Diane Alden
Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2005

Cliches are the enemy of thought. Immigration and demography are subjects too important to be left to shallow thinking and trite sayings. The great physicist Niels Bohr once said, "The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, the opposite of a great truth is often another great truth." Of course immigration has been good for America, but mass immigration during the twenty-first century brings America far more liabilities than assets. – Richard D. Lamm, former governor of Colorado, Executive Director, Public Policy Institute, University of Denver

"They only take jobs Americans don't want. They are good-hearted people. Values don't stop at the Rio Grande. They pay taxes. They just want to become citizens and fit into American society. They make the economy hum. They offer neat ethnic restaurants and markets. They want to practice their religion.

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  Besides, who will build our houses? Who will fix our roofs? Who will landscape our gardens? Who will care for our children? Who will take care of our old people? Who will clean hotels? Who will pick the peas? Who will flip our burgers?"

All this begs a host of questions: Who did all these jobs before the big influx of recent migrants? Are native-born Americans good-hearted people? Do American taxpayers not carry the load? Do Americans pay into the system more than they take out in social services? Why is the underground economy growing as fast as or faster than the legitimate economy? Why is nearly $90 billion a year sent to foreign countries through remittances? How many native-born Americans hold dual citizenship in other countries?

Why are the majority of Americans who practice Christianity not allowed representation of their symbols in the public sphere? Why are sovereignty, cohesion and assimilation less important than restaurants and markets? Why do recent immigrants receive preferred minority status in business loans? Why do politicians pander to ethnic groups? Why is Spanish our second language? Why do very few immigrants join the U.S. military?

For every trite cliche offered by politicians or apologists for unrestricted immigration/migration, there is a countervailing truth.

Minnesota: Heartland in Trouble

I chose Minnesota as an example of immigration policy gone nuts. But every state in the union, particularly California, Florida, Texas, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Georgia, have horror stories of their own.

In the last several years, Minnesota has taken in 25,000 Hmong and Somali refugees, which the federal government and feckless "charities" dump on the taxpayers of a far too lenient entitlement-festooned state. Not to mention the influx of illegals from south of the border into places like Austin and Wilmar, Minnesota, where the Jolly Green Giant and braceros pick the peas.

Along with peas getting picked, the Austin area more recently discovered that eight police officers tested positive for TB. The increase in Third World disease in the U.S., in Minnesota and nearly every state with a large immigrant population, has risen significantly since 1990.

Minnesota has approximately 25,000 Somalis, 25,000 Vietnamese, 12,500 Russians, 13,000 Laotians, 7,000 Cambodians and 7,600 Ethiopians. Actually, no one has a clue how many illegals of any country there are in Minnesota. Estimates of numbers of immigrants the last 20 years hovers around 300,000 to 400,000 in a state population of less than 5 million. Future estimates are that population increase will be due almost totally to an increase in immigration and will reach 8 million by 2020 or sooner.

The Minnesota State Demographic Center estimates there are 60,000 Hmong immigrants in Minnesota. They have a higher use of some form of entitlement than any other ethnic group. They have a fertility rate that averages 6.4 children per family. Meanwhile, the birth rate for a native of Minnesota is around 1.8 children.

Latinos are the largest of the recently arrived ethnic groups to Minnesota. Their fertility rate is almost as high as that of the Hmongs. They have a much higher rate of HIV infection than the native population, and hepatitis is rampant. TB dogs their numbers, as do Chagas disease and STD. They use some form of entitlement in higher than native numbers because their wages and education levels remain in the toilet.

Meanwhile, Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam account for two-thirds of the TB cases brought into the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that TB incidence among the foreign-born increased from 22% of the national total in 1986 to 46% in 2000. The newer strains of TB are antibiotic resistant.

In 2003, foreign-born persons accounted for 53.3% (7,845 cases) of the national case total, and 25 states reported less than 50% of their cases among foreign-born persons. Patients with TB reported most commonly were Mexico (25.6%), the Philippines (11.6%), Vietnam (8.4%), India (7.7%) and China (4.8%).

TB patients from certain countries were concentrated in certain states. For example, New York reported 56.1% of the national total born in Ecuador, Minnesota reported 55.2% of patients born in Somalia, California reported 52.3% of patients born in the Philippines, and Florida reported 49.4% of patients born in Haiti.

More recently, authorities have halted the importation of Hmong into Minnesota because of a significant increase in drug-resistant tuberculosis in Minnesota, Wisconsin and California due to Southeast Asian immigrants from Thailand.

Number crunchers in Minnesota were surprised a few years back to see a huge increase in HIV among Minnesota's black population. It was only in the last two years, when they began separating that population by origin, that the real truth came to light. HIV-positive persons from Africa had a 61 percent increase in new infections last year, from 28 to 45, with women infected in higher numbers than men.

Minneapolis is one of six U.S. urban centers for HIV-positive African refugees, although those cases (49 since 2000) are not included with the data on new infections.

Governor Tim Pawlenty says in his budget proposals for 2005-6 that the state will have to drop 27,000 poor adult Minnesotans from Minnesota Care, a low-cost health insurance system where monthly costs per person range from $4 to $208. Because of budget constraints and decreasing tax revenues, only those with children will be allowed to use the system.

This tactic may not have been necessary if so many recent immigrants were not in the programs. Use by Minnesota natives has decreased; use by recent immigrants has increased. Add this to the fact that Minnesota did not adopt the fraud prevention program of other states called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE). Nonetheless, it doesn't change the fact that the increases in Minnesota's population of those who receive entitlements, like health care and free education, have been largely due to an increase in legal and illegal immigrants and refugees.

FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) interviews hundreds of immigrants and citizens every year and haunts the immigration data. Recently, arrested aliens indicate they have entered the U.S. destined for Minnesota for economic reasons. A set of false papers can be purchased in Minneapolis for $50.

Rather than make sure everyone using Minnesota Care is in the state legally, the state Legislature and Minnesota's dimwitted collectivists prefer to hand out largesse to illegals or multicultural frauds and dump Minnesota's native-born poor rather than traumatize migrants with nasty things such as proof of who they are.

Is Minnesota's native-born population being shortchanged? Probably. As citizens of border states have discovered when they try to get medical care at local emergency rooms or hospitals, they are often turned away because illegal or legal immigrants overwhelm the medical facilities. Cost of education and splintering of efforts is a direct result of a flood of migrants from around the world into the U.S. Remember that nearly 90 percent of yearly population growth is because of immigration – legal and illegal.

This isn't blaming the victim; it is simply reality which officialdom refuses to acknowledge. To point all this out is not racist; it is a warning to legislators and national leaders that there are only so many people we can absorb before the entire system collapses. Exactly what kind of society do we want? Are we going to get Blade Runner meets Brave New World, or a new Golden Age?

Recently, FAIR published a statement by an official with what used to be the INS. As described by Curtis Aljets, the INS district director in Minnesota: "The number of illegal aliens in the state of Minnesota has increased substantially over a disconcertingly short period of time and this increase has the net effect of (1) keeping the wage rate below that considered by some to be a "living wage", (2) extensively burdening the state infrastructure (i.e., schools, medical care, law enforcement), and (3) contributing to unsafe working conditions."

The INS, Aljets continued, "is prohibited by Court Order from conducting routine verifications of the status of aliens for entities such as employers, with the exception being those cases where an employer can indicate a reason for suspecting a document submitted by an alien worker to be counterfeit or fraudulent. ... Minnesota is the exception to most other states in the nation by opting to not participate in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)."

It is not ALL about economics. Thanks to misplaced compassion and guilt rippling from Washington and various social welfare agencies, the recent murder of six Wisconsin hunters by a Hmong immigrant living in Minnesota was predictable. Chai Vang was a refugee who came from a primitive Southeast Asian culture because 35 years ago the Hmongs helped the CIA in Vietnam and Laos. He was a small child when America left Vietnam and Laos. Concerned about their future, our government brought over thousands of Hmong and the exodus has not stopped since.

Nonetheless, even though Chai Vang had lived in the U.S. for 20 years and was naturalized, he was not assimilated. Like many other refugees and immigrants from primitive Third World cultures, he raised livestock or fowl in his urban backyard, had more than one wife, had absolutely no clue about concepts such as trespassing on private property.

Many people are brought here from primitive cultures, like Hmong and Somalis, because of floating "compassion" from those who don't have to deal with the results. Chai Vang had trouble with the abstraction that behavior and rights have limits. His culture did not recognize that land could also be private property. Even after 20 years he doesn't get it.

Officials and authorities who work with the Hmong community will tell you that Vang was not an aberration but representative of attitudes of Hmong culture regarding private property. Problems with Hmongs during hunting season have become commonplace in the upper Midwest. Those problems are not limited to hunting but also to issues of property ownership of all kinds.

Meanwhile, the Hmong continue to marry their daughters off before age 17. After decades, many do not speak English. They still require one or more welfare programs to survive. The Hmong have the highest rate of welfare use of any recent immigrant group and a high fertility rate of 6.4 children. In what was once nearly a murder-free area, in just 15 years Hmong in the Twin Cities had 20 domestic homicides in which men, women and children were done in by a spouse or parent.

Meanwhile, the city of St. Paul built a school primarily for Hmong children. At one point, the state was going to pass out grants so that young Hmongs could go back to Laos and Vietnam and "experience" their roots. Additionally, a former mayor of St. Paul said that recent immigrants take up 85 percent of public housing.

According to a former federal marshal familiar with the Hmong community in the Twin Cities, "our Hmong problem is cultural. Nowhere in their culture is private property or zoning ordinances considered important. For many of these folks, even those who have been here for decades … believe it is their right to hunt on private property without permission … happens all the time. Personally, I think they come from a culture so primitive that notions of private property or one wife at a time are difficult to grasp.

"We don't seem able to help them assimilate, the schools don't help, and the Minnesota welfare system attracts them from other states and around the world. There are success stories but … overall I think it has been a disaster.

"What is a tragedy is that too many of their young ones pick up the very worst aspects of urban culture – the gang culture. The increase in Hmong and Asian gangs nationally in 15 years is off the charts. We continue to have problems with gangs of Hmong boys pimping out Hmong girls … and traveling gangs that go from state to state to Wisconsin and Maryland – everywhere.

"In the Twin Cities clan leaders pretty much run the show. But they – no one, including the church groups or agencies that bring them here – really help these people assimilate. Maybe they shouldn't – I don't know. Honestly, I think it would have been kinder to leave them in the region they come from, set them up in business, let them remain in areas with similar cultures rather than bring them to the U.S. Don't tell anyone I said this, but in my mind it is a form of colonialism in reverse."

He told me this on the condition of anonymity. I wonder why?

Hmong are not the only group whose lives are lost in translation. A dear friend of mine has several Somali children in her 6th-grade class. She said when the first group came over a few years ago, the janitors would find used toilet paper on the bathroom floors, toilets unflushed, and children's sanitary habits made some of the teachers and students freak out. Even now, Somali boys continue to need a special bus with a security guard because fights break out and drivers are threatened. Female teachers are disrespected because in Muslim culture women are of little consequence. One boy is such a wild child the school sends him home in a taxi or one the teachers has to drive him.

As for those jobs immigrants take that no American will do, the analysts at the Minnesota Demographic Center had some truth to tell to power: "These demographic trends are expected to continue with resultant tight labor markets in areas where food, especially meat and poultry, processing is concentrated. Other industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor will continue to import workers, unless there is some radical change in the national policy towards that type of hiring."

Are you listening, President Bush, Tom and Condoleezza, Dick et al.? I seriously doubt it.

Disease and Pestilence Come to America

Illegal aliens bypass health tests and legal immigrants are poorly screened for disease. The clean, healthy environment Americans worked hard to achieve is being threatened because federal officials refuse to curtail mass immigration. The United States is in danger of experiencing a public health calamity. – Wayne Lutton, Ph.D. (History), Editor, The Social Contract Quarterly (www.TheSocialContract.com )

Dr. Lutton writes: "Immigration is a threat to our nation's health. Diseases nearly eradicated are breaking out again. Tropical diseases, previously unknown in the United States but prevalent in Third World countries, including dengue fever and Chagas disease, are appearing for the first time. Medieval ailments, such as leprosy, are resurfacing.

In addition to drug-resistant TB, in excess of 7,000 new cases of leprosy have been diagnosed in the USA in the past three years. Hansen's disease (leprosy) is now endemic to the Northeastern United States for the first time ever. In the previous 40 years, only 900 people had been affected by leprosy. More recently, two-thirds of the cases of TB brought into the United States originated in three countries: Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam. Recent outbreaks include Portland, Maine; Delray Beach, Florida and Michigan.

Besides TB, leprosy and dengue fever, there is also a fatal form of dengue that is similar to Ebola or hemorrhagic fever. When you include HIV, malaria, polio, measles, Chagas disease, cholera, SARS, and one of the most prevalent, hepatitis A-B-C, the increase in immigration without significant health controls is one way to decrease the surplus population and kill off the native population – us.

But then, disease and pestilence don't come cheap.

New Jersey's growing population of illegal immigrants is going to cost state hospitals around $200 million this year alone.

Doctors and administrators around the state complain that the cost of treating illegal immigrants has forced them to delay the purchase of life-saving technology or the addition of valuable staff. New Jersey's population of illegal immigrants costs state medical facilities around $200 million per year. The federal government has set aside $200 million to reimburse all 50 states for costs of health care for illegal immigrants. That means New Jersey will receive a $5 million payment to defer some of the costs.

One New Jersey hospital administrator says, "For some hospitals, the money they spend on uncompensated care for undocumented immigrants may force them to delay a big service or economize on existing care." The hospitals in just one city, Los Angeles, report that they lose $350 million a year on illegal immigrants.

In California, the state medical association reports the cost of caring for illegal immigrants forced 60 emergency rooms to close during the past decade.

As it is, 80 percent of the state's emergency rooms report that they now lose money, largely because of the care they give away to illegal immigrants, and hundreds more emergency rooms may be at risk.

In Arizona, several dozen hospitals have cut back services to cover losses from providing free care to illegal immigrants. The Southeast Arizona Medical Center points out that the costs of caring for aliens drove them out of business.

Among those who qualify for charity care, hospitals in New Jersey expect to spend $813 million this year and get $381 million back from the state.

Multiply this by 49 other states and one begins to see the extent of the problem that Washington just can't admit. Its priorities are so out of whack it makes a sane person wonder why anyone, including the states, sends tax dollars to supplement federal incompetence and failure.

Myth – Lies and Wishful Thinking

When my grandmother and her two children arrived from Krakow, Poland, in 1910 to join my grandfather in Minnesota, there was no welfare system. There were no immigration lawyers. Grandma and her family learned English and most of the time spoke it at home. Neither the banks, phone company, doctors, schools, stores or government offices offered interpreters or instructions written in Polish. Therefore, they learned English very quickly. Grandma not only spoke English and Polish but six other languages as well.

When they had financial difficulty they did without, received help from the local Catholic church, or took whatever measures or jobs were available to deal with it. They went to night school and became citizens, worked hard, sent their sons to WWII, raised kids, and never looked back. A dual citizenship was unthinkable. It was ALL about their new homeland – America.

When immigration was scaled back in 1920, it gave Grandma and her family a CHANCE to assimilate. But in our day, a large percentage of recent arrivals have dual citizenship or never attempt to become naturalized. The U.S. government accepts this circumstance –just ask Bush's State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. Even more do not speak English and significant numbers don't even attempt to learn.

Recent immigrants are almost completely economic residents. Welfare entitlements are not just for citizens, as they should be; they are also given to green-card holders, or legal immigrants. If they are illegal, the states have to provide medical care and education at the very least. If a majority, 63 percent, do not bother to acquire citizenship but simply use the U.S. as a cash cow and in turn are used as cheap worker bees for commerce, then we are in as great a decline as the Roman Empire in its final days.

President Bush talks about the ownership society. There is more to that idea than a house, a car and a job. If there is no connection to a nation beyond economics, entitlements and pop culture, then sooner or later that society will collapse. That has always been the case.

By and large, immigrants are not lazy people. Employers consistently remark how hard they work, for long hours at low pay and without complaining. Nonetheless, most of them are at the bottom of the economic heap and many of them remain there even after decades. They continue to remain there because there is no let-up in the numbers of "willing" illegal workers who come to the U.S. year after year and decade after decade. There is no change in what is taught or the way it is taught.

Sparse evidence exists that illegal or legal Hispanic immigrants are lifted out of their circumstances by public education. The data suggests that their lot in life will not significantly improve in our lifetime, or theirs, because of some magical educational bullet. It doesn't mean they can't learn; it simply means they don't learn much in what passes for public education in America in 2005.

Victor Davis Hanson's excellent "Mexifornia" gives a detailed account of the impact of a good education on those of Mexican descent in the 1950s with a robust civic culture, as opposed to what passes for public school education and civil society in our own era.

Today, Hispanics have a lower college graduation rate than African-Americans. Less than two-thirds graduate from high school. Aside from African-Americans, they have the highest illegitimacy and abortion rates.

The latest research from the Center for Immigration Study points to the fact that use of welfare programs by legal immigrants does not decline significantly the longer immigrants live in the country. In 2001, households headed by immigrants who had been in the country for more than 20 years continued to use the welfare system at significantly higher rates than natives do.

According to the CIS study, a high rate of welfare use by legal immigrants is not explained by unwillingness to work. In 2001, almost 80 percent of immigrant households using welfare had at least one person working. The problem is that these people, even after a generation or more in the U.S., are at the bottom of the economic ladder with low incomes and a lack of education. Even if they are legalized through another silly guest worker amnesty, CIS concludes they are likely to remain poor, requiring tax credits or some form of entitlement.

The CIS analysis of Census Bureau data shows that between March of 2000 and March of 2004, the number of adults working actually increased, but all of the net change went to immigrant workers. The number of adult immigrants (18 years of age and older) holding a job increased by over two million between 2000 and 2004, while the number of adult natives holding a job is nearly half a million fewer.

Washington refuses to recognize that the number of adult natives who are unemployed or who have withdrawn from the labor force is dramatically higher in 2004 than it was in 2000. These findings raise the possibility that immigration has adversely affected the job prospects of native-born Americans.

Those in the technical and engineering field, in higher-paid skilled occupations, should not be surprised to learn that the biggest factor in the net increase in immigrant employment was not at the bottom of the labor market. In fact, half of the net increase in immigrant employment among workers occurred to those with education beyond high school. Engineering and computer consulting jobs, as well as more mundane teaching and nursing jobs, increasingly are going to immigrants.

Data from many sources indicates that immigration is enlarging the supply of workers throughout the labor force. Statistics from the Department of Labor and diverse indicators from occupational associations support the conclusion that across the board, American-born workers are being displaced.

Much of that displacement is through the work visa system, which Congress is trying to enlarge in favor of employers and cheaper foreign workers. By the way, the latest tactic for getting around work visa caps is to use "student" visas or one of the other two dozen types. The little devils in D.C. are so clever – please remember this during the next election cycle.

The H-1B, H-2, L-1 and permutations of student visas are giving commercial interests what they want. However, they are swindling the worker, taxpayer and citizen big time with what is laughingly called the "free market."

Referring to Minnesota again, during the rah-rah '90s, thousands of high-caste Indian engineers and computer people, as well as Chinese, were allowed into the U.S. on work visas. When the economy tanked, they didn't return to their countries of origin but remained in the U.S. to create an oversupply of cheap high-tech labor.

Corporate America wants even more foreign workers, as seen by Microsoft's Bill Gates' calling for an increase in computer analysts and engineers from abroad. Congress will find ways to get around caps. We have the best government money can buy. A corporate subsidy is what it is.

The economic impact of all this on American-born workers is being disregarded by the administration and Washington insiders. That is the case whether they are Democrat or Republican, agency heads or policy makers.

In any event, the real nightmare and tipping point on immigration will be if Congress passes Bush's guest worker/amnesty program. It doesn't take a TV psychic to predict that there will be a significant increase in use of means-tested programs by the "guest" worker – OR, more likely, the children born to them while they are in the U.S. working. That has been the case for several decades.

Add to their numbers those who come into the U.S. labor force through the corrupt visa system and "work" visas that are part and parcel of trade treaties like NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA or MFN and"student" visas. The leveling down of wages and working conditions may be unparalleled since J.D. Rockefeller had iron and coal miners buying their own shovels for the privilege of working in Rockefeller mines.

The price of cheap labor, trade policy and "diversity" is mighty high. Yet apologists refer to it as the free market at work. Another indication that they look at human beings as commodities or part of hyphenated identity groups. Meanwhile, if these same excuse makers and the Machiavellian federal government actually believed in the free market, they would have allowed the market to force agri-business and cheap labor industries to mechanize or adjust.

If the market were allowed to work within the framework of U.S. laws, that would be one thing. If those in power respected OUR interests, they would uphold immigration laws on the books, police the ports and borders, allow wages to rise, strangle public education before it kills again, and stop using trade and immigration to deconstruct the United States of America.

They call it globalization – I call it treachery and failure to uphold the Constitution or defend our borders and limit immigration to replacement levels. The entire American system – political, economic, social, cultural, historical – is at risk because the leadership class chooses to enact policy that is destroying us on one hand while doing nothing to uphold the laws of the land on the other. If federal, state and local authorities don't do the right thing or do nothing, who will?

Next: Part IV – Borderline Insanity: Global Schemes That Make Me Cringe

For a list of references in this report, contact me at alden@newsmax.com. Thanks mostly to the work of Center for Immigration Studies' Mark Kirkorian and Steve Camorata, FAIR (Federation for Immigration Reform), Professor Phillip Martin, UC-Davis, Center for Disease Control, the Minnesota Demographic Center, and the extensive work and devotion of Michelle Malkin, Frosty Woolridge, Peter Brimelow, Joe Guzzardi, Steve Sailer, Ed Rubenstein, Terry Anderson, Dan Stein, Roy Beck, NumbersUSA, Project USA, Victor Davis Hanson's "Mexifornia," Harvard's George Borjas, the late Dr. Hugh Graham, the American Patrol, agents of the U.S. Border Patrol, retired Federal Marshal J.D., former FBI and Customs service agents. Particular thanks to the individuals on the frontlines of this effort who understand the implications of failure to convince authority that we have a problem with the entire immigration system and get them to help us fix it.

For those who might be interested, I may be heard weekly on Marc Bernier's radio show, Wednesdays 10 a.m. CST/11 a.m. EST, wearing my military and terrorism expert hat – www.wndb.am. You can also Google Marc Bernier to learn about this extraordinary talk radio host whom I consider a friend. Gluttons for punishment can hear me periodically on Mark Edwards' "Wake Up America" Mondays at 10 p.m. PST/9 p.m. MT and 12 a.m. CST or on the Internet, KDWN, Las Vegas. Mark "has it going on." Immigration and important issues of the day are covered in depth.

Contact me at alden@newsmax.com.

Editor's note: