By Theodore Shoebat
President Donald Trump recently declared: “Illegal immigration costs the United States more than 200 Billion Dollars a year,” he wrote on Twitter. “How was this allowed to happen?”
Of course the most devoted of the Trump cult will believe this, without question.
But thankfully, there have been people on the internet rightfully correcting so that the ways of the zombie masses don’t completely inundate the internet.
As the Business Insider has pointed out, Trump has continuously contradicted himself. Weeks ago he said it was $250 billion. During his campaign in 2016 he said that it was $113 billion.
It really appears that the president — influenced by some agenda of power and control — is just pulling really big numbers out of his head to overwhelm and terrify his audience into voting for and supporting him, knowing full well that the masses who adore him will not even recognize, or care to notice, that his numbers keep changing. Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said:
“This is an issue that he goes back to again and again … He tries to mobilize his base and to signal to core longtime Republican constituencies that he’s fighting on one of their signature issues.”
Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, also said:
“I have no idea where that number comes from … It seems to be conjured out of thin air. I haven’t seen any fiscal cost estimates, either reputable or disreputable, that place the number at $200 billion per year.”
Even David Ray, the communications director for FAIR — which is amongst the most anti-immigration think-tanks out there — diplomatically (and somewhat sycophantically) acted dumber founded at Trump exaggerated number:
“We’re not sure how the president is sourcing his number and really wouldn’t want to speculate”
The real number is really a fraction of what the president affirms to fool his followers. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank that would normally sympathetic to the ways of the Republican party, has put the number at $54.5 billion in a 2013 study.
In 2016, the Cato Institute conducted an in depth study on welfare spending and immigration. They analyzed Social Security and Medicare, the two biggest welfare programs that are twice as big as all welfare programs combined. They reported:
We found that immigrants use 39 percent fewer welfare and entitlements benefits per person than native-born Americans. Immigrants are less likely to use the individual programs in most cases and, when they do, the benefits they receive tend to be smaller.
Social Security retirement benefits provide a good example. Based on the data, adult immigrants are 47 percent less likely to receive Social Security benefits than native-born American adults. Furthermore, the average amount they receive in benefits is about $1,427 below that of natives in 2016. The net effect is that immigrants individually consumed 48 percent fewer Social Security retirement benefits than natives.
Welfare and entitlement programs are generally intended to aid the poor and support the elderly, but only some Americans and immigrants fall into those categories. In another section of my study, we compare poor and elderly immigrants who meet the poverty and age requirements for those programs with native-born Americans who are also eligible. In this section, immigrants consume 27 percent fewer benefits than native-born Americans.
One reason why immigrants use fewer benefits is because they are often not eligible for them. Legal immigrants cannot get welfare for their first five years of residency, with few exceptions, mostly at the state level. Illegal immigrants are not eligible for welfare except for rare circumstances like emergency Medicaid.
Immigrants are drawn to America’s labor markets, not to welfare benefits. The number of illegal immigrants apprehended on the Southwest border, a good proxy measurement for the number who want to come here, is down by 82 percent in 2017 compared to 2000. During that time, Congress has increased the number of welfare programs available for new immigrants.
If they were coming for welfare, there would be more illegal immigrants entering the country than ever. But there aren’t. Murder, the chaotic drug war in Central America, and a recovering economy here, combined with a faltering one there, is the main driver of asylum seekers and some illegal immigrants coming from that part of the world.
Trump’s insistence on immigrants draining the system is only giving strength to the racist elements of society. Basically, the “those foreigners are taking our jobs” crowd. Immigrant workers are doing the work that average Americans don’t want to do.
Between 1990 and 2007, the city of Las Vegas’s population doubled, and so did its immigrant population. Half of Nevada’s construction workers were Hispanic immigrants. By 2008, Nevada had the largest number of undocumented immigrant workers. So while Americans want their casinos and Vegas and Reno hotels, many of them will complain about evil immigrants taking their jobs.
The city of Houston, because of its 1970s oil boom, also saw a huge increase in immigrant workers. As Joan W. Moore writes:
“The record-breaking construction of office buildings, shopping centers, storage facilities, apartment projects, and suburban homes in the 1970s and early 1980s created an insatiable demand for Mexican immigrant labor. Undocumented workers from rural and urban Mexico became a preferred labor force, especially among construction employers who paid low wages and offered poor working conditions.”
In 2008, the Greater Houston Partnership estimated that 14% of Houston’s construction workers were undocumented, more than any other job occupation. As of 2013, in the whole state of Texas, one in 13 workers — about a million people — were working in construction; half of them undocumented.
But again, these people are just draining our society, right?
Days after New Orleans was hit and devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the US federal government allowed for businesses to hire undocumented workers. Not too long after this, the government waived federal wage standard requirements for contractors working on state reconstruction projects. This meant that workers willing to get low wages for work were allowed to be hired, which enabled the mass hiring of undocumented workers. Soon after this, one hundred thousand Hispanic moved to the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Hispanic made up half of the labor force in reconstruction, and half of them were undocumented. As one report from USA Today said, the undocumented workers made up “the backbone of post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction”. As the same support reads:
Workers who converge at dawn and wait to be picked up for 14-hour shifts of hauling debris, ripping out drywall and nailing walls.
But because many are in the country illegally, immigrant workers rebuilding New Orleans are especially vulnerable to exploitation, according to a study released Tuesday by professors at Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley.
The illegal immigrants often work in hazardous conditions without protective gear and earn far less than their legal counterparts, the study said. Nearly one-third of the illegal immigrants interviewed by researchers reported working with harmful substances and in dangerous conditions, while 19 percent said they were not given any protective equipment.
Illegal immigrants also were paid significantly less — if at all — earning on average $10 per hour, compared with $16.50 for documented workers, the study said.
Trump loves to talk about how politicians care more about illegal immigrants than Americans. Can someone explain how these workers are getting treated better than native born Americans?
In the months following the Katrina disaster, undocumented workers made up a quarter of the workforce in New Orleans. 41% of these workers were already living in Texas (and 10% in Florida) before they travelled to Louisiana for the work.
A similar thing happened during Hurricane Ike in Texas. As a report from the Houston Chronicle reads:
All across southeast Texas, roofs need repair, debris must be discarded and towns hope to rebuild.
Hurricane Ike’s destruction is sparking one of the largest rebuilding efforts the state has seen in decades, but at the same time is highlighting a thorny facet of the region’s labor force: A lot of the recovery work will be done by illegal immigrants.
Homeowners have already turned to day laborers — many of whom are undocumented — to help clear brush, tent roofs and repair other storm damage. Contractors have hired them to rebuild or restore businesses and the city’s infrastructure.
And the major work of rebuilding small towns along the Gulf Coast or big homes in Galveston will likely be aided by undocumented workers. (See Aviva Chomsky, Undocumented, ch. 6 (part 2), pp. 131-132)
But of course, to the most fanatic of the immigration focused cult, nothing good could be said about these workers.
This is not the first time the US has used propaganda against Hispanic workers. The Hoover administration bolstered its patriotic status by having a program of “American jobs for real Americans” — which meant purging society of Mexican workers. The policy was enacted by Hoover’s secretary of labor, William Doak, and was under a “take care of our own” theme. The program allowed for local laws to be passed that would prohibit anyone of Mexican descent, even legal permanent residents and U.S. citizens, from getting hired for government jobs.
On February of 1931, officered raided a local park called La Placita in Los Angeles, with guns and batons. It was a Sunday afternoon, and people who were at the park to relax were met with the heavy hand of the state. Any Hispanic was rounded up, and they had cars and officers at each entrance of the park to prevent anyone from fleeing. 400 people were lined up and asked for documentation. If both Mexican citizens and Mexican-Americans could not provide this they were detained. Some were placed on a train and sent deep into Mexico.
This was a way of showing nationalism, that the the US government was looking after “real Americans.” This policy was done with the collaboration of big corporations. Companies like Ford, U.S. Steel and the Southern Pacific Railroad, assisted this government policy by laying off thousands of Hispanic workers (lets remember that this same Ford company was backing the rise of the Third Reich, so this is of no surprise). The Los Angeles City Council objected to this policy of the Hoover administration, stating that, in the words of Joseph Dunn: .“The board got tired of the memos and wrote back to the city council, ‘This isn’t about constitutional validity. It’s about the color of their skin’ ”.
This was during the height of the Great Depression. The US government needed a scapegoat, and the Mexicans were the perfect target. Most people didn’t care about them, and when tyranny is unleashed, it is always first imposed on those to whom the masses are indifferent. As Francisco Balderrama has said: “Around the country, Mexicans were scapegoated for the bad economy and became victims of cruel dilemmas”. And like today, workers from Latin America were portrayed as drains on the American society who were taking money from welfare programs and charities, and thus hurting ‘real Americans.’ But, as Balderrama has pointed out: Mexicans “comprised less than 10 percent of the relief recipients across the country”.
When one looks to the anti-immigration circles, one of the most used pieces of propaganda that is being used by them is that immigrants have “low IQs” and thus will ruin the intelligence of the society and drain its economy. This argument has become disturbingly popular. In 2009, Jason Richwine got his Ph.D from Harvard University after writing his dissertation entitled “IQ andImmigration Policy.” The basic argument of Richwine is that immigrants from Latin America have low IQs and thus should not be allowed in. The dissertation reads: “The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations.” He also wrote:
“No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
In the same dissertation, Richwine referenced the eugenist J. Philippe Rushton, siting one of his articles that deals with the differences of the “negroid brain.” Richwine, basing his research on Rushton, wrote that “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ.” Years later in 2013, when this dissertation was exposed, the Heritage Foundation got rid of Richwine. This doesn’t mean that the Heritage Foundation is innocent. This is indeed the organization that was financially founded by Richard Mellon Scaife, who was a major funder of Planned Parenthood and close associate of Margaret Sanger. We should also keep in mind that the founder of the Heritage Foundation was Paul Weyrich who directly collaborated with a Nazi, Laszlo Pasztor, and collaborated with neo-Nazi groups in Eastern Europe. So it looks like the Heritage Foundation just got caught and was trying to save itself from bad publicity. The Heritage Foundation accepted Richwine in 2009, not too long after he received his Ph.D for his racist work. They didn’t know about his Ph.D and why he got it? Difficult to believe.
What is interesting is that one of the main leaders of the AfD (one of the largest parties in Germany), Bjorn Hocke, is influenced by the eugenist work of Rushton, and it showed when he said that the “reproductive behaviour of Africans” could be a threat to Germany. The eugenist evil is rising and is surging in popularity.
The way that these eugenists today talk is no different from how they talked back in the first half of the 20th century. The eugenists of those days, bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation, pushed for a Darwinian view on immigration. Carl Brigham, who was the assistant for the eugenist Robert Yerkes (one of the pioneers behind IQ testing), said that immigrants from Italy and eastern Europe were a threat to the country. He affirmed that 46% of men from Poland, 42% of Italians and 39% of Russians, were as stupid as — and in some cases stupider than — “negros.” These statistics were used to terrify Americans into joining the anti-immigration hysteria (just like they do today).
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