American immigrants with HIV or AIDS is unknown, mostly because researchers rarely ask about immigration status.  However, it is known that the rate of HIV infection among Latino women in California is about twice the rate of white women.  At one free California health clinic, all of the women have HIV or AIDS.  Most are Mexican or Central American “immigrants.”

Then there is Schistosomiasis, Guinea Worm Infection, Whooping cough, Cysticercosis, Morgellon's, and a host of others.

All these diseases and pathogens, and a plethora of others that are not endemic to the US, are being brought in by unscreened illegal aliens who then spread them to an unsuspecting population.  These diseases will give you something to think about the next time you are eating at a restaurant with the grunt work being done by illegal aliens who didn’t have medical screening before preparing and handling your food. 

As recently reported in Hepatitis Risk for East Asians in New York, among east Asian immigrants in New York City, one person in seven carries the Hepatitis B virus and that researchers at New York Univ. School of Medicine, found that 15% of east Asians in New York - as many as 100,000 people - are chronic hepatitis carriers, with the rate highest among immigrants from China.  That infection rate is 35 times the rate found in the general population.  The article did not mention how many of the infected people were illegal aliens but odds are the vast majority were.

Health reporter Bill Sardi noted:

“Recently an outbreak of hepatitis traced to Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurant, in Pennsylvania was inexplicably traced to contaminated green onions, not the most obvious cause, undocumented food workers who harbored Hepatitis.  For the most part, Hepatitis is a blood-borne, not a food-borne disease.  The Hepatitis outbreak infected over 650 individuals, caused 9,000 Americans to undergo immune globulin shots, and killed 4 people. 

If Americans found out restaurants can commonly infect their customers from food workers, it would be a serious blow to the restaurant industry.  Better blame the green onions.  Let’s concede the onions, grown in Mexico, were contaminated from fecal material containing Hepatitis.  Did all the green onions imported from Mexico end up in one single restaurant?  There were no other outbreaks of Hepatitis anywhere elsewhere from green onions.  There were 13 restaurant workers who had Hepatitis.  They were the likely source of the transmitted infection.

While the unions resist mandatory Hepatitis screening and vaccination for food workers, the government mandates that newborn babies be jabbed with Hepatitis vaccines before they can leave the hospital.  The logic in this defies understanding until one realizes that newborn babies of immigrant families can more easily acquire Hepatitis so all babies are given the vaccines.”

As noted in a May 2006 article, Milford taking harsher stance against illegals than Framingham, increased levels of TB are being noted and some municipalities are finally starting to take action to protect their citizens.

As unfortunate as it may be, the US can not bear the financial burden for treating the world’s sick, ill, and infected populace, but the Govt. should be protecting American citizens from the diseases being brought in by illegal aliens. 

For detailed information on how bad the situation is, see:

·   Hospital to the World Welcomes Illegal & Contagious Diseases

·   A Ticking Time Bomb: Diseases that Cross American Borders

·   Infectious Diseases in Immigrants from the Perspective of a Tropical Referral Unit.

·   Disease, Unwanted Import

·   Leprosy, Hepatitis, and Tuberculosis Rising Fast in the United States

·   Illegals' presence deepens health concerns in food industry

·   Immigration and Public Health

How many citizens of the United States are contracting third world diseases from contact with an infected illegal alien?  NOBODY knows because nobody is tracking it. 

How many citizens will come down with Hepatitis, Leprosy, E-coli, or Chagas Disease from contact with an infected illegal alien before something is done? 

How many school children must get TB before our government takes action to protect them? 

Remember the movie Alien and how the creature popped out of infected bodies?  The Guinea Worm is a mini-version.  Maybe your kids can take advantage of the experience on show & tell day.

If we screen legal aliens for contagious diseases, why are we allowing unscreened and contagious illegal aliens to attend our schools, work in our restaurants, and roam the country infecting the citizenry? 

Diseases - collateral damage from a “victimless crime” to save ten cents on a head of lettuce.

IMPACT ON JOBS

The MSM report ad nauseam that illegal aliens are only “doing work that Americans won’t.”  This mantra is mercilessly bandied about by illegal immigration supporters and echoes throughout the halls of Congress and the White House whenever the topic comes up.  What is never mentioned, however, is that the illegal aliens are artificially depressing compensation and that illegal aliens are the only ones who will do the work at such low wages.  In actual fact, illegal immigration distorts the law of supply and demand in a capitalistic society.  Additionally it is grossly hypocritical to want to raise the minimum wage on one hand while the other hand winks at illegal aliens working at far below prevailing wages.

In any case, illegal aliens are not just picking lettuce and digging ditches any more.  It wasn't that long ago that being a dry-waller, brick-layer, house framer, painter, roofer, carpet layer, plumber, or electrician was a decently compensated, middle class trade.  Now it is increasingly becoming the work for illegal aliens at far less than the free market rate.  While illegal alien workers are only a small portion of many of those job categories their willingness to work at dramatically lower rates artificially drags down the compensation for all workers. 

When the resident poor and uneducated Americans can subsist on welfare they are not going to pick lettuce, dig ditches, clean toilets or wash dishes at minimum wage.  However, if there are massive shortages of workers for such jobs, the forces of supply and demand will come in to play and the compensation for those jobs will rise to attract more workers.  At some point, it will pay more than being on welfare and be attractive enough to turn off Oprah and the labor shortage will be alleviated, especially if Congress modifies some of their asinine no-work welfare policies that penalize welfare recipients for working. 

There are also side affects of “only doing the jobs that Americans won’t do,” at artificially depressed wages anyway.  One is that it increases the load on the welfare systems as there are fewer working poor and more welfare recipients.  Another is that many unscrupulous employers pay illegal aliens in cash, off-the-books, avoiding all taxes which also makes the illegal alien worker have little or no income “qualifying” them for welfare benefits as well.

One of the problems with the MSM, the President, and Congress believing that only illegal aliens will do the work that Americans won’t is that they must have never done any of that kind of work.  It must be so beneath them that they just can’t believe “Americans” will actually do it.

When I was seventeen I was 6’2”and weighed 155 pounds.  That summer I took a job in a Dole Pineapple plant where for 12 hours a day, six days a week for three months I had to lift, carry, throw, and stack 100 pound sacks of cattle feed.  Working on the loading dock one day where the sacks were filled, it was my job to pick up a bag from an automatic filling machine and carry them eight feet or so to the edge of the dock and throw them into a truck.  The filling machine filled a bag every thirty seconds.  That is 120 an hour and 1,440 a shift.  At 100 pounds each that was 72 tons. 

It was hot, humid, dusty, stunk and I was paid minimum wage – with an agricultural exemption from any overtime.  While Tennessee Ernie Ford wrote a song entitled “Sixteen Tons” about mining coal, we didn’t get any songs written about us doing 72 tons – you just did the job. 

When I started that job I could barely pick up a 100 pound bag with two hands.  At the end of the summer I still weighed 155 pounds but could pick up a bag with each hand and fling it ten feet.  I also learned that it wasn’t the kind of work I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life. 

Many of the people reading this report have similar stories and work experiences.  These are the jobs that legal immigrants, students, and the working poor have been doing for the last 100 years.  The jobs were not done by illegal aliens.  Do we need a bona fide guest worker program to allow seasonal migrant workers from Mexico to come in and earn money picking lettuce?  Maybe, but I am tired of hearing that illegal aliens are only doing the work that Americans won’t do because that is BS – I’ve done that work.  I even did it in December 2006 when I, a fifty plus year old, spent five and a half hours snow shoveling 36+ inches of snow from my around my and one of my elderly neighbor’s Colorado homes.  I didn’t want to do that work either but I did it because it had to be done.  Where were all the illegal aliens when you really needed them?

A March 2006 article in The Christian Science Monitor by Ron Scherer, Immigration debate crux: jobs impact - Experts weigh how illegal workers affect US employment, reports:

“Do undocumented workers take away jobs from Americans?" asks Anthony Chan, chief economist at JP Morgan Private Client Services in Columbus, Ohio.  "My best guess is that they take some jobs away.  Some Americans are willing to work at those jobs at low salaries, but not all [Americans are]."

Analysts are quick to point out that the economics of undocumented immigration are complex.  Few models have been crafted that try to look at how the US economy would perform without tapping into inexpensive labor for some jobs.

"We can't run econometric models.  The numbers aren't good enough," says David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York.

One challenge in performing any calculations is agreeing on the number of undocumented workers.  Only estimates exist, and they range from 9 million to 20 million.  The conventional estimate is 11 million.  But no one really knows for sure.

By way of contrast, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates how many people out of a workforce of 143 million are unemployed.  Last month, 7,193,000, or 4.8 percent, were out pounding the pavement.

The Center for Immigration Studies, which is in favor of some restrictions on immigration, recently issued a report looking at jobs and undocumented workers.  One of its conclusions was that between March 2000 and March 2005, only 9 percent of the net increase in jobs for adults went to people born in the US.

"This is striking because natives accounted for 61 percent of the net increase in the overall size of the 18- to 64-year-old population," writes Steve Camarota, director of research.

Howard Hayghe, an economist at the Department of Labor, confirms that this number is correct. But he also points out that by 2005, the economy was doing a better job of producing jobs - and the percentage of native-born residents finding jobs rose to 41 percent.  In other words, the stronger economy absorbed more workers of all educational levels.  "The more office buildings you build, the more people you need to clean them.  The more roads you build, the more workers you need," says Mr. Hayghe.

In addition to the 7 million Americans looking for jobs, another 1.5 million are considered to be "marginally attached" - that is, not actively looking for work.  Moreover, some 386,000 are counted as "discouraged" workers.  And there are about 19 million, including students and senior citizens, who are not in the workforce.

"If we close the borders and have less undocumented workers, it would put some upward pressure on overall wages," says Mr. Chan. "It's no secret business will have to pay workers more money."” 

The National Academy of Science reported in Dropping Out - Immigrant Entry and Native Exit from the Labor Market, 2000-2005 that from 1980 to 1995 there was a 44% of the decline in the real wages of high school dropouts as a result of immigration.  Since Black and Hispanics Americans lead the statistics in dropping out of high school this means that illegal aliens affect these two groups the greatest and is a great contributor to the high unemployment rate in this segment of the population.

A commentary by Dan Stein, Executive Director, Federation for American Immigration Reform in Mass Immigration Takes Greatest Toll on African-Americans notes that:

“In some cases the influx of immigrants has allowed native-born workers to move up the ladder.  But in all too many other instances, mass immigration has moved American workers off the ladder entirely, particularly Black Americans.  According to a report by the National Academy of Sciences done during the economic boom of the late-1990s, the dramatic rise in immigration was a direct cause of dramatic declines in jobs and income for Americans with a high school education or less.

If one tracks the economic progress of African-Americans, or the lack of it, over the past century there is an unmistakable correlation with patterns of immigration.  Blacks have made the greatest economic advances during periods of low immigration, while economic conditions have stagnated or regressed during period of high immigration.”

The prestigious Wall Street investment firm Bear Stearns recently published a report, The Underground Labor Force is Rising to the Surface, which claims that the illegal alien population is double the official government estimates and that the Government vastly underestimates the cost of illegal immigration.  According to Bear Stearns:

·   The illegal alien population of the U.S. is about 20 million - roughly the population of New York State.

·   Between 4 and 6 million jobs have shifted to the underground economy since 1990.  These are not “jobs Americans won’t do, but rather jobs Americans used to do.

·   On the revenue side, the United States may be foregoing $35 billion a year in income tax collections because of the number of jobs that are now off the books.

·   There are approximately 5 million illegal workers who are collecting wages on a cash basis and are avoiding both income and FICA taxes.

·   The United States is hooked on cheap, illegal workers and is deferring the costs of providing public services to these quasi-Americans.

Long before the nation was flooded with illegal aliens somebody picked the lettuce, mowed the grass, flipped burgers, dug the ditches, and cleaned hotel rooms.  These entry level jobs were done by guest agricultural workers, the working poor, legal immigrants and, in the summer, by students.  Given supply and demand in a capitalistic society, there still are plenty of legal immigrants and resident Americans who would do these jobs at a fair and free market wage.

As Victor Davis Hanson recently noted in Rethinking illegal immigration:

“Areas in the United States that have experienced far less illegal immigration seem to have no insurmountable problems manning restaurants, cutting lawns or serving the needs of hotel guests.  Travel to the Midwest, for example, and you'll see students are employed as cooks and maids.  Construction relies on legal laborers.  The evidence suggests massive illegal immigration causes as much upheaval inside Mexico as it supposedly prevents - while aggravating, not solving, problems in the United States.” 

When illegal aliens take these jobs they not only take jobs from American teens and drive the wages down but also deny entry level work and the ladder of opportunity from the working poor and legal immigrants thus making the American Dream harder to obtain.  The subsidized labor also inhibits spending money on automation.  Additionally, even Wal-Mart can’t hire all the retirees who want to work part time.  Have you ever gone to Las Vegas?  Next time note all the retirees working in the restaurants.

As noted by Frosty Wooldridge in Our Country Coming Undone:

“Illegal immigration hurts America's poor.  In a recent account in the New York Times, Black children suffered 50% greater poverty in the past 10 years due to immigration.  Illegal immigrants compete for jobs normally done by America's poor.  A study by the Center For Immigration Studies wrote that "Mexican immigration is overwhelmingly unskilled and it's hard to find an economic argument for unskilled immigration because it tends to reduce wages for U.S. workers.

…Cheap labor from illegal immigration is not “cheap.”  It's subsidized by all of us in the form of our tax dollars paying for their services.  It makes a few employers wealthy at the expense of all of us.”

Steven Malanga notes in How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy, “A handful of industries get low-cost labor, and the taxpayers foot the bill.”  Sounds like a great deal for some employers but, as usual, the taxpayers are the ones getting ripped off.

An October 16, 2006 article in the Boston Globe, by Andrew M. Sum and Paul E. Harrington, Two kinds of immigration, notes:

“The overall effects of new immigrant inflows from 2000 to 2005 on American labor markets are unprecedented… new immigrants accounted for 86 percent of the total gain in employment that the nation experienced over the past five years.  Our analysis suggests that close to two-thirds of these new immigrant arrivals were unauthorized.  Among males, all of the net growth in employment between 2000 and 2005 was attributable to new immigrants.  This extraordinary finding casts serious doubt on the common contention that new immigrants simply take jobs that Americans do not want.

Worse still, the impact of this displacement of native-born workers and established immigrants was concentrated among young people....Available evidence shows that there has been a high rate of displacement of younger, native-born male workers and younger women without four-year college degrees by newer immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants.  Our own statistical analysis of native-born adults under 25 revealed that higher inflows of new immigrant workers in their state of residence hurt their ability to find jobs.  The negative effects were larger for young men than for women, for young adults with no postsecondary schooling, and for native-born Black and Hispanic males.

The notion that there is a shortage of unskilled, low-educated workers in the United States and in Massachusetts is a canard.  The evidence - ranging from employment rates to measures of changes in annual earnings, weekly wages, and employee benefits - reveals a surplus of less- educated workers in both national and state labor markets.  The lifetime earnings of adults without high school diplomas over the past 25 years have declined catastrophically, and these declines have imposed increasing fiscal burdens on the rest of the taxpaying public.”

A May 8, 2006 article in the Washington Times, Immigrants and wages, reports:

“Examining more closely the pattern within the 2000-2005 period provides compelling evidence illegal immigrants have been used deliberately to force down wages.  In most industries that use illegal immigrants heavily, inflation-adjusted wages rose modestly during the first years of the current decade.  Yet soon after, they dropped significantly.  Obviously, the nation's restaurateurs, hoteliers, contractors and cleaners decided paying workers $12 per hour and often less, with few or no benefits, was outrageous.  In response, they stepped up efforts to bring Mexican and Central American labor markets and standards into the United States.

The wage trends in illegal immigrant-heavy industries make it clear these sectors are not facing shortages of native-born workers.  They're facing shortages of native-born workers who will accept poverty-level pay.  If the president and Congress have any interest in ensuring American immigration policy helps raise and not depress living standards, they'll tell these employers to stop the special-interest pleading and do what their predecessors throughout U.S. history have done:  Raise pay high enough to attract the U.S. workers you need, and if your business models aren't good enough to accommodate living wages, invest in developing new labor-saving technologies.

Denying pauper-wage industries the crutch of a wage-depressing flood of illegal immigrants is essential for keeping the United States a high-wage, First World economy.  It is also essential for offering real economic opportunity to legal immigrants and native-born low-income Americans. The wage trends in illegal immigrant-heavy industries make it clear these sectors are not facing shortages of native-born workers.  They're facing shortages of native-born workers who will accept poverty-level pay.”

Steven Malanga also stated in How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy:

“Consequently, as the waves of immigration continue, the sheer number of those competing for low-skilled service jobs makes economic progress difficult.  A study of the impact of immigration on New York City’s restaurant business, for instance, found that 60 percent of immigrant workers do not receive regular raises, while 70 percent had never been promoted.  One Mexican dishwasher aptly captured the downward pressure that all these arriving workers put on wages by telling the study’s authors about his frustrating search for a 50-cent raise after working for $6.50 an hour: “I visited a few restaurants asking for $7 an hour, but they only offered me $5.50 or $6,” he said.  “I had to beg [for a job].”

Similarly, immigration is also pushing some native-born workers out of jobs, as Kenyon College economists showed in the California nail-salon workforce.  Over a 16-year period starting in the late 1980s, some 35,600 mostly Vietnamese immigrant women flooded into the industry, a mass migration that equaled the total number of jobs in the industry before the immigrants arrived.  Though the new workers created a labor surplus that led to lower prices, new services, and somewhat more demand, the economists estimate that as a result, 10,000 native-born workers either left the industry or never bothered entering it.

With all the MSM hand wringing over the plight of the illegal alien workers recently rounded up at the Swift meat processing plants across the US in December of 2006, few reported that it was knowingly going on for years, as noted by Joel Dyer in an article in the Greeley Tribune, Meatpacking industry has a long history of reliance on immigrant laborer, and that management used illegal labor and the high turn over to artificially keep wages down to the point of even reducing the wages from higher levels of pay workers received prior to the hiring all the illegal alien workers. 

You probably also missed the AP article in the Greeley Tribune, Former Dallas employees sue Swift alleging wage manipulation, where some former employees aren’t too happy about the way Swift kept the wages down. 

As for doing the dirty work that Americans just won’t do, even at those artificially depressed wages, did you happen to see another report in the Greeley Tribune by Bill Jackson, More applicants applying for Swift & Co., on your local news where it was reported that 800 citizens and legal immigrants applied for the few dozen vacant positions in the Greeley meat packing plant?

That little fact, which goes counter the MSM’s constant blather, was also reported by Fernando Quintero in the Rocky Mountain News in Loss for one is another's gain - Applicants line up to fill jobs left empty by Swift plant raid but it didn’t make the national news cycle either. 

So even with the depressed wages, caused by illegal aliens, it would appear that there are still a lot of legal immigrants and Americans willing to do the jobs the MSM say only illegal aliens will do.

All of these dynamics were actually illustrated in another raid as noted in a January 17, 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal, An immigration raid aids Blacks for a time, where it was reported:

“STILLMORE, Ga. -- After a wave of raids by federal immigration agents on Labor Day weekend, a local chicken-processing company called Crider Inc. lost 75 percent of its mostly Hispanic 900-member work force.  The crackdown threatened to cripple the economic anchor of this fading rural town.

But for local African-Americans, the dramatic appearance of federal agents presented an unexpected opportunity.  Crider suddenly raised pay at the plant.  An advertisement in the weekly Forest-Blade newspaper blared "Increased Wages" at Crider, starting at $7 to $9 an hour -- more than a dollar above what the company had paid many immigrant workers.  The company began offering free transportation from nearby towns and free rooms in a company-owned dormitory near to the plant.  For the first time in years, local officials say, Crider aggressively sought workers from the area's state-funded employment office -- a key avenue for low-skilled workers to find jobs.  Of 400 candidates sent to Crider -- most of them Black -- the plant hired about 200.

…For the first time since significant numbers of Latinos began arriving in Stillmore in the late 1990s, the plant's processing lines were made up predominantly of African-Americans.

The sudden reversal of economic fortunes in Stillmore underscores some of the most complex aspects of the pitched debate over immigration: Do illegal immigrants take jobs from low-skilled American workers?  The answer in Stillmore initially appeared to be yes.”

Note that the plant once had predominantly Black workers but then replaced most of them with illegal alien Hispanic workers at lower wages.  When the illegal aliens were removed, the Black workers got their jobs back and the wages went up.  The article continues to go on talking about the problems of the plant keeping its new workers at such low wages.  However, this is not an argument for needing workers that will “do the work Americans won’t do” but illustrates that the free market equilibrium of supply and demand is still not functioning in the plant.  Rather than pay a decent wage to get good workers, the mindset is still to pay the lowest wage possible for a dirty job so consumers can pay ten cents less for a pound for chicken.  The use of cheap labor also inhibits modernization, automation, and mechanization where productivity would go up resulting in even more skilled and higher priced employees producing more packaged chicken than lower priced employees for the same total labor costs.  Unfortunately, until all the illegal aliens working in all the other chicken processing plants have been removed the free market will still be distorted.

Given the current excitement amongst the Democrats by the potential Presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, it is worth remembering an article by Robert Engler from 2004, A goblin is haunting Barack Obamas election campaign to become the Democratic senator from Illinois.  That goblin is in the shape ... where it was noted:

“The fact of the matter is, illegal immigration, especially illegal immigration from Mexico, is hurting Black Americans.  If Democratic candidates ever getting around to speaking the truth, they will have to tell Black voters that illegal immigration is taking jobs away from Black Americans, cutting into resources available for welfare, and restructuring public schools and many urban areas.  In short, the votes of Latinos are brought by the Democrats at the expense of Black America.

Tony Brown, author of What Mama Taught Me, knows all too well how Black Americans are injured by illegal immigration.  He writes, '''The U. S. Census Bureau reported in the New York Times...the poor Black and Latino communities lose the most income of any group of Americans, including all Americans who did not finish high school and all Americans who are paying higher taxes to subsidize welfare benefits for illegal immigrants and businesses that hire them.  Illegal immigrants overuse welfare benefits and services and underpay income taxes for a net loss to local, state and federal taxpayers.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) http://www.fairus.org, has also documented the detrimental impact of illegal immigration on Black Americans.  In California, Blacks are being forced out from communities like South Central, Los Angeles, where they have long lived.  ''This once predominantly Black neighborhood is becoming largely Hispanic.  South Central is being transformed. Here we talk about 'Black flight.'  People are leaving neighborhoods where they have lived for years because they don't feel like they belong any more reports Terry Anderson in the San Francisco Examiner, (Feb. 3, 1999.)"

The Federation for American Immigration Reform continues in its report that, ''Other statistics are also sobering: a GAO study found that a decade of heavy immigration to Los Angeles had changed the janitorial industry from a mostly native Black, unionized workforce to one of non-unionized Latinos, many of whom were illegal aliens.  According to the Census, the employment of Black Americans as hotel workers in California dropped 30 percent in the 1980s, while the number of immigrants with such jobs rose 166 percent.  A similar story can be told of the garment industry, the restaurant business, hospital work, and public service jobs.''  One can expect Blacks in Illinois to suffer the same declines as illegal immigration from Mexico continues.

Immigration researcher and commentator Roy Beck noted in his 1996 book, The Case Against Immigration that: ''To review the Black side of our nation's immigration tradition is to observe African Americans periodically trying to climb the mainstream economic ladder, only to be shoved aside each time.  It is to see one immigrant wave after another climb onto and up that ladder while planting their feet on the backs of Black Americans....The most racist policy in this country for the past 25 years has been our immigration policy, because it has been the worst thing that has happened to Blacks from the federal government since slavery.''

The Harvest Institute also documents the impact of illegal immigration on Black Americans.  ''Dr. Claud Anderson, president of The Harvest Institute, a Black research and education organization, announced that The Harvest Institute does not support President Bush's recently proposed amnesty for illegal immigrant aliens and has released an Information Alert (available at www.harvestinstitute.org).  Dr. Anderson said, ''Despite the stance of many civil rights groups, immigration's impact on native Blacks and their communities is disproportionate, direct and devastating. Blacks are losing faith because the government continues a pattern of bestowing the rights that should first go to native Blacks to immigrants from foreign countries. Native Blacks are ignored and patronized with symbolic and ceremonial actions by both political parties.  The issue of immigration is roiling within Black communities and has become...divisive.''

As the Democrat's ''multicultural'' candidate, Barack Obama has little to say about this multicultural issue.  You can read his position papers and look at his website and find no recognition that illegal immigration from Mexico is hurting Black Americans.  One has to wonder what kind of immigration policy Obama will vote for if he ever becomes a U. S. Senator.  One has to wonder even more why Black Americans continue to vote Democratic, when the Democrats are not looking out for their interests.''

This article is referenced not to slam Obama or the Democrats, because the collateral damage from illegal aliens is affecting all Americans of all political parties, but to illustrate that the Democrats know it disproportionately impacts their primary voting block the greatest but still are doing nothing about it illustrating it doesn’t make any difference what political party the inept and traitorous politicians belong to when it comes to tolerating illegal immigration.

As noted in Debating the effect of undocumented workers:

“Workers who have been most affected by the massive influx of illegal immigrants into the United States over the past five years are low-skilled, young native-born workers, according to a recent study by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.

"It appears that employers are substituting new immigrant workers for young native-born workers," economists Andrew Sum, Paul Harrington and Ishwar Khatiwada wrote.  "The negative impacts tended to be larger for in-school youth compared to out-of-school youth, and for native-born Black and Hispanic males compared to their white counterparts."

The study concluded that the rise in immigrant employment, especially among illegal workers over the past decade, has contributed to a breakdown in the nation's labor laws and labor standards, undermining the unemployment insurance and Social Security systems and basic worker protections that have evolved over the last century.”

What are some of the results?  In a recent Associated Press report, Hispanics' immigration to South raises tensions with Blacks - Groups have same goals, could be allies, some say, it was noted:

“We've just never been friends and buddies, ‘said Isabella Brooks, the president of the NAACP in Colquitt County, near Tifton.  She said she has no white neighbors and doesn't socialize with the Hispanics up the street because of the language barrier.” and “In places such as Houston and Los Angeles, where Blacks and Hispanics have long lived side by side, the two groups most often fight for jobs, notably low-income jobs that were often held by unskilled Black workers.”

Note that the language barrier creates greater balkanization and the job displacement fuels resentment.  More collateral damage.

However, it is not just a Black or Hispanic thing.  Illegal immigration hurts all Americans.  As noted by T.J. Bonner in Judicial Watch’s Special Report, New Fronts In The Immigration Battle:

“You cannot convince me that if you paid a decent wage to American workers, that they would not take many of these jobs.  Drywall hangers, for example, used to make $18, $20 an hour; now the going rate [is] $8 to $10 an hour.  These are jobs that Americans cannot afford to work in because they cannot afford to live in sub-standard living conditions.  On the other hand, people who have no interest in this country, [who] live [with] 15 adult males, unrelated, in a one-bedroom apartment…[and] send most of their money back home – They are more than willing to take those jobs.”

Harvard Professor George Borjas has reported that illegal aliens displaced American workers at a cost in excess of $133 billion dollars in 2005.  Does that sound like a “victimless crime?”  By any conceivable measure the answer has to be “NO!” especially if you are one of the displaced workers.

So we now conclusively know that illegal aliens are taking jobs that Americans used to do and still would do if greedy businessmen and big business weren’t trying to take advantage of illegal aliens and hire the cheapest labor so that they could put the ill-gotten savings to the bottom line. 

For more detailed information on the impact of illegal immigration on jobs, see:

·   Dropping Out: Immigrant Entry and Native Exit From the Labor Market, 2000-2005

·   A Jobless Recovery? Immigrants Gains and Native Losses

·   The Evolution of the Mexican Born Workforce in the US

·   Immigrants and wages

·  Immigration wage debate rages - Pay stagnates in sectors full of foreign-born workers

·  Increasing the Supply of Labor Through Immigration - Measuring the Impact on Native-born Workers

A related immigration issue that has a negative impact on jobs and wages is the abuse of the guest worker program.  In case you think the President’s and Congress’ guest worker program is just for allowing temporary, seasonal guest workers in to pick lettuce, think again. 

Listed below are some of the jobs that H-1B visas are being issued for. 

·   Accountants and Administrators

·   Executives, Managers, Administrators

·   Programmers and computer scientists

·   Various engineers and Technicians

·   Research Associates and Scientists

·   Lawyers and Tax Analysts 

·   Teachers and college professors

·   Postdocs and Fellows

·   Sports Instructors and Physiologists

·   Doctors, Nurses, Med-Techs, Therapists

·   Pharmacists

·   Surgical and Dental Assistants

·   Fashion models, Secretaries, Clerks

·   Architects, Musicians, and Artists

·   Youth Counselors, Day Care, and Cashiers

Do those look like jobs that “Americans won’t do?”

Besides a legitimate guest worker program for the seasonal agriculture industry, American companies and universities are allowed to import “temporary” workers for all sorts of jobs that they need workers for.  The main reason given is that there are no workers available but usually it is that there are no workers available at the lower wage rates desired by the employer. 

Does that sound familiar?  In any case, the program has no serious safeguards to protect American workers from being replaced and is often abused to simply provide cheap foreign labor to increase bottom line profits.

The Immigration act of 1990 established an annual quota of H1B visas to allow the best and brightest workers in where there are legitimate shortages in the US workforce.  In a capitalistic society, supply and demand takes care of shortages and surplus – in a much more efficient way than government programs could ever do. 

In March 2003, the American Engineering Association reported that the US high tech sector lost 560,000 jobs between January 2001 and December 2002.  While this corresponded with the dot-com bust, it is worthwhile to note that during the same period companies sponsored more H1B and other “temporary” visas than the numbers of jobs lost.  Obviously, there could not have been a simultaneous surplus and shortage but employers simply wanted cheaper labor.

In 2001 it was reported that 9 out of every 10 new job openings for computer/IT were taken by temporary workers on H-1Bs.  In 2002 the INS issued 312,000 visas.

More and more frequently, companies are using the program as part of their job outsourcing plans where the foreign worker is brought in and trained by the American worker.  Only when the foreign worker goes home the job goes with him and the American worker is then laid off. 

For information on how extensive and growing the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign workers is becoming, see a Counter Punch special report by Craig Roberts, The New Face of Class War, where it is reported that even the upward mobility of middle class jobs is being dismantled.

For more information on the abuse of the guest worker program, see: H1B and Who is America For?  This is something to keep in mind when the politicians talk about expanding the “guest worker program.”  What they may actually have in mind is allowing your employer to replace YOU with a cheaper foreign worker.

Additionally it is worth noting that those higher priced H1B workers do not contribute to the Social Security System, as noted by Edwin Rubenstein in Can Immigrants Save Social Security?:

“An estimated 500,000 foreigners are in the U.S. on temporary H-1B visas under the 50-year-old program designed to fill employer needs unmet by U.S. residents for professionals and specialists with a bachelor's or higher degree, including architects, engineers, accountants, doctors, college professors and even fashion models.  Nearly 54% are involved in computer-related fields, according to a recent federal study.  Their median income is about $50,000, and half are expected to earn between $40,000 and $60,000. 

Admittedly, H-1B’s represent a narrow slice of the immigrant workforce.  (Technically they are “guest workers” rather than immigrants.)  But their high earnings makes them valuable potential contributors to Social Security.  With median income of $50,000, the half million H-1Bs could potentially contribute $1.9 billion to the pension system, or enough to fund benefits for more than 95,000 retirees. 

Foregone payroll taxes are just the tip of the iceberg.  H-1b’s are entitled to every social service funded by U.S. taxpayers.  They use our city parks, roads, and other infrastructure.  And after working six years without paying Social Security taxes many H-1bs get Green Cards, qualifying them for Social Security benefits when they retire.  No effort is made to collect back payroll taxes.  And what about those American workers who lose their jobs, their health insurance, and Social Security points because companies prefer the cheaper H-1bs?

Recent immigration laws have raised the H-1B quota and made it easier for displaced H-1Bs to stay in the country.  That’s good for companies that employ guest workers, but ordinary Americans and their Social Security System are worse off because of it.”

Come to think of it, aren’t these the kind of legal immigrants we want rather than unskilled and uneducated immigrants who are a drain on society?

In any case, when you hear the Government wanting to increase the amount of “guest workers” in the country to solve the illegal immigration “problem,” remember that what they are not saying is that they want to allow YOUR company to bring in guest workers for YOUR job, whatever it may be.  Unless, of course you are picking lettuce – only illegal aliens will do that work at the depressed lettuce-picker wages.  The devil is in the details. 

Only when H1-Bs are given to foreign correspondents and media people will the MSM start reporting on this disgraceful program. 

Finally, while seemingly counter intuitive, it is worth noting that increased immigration is actually bad for union participation as illustrated by

Go to Numbers USA – Unions for more information on the relationship between immigration and unions. Given the difference in wages between union workers and illegal alien workers, I suspect that illegal immigration is even worse for unions.

Reduction in wages, job displacement, and billions of dollars out of the pockets of American workers from a “victimless crime” to save ten cents on a head of lettuce. 

Exactly how many Americans jobs will you accept being lost to save ten cents on a head of lettuce?

Exactly how much in lost wages will you accept?  Will you accept it if it is your job and wages?

 

 

www.congressandimmigration.com