The Costs Of Immigration
Runaway immigration has it’s advocates. The democrats like it because the believe that it will, in the future, generate huge numbers of, presumably grateful and loyal democrat voters. Big agriculture and big business like it because it will provide lots of workers willing, presumably, to work for very low wages, keeping the cost of farming and production low. Idealists like it because it helps to assuage chronic guilty consciences. Leftist activists and politicians like it because it will, they hope, provide more people inclined, or at least sympathetic to their views. However, none of the above mentioned parties spends much time talking about the COSTS of immigration.
The direct economic costs have been tabulated by a number of investigators. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the state of Texas now spends 12.1 BILLION dollars on illegal immigrants each year in order to “medicate, educate and incarcerate” them. Twelve point one BILLION! If you think that this burden becomes insignificant when spread among the many citizens of that state, it doesn’t. The cost to Texas taxpayers PER FAMILY is $1,197 per year! Further, the Washington Examiner has reported that our government spends $20,000 to settle EACH refugee! And the costs don’t stop there. According to the ORR (Office of Refugee Resettlement) over NINETY PERCENT of Syrian refugees go on food stamps! Staggering!
But, although the direct economic costs are shocking, they’re not the whole picture. There are many other indirect costs as well. I would like to enumerate some of these.
The first indirect cost to look at is the amazing cost of policing and security that immigration to the US has required. Since the September 11 attacks and the other attacks that followed, it became imperative for us to usher in a whole new level of security. The creation of agencies like the National Transportation Safety Board and the Department of Homeland Security did NOT come cheap. Nor did ramping up our existing intelligence services such as the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the N.S.A. This tremendously costly response to jihadi terrorism was necessitated, in large part, by Muslim immigrants to our shores. (Can you think of any attacks, for example, by our Asian immigrants? I couldn’t either.) How likely, then, are Muslim immigrants to assimilate and become productive citizens? That question is difficult to answer, but I don’t think that there are a lot of grounds for optimism. A recent Al Jazeera poll found that an astonishing 81% of Muslims world wide support ISIS (Al Jazeera is the leading Islamic news service, and as such, should be a very reliable source of data)! Are these people likely to assimilate? I think not. And now the democrats want to bring in MORE! Staggering costs are anticipated.
In addition to terroristic acts tied to jihad, it is important to also recognize the NON jihadi violence that Muslim immigrants bring with them. Just yesterday several New York City Police Officers were attacked by one Akram Joudeh, who is, reportedly an unpolitical and non religious Muslim. Reportedly he went at uniformed police officers with a MEAT CLEAVER during an arrest for a PARKING VIOLATION! He left one officer hospitalized with a 6 inch gash about his face and head, and would have caused more grievous injuries were he not stopped with 18 bullets from the police! Now, consider the costs of treating Joudeh medically (he survived), treating the wounded officer and then at some point trying him and incarcerating him (hopefully) for a very long period of time! Staggering. And he’s just one of many. A report from the United Kingdom, for example, lists POLICE STATISTICS for England and Wales (published by the Express.co,uk on August 1, 2016) showing that of the 1,602 Syrian “refugees” they took in over the past year, an astonishing 56% (900 out of 1,602) were arrested for a serious crime IN LESS THAN A YEAR! Breathtaking, isn’t it? Even in the United States, there is clearly a Muslim crime problem. Pew Research has found that Muslim incarceration in America is 11.2 TIMES over represented when adjusted for population size and compared to non Muslims incarceration. That’s NOT eleven PERCENT more, it’s 11 TIMES more! I have read several analyses of this problem, some of which trace the origins of Islamic violence all the way back to Muslim family life. In her book “The Banality of Suicide Terrorism” author Nancy Kobrin makes the point that “happy well adjusted children do not become suicide bombers nor do they become criminals.” One theory is that , because the mother in Muslim households has so little power, there is much anxiety in the muslim family which is absorbed by the young child and becomes manifest later in psychopathology and sociopathy. Other theories point to cultural differences having to do with “point of control” issues and acceptance of anger as a means to settle differences between people (some of this analysis is given by author Nicolai Sennels in his book “Among Criminal Muslims”). No matter what the actual cause, however, the effect, as shown above, is an elevated level of violent and criminal behavior in Muslim immigrants. The cost of this criminality, again, will be staggering.
Now, it should be pointed out that the costs of criminality are not confined to immigrants from the Mid East. Mexican immigrants bring crime with them as well. The debate on this issue often gets erroneously framed in extreme terms, which it should not be. I don’t think that anyone can claim that ALL of our illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals. Nor can they claim that MOST are criminals. Nor, even, that MANY are criminals. Having said that, however, it MUST be said that SOME are criminals. Quite a few immigrant murders have made national news. The heartbreaking example that always comes to my mind is that of Kathryn Steinle, a bright young woman who was shot by an illegal immigrant, Francisco Sanchez, as she walked along the San Francisco waterfront with her father in broad daylight. Sanchez was a convicted felon immigrant that had been previously deported back to Mexico FIVE TIMES! In addition to murders, there have been many rapes and very many robberies. So, there can be NO doubt that SOME illegal Mexican immigrants ARE criminals. America MUST, therefor, have the opportunity to sort them out and prevent their entrance into our country. Runaway immigration simply does not allow this, and the cost of the ensuing criminality will be breathtaking both in terms of actual economic costs and in terms of the emotional costs to the victims, families of victims and society in general.
In addition to the costs listed above, there are a surprising amount of medical costs as well. What do I mean by medical costs? Simply, the cost of treating the unique medical conditions that immigrant populations bring with them. Some of these conditions are expected in immigrant populations, while others are quite surprising. There are two categories of disease relevant here: acquired and congenital (present at birth). The first category, acquired, has many of the conditions we might expect in immigrants: parasitic infections and zika infections from south of the boarder, for example, or even the Ebola virus from Africa. The second category, congenital disease, is perhaps more surprising. An example would be the astonishingly high presence of microcephaly seen in Muslim populations. Now microcephaly has gotten a bit of publicity lately due to the fact that it can be caused by the zika virus. This same condition, however, can occur without the virus, and it turns out that the incidence of this condition is at least FIVE times more prevalent in Muslim births. By the way, you can confirm this statistic by going on line to the esteemed British journal Lancet that published some of the early work on this. Now, the reasons for this shocking rate of microcephaly are debated. One theory involves low levels of vitamin D since the women are quite covered up and vitamin D production occurs in the skin in response to sunlight. Another theory is consanguinity. Apparently first cousin marriage is common in that culture. What ever the cause, this condition results in severe retardation, and microcephalics require total care for life. The cumulative costs will be staggering.
So, in conclusion, runaway immigration has tremendous costs associated with it, some obvious and some hidden. These costs are almost never discussed and are basically kept from public awareness. I think it is imperative, therefore, that our citizens be aware of these costs as we, as a society, decide what to about this very important issue.