Immigrants - Documented And Undocumented - Are Important Assets To The United States

Immigrants contribute more benefits to the United States than they receive in services. Contrary to American conservative propaganda, millions of undocumented immigrants pay taxes and, even if some don't pay taxes, they contribute in other ways such as consumer taxes. They perform millions of jobs including harvesting crops and play an important role in constructing new homes. If the American conservative position is correct - that undocumented immigrants violated U.S. laws by coming to the U.S. and should be arrested - American conservatives must demand, with the same level of intensity - the arrest and prosecution of U.S. business owners who hire undocumented workers. Research indicates strong enforcement efforts have a negative economic impact.

Undocumented and documented immigrants contribute to the enrichment of the United States with their culture and languages. Despite the rhetoric of American conservatives, immigrants learn English quickly and are willing to die for the United States. As of 2008, 65,000 immigrants had fought or were currently fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A report by the National Research Council, fulfilling a mandate by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform {a congressionally appointed organization was asked "to examine the effects of immigration on the national economy, on government revenues and spending, and on the future size and makeup of the nation's population."

The study, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration, was released on May 17, 1997. The conclusion: immigrants - regardless of legal status - contribute more to the United States than they receive in benefits.

James P. Smith, RAND Corporation senior economist and one of the group's chairpersons, stated "Immigrants may be adding as much as $10 billion to the economy each year. The vast majority of Americans are enjoying a healthier economy as the result of the increased supply of labor and lower prices that result from immigration."

What would be the impact of providing a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the United States? The best answer is examining the result of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. "That legislation came about in the middle of a financial downturn, when unemployment was on the rise. What's interesting is that while the economy fell and we found ourselves in a recession, taxes on the recently legalized undocumented immigrants helped contribute to the economy."

A study by the libertarian Cato Institute stated that legalizing undocumented immigrants "would improve wages and working conditions for all workers." Two of the most important conclusions are that a national program to legalize current undocumented workers in the United States, with a law providing for new immigrants in the future, would increase productivity among immigrant workers and create jobs for other American workers. The gain would be approximately $180 billion over a ten year period. A more interesting conclusion concerned enforcement-only efforts. The study concluded such efforts would shrink the U.S. economy, reduce opportunities for high-skilled U.S. workers and the U.S. economy would lose $80 billion over a ten year period.

Note: In another posting, a discussion regarding job creation and the impact on health care.

Sources:

Jorge Ramos, A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto, Vintage Books, 2010, pp. 41-43.

James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston {Editors}, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration, Washington, D.C., 1997 {Link: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?booksearch=1&term=Search+This+Book&record_id=5779&bottom_Search+This+Book.x=13&bottom_Search+This+Book.y=18}

Peter B. Dixon and Maureen T. Rimmer, Restriction or Legalization? Measuring the Economic Benefits of Immigration Reform, The Cato Institute, Trade Policy Analysis No. 40, August 13, 2009 {Link: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10438}

Maribel Hastings, "Economic Arguments for Legalization," America's Voice, March 25, 2009

President Dwight D. Eisenhower On Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Labor Laws and Farm Programs

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (Dwight D. Eisenhower in a letter to his brother, Edgar, on November 8, 1954).

Culture Of Death

Last night, the State of Georgia may have executed an innocent man. If so, it wouldn't be the first time the United States has executed an innocent person. Here's what I find most appalling about the death penalty in the United States, and it speaks to high level of hypocrisy one currently finds among the "law and order" types on America's political right.

These people will tell you they are opposed to government because government is inefficient, can't do a job properly and there are high levels of fraud in government. At the same time, these people have an abiding faith in the "system" when it comes to executions. On this issue, many on the political right believe the state can do no wrong, is always right and the state never makes a mistake.

Today, the United States, in using the death penalty, stands next to such bastions of individual liberty as Saudi Arabia and China. It's a sad day when any human being dies and, yes, there are evil people in the world. I'm liberal, even very liberal, however I totally reject the liberal idea that, well, deep down everyone is a good person. That's completely wrong and, as I stated, there are some very evil people in this world. However, the death penalty has outlived whatever usefulness it had if, in fact, it ever had any.

Pope John Paul II -- who will one day be a Saint -- spoke to this issue in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life). He said that, in our modern age, instances when the state is unable to protect the public through nonlethal means "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." In other words, if nonlethal means are available and sufficient then the state should avoid using the death penalty in keeping, as the Catechism states (2267), "the dignity of the human person." More specifically, the argument of death penalty proponents that we must kill a person in order to protect society are increasingly invalid because there are other methods to protect the public such as life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

The Catechism, (2269-2269), speaks to unintentional killing and notes that such killing is not as imputable as homicide but a person who unintentionally kills will not be exonerated from "grave offense" if they act in an irresponsible way that causes the death of another person although the intention to kill didn't exist. Here, Georgia officials and, for that matter, the entire United States Supreme Court can't use this defense. The clear intention was to kill Troy Anthony Davis and, if Davis was innocent and those who recanted their court testimony were truthful in recanting, both the State of Georgia and the United States Supreme Court acted in an irresponsible and, I would add, an immoral manner by not staying the execution until a court could determine if those who recanted their previous court testimony were being truthful.

In the end, if Davis was innocent, I seriously doubt death penalty proponents in the United States will lose any sleep over that fact. They have committed themselves to an extreme culture of death wherein they place an unshakable faith in the same government they despise and criticize when it, for example, strives to protect the most vulnerable of American society. When it comes to life and death, there's rank hypocrisy on both the right and left, but I shall leave that discussion for another day.

The United States will be the bastion of morality and goodness many Americans claim it is when we no longer use the death penalty. Until then, the United States should refrain from preaching morality to any other nation on this planet and, for once, admit we employ barbaric methods in meting out punishment. The death penalty is not, in any way, related to justice.

Is there a petition or statement, where I can add my name, telling Americans, and every other human being on this planet, that when the United States employs the death penalty it doesn't do so in my name because I, for one, understand the sanctity of human life?

Frankly, I'm not proud to be an American today. Then again, considering the sorry state of affairs that have existed in this country for most of my life, ranging from a national refusal to acknowledge the richest nation on the planet does virtually nothing about the thousands of Americans who sleep on our streets yet obscenely spends billions of dollars for weapons of mass destruction, a national refusal to provide health care for all Americans, a tendency to use the most extreme militarism to get our way in the world, the barbaric use of the death penalty, a tendency to ignore international law, and a tendency to commit heinous war crimes by using depleted uranium ammunition that violates, on at least four levels, humanitarian law, I'm not that proud to be an American any day.

The Real Tea Party Story

I've commented on this previously, especially in the article pertaining to Rick Snyder's endorsement of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) agenda. This is scary stuff folks, and the goals of the ALEC and the Koch brothers is very apparent. Their primary goals are to privatize the U.S. government, destroy unions and turn workers into serfs. In the process, their goals increase the power and wealth of the richest two percent and undermine the working class.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/11603/publicopoly_exposed/

"As Kate Zernike noted in our October 2010 cover story, 'Tea Party Confidential,' Armey and the group's president Matt Kibbe wrote an op-ed article in 2007 proposing the Boston Tea Party as a model for putting grassroots pressure on a central government. She writes, 'Presaging Tea Party tactics in the summer of 2009, they described how Samuel Adams packed town hall meetings with his supporters to drown out Tory voices and used each new British policy or tax as 'an excuse to rally new recruits to the cause of American independence.' They wrote, 'Adams was the first American to recognize that 'it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather, an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.'

"Beginning in 2009, FreedomWorks was instrumental in creating the faux-populist Tea Party. The mainstream media uncritically hyped the scores of Tea Party tax day protests orchestrated by FreedomWorks and the National Taxpayers Union (another Koch-funded ALEC group headed by former ALEC executive director Duane Parde), thus helping enable unprecedented Republican legislative majorities in states across the nation.

"Case study: Arizona

"Documents released following a public records request to the office of then-Arizona Senate President Bob Burns (R-Peoria) indicate that in 2009 and 2010, Arizona ALEC lawmakers requested more than $60,000 in reimbursement for travel, lodging and registration fees from ALEC’s scholarship fund for their time at ALEC functions—including the December 2009 event at which State Senator Russell Pearce (R-Mesa) submitted his draft of SB 1070 for approval as a piece of ALEC model legislation, the law known as 'breathing while Brown' to its critics. (See 'Corporate Con Game: How the private prison industry helped shape Arizona’s anti-immigrant law,' In These Times, July 2010.)"

Thus, the tea party movement isn't, as it claims, a grassroots movement but, rather, a political movement financed by some of the wealthiest conservative Americans and corporate America. The fact that the corporate media, and in that definition I include ALL cable news programming, has promoted the false grassroots claim is disturbing but not surprising.

Never forget the Koch brothers, the ALEC, FreedomWorks, the tea party movement and the extreme conservatives they support promote the irrational idea that government -- local, state and federal -- should and can be operated like a business. There's no way any government can be operated as a business unless, of course, governmental organizations are privatized. As Michael Parenti so eloquently states it, "Conservatives insist that government should be 'run more like a business. 'One might wonder how that could be possible, since government does not market goods and services for the purpose of capital accumulation.'"

In reality, the goal of corporate thugs like the Koch Brothers, parliamentary whores like John Boehner and extremist governors like Rick Snyder and Scott Walker is to make a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and only for the wealthy.

Conservative Economic Solution Doesn't Work

Previously, in this blog, I've mentioned the idea, held by conservatives, that low tax rates lead to economic growth.  This idea has become a kind of religious belief among conservatives, and it's how often they use this argument.

For example, Speaker of the House, John Boehner, said "We've seen over the last 30 years that lower marginal tax rates have led to a growing economy, more employment and more people paying taxes.”

Senator Jim DeMint has been quoted as saying, "But we also need to just cut the top marginal rate for individuals and corporations so that we're more competitive and companies can look way out in the future and know they'll have a competitive tax rate.”

And, finally, the Club for Growth states, “To stimulate GDP growth, a tax cut has to cut the marginal tax rates upon which the decision makers in the economy base their decisions to work and, above all, to invest.”

There's only one big problem with this conservative argument.  It's false and, as I've mentioned several times, has no historical validity.

Michael Linden, Director of Tax and Budget Policy at American Progress, addresses the fallacy of this long-held conservative belief in an article posted on the American Progress.

See: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/06/marginal_tax_charticle.html

"The top marginal income tax rate has ranged all the way from 92 percent down to 28 percent over the last 60 years. With such a large range, it should be easy to see the enormous impact of lower rates on overall economic growth, as conservatives routinely claim. Years with lower marginal rates should boast higher growth, right?

"That’s definitely not what happened. In fact, growth was actually fastest in years with relatively high top marginal tax rates. Back in the 1950s, when the top marginal tax rate was more than 90 percent, real annual growth averaged more than 4 percent. During the last eight years, when the top marginal rate was just 35 percent, real growth was less than half that."

You'd think that prominent conservatives who, more often than not, are criticizing the rest of us for our alleged lack of knowledge regarding the history of this country would be embarrassed to use this historically false economic argument but, when it comes to being parliamentary whores for the wealthiest Americans including corporate elites, it appears Boehner, et al have no shame.

Based on their extreme ignorance of American economic history, and American history in general, I have to question whether Boehner and his crowd were frequently socially promoted while attending the public schools they now want to destroy.

Conservative Claims U.S. Muslims Have No Free Speech Rights

"The right to freedom of religion guaranteed in the United States Constitution doesn't apply to Muslims, according to a blogger writing for a conservative Christian organization.

"Bryan Fischer, a blogger for the ultra-conservative American Family Association (AFA), declared Thursday that Muslims have no First Amendment rights in the United States.

'The First Amendment was written by the Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity,' he wrote in his column at Renew America. 'They were making no effort to give special protections to Islam. Quite the contrary.'

"Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy, Fischer continued.

"Our government has no obligation to allow a treasonous ideology to receive special protections in America, but this is exactly what the Democrats are trying to do right now with Islam.

"Fischer added that Muslims have no constitutional right to build mosques.

'They have that privilege at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked if, as is in fact the case, Islam is a totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States,'" he said.

Yes, folks you read that correctly.  Bryan Fischer, a batshit crazy conservative, is claiming Muslims have no constitutional protections in this country.  My question is where the hell does the conservative movement find people like Bryan Fischer?   Let's be clear about Fischer's tactics.

In 2004 another hateful, mentally deranged religious bigot, Michelle Malkin, authored a book advocating concentration camps for Muslims.  Combined with Fischer's false claim regarding First Amendment rights of Muslims, the intent of far-right conservatives is quite clear.

Fischer, Malkin and others of their loathsome ilk, are working to dehumanize, disenfranchise and segregate Muslims.   The words and proposals of Fischer and Malkin sound eerily familiar to the societal and legal restrictions placed on Jews by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany. 

Folks, this is an anti-American as it gets!

Here, readers might be thinking the [Friedrich Gustav Emil] Martin Niemöller quote " First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist" is soon to appear.  However, you'll never find me quoting a despicable character like Niemöller.  Why?

It's goes to the fact that German Christians, Protestants and Catholics, strongly supported the Nazis.  In the case of German Protestants, their support for Hitler and the Nazis was based, in part, on the party's opposition to modernism.  As for Niemöller, he welcomed Hitler's ascension to power in 1933 believing it would bring a national revival. 

He only began to oppose the Nazis when Hitler threatened to attack the churches via the Aryan paragraph.  The Aryan paragraph is a clause in the statutes of an organization, corporation, or real estate deed that reserves membership and/or right of residence solely for members of the Aryan race and excludes from such rights any non-Aryans, particularly Jews or those of Jewish descent, as well as to those who were then referred to as Negroes. Aryan paragraphs were an essential aspect of public life in Germany and Austria from 1885 to 1945, and they were also used in many suburban real estate deeds in the United States up until the late 1950s (as an aside, during his confirmation hearings, William Rehnquist defended Aryan paragraphs). 

However, the dark side of Niemöller can be seen in the fact that, even as he gradually abandoned his sympathies for the Nazis, he continued to make pejorative remarks against Jews.  For example, in a 1935 sermon, Niemöller employed the oldest pillar of Christian anti-Jewish bigotry, the deicide canard.  He remarked: "What is the reason for their obvious punishment, which has lasted for thousands of years? Dear brethren, the reason is easily given: the Jews brought the Christ of God to the cross!"

In the same hateful vein as Niemöller, today we're witnessing the worst elements of conservatism and Christianity demonize Muslims.  The similarities between the words and actions of Martin Niemöller, Bryan Fischer, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck and hundreds of other conservatives and Christians cannot be ignored if we are to remain a society that protects the rights of all Americans.  We cannot remain silent in the face of attempts to deny American freedoms to a group based on religion. 

Let's recognize Bryan Fischer for what he is, namely a hateful anti-American religious bigot.

Source: 

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/24/fringe-conservative-group-claims-u-s-muslims-have-no-free-speech-rights/

New Milestone: 1 in 6 in U.S. A Hispanic

Today, the Census Bureau is releasing its first data related to the 2010 census.   For those of us who've observed the changing demographics of the United States, this is what we expected.

Examination of the data reveals Hispanics accounted for half of the increase in U.S. population over the last ten years, overall rapid minority growth, growth of suburbs and an aging white population.  

"Racial and ethnic minorities are expected to make up an unprecedented 90 percent of the total U.S. growth since 2000, due to immigration and higher birth rates for Latinos. Currently the fastest growing group, Hispanics are on track to exceed 50 million, or roughly 1 in 6 Americans; among U.S. children, Hispanics are now roughly 1 in 4."

The growth in the Hispanic population wasn't confined to states most of us traditionally think of as having significant Hispanic populations, i.e. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.  The Census Bureau data indicates there were significant jumps in Hispanic population in Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina.

In addition to the tremendous growth in the Hispanic population, Asians had a larger gain than African Americans, and Americans who identify themselves as "multiracial" increased by more than 25 percent to total 8.7 million.

White Americans, according to the latest Census Bureau data, saw their numbers drop from 69 percent of the population in 2000 to 64 percent in 2010.  The primary reason is declining birth rates; the median age for white Americans is now forty-one.  

What does this mean for the United States?  One important topic is Social Security and the changing face of the workforce. 

This issue was the topic of research for "Burden of Support: Young Latinos in an Aging Society." The book,  written by David Hayes-Bautista, Werner Schink, and Jorge Chapa and published by Stanford University Press,  discusses the fact that, as baby boomers age and retire, the labor force will be increasingly comprised of minority workers and, therefore, the costs of maintaining Social Security and Medicare will increasingly fall to non-white workers while a large number of recipients will be white.

What societal issues may arise from this change in demographics?

We'd be better served if we stepped off the anti-immigration train and began understanding that one of our highest priorities should be educating every member of our changing society.  This means investing in education not balancing budgets on the backs of children and, yes, it means paying higher taxes to fund infrastructure such as new schools, new textbooks and better pay for teachers.   It's time we, as a society, stopped using teachers and teachers' unions as scapegoats for the economic mess created by giving unneeded tax cuts to the wealthiest two percent, tax subsidies rewarding corporations that take jobs offshore and two unnecessary wars created, in large part, by outrageous lies.  

Otherwise, we'll see a quicker decline of the American empire than we're already witnessing.