Cheap Labor

16 Feb, ’07

A recent report by the Washington Post claims that aliens working in the United States are sending $25 billion in cash back to Mexico annually. An additional $25 billion is transferred to Central and South America, with yet another $16 billion U.S. dollars vanishing into Asia. That cash draining out of the United States was predominately earned by illegals, and a few green card workers. That’s money illegals made taking jobs from America’s middle class workers. It was also reported that illegal aliens in the United States comprise the second largest underground economy in the world. An economy that does not pay $301 billion in income taxes annually. Instead, you pay those taxes. Politicians and corporate America call such illegals “cheap labor”, or by presidential definition, “They do the jobs Americans won’t do.” What the president doesn’t tell you is that illegal aliens work for the equivalent of slave wages, on which no legal, taxpaying, citizen could support a family, operate a car, or even buy the groceries. Now, corporate America wants even more cheap labor, and it appears that the government is giving it to them by further relaxing immigration and border controls.

Let’s examine the oxymoron of “cheap labor” as it applies to our new 20 some million person “illegal” working class. For example, take an average illegal alien with his wife and five kids. He works for $6.00 an hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax even if he presented a counterfeit social security card. But at the end of the year, if he files an income tax return, he receives earned income credit of up to $3,200.00. His “anchor baby” children each received free hospital care at $5,000.00 per birth which totals $25,000.00 of a hospital’s funds. Since illegals don’t have to pay, hospitals pass the costs on to you in higher rates. Illegal children also receive K-12 education at your expense. Some quick math shows one of his children’s schooling at 13 years times $7,000.00 per year equals $91,000.00. By including all five kids, you’re paying about $364,000.00 in taxes to support those five school children from another country. When you add up free breakfasts and lunches at $5.00 per meal, we have another $9,000.00 per year in food.

When you calculate the cost of schooling for the reported 380,000 anchor babies annually, it turns out that “cheap labor” costs the American taxpayer $34.5 billion annually for education in already overcrowded schools. It costs roughly $1.9 billion to pay for their hospital births each year. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, an illegal alien working in the USA will create a net drain on the American taxpayer of over $55,000.00 during his lifetime. In a more recent report, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation reported that cost at $100,000.00. Because of his wage enforced poverty, and his children, an illegal alien qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent. He and his wife qualify for food stamps and you can bet they draw them. Additionally, his wife, kids, and he, qualify for a lifetime of free medical care. Current estimates show over 3.1 million illegal alien children are attending U.S. schools. Their parents qualify for financial relief from energy bills. If they become disabled, they may qualify for Social Security Income. The average illegal child requires a bilingual teacher at a cost of $9,200.00 a year each, times five kids, equals $46,000.00 annually, but, of course, the kids don’t want to learn English in the barrios of New York, Miami, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. They could care less! The children of legal citizens then suffer from a severely degraded educational system. To give you an idea of what illegals working in our country costs us, Lou Dobbs at CNN reported on his program of Saturday, November 4, 2006, education for illegals in New York cost taxpayers $5.0 billion annually while California’s illegal population, now over 3.1 million; costs them $6.0 billion annually. When you add in the $1.6 billion in federal funds to support the 618,000 convicted illegal aliens sitting in our state and federal prisons, you really can’t define them as “cheap labor” much longer. You can’t define them as “slave labor” either. You can define their lives as “free room and board” provided by the taxpayer. When you look at the millions of American working poor now standing in the food stamp and unemployment lines, with billions of your tax dollars paying for their welfare and medical care--the real meaning of illegal aliens working the jobs that Americans won’t do for less than minimum wages brings a whole new understanding to “cheap labor.”

On December 12, the United States government carried out one of the largest nationwide operations against illegal immigrants at their workplaces in U.S. history, arresting 1,300 people at six meat-packing plants owned by the Swift Company. The government later charged some 200 of the people detained with identity theft and other crimes, but most of the illegal aliens were simply deported. The raid on the Swift plant in Cactus, Texas, a small town in the Texas panhandle, saw 75% of the local population arrested as illegal immigrants. Over the course of the plants 30 year history, it’s reported that hourly wages decreased by 50% as increasing numbers of illegal aliens were hired at reduced wages, while legal citizens were forced out of their jobs.

It’s estimated that over 35,000 illegal aliens are currently employed by Idaho’s agricultural industry. The economic strain on local government is such that Canyon County has filed lawsuits against the local employers of illegals, in an attempt to regain at least some of the county funds spent on caring for those illegals. Cheap labor? Only for the corporate world.
When one entity feeds off another being, it’s classified a parasite. Today, Mexico, Asia, Central and South America are devouring the United States like parasites. Worse, our elected parasites in Washington, DC make this ongoing situation possible by ignoring our immigration laws. They allow illegal alien “parasites” to suck the financial life-blood out of our country, while they slowly destroy our social and cultural integrity.

I’m not opposed to immigration as such. I am however opposed to the problem of illegal immigration being ignored by our elected officials. Perhaps it’s time we informed Congress, and the White House, that we did not elect them to turn a selective blind eye towards some of our nations laws.