This puts the lie to open-border advocates’ claim that immigration is a net plus for our nation. While this might have been true prior to the nanny state’s rise, when immigrants had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, today’s statist, entitlement culture has changed that equation. As pressing one for English and Mexican flags waved in street protests evidence, many today come here not to assimilate but because “America, land of the free” has come to mean free stuff for non-Americans.
And it isn’t simply that immigrants are more likely to be on the dole — they also outstrip native Americans in terms of raw numbers. Writes Examiner.com’s Jim Kouri, “According to analysis by Judicial Watch, the majority of households across the country benefiting from publicly-funded welfare programs are headed by immigrants, both legal and illegal.”
None of this is surprising. The fact that 85 percent of our immigrants now hail from the Third World and Asia — a situation created by Ted Kennedy’s Immigration Reform Act of 1965 — ensures that our new arrivals are generally both poor and uneducated. It is an immigration regime that has made us the flop house and soup kitchen of the world.
But while this diversity may be “strengthening” us into bankruptcy, there are some Americans who benefit from it. For instance, businesses that want cheap labor do. As the CIS points out, “The vast majority (95 percent) of immigrant households with children had at least one worker in 2009. But their low education levels mean that more than half of these working immigrant households with children still accessed the welfare system.”
Translation: The taxpayers are subsidizing these businesses’ cheap labor.
If immigrants could not receive handouts, the United States would be less appealing and they wouldn’t be as likely to migrate here (admittedly, this wouldn’t deter all of them, but it is a factor). This would put pressure on businesses to offer higher wages, which, in turn, would increase the chances that Americans would take jobs currently held by immigrants. Remember, there are no jobs Americans won’t do — only wages Americans won’t work for.
The second group that benefits from our suicidal immigration regime is statist politicians. Importing the impoverished is a recipe for growing the statist voting bloc, and the proof is in the pudding: The demographic that Third World and Asian immigrants represent supports statist politicians by a wide margin. And this fact isn’t lost on leftists. As Simon Rosenberg of New Democrat Network, a Democratic-aligned think-tank, said, “America is in the midst of a profound demographic change. Each election now brings a different electorate than the one just past.” Rosenberg makes the point that immigration and birth-rate trends are causing the U.S. minority population, which votes primarily Democrat, to grow and the nation’s white population — a core Republican and Tea Party constituency — to shrink percentage-wise. In other words, the statists support immigration so they can import voters.
And they’re doing a good job of it. The most recent census shows that the rate of this demographic shift has been faster than anyone expected. As Richard McGregor of the Financial Times writes:
The non-Hispanic white population dropped from 69.1 per cent in 2000 to 63.7 per cent in 2010. By contrast, the minority population, which includes African Americans and African Asians, jumped from 30.9 per cent to 36.3 during the same period.
…The numbers of people identifying themselves as Hispanics in states like Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Nebraska and New Hampshire all increased by more 50 per cent in the decade. Such rises should help the Democrats in 2012.
This is why, without changing our immigration regime, a ballot-box remedy for the problems of a porous border, handouts for illegals, and creeping socialism will be impossible. Like the ocean, each new wave of immigrants hitting our shores is decidedly blue. Thus, unless we want our future to be red in the old sense, something will have to change.
