The Towers! They Do Nothing!
David Weigel | April 23, 2008, 6:38pm
An
update from the ever-less-bitter immigration wars:
The government is scrapping a $20 million prototype of its highly touted "virtual fence" on the Arizona-Mexico border because the system is failing to adequately alert border patrol agents to illegal crossings, officials said.
The move comes just two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his approval of the fence built by The Boeing Co. The fence consists of nine electronic surveillance towers along a 28-mile section of border southwest of Tucson.
This just two months after feds admitted they
couldn't even finish building the useless thing. More hilarity from the dry run:
Agents began using the virtual fence last December, and the towers have resulted in more than 3,000 apprehensions since, said Greg Giddens, executive director of the SBI program office in Washington.
But that's just a fraction of the several hundred illegal immigrants believed to cross the border daily near southwest of Tucson.
It's not a secret that the Bush administration was engaging in kabuki here. It did the same thing on the non-virtual, brick-and-morter fence that'll never be built.
Headline explained
here.
Dave | April 23, 2008, 7:48pm | #
Immigration has direct massive negative consequences on today's and yesterdays economy.
Are you now living from paycheck to paycheck, wondering how your going to feed your family, making your mortgage payment.
You need to be aware of how much Uncle Sam is secretly skimming off your taxes and diverting into government freebies
for immigrants and illegal foreign nationals.
This is a document that should disturb you, because the globalist open border, free traders do not want you to see it. This is an thoroughly researched analysis of immigration costs, that the hierarchy of the U.S. government and special interests groups do not want you to read.
Now you can read the disturbing details in the new 70-page document called “The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration” by Edwin S. Rubenstein (www.eagleforum.org/sources). A Manhattan Institute adjunct academic with a mile-long scholarly resume, he has been doing financial analysis ever since he directed the studies of government waste for the Grace Commission of 1984.
Did you know that taxpayers are supporting immigrants to the tune of $9.000 each. That means your subsidizing each family of four with $36.000.
More than 37 million immigrants in the United States, both legal and illegal, cost the federal government more than $346 billion last year, twice as much as the nation's fiscal deficit, according to a report released yesterday. The loss estimates, the report said, included $100 billion in federal taxes lost "from the reduction of native incomes caused by immigrant workers." He also stated that even programs that are not usually associated with immigration, he said, have actually added financial burdens to the taxpayers.
Our students are short-changed in overcrowded classrooms, because teachers must spend more time with illegal immigrant children.
The financial burden immigrants inflict on education starts with the 3.8 million K-12 students enrolled in more-expensive classes for the non-English-speaking. When we add up the costs of hiring specialized teachers, training regular teachers, student identification and assessment, and administration costs, the total amounts to an estimated $1,030 per pupil, or $3.9 billion. Of the 48.4 million public school children, pre-K through 12th grade, 9.2 million or 19 percent are immigrants or the children of immigrants. In the next few years, immigration will account for almost all the increase in public school spending.
Look at the $1.5 billion cost of incarcerating 267,000 criminal aliens in federal prisons. That's not the worst of it; prison capacity is limited, so 80,000 to 100,000 other criminal aliens have been prematurely released to prowl our streets. Then their is the expenditure to hunt down 676,847 fugitive warrants by (ICE) and special agents. Actual cost for incarcerating illegal foreign nationals since 2001, over $1,407.798.965 dollars.
The Manhattan Institute report includes all sorts of costs that pundits conveniently ignore, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. EITC gives an average cash payment of $1,700 per year to 25 percent of immigrant households.
The emergency medical treatment given 'gratis' to illegal immigrants is another enormous cost, causing many border state hospitals and emergency rooms to close. Emergency means any complaint from morning sickness to athlete’s foot, gunshot wounds to AIDS.Even after some restrictions were imposed in 1996, 24.2 percent of immigrant households still receive Medicaid, whereas the figure for native-born Americans is 14.8 percent.The stiudy calculates that Hispanics account for 19.2 percent of Medicaid enrollment, while they are 13.7 percent of the U.S. population.
This is just the tip of the iceberg about these outrageous costs.
Please go to (www.eagleforum.org/sources) and know what your taxes are paying for...?
