"UNPLEASANT REALITY"

[Note - All mistakes below are original to the text. The spacing of the email has been slightly reformatted for legibility.]

From: XXXXXX@gmail.com
To: XXXXX@yahoo.com 
Sent:  October 12, 2010 3:11 PM
Subject: Unpleasant Reality]

Take the time to look up the websites for verification.  Some of them are hard to get to - but quite interesting when you finally get to read them!

Remember this on voting day.  Please don't re-elect them again.

A MUST READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (and pass on)

Subject: Bankruptcy 101...why Arizona did the right thing!!
  
It's easy to dismiss individual programs that benefit non-citizens until they're put together and this 
picture emerges.  Someone did a lot of research to put together all of this data. Often these programs are buried within other programs making them difficult to find.

A Real Eye Opener ... 

W HY is the USABANKRUPT?
   
Informative, and mind boggling! 

You think the war in Iraq was costing us too much?  Read this:

We have been hammered with the propaganda that it was the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us.

I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. 

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times 
that the reader gets sick of reading them. I also have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts...

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state 
governments.

Verify at: http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters7fd8 
  
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML 
 
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML
 
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt..0.HTML
 
5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML
  
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/%20TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML
 
7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://transcripts.CNN.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML<http://transcripts/.. 

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.HTML 
  
9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSC RI PTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens.  In particular, their children are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn..com/TRANscriptS/0606/12/ldt..01.HTML<;

11.  During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the US  from the Southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report:

12. The National policy Institute estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.
Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute..org/PDF/deportation.PDF 

13. In 2006, illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.

Verify at: http://www/.. rense.com/general75/niht.htm<;

14. The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes Committed byIllegal Immigrants In The United States.   

Verify at:http: // www.drdsk.com/articleshtml % 20w.drdsk.com/articleshtml 
  
The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARSA YEAR AND IF YOU'RE LIKE ME, HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS AMOUNT OF MONEY; IT IS $338,300,000,000.00 WHICH WOULD BE ENOUGH TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY FOR THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY.
  
Are we THAT stupid? 

If this doesn't bother you then just delete the message.  If, on the other hand, it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the United States 

RESPONSE

Hey guys,

Thanks for forwarding me this email. $300 billion is a lot of money, so I thought I'd look into some of what the email said about how much immigrants are costing American taxpayers. It looks like the email wasn't exactly telling you the whole truth.

I clicked on the links to see where they went. Most of them didn't even work, but the ones that did went to organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). I was curious about what those were, so I looked them up, and - yikes. This website (http://www.splcenter.org/publications/the-nativist-lobby-three-faces-of-intolerance/cis-the-independent-think-tank) says that CIS was founded by someone who has ties to some pretty ugly racist groups. And FAIR was run by the same guy! I definitely don't want to get my facts on immigration from someone who's motivated by racism.

Anyway, despite what this email says, it turns out immigration is actually good for the economy. I found a really interesting article from the San Francisco Chronicle that explains it. This is what it says:

There's no dispute that a larger pool of workers -- whether legal or illegal -- boosts gross domestic product. More workers means more output. More people means more consumers spending money on food, rent and a range of necessities and luxuries. A better question is: How do immigrants affect the size of the economy per U.S.-born citizen? 'GDP per domestic person goes up,' said James Smith, a senior economist at the Rand think tank in Santa Monica and lead author of the National Research Council's study 'The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration.

You can read the whole article here: http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-05-21/news/17295663_1_illegal-immigration-low-skilled-george-borjas

And it turns out that if we were to legalize low-skilled immigrant workers, it could help the economy even more. The Cato Institute, which is a pretty conservative libertarian organization, says that legalization could help the economy by $180 billion. Their full report is here:  http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10438

It is true that immigrants -- both documented and undocumented - do benefit from government programs, just like native-born Americans. But immigrants contribute way more to the economy than they cost the government. Another Cato Institute study says that "increased economic activity created by lower-skilled, mostly Hispanic immigrants far exceeds the costs to state and local governments." In North Carolina for example, immigrants cost the state $61 million - but they also increased the state's economy by $9 billion. So on the whole, they're adding money into the economy, not costing states billions like the email claims. And did you know that a lot of undocumented immigrants even pay taxes? The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 75 percent of undocumented immigrants have taxes withheld from their paychecks or file tax returns.

That Cato study is here in case you want to look at it: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10658#16

And the CBO report is here: http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/87xx/doc8711/12-6-Immigration.pdf

One of the other things the email gets wrong is about undocumented immigrants in jail. One of the things I found when I was figuring out this email is that studies indicate that foreign-born are actually less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born men. One study in California says that U.S.-born men are institutionalized at a rate that's ten times higher than foreign-born men. You can read that study here:  http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_208KBCC.pdf#page=2

And the claim that immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans? Well, actually, the Immigration Policy Center says that immigration - either legal or illegal - doesn't cause high unemployment. They point out that if immigrants took jobs away from American citizen, then you'd have the highest unemployment rates where there are the highest numbers of immigrants - but that's not the case. Here's where the Immigration Policy Center explains all this: http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/immigration-reform-and-job-growth

It's hard to check a lot of the specific numbers when the links don't work, but all of the reliable information I've found shows that whatever immigrants may cost the government, their positive effect on the economy is far greater.

I guess it's not surprising that an email that cites organizations like FAIR and CIS and that uses derogatory terms like "anchor babies" would try to convince you that immigration is a bad thing, though. It's pretty clear that their motive is to keep a certain type of person out of the United States, not to help the country or the economy.

Talk to you soon!