The President’s “immigration accountability executive action” has confused many Americans since a president’s action is more or less a “wish list” and does not have the legally-binding power of an executive order. Unlike an executive order, an executive action is not published in the Federal Register. An executive order can be reversed by Congress or by the courts. Is this executive action meant to obfuscate the illegal immigration issue and postpone the “fixing of the broken immigration,” a euphemism for refusing to enforce the already existing laws? http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/20/fact-sheet-immigration-accountability-executive-action
Our country cannot afford to amnesty 5 million illegal aliens even though they may be in the country right now or en route. The Heritage Foundation’s chief economist Stephen Moore has calculated recently that illegal aliens cost the American taxpayers $30 billion per year. If we take into account the number of requested work cards by the DHS for 34 million, the cost of an additional 29 million illegals would skyrocket the $30 billion to absolutely unmanageable numbers when our national debt is already impossible to repay, unemployment is in double digits, and the economy is lacking significant job creation.
The November 20, 2014 Department of Homeland Security “Policies for the Apprehension, Detention, and Removal of Undocumented Immigrants” consider drunk driving, sex abusers, drug dealers, and gun offenders secondary priority for deportation; top priority includes terrorists, felons, and new illegal border crossers. http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_memo_prosecutorial_discretion.pdf
We’ve been told that illegal immigrants work hard and they do. But they also have large families at home that are supported by various welfare programs and are medically treated freely in any ER in the country and eventually under Obamacare.
Illegals are encouraged to pay taxes using the Internal Revenue Service’s Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) designed to encourage illegal aliens to file and pay taxes but some do not. Many that do file, because they report income below the federal poverty level, receive earned income tax credit from the IRS, using children here in the U.S. and children who are still in Mexico as dependents, costing U.S. taxpayers $4.1 billion per year.
Many illegal aliens, day workers who wait to be picked up at the local Seven Eleven, work under the table, avoiding paying taxes altogether. They do pay sales taxes as they spend some of the cash and the welfare benefits to live in this country, contributing to consumption, the largest component of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, money that is being trafficked and other large sums are being sent to their home countries and never taxed. They thus benefit from our welfare system without paying into the very system that they milk.
Any taxpayer dollars that are spent on welfare for illegal aliens or American citizens are funds that are not spent on investment and on job creation in our economy.
For example, on any given day, at the local international grocery store where I often shop, there is a line of illegals waiting to send money via Western Union to their home countries. I joined the line one day so I could hear for myself how much they were sending. One guy sent $1,200 to Mexico and another $800 to Guatemala. Assuming the average of the two, $1,000 per month, a simple calculation of 5 million illegals sending money home per month would yield $5 billion, a tidy sum of $60 billion per year. And the numbers of illegal aliens reported to be in this country vary widely, from 11-12 million to as many as 34 million.
When liberals spew economic statistics about the extent that illegal aliens contribute to this economy by spending their earned money here, I am very skeptical. No amount of propaganda coming from the left or Pelosi’s theatrics washing the feet of illegal aliens is going to convince me that it is good for our country to accept floods of law breakers and reward them with unconstitutional citizenship. If we do, the notion of American citizenship no longer exists.