Illegal Aliens: Misplaced Compassion
This issue of illegal aliens is not about immigrants; it’s about America.
America gives illegal aliens free health care, free child education, aid to families with dependent children, and other benefits, all at taxpayer expense. Estimates of net tax subsidies to American taxpayers for each low-skilled illegal alien family are as high as $20,000 per year. With a temptation like that, it’s hard to fault illegal aliens who sneak across American borders in the middle of the night.
Since America’s birth, immigrant skills and motives have not changed. But America has.
America once had land to spare, plentiful natural resources, an economy that needed and supported immigrant labor (with little or no resulting economic damage to American citizens), and government policies that required self-sufficiency and prevented immigrants from burdening American taxpayers.
A century of societal changes has shifted the scales. Now, illegal aliens do more damage to America than good.
Today, congestion rules much of America, damages our environment, and is getting worse.
Natural resources (particularly energy and water) are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. America has a surplus of homegrown labor that needs the jobs taken by illegal aliens.
Over 56,000 noncitizens are incarcerated in American prisons , thus costing American taxpayers over a billion dollars a year in incarceration costs, diverting money from beneficial programs, and forcing higher tax burdens on struggling American families.
The Tennessee Valley is not immune. We suffer brutal murders and horrific vehicular homicides by illegal aliens that prematurely end promising lives. Tennessee Valley jails regularly house over 100 illegal aliens at a time not because of their illegal status, but because they have victimized American citizens, costing us millions of dollars in incarceration costs that could be better spent elsewhere..
Competition from cheap, low-skilled illegal alien labor undercuts American wages by roughly $2,000 per year. These American workers are often the least among us and increasingly suffer from lost manufacturing jobs to overseas competition and lost domestic jobs as cheap illegal aliens expand their domination of construction trades and other blue-collar industries. More and more American workers face unemployment, low-wage jobs, poverty, and welfare. What are they to do? Where are they to go?
Long term illegal alien effects are startling. Legal immigrants are screened for deadly diseases. Illegal aliens give America drug-resistant tuberculosis and other diseases that threaten all of us.
Many of today’s construction trades business owners were once entry-level brick-layers, framers, roofers and the like. They learned a trade. They started their own businesses. Cheap illegal alien labor destroys this upward mobility by preventing Americans from stepping on the first rung of the employment ladder. Why hire a young, inexperienced American when you can hire an illegal alien for less?
No one can reasonably argue that illegal aliens do more good than harm to America.
The problem with illegal alien proponents is not their compassion for illegal aliens. The problem is their lack of understanding or compassion for Americans who die at the hands of illegal aliens or Americans who struggle to make ends meet because illegal aliens undermine their wages or, worse yet, cost them their jobs.
As your Congressman, I will do everything within my power to remove illegal aliens from America. The first step is to get the federal government out of the way of state and local governments that want to solve the problem. The second step is to make it unprofitable for American employers to hire illegal aliens rather than American citizens. The third step is to stop using American tax dollars to lure illegal aliens to America. That’s just plain dumb.
If illegal aliens cannot find jobs in America, those that are here will leave; and those that aren’t here won’t come.
