Middle America Pays the Way for Illegal Aliens

By Nicholas Stix

egend has long held that illegal aliens provide Americans with cheap lettuce and cheap child care. While that may be true for agribusiness and the upper classes, the real legacy of illegal immigration is an expensive one in which the American middle class pays and pays and pays while getting nothing but grief in return.

In states with heavy illegal alien populations, the budget of a middle-class family is full of hidden illegal alien surcharges. As a result, today's middle-class American family with two full-time working parents has less discretionary income than its traditional forebear, in which the father alone was the breadwinner. (Conditions are much worse for families torn apart by divorce or the death of a parent.)

And things are only getting worse. Immigration writer Ed Rubenstein estimates that legal and illegal immigration combine to cost American-born California taxpayers $21.7 billion per year, for a 6.6% annual surcharge. And as Rubenstein points out, legal immigrants also have a voracious appetite for social services: "California immigrant households received a net subsidy from combined federal, state, and local programs averaging $6,145 in 1996."

Compared to previous generations, middle-class Americans today pay, as a proportion of their incomes, outrageous prices for homes just to protect their children from "bad schools" in undesirable neighborhoods. So say the mother-daughter writing team of Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. In their new book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke, they write, "The brunt of the price increases has fallen on families with children. Data from the Federal Reserve show that [after inflation] the median home value for the average childless individual increased by 23 percent between 1983 and 1998 … For married couples with children, however, housing prices shot up 79 percent - more than three times faster." Increasingly high property taxes on those homes go to pay for the education of not just the children of Americans, but illegal aliens too, who, thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court decision, now have a "right" to that education at citizen expense.

In 1968 Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act that mandated teaching Hispanic children in Spanish and English, which in practice has meant in Spanish only. (The BEA was officially "eliminated" by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, yet it did not eliminate bilingual education.) That meant an additional burden on taxpayers to provide Spanish-speaking teachers in states buffeted by high levels of illegal immigration, including the entire American Southwest, and especially Florida, New York, and Illinois.

In California, with an estimated 4 million illegal immigrants (out of 9-13 million nationally), illegal immigration has transformed a public school system that was once the envy of the nation. Crime, declining academic standards, and a curriculum designed to flatter foreign populations are driving many Middle Americans into expensive private schools, while others have sought safer public school districts. Realtors have cashed in. Thus middle-class Americans pay taxes to maintain public schools from which they have been disenfranchised, or buy overpriced homes while aliens here illegally use the schools for free.

Throughout the American Southwest, public and private hospitals alike face the prospect of shutting down because of the onslaught of illegal and indigent immigrants. Laws prohibit hospital emergency rooms from turning away patients based on inability to pay, or from inquiring about a patient's citizenship status. Exploiting such laws, illegal immigrants use emergency rooms for primary medical care and often manage to avoid paying for medical services. Meanwhile, American patients with real medical emergencies, whose taxes maintain those hospitals, must pay increasingly high medical insurance premiums.

News reports tell of California citizens with genuine medical emergencies who are forced to drive from hospital to hospital because facilities often close their emergency rooms to new patients as early as noontime, due in fact to overloading by immmigrants. Bizarrely, such reports never mention the role of illegal immigration in causing the medical crisis. Instead, one hears only of "uninsured" patients, amid suggestions that the system needs massive transfusions of tax dollars, and that America needs European or Canadian-style socialized ("universal") health care. None of the stories this reporter has seen, has told of illegal aliens ever being turned away from medical facilities, no matter how trivial their complaint. Thus are Americans disenfranchised by the very medical system they pay so much to maintain.

At the same time, Americans pay higher auto insurance rates to cover the expenses caused by aliens involved in accidents who drive illegally and without insurance.

Illegal immigrants' defrauding of California's generous welfare system has long been a scandal. Such welfare fraud is now a national scandal, as state and local governments operating stealth amnesty programs violate the Constitution by negotiating directly with Mexico and other foreign governments to accept the "matricula consular," an insecure form of ID used exclusively by illegal aliens, and in issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens.

The matricula consular or state driver's licence can be used to apply for welfare benefits from officials who are forbidden by local laws to ask about citizenship status. Meanwhile, a driver's license can be used to illegally register to vote.

Increasing numbers of states are following New York's example, granting in-state tuition to illegal aliens at the same time that they charge law-abiding, American citizens from other states two and three times the in-state rate. Again, citizens are forced to subsidize benefits for the illegals.

But that isn't the half of it. As columnist Paul Craig Roberts and others have pointed out, immigrants - including illegals - with the right skin color enjoy affirmative action privileges, and go to the head of the line for jobs in place of qualified, American citizens.

According to computations by Harvard University economist George Borjas, America's immigration policy costs every American worker an average of $2,578 in annual income in the form of depressed wages, in addition to all the hidden surcharges already mentioned.

Far from producing economic benefits, illegal immigration is an expensive burden that Middle Americans who work for a living can ill afford.