Turn off the immigration spigot

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views February 11, 2002]

From the American Civil Rights Institute comes a rational plea for a halt to immigration:

The terrorists of the September 11 attack were all foreign born, with some staying in this country illegally. Conducting background checks of visa applicants, and tracking and deporting illegal and criminal aliens require an enormous amount of time and resources. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is already overwhelmed with its current backlog. How can the INS, our ports of entry, and our consular offices be effective if they are continually burdened with over 700,000 applications for permanent residency annually, in addition to hundreds of thousands of "temporary" working visas and student visas and millions of tourist visas to process every year? . . .

According the California Department of Education, one in four school children in the state cannot speak English well enough to understand what goes on in the classroom. In the last 14 years, California voters passed school bonds totaling some $18 billion just for K-12 alone. Even schoolchildren in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Nashville, and North Carolina also speak 80, 85 and 170 languages, respectively. . . .

Because one-third recent immigrants have no high school diplomas and are mostly low-wage earners, they are not likely to pay enough taxes even to cover the cost of educating their children, which is $5000 per child per year, on average, let alone other infrastructure. The Social Security taxes that low-income immigrants pay are not likely to offset the benefits they will receive when they retire. . . .

Continuing to admit massive immigration from over 100 countries will only further divide this nation. Although the United States had high immigration at the turn of the 20th century, most immigrants were able to eventually assimilate in large part thanks to a quasi-moratorium on immigration between 1925 and 1965. Presently, assimilation of most immigrants is becoming next to impossible. . . .

Although many individual immigrants have made valuable contributions to the U.S., for the sake of our public safety and national unity, Congressman Tom Tancredo has introduced H.R. 2712 to institute a moratorium so that, as TV commentator John McLaughlin put it, we can "fix the plumbing with the spigot turned off."

Other groups in the struggle against immigration overload are:

Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) - Advocates a temporary moratorium on immigration

Project USA (Director, Craig Nelsen) - Specializes in outdoor billboards, forums, and other alerts

Center for Immigration Studies - Research and policy analysis

California Coalition for Immigration Reform - Issues of illegal immigration

American Patrol (Voice of Citizens Together) - videos and other presentations

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