It is humorous for some to come in here and claim that concerns regarding immigration policy are based upon "lies and misconceptions", in which those same thread participants then engage in lies and misconceptions!
The immigration issue is a very complicated one - there are not easy, nor cheap, remedies. What is more clear is the need for remedies, as the current status quo is simply not working.
A report by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation place the longer term costs of amnesty at around $2.6 trillion dollars. That is a signficant cost to the system by any measure, and one that should give any reasonable person pause.
Amnesty Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers at Least $2.6 Trillion
Rector also, in testimony to a House Subcomittee in 2007 outlined the net cost of low skill immigrant households at over $49 billion per year - meaning that these immigrant household were taking $49 billion from the system over what they were putting in. That too is a significant number, particularly for a nation struggling with an ever growing deficit issue.
And here is what Ernest Istook said on the subject a couple months ago...
Obama obviously wants to leave the impression that government won't pay health care for illegals.
It's a false impression. Here are the two big fallacies with Obama's carefully-chosen and scripted words:
There are other avenues for illegal aliens to receive health care at public expense.
All efforts to add enforcement language to HR3200 were defeated by mostly party-line votes. We can expect that the bureaucracy would look the other way under Obama's control (just as it has with prior presidents).
Current law says illegal aliens qualify only for emergency medical care through Medicaid. Most of these are childbirths.
These costs exceed $3 billion a year. But because few states require proof of legal presence for regular Medicaid, nobody knows the true number of illegals who receive it, or at what cost.
The House bill not only makes a major expansion of Medicaid eligibility but also restricts (in Section 1702) inquiries about immigration status. Efforts to fix this and to add enforcement provisions to HR 3200 were offered in the Ways & Means Committee by Rep. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and in the Energy & Commerce Committee by Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), but voted down. No Democrats supported Heller. Blue Dog Representatives Mike Ross (D-Ark.), Jim Matheson (D-Utah), Charles Melancon (D-La.), John Barrow (D-Ga.), and Baron Hill (D-Ind.) voted for the Deal proposal.
H.R. 3200 contains gaping loopholes that will allow illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded benefits. And these loopholes are no accident. The legislation contains no verification mechanism to ensure that illegal immigrants do not apply for benefits. Republicans offered an amendment to close this loophole -- it would have required verification using the existing methods that are already in place to verify eligibility for other federal benefits programs. But, when they were asked to put the language of the bill where their words were, in a party-line vote, House Democrats rejected the amendment to require verification and close this loophole.
Immigration Distrust on Health Bill
So what we have is a current immigration system that is incredibly costly and rife with abuse against the American taxpayer - and the Democrats attempts at healthcare reform will only add to that cost and abuse for we will be combining both the innefective system of government run healthcare with the already proven innefective system of government run immigration policy that will further feed the cavernous beast of the American welfare state.
Most Americans do not realize the size and scope of our means tested welfare programs that
cost taxpayers over $700 billion per year. This is more than is spent on the entire defense budget, including the war in Iraq. When Lynden Johnson initiated his War on Poverty welfare state expansion, means tested welfare accounted for 1.2% of our entire GDP.
It has since increased by over 400%. In inflation adjusted dollars, the entire cost of America's means tested welfare programs is $16 trillion dollars - more than double what has been spent on all the wars in America's history. In one year, America will spend more on means tested welfare than it has spent in all the years of the Iraq war, and Obama's current budget has this country spending an additional $10 trillion in means tested welfare spending - a rate that is nearly double that of the Clinton era.
These numbers are staggering, dangerous, and a recipe for eventual economic collapse for America. Adding government run healthcare will add to those costs. Adding government run healthcare with no provisions requiring no tax payer treatment for illegal aliens will raise that cost even higher.
Obama to spend $10.3 trillion on welfare | Spero News
