"Sent my my cousin's wife down in Florida. Yes Florida." -Doug
Well, here is a round-up of red delicious talking points with links. The usual. Blame the democrats in congress for popular talking points like: Immigrant rapists, oil prices, Iraq and the housing crisis. This forward is slightly different in one respect, it really tries to use linked citations.
You'll find citations from unbiased think tanks and reputable news sources are included. Here's my own google noodling about these organizations, feel free to click and scoff. The Tax Foundation, The Center for Immigration Studies, The Federation for American Immigration Reform, The National Policy Institute (a nuanced white advocacy think tank), Rense.com (ready the foil hats), and The Violent Crimes Institute (some lady's blog).
Happy mother's day! -m
-----begin forward-----
In Just one year - - -
This email comes in three parts:
Part 1
In just one year. Remember the election in 2006? Thought you might like to
read the following:
A little over one year ago:
1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high;
2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon;
3) The unemployment rate was 4.5%.
Since voting in a Democratic Congress in 2006 we have seen:
1) Consumer confidence plummet;
2) The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.50 a gallon;
3) Unemployment is up to 5% (a 10% increase);
4) American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evaporate
(stock and mutual fund losses);
5) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars;
6) 1% of American homes are in foreclosure.
America voted for change in 2006, and we got it!
Remember, it's Congress that makes law not the President.
H e has to work with what's handed to him.
Quote of the Day........"My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the
history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it."
-- Barack Obama
Part 2:
Taxes...Whether Democrat or a Republican you will find these statistics
enlightening and amazing.
www.taxfoundation.org/publicati
Taxes under Clinton Taxes under Bush 2008
Single making 30K - tax $8,400 Single making 30K - tax $4,500
Single making 50K - tax $14,000 Single making 50K - tax $12,500
Single making 75K - tax $23,250 Single making 75K - tax $18,750
Married ma king 60K - tax $16,800 Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K - tax $21,000 Married making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 125K - tax $38,750 Married making 125K - tax $31,250
Both democratic candidates will return to the higher tax rates
It is amazing how many people that fall into the categories above
think Bush is screwing them and Bill Clinton was the greatest
President ever. If Obama or Hillary is elected, they both say they
will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of the people that
fall into the categories above can't wait for it to happen. This is
like the movie, The Sting with Paul Newman; you scam somebody out of
some money and they don't even know what happened.
PART 3:
You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:
Boy, am I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is 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 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://tinyurl.com/zob77
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
<http://www.cis..org/articles
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
Verify at:
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
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
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com
7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com
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/TRANSCIP
9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by
the illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com
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
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 U. S from the Southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht
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.nationalpolicyinstit
13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to
their countries of origin.
Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75
14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes
Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the United States ."
Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articlesht
The total cost is a whopping $338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. 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 country including every
representative in Washington, D.C. - five times a week for as long as it
takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and
enforcement thereof.
Posts
10 comments:
The Tax Foundation actually disavows the figures put forth in that e-mail.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/22958.html
And this has been featured on both Snopes and Factcheck.org
CLAIM: "While there are some criminals sneaking in, most illegal immigrants simply want to find jobs, and American employers have been eager to make use of this work force."
The above commonly repeated claim is uttered repetedly by liberals. It almost makes the number of criminals sneaking in seem acceptable, as in sometimes you have to take the bad with the good. Except this is much more like taking the worst with the bad.
REALITY: The Department of Homeland Security reports that a little over 11% of the people caught already have criminal records in the U.S. Of course, we have no way of knowing what the criminal histories of these “entrants” are in their home countries.
Anyway, using only verifiable U.S. crime data:
If 2,000 are making it across the border each and every day then there are 220 returning criminals each and every day.
1,540 returning criminals each and every week.
6,673 returning criminals each and every month.
80,080 returning criminals each and every year.
Does even the most liberal minded anarchist consider this acceptable?
Zeezil-
Illegal immigration should be stopped. But I fail to see how this is a problem that can be layed soley at the feet of "liberals" as you wish to. Lets not forget, the biggest immigrant amnesty in history was implemented by Saint Ronnie, champion of the Republican Party. President Bush ruled for 6 years with a Republican House and Senate, a friendly Supreme Court, and carte blanche to implement his chosen policies following the tragedy of 9/11.
Did the Republicans implement any type of meaninful reform in this time? Did they secure the border, or implement a National ID, or create a guest worker program? No, they wasted time, energy and money on screwups like the war in Iraq.
The thing about this stupid email is that is tries to compare the ever growing cost of the Iraq war to the costs of illegal immgration in an attempt to somehow excuse the war. Get a clue, just because one is bad doesn't mean the other is good. Furthermore, it doesn't take brain surgeon to figure out that if we hadn't wasted so much money on Iraq we could have used that money to fix our immigration problem!
Furthermore, lets take a look at the most recent plans to grant amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants. Who supported these nasty plans, foisted upon us by horrible, evil "liberals"? Thats right, President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain!
anonymous....doesn't matter. The cuts under Bush still saved me more money than Clinton's and factor in the AMT and I saved 3300 more than under Clinton.
The whiners of society who say tax cuts are for the rich are forgetting that people in the 125k-180K income are paying the 68% of the taxes.
Defendusa- It does matter, because that email's numbers are incorrect. Taxes are lower under Bush, but not by the amount stated in that email. It does a disservice to honest debate when false figures are used.
You also have to consider the trade off. Bush has cut taxes at the cost of greatly increasing the national debt, as opposed to Clinton, who managed to balance the budget and eventually had a surplus. Bush's tax cuts will have to be paid for eventually, with interest.
I received the immigration email from my sister, and therefore went to all the links to check out the "facts."
Most of the "facts" were mis-stating and lying (for instance, including the total costs for legal and illegal immigrants, and saying the higher number was the fault of illegal immigrants).
Some of the other links with "facts" were simply broken links that didn't go anywhere.
I cannot believe I spent 2 hours on a beautiful Saturday morning researching b.s. in order to send a nice email back to my sister telling her that she is being lied to and not to believe any email that starts with "Fwd: Fwd: FWD:"
> > > Subject: RIDICULOUS!!!! It’s time we wake up!!
I agree. Posting inflammatory stuff like this without verifying any of it *is* pretty ridiculous. ;-) But it’s a really long list, so surely SOME of it must be true, right? I’m a pretty detail-oriented person, and I’ve heard a lot of numbers lately that don’t agree with what’s here - so I just had to check. Sorry this is so long - copy-paste it into a wider text editing program to read it more comfortably, and I hope it save you some time answering your email buddies who sent you this rant.
> > Boy am I confused. Listening to the Partisan ’politicals’, I have been > > hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on > > terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.
536 BILLION dollars already -and counting! - for the Iraq war [cool constantly-updating graph using data from the Congressional Research Service: http://zfacts.com/p/447.html ]. That’s a lot of cash, but it’s still gushing. "The bill for Iraq over the past five years is now approaching a cumulative $500 billion." - Larry Lindsey, said former White House economic adviser, Jan 11, 2008 on CNN [source: http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/10/news/economy/costofwar.fortune/ ] (Before the war, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay estimated the cost at $100 to $200 billion. So the White House got rid of him and "re-estimated" the cost at $50 to $60 billion. It’s now $536 billion and still rising - the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will exceed $2.4 TRILLION before we are out of there (note that they have consistently revised these estimates upward as time has gone on). ["The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion through the next decade, or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country, according to Congressional Budget Office" source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2007-10-23-wacosts_N.htm ]
> > Now .... 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 have included the URL’s for verification of all the following facts.
Interesting that you should say that. I will let you know where the links actually lead and whether they work. I find that using "tinyurl" tends to disguise sources, so I avoid that.
> > 1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year.
I love it! If the "source" is not certain about the difference between 11 billion or 22 Billion, I would gladly take a few million off their hands to help them even out the numbers ;-)
In fact, the statement is false.
"MYTH #3: The nation spends billions of dollars on welfare for undocumented immigrants.
FACTS: To the contrary, undocumented immigrants are not eligible to receive any "welfare" benefits and even legal immigrants are severely restricted in the benefits they can receive.
As the Congressional Research Service points out in a 2007 report, undocumented immigrants, who comprise nearly one-third of all immigrants in the country, are not eligible to receive public "welfare" benefits — ever.
Legal permanent residents (LPRs) must pay into the Social Security and Medicare systems for approximately 10 years before they are eligible to receive benefits when they retire. In most cases, LPRs can not receive SSI, which is available only to U.S. citizens, and are not eligible for means-tested public benefits until 5 years after receiving their green cards.
A 2007 analysis of welfare data by researchers at the Urban Institute reveals that less than 1 percent of households headed by undocumented immigrants receive cash assistance for needy families [they *could* do so based on the children in the household who are American citizens], compared to 5 percent of households headed by native-born U.S. citizens."
[source: http://www.aila.org/Content/default.aspx?docid=24201 ]
Then there’s this: http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/socialsecurity.asp Or this: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050410/news%5Fmz1e10ruben.html
> http://tinyurl.com/zob77%20
The above link leads to a page on the website of than anti-immigration political activist group FAIR, which is a fascinating organization founded by a right-wing dentist (John Tanton) and funded by the Scaife foundations, the Pioneer Fund, and others. The "real" link is http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters7fd8 Note that FAIR also DONATES money to politicians and other anti-immigration organizations - in some ways it’s a conduit. You can find more information about FAIR here: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1467.html or many other places. Or just Google "John Tanton" to find out a lot about his wondrous and varied activities.
> > 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. > > http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
I was skeptical about this one because it was from CIS - The Center for Immigration Studies - which has an axe to grind, as it was founded in 1985 as a spin-off "thinktank arm" of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Another FAIR spin-off is the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which functions as the litigation arm of FAIR. John Tanton again. Nonetheless, the WIC and school lunch programs *are* used by illegal-headed households. The $2.2 billion is not far off. So this one we are keeping, it’s for real. Starving infants and wraith-like migrant school kids would be the alternative, I suppose. "Respect life" only goes so far, huh?
> > 3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. > > http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
In truth, the Reuters article "Medicaid spends 1 pct on illegal immigrants: study," says, "Less than 1 percent of Medicaid spending went to health care for illegal immigrants, according to a study (Journal of the American Medical Association, Mar 2007) that the researchers said defied a common belief that they are a bigger drain on taxpayer money. In fact, the number quoted was 0.7 percent for the relevant study. Medicaid’s annual budget is around $85 billion, so this means roughly $595 million is spent on illegals per year.
Illegal immigrants, as well as legal immigrants in the country less than five years, generally are not eligible for Medicaid.
But they can get Medicaid coverage for health emergencies if they are in a category of people otherwise eligible, such as children, pregnant women, families with dependent children, elderly or disabled individuals, and meet other requirements." http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN1346120320070313
So far, we are up to $2.8 billion.
> > > 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! > > http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html
CNN.com: Page Not Found, but it’s probably a typo, and was the same as the link for the next one. I went to AILF website ( http://www.ailf.org/ipc/policybrief/policybrief_2007_dream.pdf ) and they have some stats: "Children account for 1.8 million (or 15%) of the roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants now living in the United States." Also, New York spends about $6,000 a head and Minnesota spends about $8,000 a head for K-12 public schooling. Yup, $12 billion is reasonable. Although frankly, having graduated from HS decreases the load they are likely to place on social services; a 1999 RAND Corp study found that even with the cost of educating them, it’s cheaper to do that than to pay for the additional medical and social services used by uneducated families living in poverty. We are now up to 14.8 billion. But a lot of them do speak English, especially by the time they reach high school. Here’s the 2005 story of one who graduated high school in 2003: "Esteban Navarro’s disappearance broke a lot of hearts at Trenton Central High School, where the dropout rate among Hispanic students is triple the state average. Two years ago, Mr. Navarro, a quiet and gifted student, was headed for top honors. His teachers said he was a star soccer player who received a perfect score on the advanced-placement calculus exam and was named class valedictorian. By senior year, the long-haired teenager was being courted by Princeton, where he took advanced math classes.
But by spring 2003, when he was a senior, Mr. Navarro’s plans to attend college unraveled. As the son of illegal immigrants, Mr. Navarro, who was born in Costa Rica, had no Social Security number. Had he been a citizen, his parents’ meager income as a cook and a house cleaner might have qualified him for financial aid, but federal law barred him from receiving assistance.
Afraid to risk flouting federal law, Princeton and other leading universities could not process Mr. Navarro’s applications, according to several people with knowledge of his situation. And at graduation, as the principal called on him to deliver the valedictory speech, Mr. Navarro had already dropped out - his dream of becoming a mathematician dashed in a tangle of immigration laws. ... Now 21, Mr. Navarro, who had attended school in the United States since the first grade, works in a pizza shop outside Philadelphia. " [ http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/nyregion/19njCOVER.html ] or even [ http://www.westword.com/2004-12-02/news/head-of-the-class/ ] Yeah, a few of them speak English. Bet he makes great pizzas, huh? Mathematically precise. We’re up to $14.8 billion.
> 5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the > > American-born children of illegal aliens , known as anchor babies. > > http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
These are American citizens. We are supposed to deny them public-school education (such as it is) because their parents were *not*?? Tell that to Alberto Gonzales, who was an honor student in high school and earned his law degree from Harvard, and who was also the son of illegal immigrants from Mexico. Or Mitt Romney (Mitt Romney’s father George was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1907, the son of Gaskell Romney and Anna Amelia Pratt. Gaskell, born like Mitt’s dad in Mexico, actually crossed the US border from Mexico in 1912 by walking through the desert into New Mexico — a classic method of entry for illegal aliens), or (you’d need a ouija board for this inquiry!) Dr. James Ritty, inventor of the cash register and US veteran, who was also a son of illegal immigrants quite some time ago :-)
> 6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. > > http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html > > > > 7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. > > http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html That’s Lou Dobbs, and his numbers were off a bit: "Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) suggest that the percentage of prisoners at the federal and state levels who are aliens is far lower than claimed. According to BJS reports, about 6.4 percent of all state and federal inmates at midyear 2005 were "noncitizens" — not just illegal immigrants — and the total number of those prisoners rose by just 337 through midyear 2006. In contrast, the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ latest inmate population report stated that as of May 26, 2007, 73.5 percent of federal prisoners are U.S. citizens and 20.8 percent are noncitizens — not just illegal immigrants — from Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, while the citizenship status of 5.7 percent of the federal prison population is recorded as "Other/Unknown."" [Colorado Media Matters]
Guess if you ONLY counted Federal prisons *and* rounded up to the nearest ten percent...???
But then there’s this: "According to a 2007 study by University of California, Irvine, sociologist R. G. Rumbaut, among men age 18-39 (who comprise the vast majority of the U.S. prison population), the incarceration rate for the native-born (3.5 percent) was five times higher than the rate for immigrants (0.7 percent) in 2000. The study also found that incarceration rates were lower for immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala—who account for the majority of undocumented immigrants. In 2000, only 0.7 percent of foreign-born Mexican men and 0.5 percent of foreign-born Salvadoran and Guatemalan men were in prison. A 2005 study by economists Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, concluded that lower incarceration rates among immigrants are not the result of deportation or the threat of deportation. Rather, immigrants are a “self-selected” group with “low criminal propensities.” " [source: source: http://www.aila.org/Content/default.aspx?docid=24201 ]
In 2005, the GAO did a study of incarcerated illegal aliens and found 55,322 confirmed cases of ICE-described illegal aliens serving time in federal or state or local facilities. So that’s a solid *minimum* number ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05646r.pdf ). Clearly the actual number will be larger. Here’s an estimate: "The former-INS estimates that approximately 221,000 foreign-born residents are currently incarcerated in Federal, state, or local facilities. Nearly two-thirds entered the country without inspection." That’s 146,000. Multiply that by the cost per inmate per year: about $19,000, so the total cost estimate is (rounded up) $2.8 billion. So our total so far is $17.6 billion. Another GAO study: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05337r.pdf This sums up the incarcerated "criminal aliens" - which includes nonresident aliens of various kinds, so these are by no means all illegal aliens! People sometimes use this figure anyway when trying to make conclusions about incarcerated illegal aliens.
> 8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. > > http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html
That link does not exist. But this is what you wanted, an encore presentation of Lou Dobbs’ "Broken Borders:" http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html As detailed above, "undocumented immigrants are not eligible to receive any "welfare" benefits and even *legal* immigrants are severely restricted in the benefits they can receive." Robert Rector from the Heritage Foundation seems to be responsible for this number, which he says includes education of illegals, but then he turns around and says that it is their lack of education that makes them depress the market — so are they getting an education here, or working at cheap jobs? If they WERE getting an education, Rector’s argument suggests that would actually improve matters for our own economy. Either way, education and WIC/school lunches/TANF are being counted twice. Forget this one, it’s double-counting - at least. So we are still at $17.6 billion.
> 9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are > > caused by the illegal aliens. > > http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
Umm, the $200 billion is money that Americans *didn’t* have to pay out, and the writer is complaining about this "business-friendly" situation? Because the employers *should* be paying more? OK, I’ll keep that in mind... Wait, though — with 11 million illegals here, that’s $18,000 per person. We could subsidize 1/7 the population of Mexico to STAY THERE, where average healthy wage earners get about $12,000/year, and we’d be benefiting our overall economy... more to the point, that’s about $10/hour "they" are supposedly taking from American workers’ potential earnings, so by making the "suppressed wages" argument, the Lou Dobbs people are asserting that wages in the US would jump $10/hour for some 11 million Americans who presumably would take migrant fruitpicker, gardening, housekeeping, food prep and construction crew (non-unionized, of course!) jobs if all the illegals suddenly disappeared. Do you really believe that those wages would jump $10/hr? What’s the US unemployment rate quoted by the Administration, five percent? If you believe that number, that would mean the number of unemployed American citizens is LESS than the number of illegals working here — remove the illegals, and if the American computer programmers and English majors who are unemployed don’t want to pluck chickens, you are going to have some interesting crises in the food industries and agriculture.
> > 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. > > http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html
In fact, the above email claim was *not* what the reference actually said.
Lou Dobbs’ guest (Heritage Foundation’s) Robert Rector says the following (which is ugly enough, and he not only *can*, but *will* say such things on the air at any opportunity): "RECTOR: I think there’s a lot that you simply can’t say here. I’ll say another thing that can’t be said here, which is the fact that Hispanics in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-Hispanics, and it seems very clear that if you basically bring in a lot of low-skilled Hispanics with dysfunctional family structure from the Central America, that both they and, in particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the United States." To remind the person who sent you this email (and Mr. Rector), "Hispanics in the United States" are mostly not illegal aliens, and: "According to a 2007 study by University of California, Irvine, sociologist R. G. Rumbaut, among men age 18-39 (who comprise the vast majority of the U.S. prison population), the incarceration rate for the native-born (3.5 percent) was five times higher than the rate for immigrants (0.7 percent) in 2000. The study also found that incarceration rates were lower for immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala—who account for the majority of undocumented immigrants. In 2000, only 0.7 percent of foreign-born Mexican men and 0.5 percent of foreign-born Salvadoran and Guatemalan men were in prison. A 2005 study by economists Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, concluded that lower incarceration rates among immigrants are not the result of deportation or the threat of deportation. Rather, immigrants are a “self-selected” group with “low criminal propensities.” " [source: source: http://www.aila.org/Content/default.aspx?docid=24201 ]
> > > 11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border
Whoah, wait a minute, there are 11 million in the USA and 91% of them came in 2005??? Or perhaps they come here to work for part of the year when the crops need picking and then they *go home*??? Hang on, the origin of this wildly uncertain number is below...
> also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroine and marijuana, crossed into the U.S. from the Southern border. > > Homeland Security Report: > > http://tinyurl.com/t9sht
Here’s the link that tinyurl leads to, a report from the majority staffers (Republican, it was still 2006) of the House Committee on Homeland Security, which states: "During 2005, Border Patrol apprehended approximately 1.2 million illegal aliens; of those 165,000 were from countries other than Mexico." Then a few lines later, "Federal law enforcement estimates that 10 percent to 30 percent of illegal aliens are actually apprehended and 10 percent to 20 percent of drugs are seized. Therefore, in 2005, as many as 10 to 4 million illegal aliens crossed into the United States;" Aha, hence the huge number and the factor of 2.5 uncertainty. It’s kind of like quoting "street value" in a drug bust.
> > > 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.’ > > http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf Oh, this is really amazing. That link doesn’t work and the curious readers are directed to this link instead: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/publications.php?b=deportation But what is really amazing about that page (you’ve GOT to check it out!) is that at the top it has some innocuous-sounding titles but by the bottom of the list you get the full picture about the National Policy Institute: WELCOME TO THE NPI E-BOOKSTORE
The following NPI publications are available as e-books free of charge to media professionals and other interested persons.
Simply select the publication you wish to receive, enter your e-mail address, and click "submit." You will then be sent an e-mail containing a link that will allow you to download the selected publication.
Please note: the e-mail will be sent from ’ebooks@nationalpolicyinstitute.org’. If you are using a spam filter, be sure to ’whitelist’ nationalpolicyinstitute.org before ordering to ensure proper receipt of the e-mail. Your e-mail address will be held in confidence and will not be used for "spam." We may, however, follow up with you to ask your opinion of the publication.
AOL users: We have been experiencing frequent difficulties having our auto-generated e-mails delivered to AOL addresses. If you also have a non-AOL address, please use it. If you use your AOL address and do not receive your e-mail, please notify us and we will find an alternative means to deliver your e-book. Affirmative Action and the Costs of Diversity Conservatives and Race The Costs and Benefits of Mass Deportation A Letter from a Grandfather to His Genes The Southern Poverty Law Center (I) The Southern Poverty Law Center (II) The State of White America - 2007 The Wealth and IQ of Nations New! Global White Population to Plummet Oh, well, I’m white, I’d better get busy BREEDING for the NPI... wonder if they have a spare copy of "Camp of the Saints" lying around...!
> 13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. > > http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm
Not true. This Rense.com posting is simply another version of the current email: so it’s not really sensible to use it as a reference, either. Maybe the email’s composer was getting tired. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has vastly different numbers. Coming from the USA into Mexico, for both LEGAL and illegal workers, according to the Fed, "Mexicans living in the United States sent a record $23.1 billion back home in 2006, putting remittances third after oil and maquiladora exports as a foreign-exchange generator for Mexico." [source: http://dallasfed.org/research/swe/2007/swe0704b.cfm ] And that money is not something we taxpayers are paying in our taxes, it’s money we pay both legal and illegal immigrant workers to pick our crops, clean our hotels, prepare our restaurant food, pluck our chickens, and re-roof our garages.
Remember that more than 2.6 million Americans live and work outside the United States, and they also send money back to the USA. Although there are not as many of us working elsewhere as there are Mexicans working in the US, our salaries do tend to be higher. By quite a bit, usually. Aside from food, rent, and some other necessities, a lot of that money winds up back in the US, whether it originated with a US company or with a foreign company.
> 14. ’The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex > > Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States ’. > > http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml I’m sorry to see Deborah Schurman-Kauflin (Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies, 1999 from The Union Institute & University’s Ph.D. program for professionals with full-time jobs, http://www.tui.edu/news/network/NETWORK_sum2001.pdf page 35) used as a source. Her methods are wildly extrapolative, she has not done a solid professional job of statistical analysis (not even any discussion of uncertainties). She has a blurb on her site about how she "has been studying serial killers for 20 years," but her photo looks surprisingly young for someone with a PhD working in her field for twenty years. That’s because her description is designed to mislead without actually lying. In fact, she wrote something a little closer to the truth for TUI’s newsletter’ she wrote that she "has been studying serial killers since she was 14 years old. The daughter of a psychologist, Schurman-Kauflin found herself engrossed in her mother’s books and later pursued an undergraduate degree in criminal justice. While working as a homicide investigator, Schurman-Kauflin learned of The Union Institute, designed her program to pursue her interest in serial murder investigation, completed her Ph.D., and currently works as a criminal profiler." This is why it is so difficult to find any credentials for her. This is also very likely why her stats don’t include analysis.
Interestingly, "More than half of the arrests made as part of Operation Predator have been arrests of foreign national sex offenders whose crimes make them removable from the United States. To date, more than 450 of these predators have been deported. Their crimes include a Los Angeles man who repeatedly molested his own daughter and an Austrian-national soccer coach convicted of repeatedly fondling a mentally impaired minor." Most of them were not illegal immigrants from Mexico, and some were not illegal at all, although one can enter the US under false pretenses (not reveal a criminal history, for example), at which time one becomes "illegal." Then there is this page on "illegal immigrant crime" from Colorado Media Matters: http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200702160002
The government’s General Accounting Office found that its sample of 55,322 incarcerated illegal aliens had been arrested for (over the years - many had multiple arrests) 700,000 crimes altogether [http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05646r.pdf], of which 12 percent were sex-related (84,000 crimes. That’s not in one year, that’s for all incarcerated illegal aliens GAO could identify as such - so not Nearly One Million Sex Crimes, but 8.4 percent of Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin’s number. Now if we estimate that the average time served is going to be 5 years, it takes 50 years to get to 840,000 at a constant rate - yeah, I know that’s a simplification - there were fewer in the past and there will "probably" be more in the future - so Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin could possibly have gotten that number by extrapolating over all illegal immigrants for the last century... just a thought.)
> The total cost is a whopping: $ 338.3 BILLION dollars a > > year. > > > > Are we THAT stupid??? > > > If this doesn’t bother you then just delete the message.
It does bother me, I had to look everything up to see what portion of it was trustworthy. Turns out: not much. Comparing annuals: I got $17.6 billion per year, and "showed my work." For 2008, Pres Bush requested $190 billion for the wars, most of it to be dedicated to Iraq. [source: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N19596736.htm ] Feel free to find more sources and "improve" my calculations (I tend to trust the numbers from government agencies such as GAO or from actual universities more than from foundations funded by anti-immigration zealots, so if you wouldn’t mind sticking with those I’d appreciate it).
> If, on the other hand, it does raise the hair on the back of your neck,
Getting a lot of half-truths and outright lies designed to make me hate and fear Mexican migrant harvesters and their legally American children *should* raise the hair. This is the USA, not 1928 Germany, not Rwanda or even South Africa (where young adults whipped into a frenzy against foreign workers just beat and burned a bunch of the foreign workers to death over the last week). We should know better, and we should always, always, check the "facts," especially a whole laundry list like this all pointing in one direction.
> I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the country including every representative in Washington, D.C.
Quick, forward this to everyone you know! :-) Yeah, those are the emails I always check with snopes.com, but it’s so long they only debunked part of it. Good luck!
As stupid and illogical as that email was, it's nice to know that there's still one right-winger, somewhere, who admits, "it's Congress that makes law not the President. He has to work with what's handed to him."
Kind of refreshing.
Awsome debunkery, anonymous...
Thanks!!
;-}
Post a Comment