Maria and Our Immigration Problem

The short and stocky Salvadoran woman was very talkative in her unschooled English. She’s been in this country for twenty years. She had fled her native country for economic reasons; she paid a coyote $1,000 to bring her across the southern border with Mexico, her family’s savings.  She had promised to send money back every month and, once able to marry and have babies, she would wait patiently until she could claim legal residence and bring her extended family to the United States via chain migration.

She and Juan had four children and now, at the age of 40, her 18 year old daughter has given birth to an out of wedlock child who became an automatic U.S. citizen the moment he took his first breath, thanks to the anchor baby ruling twisted by liberal courts into a birthright citizenship under the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

She has kept her promise and some. She has brought to the United States her mom, dad, sisters, brothers, and cousins from her large extended family.  She has recently taken in a stranger, an eight-year little girl, who had been sent to the United States unaccompanied by her parents on the government’s promise that she would be allowed into the U.S., no questions asked.

Many such children were brought in the middle of the night and dispersed to centers around the country in communities willing to take them in and shelter them with our government’s money.  Maria was grateful to Obama for bringing in small and unaccompanied minors even though most were male, way past the age of adulthood, and sporting gang tattoos.

El Salvador, with approximately 6.34 million people, is the smallest and most densely populated nation in Central America. The Salvadoran economy produces about $4,000 worth of goods and services per capita. The official currency is the U.S. dollar which makes it quite convenient when the illegal Salvadorans in this country send home tax-free money to their relatives. It is a social security net that their government cannot possibly replace.

They had a home in El Salvador with glassless windows to allow some air circulation from the humid and overpowering heat. Tropical critters, including snakes, plagued them often. Depression and a sense of hopelessness surrounded her and suffocated any desire to try and make things better. Her mom had told her that she would do fine so long as she did not irritate the police and the gangs that roved in all neighborhoods asking for and seizing food, clothing, and whatever valuables a family may have had. Nobody dared to infuriate them or else they would wind up dead.  It never crossed mothers’ minds that it was up to them to change the culture of crime and fear by raising good sons who could oppose the criminal life that ruled them daily.

Having no education beyond eighth grade, Maria works hard for $18 an hour, cleaning a few homes of the wealthy, earning an untaxed living while her extended family takes advantage of the U.S. taxpayers’ generosity who provide them with welfare and Medicaid insurance. She is not the best cleaner, she added, but she tries, never admitting when she brakes things in some of the homes that hires her.

The work ethic in her country is vastly different than here and she does not understand the American obsession with work and the lack of the three-hour siesta. Perhaps that is what makes Spain the happiest country to live in, their extended siesta. Family and their needs are most important to her, not the needs of an employer who hired her.

She changed employers often – breaking their stuff while cleaning and using cleaning methods that were not up to par with our western standards. She did not quite understand the issue of germs and cross-contamination. She thought Americans to be obsessed with cleanliness and disinfectants. What could possibly be wrong using rags to clean commodes by hand and then use the same rags to clean countertops?

She explained that her countrymen are not so generous as the Americans are – they only give up their possessions and hard-earned money if MS-13 gangs and police come around demanding to be paid, confiscating their valuables. Whoever dares to say no, winds up dead.

The small country struggles with excessive poverty, inequality, and crime. Mostly agricultural, depending heavily on coffee production at one point (as much as 90%) and the indigo plant during the colonial period, El Salvador is now turning to other sectors (finance, industry) to improve its GDP.

The fact that Maria knows nothing about civics and government in our country, does not stop her from voting for the party that has given many immigrants like her welfare – the Democrat Party. There is an occasional Democrat Party drive in her Hispanic community to rally the vote and those who do not have transportation are offered rides. They are always coached how to vote and for which candidate, always Democrat.

She is just smart enough to know how to manage her family’s budget but not knowledgeable how the free market economy works in our country. Like all third world citizens who come to this country illegally with stars in their eyes, she thinks money grow on trees in the United States and there is an endless supply of it because it comes from the generous government. She does not see any connection between the funding source of government and the “rich” American taxpayers who fund it. By the rest of the world’s standards, any American with a job is filthy rich and should share their wealth with the world.

I asked her if it bothered her that she is voting for the Democrat politicians who want open borders and are bringing in the MS-13 gangs she escaped from El Salvador, turning this country into the unsafe country she left behind for the wellbeing and economic prosperity here. She raised her shoulders with a deer in the headlights look on her face and said nothing.

It would only take ten percent of the millions of the flotsam and jetsam of the world currently residing illegally in the U.S. to vote Socialist Democrat, fundamentally transforming this country into a ruling regime diametrically opposed to our U.S.  Constitution and Christian roots.

Should Illegal Aliens Not Get to the Back of the Line?

Millions and millions of legal aliens past and present must feel pretty betrayed and foolish that they have followed the law, spent endless hours filling out paperwork, paid expensive fees, waited and waited, traveled to immigration offices sometimes in faraway places at great cost to them, subjected themselves to interrogations, fingerprinting, medical tests to prove that they were healthy, undergoing financial cross-examination to make sure they would not become a burden to American society, in order to legally immigrate to the United States as resident aliens.

They want a chance at the American dream. But this American dream has been destroyed by the lawlessness that permits illegal aliens to break our laws and demand citizenship and rights that previously were reserved for law-abiding people either born in this country or naturalized, people who wanted to make America better through their contributions once they were given the opportunity to live in a formerly free country.

Now we reward law breakers, no questions asked, with every possible financial incentives an American citizen has and they are not satisfied. They demand American citizenship, free health care, birth certificates even though most were not born in this country, and they demand their own Bill of Rights. This document was just released by United We Stay, a group comprised of illegal aliens, first generation Americans, and liberal human rights activists. In addition to their 10-point demands, they object to the term “illegal” and “alien” because they are “dehumanizing.” http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/5/illegal-immigrants-release-bill-rights/

At the same time, illegal alien groups had no hesitation releasing a vile video with very young children using profane language and gestures that cannot be played on screen without blocking the profanity, a message addressed to presidential candidate Donald Trump and to any law-abiding American who  supports him. A majority of Americans reject criminality and such behavior unbecoming of adults but especially young children.

If this group was looking for sympathy and acceptance from Americans, this ill-conceived video certainly back-fired. Americans were outraged and disgusted that young children could be used in such a repulsive way by their own parents and other adults.

We are not racists or bigoted because we like the rule of law. You disrespected our country and broke our laws when you decided to sneak across the southern border without proper papers and authorizations.  

Americans don’t want to raise their children around your children if these are the values, the vile language,  and despicable behaviors that you teach your young children – no respect for the rule of law, for authority, and for the potentially future president of the United States. This video shows in glaring detail your mal-educated youth in action.

We don’t care that you “work hard” and that you do jobs that “Americans won’t do.” Americans and legal immigrants work hard too and pay heavy taxes so that you can have your anchor babies in the United States at taxpayer expense and free emergency healthcare in any hospital in the U.S.  Anchor baby is not an offensive term, it is how you anchor yourselves by blood lines to eventual legal residence in the U.S.

Americans in whose faces you spit, whose flags you burn, whom you mock with obscene gestures and call lewd names are paying for your EBT cards, your WIC benefits, your child’s Medicaid, your housing, your food, your unearned income tax credits, your children’s free education, your ESL lessons, school lunch meals for your kids, housing, furniture, and other benefits that poor Americans may or may not receive. You demand your “entitlements” you did not pay a dime into simply because you are human beings. It is not our obligation to take care of you, we must first take care of our elderly and needy citizens.

After the publication of this video and the recent wave of crimes committed by illegal aliens, more Americans realize that presidential candidate Donald Trump, heavily vilified by the main stream media and by progressive groups, was right. A certain segment of the illegal immigrant population are criminals, rapists, and bring in drugs as mules when they don’t have the fee to pay the coyote to guide them across the border illegally in the dead of night.

Unlike illegal aliens already in the U.S., flaunting, demonstrating, and financially benefitting from their illegal status, over four million legal immigrants are quietly awaiting the dispensation of their immigration status application, following the law and waiting patiently in their countries, unable nor willing to jump the border, with no desire to transform America into the third world socialist dictatorship they hope to escape.

Should illegal aliens not get to the back of the line?

 

Hospital Closures under ObamaCare

Photo courtesy of Lazar Dinu
Colentina Hospital Patients 1989

A remarkable photograph taken by Lazar Dinu in 1989 shows patients from a hospital in Bucharest, overjoyed that the communist dictator was gone and they would be able to find drugs in pharmacies, doctors would treat them without bribes and would not kill them during simple surgeries, hospitals would be modernized and actually heal patients, and happiness would be restored.

I wrote about socialized medical care in communist Romania in my autobiographical book, “Echoes of Communism,” (http://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Communism-Lessons-American-Choice/dp/1456535080/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419872185&sr=1-1&keywords=Echoes+of+communism) and in a recent article on ObamaCare. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/68532

Judging by the comments of Romanians today, twenty-five years later, not much has changed.  A few private hospitals were built, the bureaucrats and politicians are getting rich off the EU funds that are supposed to go into health care, a Palestinian doctor wants to install a monopoly over healthcare, state-run hospitals are still dirty, deficient, money run out early in the year, doctors and nurses still take bribes to care for patients, patients are still housed in wards and cared for by their families, drugs are more easily available when bought out of pocket, and medical insurance pays modest and inadequate sums for various procedures and for drugs.

If you might think the situation in Romania is bad because they have to overcome 44 years of communist totalitarian dictatorship, you would be right, however the socialized medical care in many EU countries is not much better. Take for instance Ireland - their overworked doctors and nurses are wonderful but conditions in some hospitals are dreadful.

The patient named Maureen I described in my previous article (http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/68077) had to share a room recently with five men. One was 94 years old and had dementia, shouting incessantly, and another was a mental patient who kept his clothes piled on the floor, while two security stood guard at the door in case he became destructive or dangerous.

There was one bathroom for all six patients, with no rails to hold on to and the shower did not work. The entire room stunk to high heaven. There were two holes in the wall where the rail had been. Maureen was lucky that a kind nurse gave her a sponge bath each day.  On the day Maureen’s husband was visiting, one of the men urinated into the water jug. 

Family members were told not to alert the media in case their loved ones needed to be hospitalized there again.  One visiting family member who wanted to speak to the media was asked not to do so.

The hospital was supposed to be closed down but people marched and it was kept open under these horrible circumstances. People felt that a hospital with such ghastly conditions was better than no hospital at all.

Apparently co-ed wards are now the norm. When wards are full, it is common to keep patients on gurneys in the hallways. Most doctors come from third world countries and have limited training. There is not enough money for adequate medical staff or hospital administration. Medical personnel are frustrated because they cannot provide proper care to all patients.

If you are lulled into a false sense of security because this cannot happen in the United States, think again. ObamaCare is causing a wave of small hospital closures across our country. According to Paul Bremer, “Eighteen acute-care hospitals across the United States shut their doors in 2013. At least 12 more hospitals have closed this year in rural areas alone. More are getting out the plywood to nail over windows and barricades for doors.” http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/obamacare-blamed-for-killing-hospitals/

Small and mid-size hospitals are closing in inner cities and rural areas with a disproportionate number of Medicare/Medicaid patients.

Reasons for closures are low reimbursements rates, bureaucrats telling doctors that some patient services are “not medically necessary,” physician practices heavily dependent on government reimbursement, ObamaCare regulations that are too expensive to implement, high out of pocket expenses for the insured under ObamaCare, causing less people to go to the hospital, and economically depressed rural farming towns where locals cannot afford to go to the doctor or to the hospital.

Additionally, California hospitals are in danger of closing their doors due to the overwhelming influx of illegal aliens who are treated for free and have their anchor babies delivered free at huge costs to taxpayers.

Madeleine Pelner Cosman wrote a five-page report titled “Illegal Aliens and American Medicine,” in the spring 2005 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons in which she stated that “84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbursed tax on the system.” http://www.jpands.org/vol10no1/cosman.pdf

Lee Hieb, M.D., orthopedic surgeon, wrote, “Today, all over America, small and mid-size hospitals as well as hospitals in inner-city, poor areas are closing.” In her book, Surviving the Medical Meltdown: Your Guide to Living Through the Disaster of Obamacare, Dr. Hieb said that “Events happening now give us some idea of what medicine will be reduced to in the future.” http://www.naturalnews.com/048141_Obamacare_hospital_closures_health_care_system.html

For people like me who survived the maltreatment and lack of proper medical care under socialized communist healthcare, there is no surprise; we know exactly what is coming. If Americans would only listen to the voices of reason and experience! If something sounds too good to be true in this “fundamentally transformed America,” it is going to be rationed and miserable.

 

 

 

Infecting a Nation for Politics and Money

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
– Christopher Manes, Earth First!

“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”  – John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Ebola Source: The Web

Should flights coming from West African nations be cancelled and our borders closed? According to Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the answer is “No, absolutely not.”  “When you start closing countries like that, there is a real danger of making things worse,… governments could fall if you isolate them.”

What kind of logic is that? How is it possible that blocking visas and the travel of people sick with Ebola and quarantining them in the Hot Zone is making things worse? Would that not be easier for the virus outbreak to be contained and allow the virus to burn itself out before it mutates?

Apparently the neighboring countries to Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria have good judgment and have made the decision to close their borders to and cancel incoming flights from the affected countries.

Should Americans care if governments might fall in West Africa where Ebola is raging out of control, when the safety of our own citizens is at stake? We used to be insulated somewhat by our geographical location but thanks to our government’s insane politics we now have Ebola cases and the enterovirus D68 infections among American children in almost all states of our union.

American children were made sick by the illegal alien children who were bureaucratically dispersed and placed in classrooms around the country.  These children did not speak English, were illiterate in their own native dialects, and lacked any knowledge of basic hygiene. In addition of lice, scabies, TB, and chicken pox, the list of infectious diseases they brought into our country is quite long.

The surge of illegal alien children has dropped, according to the Washington Times, from 10,000 per month in May and June to 3,100 in August, but the damage has already been done. (Stephen Dinan, Disease plagues illegal immigrants; lack of medications, basic hygiene blamed, The Washington Times, October 6, 2014)

At least five children have died in the U.S. with respiratory illnesses caused by the enterovirus D68 (EV-D68). The latest casualty is Eli Waller from New Jersey who died of the “polio-like illness.” Health officials “have no idea how he contracted the virus.” Michael Savage pointed out on his website that the County of Union New Jersey Department of Human Services in Elizabeth, New Jersey, accepted $1,100,766 in grants from HHS to receive shipments of unaccompanied illegal alien children.

Eli has died “to support Obama illegal-alien goals,” said Michael Savage on his website. He discussed on his show church charities and child services agencies that have received millions of dollars in grants to accept and care for unaccompanied illegal alien children infected with communicable diseases.

Dr. Savage blamed the spread of the “mysterious” virus which is no mystery to him at all, on this administration’s leftist policies of open borders. He reminded listeners that these progressives have blood on their hands. “They will infect a nation to buy another car, to buy another house, “and to push their progressive agenda.

Prof. Paul Ehrlich spelled the progressive depopulation agenda quite succinctly in The Population Bomb. “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

Markus Bergstrom, chief information officer of Startup Cities Institute in Guatemala, wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post, "Losing the Birth Lottery."  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/losing-the-birth-lottery/2014/10/03/d1806338-4a69-11e4-a046-120a8a855cca_story.html

According to him, it is “borderism” and “racism” that are preventing the Mexicans south of the border to come and go as they please, borders are a nuisance . I wonder if Bergstrom heard of Sgt. Tahmooressi who is languishing in a Mexican jail for having accidentally crossed the border into Mexico.

A Mexican citizens and an American citizen from New Mexico are only separated by a birth certificate, having been born on the wrong side of the fence, he said. I don’t know what fence he is talking about because our southern border is wide open into the U.S., we even provide charter flights and buses to come here illegally, grants to care for them, medical care, welfare, Social Security cards, and many benefits paid for by the American taxpayers who had paid into the Social Security “trust fund” for decades. We also have the 14^th Amendment  with birthright citizenship that provides pregnant illegals with convenient “anchor babies.”

In Bergstrom’s opinion, we must address this geographical injustice and transform the United State into a European Union with open borders because the mass migration from poor countries to developed countries in Western Europe worked so well, Europe is not a basket case of financial bankruptcy and multicultural strife, violence, beheadings, and overall failure.

Bergstrom says, “… borderism and racism are ultimately questions of ethics. Inheriting the wrong genes is no longer punishable by law, but inheriting the wrong citizenship is. Borderism is thus a sibling of racism as it subjects our rights to the lottery of life. While many opportunities in life are unequally distributed, our legal rights must always be universal.”

There you have it, progressivism on parade. We are all global citizens now and borders and sovereignty are a thing of the past.

©Ileana Johnson 2014

 

 

 

 

Illegal Aliens and Federal Benefits

Theoretically, the law forbids illegal aliens from receiving benefits reserved for American citizens with the exception of emergency Medicaid. In practice, it does not prevent any of them from applying for and receiving benefits paid for by American taxpayers who sometimes, are themselves denied benefits.

Emergency Medicaid provided in emergency rooms, although well intentioned, has been used and abused by illegal aliens as their own personal physician, resulting in the bankruptcy of many small hospitals across the nation, particularly in California.

Federal benefits distributed to illegal aliens include: grants, contracts, loans, professional and commercial licenses, retirement, welfare, WIC, disability, public housing, college education, Pell grants, food stamps, tax credits, earned income credits, tax refunds, and unemployment benefits.

The Census Bureau reports 40 million foreign-born people residing in the United States. In this category, one-third is estimated to be illegal aliens. Liberal main stream media calls them “undocumented workers,” “in the shadows residents,” or “unauthorized residents.”

According to the Pew Hispanic Center there were 11.2 million “unauthorized immigrants” in 2010.  Their in-house demographer, Jeffrey Passel, used 2008 Current Population Survey (CPS) to estimate “the number of persons living in families in which the head of household or the spouse was an authorized alien,” for a total of 8.8 million families. Liberals like to redefine illegal aliens with euphemisms that suit their agenda. Other sources publish much higher numbers of illegals.

Illegal alien families are likely to have U.S. citizen children or “anchor babies.” These families are given “mixed status” by the Congressional Research Service. Passel also estimates that one in three illegal alien children is poor. This is obvious since illegal aliens have fled their home countries mostly for economic reasons and dire poverty.

Liberals lobby Congress to deal with illegal aliens based on controversies such as demographic issues, how to treat illegal families that have “anchor babies” who are U.S. citizens, and how strict identification requirements may hurt Americans who are denied benefits.

Once a foreign national had crossed the border illegally, they have committed a crime which is not punished lightly in most countries. In the U.S. however, progressives demand that illegal aliens have due process rights, eligibility for federal assistance, educational opportunities paid by taxpayers, military service opportunities, employment rights, and pathways to citizenship. No other country in the world rewards law breaking with citizenship but the United States.

Illegal aliens, a.k.a. “unauthorized residents,” come in three categories:

-          Visitors who overstay their nonimmigrant visas

-          Foreign nationals who enter illegally (“surreptitiously” as liberals like to say)

-          Foreign nationals who enter with forged documents

-          Pregnant foreign nationals who enter illegally in the last month or trimester of pregnancy in order to deliver “anchor babies” (These foreigners have spawned organized “anchor baby tourism” in cities like New York)

 According to “jus soli,” codified in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, children of slaves born on U.S. soil are American citizens. Liberals extended this principle to the children of any illegal alien who happens to give birth on U.S. soil. Thus a new breed of families is codified by the Pew Hispanic Center as “mixed-immigration status families.” However, foreign diplomats’ children who are born on U.S. soil are citizens of their parents’ respective countries and not American citizens.

The Congressional Research Service which produces data for Congress identified another category of illegal immigrants, “Quasi-legal migrants.” In certain cases, the Department of Homeland Security issues temporary employment authorization documents (EADs) to aliens who are not authorized to reside in the United States. They can, however, obtain Social Security cards. The CRS identified several groups in this “quasi-legal” category:

-          Those with temporary humanitarian relief who have Temporary Protected Status (TPS)

-          Asylum seekers with cases pending for at least 180 days

-          Those awaiting in the U.S. the resolution of legal permanent residency process (family and fiancées of legal residents)

-          Tourists, students, and temporary workers who overstayed nonimmigrant visas with petitions awaiting to adjust status as employment-based LPRs (legal permanent resident)

The “quasi-legal” groups are often denied approval for legal permanent resident status. Twenty-five percent of asylum seekers and generally, 80-85% of LPRs petitions are eventually approved.

Special illegal alien immigrant juveniles (under the age of 21 and unmarried) who were homeless, orphans, or victims of abusive family situations are eligible for permanent legal residence and become dependents of the courts. The court grants custody of the child to a state agency, declares him/her eligible for foster care, and determines that it is not in the best interest of the child to return to his/her country of birth. Taxpayers then become de facto supporters of such children. According to CRS, since 2008, such children exceeded 1,000 each year.

“Permanently residing under the color of law,” (PRUCOL) has been used historically to give benefits to foreign nationals who are known to be residing in the U.S. yet the government has no plans to deport. “Quasi-legal” aliens fall in this category of PRUCOL.

Social Services Block Grants and migrant health center services are offered as limited exceptions within the 1996 welfare act:

-          Treatment under Medicaid for emergency medical conditions (except organ transplant)

-          Short-term emergency disaster relief

-          Immunizations

-          Testing and treatment for communicable diseases

-          Soup kitchens, crisis counseling, short-term shelters

-          HUD assistance

Although the law clearly states to the contrary, pre-natal care, treatment, and assistance under Medicaid, CHIP,  nutrition programs, and other benefits are given to illegal aliens, all funded by U.S. taxpayers.

Title IV of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation ACT (PRWORA) of 1996 (P.L. 104-193) “established comprehensive restrictions on the eligibility of all noncitizens for means-tested public assistance, with the exceptions for LPRs with a substantial U.S. work history or military connection.” PRWORA expressly bars illegal aliens from most state and locally funded benefits.

The Department of Labor estimated $53.8 billion in unemployment benefits were paid to illegal aliens in 2002 and IRS paid $4.2 billion in refundable tax credits in 2010 to illegal aliens. Unemployment compensation overpayment of 0.51% of total was made to illegal aliens. (Congressional Research Service, “Unauthorized Aliens’ Access to Federal Benefits: Policy and Issues, Ruth Ellen Wasem, September 17, 2012)

The Food Stamp Program reported that 1.9 million U.S. citizen children (“anchor babies”) living with illegal alien parents received food stamps, or 7% of all participants. Medicaid spent $2.5 billion, $2.2 billion on treatment for the uninsured, and $1.9 billion on food assistance programs, including emergency Medicaid and school lunch programs. According to Steven Camarota, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, “Many of the costs associated with illegals are due to their American-born children, who are awarded U.S. citizenship at birth…greater efforts at barring illegals from federal programs will not reduce costs because their citizen children can continue to access them.” (Steven A. Camarota, The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget, Washington, D.C.: Center for Immigration Studies, August 2004)

At a time when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, out of the labor force, and 47 million Americans are on food stamps because of the disastrous economic policies pursued by the current administration, should we continue to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on illegal aliens who are the responsibility of their own countries?