(snip)"Advocates furiously downplay the cost of this nation-within-a-nation. They peddle instead sugary platitudes that hold illegal immigrants are simply hardworking people who "pay taxes" and fuel the American economy.
The facts, plainly visible to working Americans, tell a different story:
The estimated 1.1 million illegal immigrants currently in the nation's public school system cost taxpayers $9.6 billion every year in an attempt to educate them (despite the illegal immigrant community's epidemic-scale dropout rates)
The 2.2 million children of illegal immigrants in America, often referred to as "anchor babies" to ensure the parents can stay, add an additional $20 billion to that tab
In California, the 2004-05 state budget spent $9,811 per pupil in the classroom. An estimated 425,000 illegal immigrants in the state's classrooms during that period cost taxpayers more than $4 billion -- a figure that does not include the "anchor baby" population in the classroom
More than 40,000 illegal immigrants jammed California's prison system in 2004, costing taxpayers $1.5 billion in tax dollars not reimbursed by the federal government
In one of the cruelest jokes played on the American taxpayers, illegal immigrants are allowed to claim children living back in Mexico and qualify for the earned-income tax credit, which traditionally has helped the American poor. {this little tidbit is even beyond my own pessimistic imagination - Melonie}
These numbers are just the tip of a fiscal iceberg that government officials have slammed the American ship of state into -- and now they are striking up the band and rearranging the deck chairs.
Americans hear the mantra every day that without illegal immigrants working in jobs that citizens are too lazy to do, everything from a clean hotel room to a head of lettuce would skyrocket in price. A day without a Mexican -- the refrain now goes -- would literally lead to the collapse of the American economy.
To the contrary, a year without the crushing weight of millions of illegal immigrants on communities and their budgets just may save the American working and middle class.
Yet there is precious little discussion of how a family of six Mexican nationals living in Pomona, Calif., who soak up nearly $40,000 annually in taxpayer dollars just to educate their four children, is contributing more back into the economy. Consider even if the primary wage-earner in this family grossed $35,000 annually, a fortune back in Mexico, most of that income is likely to be off the books and undertaxed.
But education is only one part of the social services system meant for at-risk and in-need Americans that illegal immigrants have drilled into: health-care costs and subsidized housing are two other areas where the crushing cost of illegal immigration is destroying the system.
Working- and middle-class Americans know that illegal immigrants do not live in the shadows, as political mythology would have it, but more aptly they occupy a parallel universe -- one that sees them compete for American jobs, access benefits for Americans and yet send their hard-earned money out of the country to Mexico, propping up a hopelessly corrupt government."(snip)



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