Mike Scott
Glendora, CA 91741
April 22, 2004
Los Angeles City Councilmember Janice Hahn
City Hall Office
200 N. Spring Street, Rm 435
Los Angeles, CA 90012
RE: L.A. Times article of today “House Crammed With Illegal Immigrants”
Dear Councilmember Hahn:
Regarding the Times’, “City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, whose district includes Watts, said the immigration agency has largely abdicated enforcement responsibilities in Los Angeles. "The federal government is turning a blind eye to what's happening at the border". With all due respect Councilmember Hahn, who’re you kidding about “blind eyes”? What about Special Order 40? Illegal immigration is basically a creation of federal government policies that have ignored their own immigration laws for decades, - in conjunction with malfeasant and squeamish local municipalities such as the Los Angeles City government that indefensibly supports Special Order 40.
According to the INS; “An illegal alien is a person who is in the United States in violation of U.S. immigration laws. Such a person may have entered illegally—that is, without Immigration and Naturalization Service inspection (undocumented) or using fraudulent documentation—or legally under a nonimmigrant visa or other temporary condition and subsequently violated the terms of the visa or other terms of entry”.
Federal laws, USC 8, Sec. 1325, 274, 275, 276, 277,make it a federal felony to “aid, abet, assist, encourage or induce an illegal alien to remain in the United States”. Clearly Special Order 40 encourages and induces illegal aliens to remain in the United States. And all you do is point fingers at the Beltway.
Here in California, if we add-up the expenses of just the basic components of illegal immigration for a single year, - - K-12 education for 430,000 kids, pre-natal & delivery costs in county hospitals for 84,000 illegal moms, monthly subsidies to these same illegal moms for their new U.S. citizens, emergency health care costs borne by the State’s major counties, and the costs to incarcerate about 24,000 illegal alien felons in state/county prisons, we’re at $5.9 billion, year after year after year. (Please see attached spreadsheet)
Los Angeles County's underground cash economy is a fiscal disaster, with an estimated 28% of the workforce (mostly illegal immigrants) paid in cash, thus depriving the safety net of an estimated $1.1 billion annually. California leads the nation in suffocating under the burden of medically uninsured people. California spent $1.55 billion in 2002 for medical care for uninsured illegal aliens. Los Angeles County recently voted to close 16 community clinics, and reduced by 25% funding for its network of private clinics partnering with the County. In addition to this, within the last decade, 50 emergency rooms and 17 trauma centers throughout Southern California have closed their doors, all because they couldn’t afford to keep them open because of the exponentially increasing numbers of uninsured patients that include critical-masses of illegal aliens. The County’s population grew 7.4 percent in the last decade; a period in which 27 hospitals closed their doors. Additionally, 81 hospitals no longer have emergency rooms. Los Angeles County spent about $340 million in 2002 providing health care to illegal immigrants, according to a report from the Department of Health Services. So bad is the crisis here that some patients must wait 4 days for a hospital bed, and some even die while waiting for these beds.
The statewide system is "on the brink of collapse," according to a 2003 study by the California Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems. The study warned that thousands of workers will lose their jobs and hospitals will close if the split between rising costs and declining revenues keeps growing.
Our immigration policies are hopelessly utopian, guided primarily by nation-of-immigrant’s nostalgia and political & ideological opportunism. Bumper-sticker mass immigration advocacy is painless and risk-free. While it gives fair-weather huddled mass buffs a sense of satisfaction, no nation was ever saved by pointing fingers at look-a-likes, or by immigration policies displayed on chrome.
Victor Hugo nailed it when he said, "There is one thing stronger than all the kings and queens, and all the armies of the world combined, and that is the power of an idea whose time has come". And that idea is that in the final analysis, no democratic society can indefinitely allow a relentless flood of illegal immigrants to contravene its laws, violate its borders, overwhelm its infrastructures and social systems, diminish employment possibilities for its indigenous uneducated and poor, and degrade its way of life, as is happening here in California.
Sooner or later the whole squeamish lot of Special Order 40 supporters will pay a terrible and predictable political price for ignoring their fiduciary responsibilities.
Tick tick tick tick.
Sincerely,
Mike Scott
