The reason the federal government has not secured the border, and obviously will not secure the border to prevent the entry of illegal aliens is that so many in our country are profiting from them. The twenty-first century plantation owners, the end users of illegal aliens, howl at the prospect of immigration law enforcement.
Certainly businesses, large and small, profit from illegal immigration and legal immigration. Businesses get cheaper labor than they otherwise would by hiring American workers. And, in addition to paying lower wages, many times they pay the illegals under the table, which deprives the state of taxes on their earnings.
But there are other groups equally anxious to keep the inbound flow coming.
Church and Non-Profit profiteers
Churches and non-profit organizations lobby for, and benefit from, illegal aliens. Churches, from Catholic to Evangelical to Mormon, want those new parishioners.
The non-profits — Catholic Charities being the best known but by no means the only one — build their bureaucracies from charitable donations, which are quite sizeable. Lawyers running a large trust will get no grief from making “humanitarian” contributions to non-profit organizations that are ministering to the poor or “supporting families.”
There are hundreds of charitable trusts that list immigrants as a field of interest. It is usually “immigrants/refugees,” but one can be sure that most of the money that benefits “immigrants” really means illegal aliens. And, the language of these trusts is so civilized.
This is from a $250 million foundation:
The foundation has an historic interest in ensuring that individuals and families living in the city have access to the services and resources they need to pursue and sustain successful lives. The foundation invests in organizations, programs, and projects that achieve results aligned with two objectives. The first objective is to build and preserve economic security and independence among low-income individuals and families.
It sounds great. And, it sounds sincere. It probably is sincere. And, who would argue with that? You can be sure that the grant application includes all the key words from the foundation’s description of programs. And, you can be equally sure that whoever is soliciting a donation has a stable of illegal aliens to service. A never-ending flow of illegal aliens gives the non-profit all the linguistic ammo they need to write huge reports on whom they have serviced and how the numbers have grown, all used in the next solicitation letter. The funder may not even know the money is going to benefit illegal aliens. Some make it obvious that they don’t care if it does.
There are literally thousands of foundations with billions of dollars in the U.S. The money they funnel to the non-profits is more than enough to motivate them to complain loudly whenever the government, recently it is state governments, seeks to enforce immigration law.
Universities, colleges and K-12
The education industry in America is a profiteer. Remember that immediately following the terrorist attack on 9/11, it was believed that some of the hijackers had entered the United States on student visas? The system was so riddled with errors that less than three weeks after 9/11, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) called for Congress to support a six-month moratorium on student visas, meaning that all foreign students who applied for new visas to study in the U.S. in the next six months would have been rejected. Within days Feinstein rescinded her proposal as the education-industrial-complex shrieked in horror. It seems that Feinstein’s own state of California had 65,000 foreign students in 2001, and the number is higher today.
The proposal was never considered again, even though six months to the day after Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi crashed jumbo jets into the World Trade Center, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) notified a Venice, Florida, flight school that the two fanatical jihadists had been approved for student visas.
It seems that the money which foreign students pay to “institutions of higher learning” trumps national security. Accordingly, nine years after 9/11 it was found that hundreds of foreigners received student visas to a phony language school in Florida.
The Dream Act is an amnesty for illegals between the ages of 3 and 35, depending on which version is being considered. It is stalled in Congress, but many states are passing their own Dream Acts, which will provide colleges in the coming years with millions of students, many of whom will receive scholarships and grants and other tax dollars.
K-12 schools at the local level are funded, in part, by the state based on what is called ADA — Average Daily Attendance. Based on students in attendance, the schools receive money from the state. Therein is the incentive to boost class size with illegal immigrant students. The Teachers Unions support packing the classrooms, because then the schools can hire more dues paying union members, AKA teachers, to reduce class size. The more students reported to the state, the more funding the school receives from the state.
The Education Industry, from kindergarten to the post-graduate level at the finest universities in our country, to the teachers’ unions and other support infrastructure, is a clearly a profiteer from illegal immigration.
Government bureaucracies
Entitlement bureaucracies that dispense welfare, food stamps, WIC-Women Infants and Children, and the myriad of mind-boggling taxpayer-funded services and benefits are also profiteers from illegal immigration. As bureaucrats seek to justify and expand their budgets and grow their empires, they seek people to whom they will dispense the tax dollars. The fastest-growing segment of the low-income population in America is illegal aliens, who are the perfect fuel for the local, state, and federal entitlement factories.
Immigration lawyers
America welcomes over one million legal immigrants and refugees a year, more than almost all the other nations of the world added up. Immigration lawyers have a full and profitable practice assisting legal immigrants adjust status, etc. But the dark side of the legal profession advises businesses on how to end run the law. A now infamous video on YouTube called “PERM fake job ads” shows immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explaining how employers can run classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified American applicants, and the steps to use to disqualify qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers. This is perhaps the lowest form of immigration profiteer.
Business
Of all the end users who benefit from open borders, business is the biggest profiteer. Business benefits from the cheap labor provided by illegal aliens. But, that is only the beginning. Ultimately, it is about consumers.
The reason for the near total non-enforcement of our immigration and employment laws is that the aging Baby Boom Generation of consumers needs to be replaced. And, who better to replace them with than illegal aliens from the Third World?
Cheap labor is the first part of the equation, but it is what that cheap labor becomes with their first paycheck that is the goal. They become consumers.
It is the addition of millions of consumers to our economy each year that is the purpose of open borders.
Demography is destiny. The post-World War II Baby Boom Generation1 began in 1946 and “ended” in 1964. In eighteen years, approximately 78.5 million babies were born.
The boom sneaked up on America at mid-century. Kindergartens and grade schools were bursting with Boomers in such numbers that school administrators were sent scrambling.
The first discretionary purchase impacted by Baby Boomer Consumers was brought to us by Walt Disney and Fess Parker: the Davey Crockett coonskin cap.2 At the height of the fad, coonskin caps were selling at a rate of 5,000 a day.
Add a fad to mass production and the fact that in the years immediately following World War II half of the manufacturing capacity in the world was in the United States, and the consumer economy was born. Baby Boomers became the consuming engine that helped fuel the fantastic economic growth of America for the past six decades.
The movement of “the pig in the python” became the predictor of what smart, forward-thinking businessmen focused on. They knew the market would be there for cars, houses and all the consumer items that one could invent.
Well, it’s almost over.
The Boomer Consumer demographic is now rapidly aging out of the consuming cycle. People reduce their spending around the age of 50 and are pretty much out of the consuming cycle by 54. With the exception of the obvious, like wheel chairs, hearing aids, and Medicare supplemental insurance, most of today’s advertisers aren’t even aiming commercials at anyone born before 1957 (the peak year of the Baby Boom). In 2012, the number of Boomer Consumers begins an accelerated decline.
If we assume that the Baby Boomers will retire at 62, that wave began in 2008 and is averaging 10,000 people per day, increasing to 12,000 a day before the trend begins to decline in 2019. And those numbers are just for the native-born. You can add at least 55 million legal and illegal alien consumers to that cohort who have joined the population over the last 25 years.
The aging Boomer Consumers need to be replaced but in higher numbers because, as the Boomers retire, and the middle class continues to shrink, their replacements will be earning and consuming less.
The current median household income in the U.S. is $50,000.3 The IRS tax rate is about 25 percent or $12,500. Add to that a state tax rate that varies between 9.3 percent and zero (California and the District of Columbia are the highest) and you have roughly $34,000- $37,500 of annual consumable income.
The minimum wage4 in the U.S. is $7.25 per hour, up to $8.50 in some states.
A minimum wage set at $8.00 per hour x 40 hours x 50 weeks yields an annual wage of $16,000. At $10 per hour it is $20,000 a year. And while it is reasonably assumed that many illegal alien workers are paid under the table and have no tax withholding, at least 8 million illegal aliens are working on the books and have some withholding.
Pew Hispanic reports5 the median income of Hispanics in California at $22,405, which is the poverty level6 for a family of four.
How many illegal aliens working at minimum wage will it take to replace the lost consumption of the retiring boomers?
A conservative estimate is that it will take at least 2.5 low-income wage earners to replace one middle class median income boomer-consumer.
In short, 78.5 million Baby Boomer Consumers x 2.5 low-income legal/illegal alien wage earners = 196,250,000 new consumers that must be added to our economy to maintain current consumption levels.
The population of the United States is 311,500,000.7
311,500,000
+ 196,250,000
507,750,000 people
(before you add in the birth rate)
The U.S. Census Bureau8 estimates, “…about 86 percent of the population growth (by) the year 2050 may be due to the effects of post-1992 net immigration.”
Why import undereducated Third Worlders who will be mired in poverty for at least two generations to replace the Baby Boomers?
Because, it is easy. Finding a 196 million people desperate to flee a Third World hell hole is a no-brainer.
They export themselves. With an enforcement posture by the U.S Border Patrol that is designed to fail, the welcome mat is out and the door wide open. They come here under their own power, move to an area that can absorb their labor, and live better than they did in the corrupt land they left, even in what America considers overcrowded squalor.
The Hispanic birth rate,9 the highest of all ethnic groups and the majority of illegal and legal immigrants to the United States, is estimated at 2.9 per woman. In 2007, 4.3 million babies were born in the U.S., breaking the record set for children born in 1957.
So, you don’t have to be an economist or a demographer to predict that at the current rate of immigration (legal and illegal), combined with their offspring, the U.S. population will be at, or exceed, half a billion people by 2050, probably before. That’s a half billion consumers.
Why are illegal aliens from Mexico and other Third World countries the perfect replacement consumers for the Baby Boomers? Consider that illegal aliens come with virtually nothing. They have a water jug and the clothes on their back. They come with nothing, they need and want everything.
They have grown up watching American movies and American television and they know exactly how we live in America and they want to come and live and consume just like us. Most of the people in the world just want to flee the grinding poverty and brutality of their home countries and live and consume like Americans. And, who can blame them, really?
And now that the word is out that America won’t stop anybody from coming in or keep them from working once they get here, they are coming. The biggest encouragement is the knowledge that the federal government will do nothing to prevent them.
For years, as we learned of, and experienced firsthand, the negative effects that massive legal and illegal immigration has on population growth, crime, education, healthcare, the environment, and employment, many citizens asked, “Don’t they (the federal government) know what is happening?”
They know. They all know. Nobody doesn’t know.
But, it doesn’t matter, because business wants those new customers and it is business that keeps the politicians in office. Everything else is simply collateral damage.
And, for this class of profiteers, there apparently is no limit to the consumption utility of illegal aliens, who even helped inflate the ballooning real estate10 prices that burst in 2008.
In the 2010 book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,11 author Michael Lewis describes the subprime mortgage meltdown in understandable terms. In Chapter 4, “How to Harvest a Migrant Worker,” Lewis tells how, “In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.”
The main protagonist laying on The Big Short is trader Steve Eisman, who anguished over whether or not he was right about the impending burst of the subprime mortgage bubble on which he was betting millions of dollars. He then learns that his housekeeper, a woman from South America, was offered a no-money option adjustable-rate mortgage for an overpriced house in Queens. Then he learns that his twin daughters’ baby nurse and her sister, both from Jamaica, owned six townhouses in Queens. (Eisman’s hedge fund made almost $1billion on The Big Short.)
Banks want to make illegal aliens their customers and will open accounts using the Mexican Matricula Consular card,12 which is not a secure I.D. and isn’t even trusted in Mexico.
Are low-income workers good consumers?
Dollar Tree-DLTR (where every item is $1.00) opened its 4,000th store last year. (In comparison, Nordstrom has about 200 outlets in the country, Sears has 926 and is closing stores, and J.C. Penney has 1,100.) Dollar Tree’s share price13 has more than tripled since March of 2009 and closed recently at $93.12.
From a $724,000 mortgage to the Dollar Tree, legal and illegal alien consumers are welcomed.
Corporate profiteers are the reason our borders are not secured and our immigration and employment laws are ignored, and have been ignored by successive administrations.
Capitalist greed, as unregulated as our border and aided and abetted by career politicians and bureaucrats, is mutating our country, our culture, and the character of our nation.
The decisions affecting the future of our country are not being made by the American people but by the profiteers in the board rooms of banks and multinational corporations. These changes are being imposed from the top down and are anti-democratic. The technical term is plutocracy. And it is totalitarian.
Our immigration and border security policies are being treated with the same attitude and behavior that that led to the subprime mortgage debacle. Greedy people are taking with both hands with no regard for the future and the potential damage that is inevitable.
Perhaps a suitable logo for the profiteers of illegal immigration is a picture of a pile of ashes under the words; “Profits over Patriotism.”
Endnotes
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coonskin_cap.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States
5. http://pewhispanic.org/states/?stateid=CA.
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States.
7. http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html.
8. http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/natproj.html.
9. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122002725.html.
10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peSfhvImbXU.
11. http://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393072231.
12. http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/08/news/economy/illegal_immigrants/.
13. http://investing.money.msn.com/investments/stock-price?symbol=dltr&ocid=qbeb.