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October 31, 2003
 Bush’s
La-La Land—Or Occupied (And Fleeced) America?
By
Joe Guzzardi
Last Monday I went to the Woodbridge
Medical Center, a local health care clinic, for my
TB shot as
required by Lodi Unified School District here in
California.
What a scene! About twenty-five
people and infants were waiting around. Phones rang off
the hook.
No one
spoke English.
Notifications hanging on the clinic
walls reassured visitors that, pursuant to a 1999 law,
their immigration status would never be revealed.
Flyers were everywhere:
And indeed it can if you have lived
in California for a mere six months, do not have
maternity insurance or have a family income too high for
no-cost Medical.
See how progressive we are in
California? Get
pregnant in Mexico; have your baby in California! And
we have taxpayer funded health care programs for not only
low income but mid-income
pregnant illegal aliens, too.
- “Healthy Families…provides low cost
health, dental and vision coverage to uninsured children
in
low wage families.”
Families pay premiums of $4-$9 per
child with a maximum of $27 per family for health, dental
and vision coverage. Both AIM and Healthy Families are
part of California’s
Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board.
When I finally saw the nurse, I
asked about the daily patient traffic. She estimated that
about 200 people come to see either doctors or nurse
practitioners. The clinic, she guessed, received 100
phone calls per day.
Remember that this is in Lodi, a
one-horse town of 60,000. Imagine what goes on statewide.
Welcome to the real world of
immigration. A handful of powerful industries—agriculture,
hospitality and
construction—profit enormously. To the rest of us,
thanks to ridiculous immigration laws, falls the
humanitarian and financial responsibility to nurture the
aliens by providing
medical care,
schooling and subsidized housing.
During the two months that my
VDARE.COM column was
suspended while I
ran in California’s Recall Election, one of the most
insightful and powerful articles about immigration
reality appeared in the October 10th Wall Street
Journal. [Tighter Border Yields Odd Result:
More Illegals Stay]The
Record (Stockton, CA.) published its version
titled, “Immigrants not risking return to Mexico”
on the same day.
According to Journal reporter
Eduardo Porter, studies conducted by Professor Douglas
Massey at the
Mexican Migration Project of the University of
Pennsylvania, the California Public Policy Institute and
the Mexican National Population Council found that what
it called “undocumented workers” who come to
California (and in this specific case, Stockton) do not
return to Mexico.
Consequently, wrote Porter:
- Nearly a third of Stockton’s
population is Latino, up from 25% a decade ago
- Almost 45% of Stockton’s children
under 6 are Latino, up from 30% ten years ago
- Latino children account for 70% of
the 2,300 births at San Joaquin General Hospital.
- Some Stockton schools are filled
to four times capacity.
- Farm workers pool resources and,
in violation of city code,
pile into dilapidated apartments
- Hourly
wages for field workers in constant dollars fell over
the decade from $6.98 to $6.18, according to the
California Department of Labor.
- Poverty rose 30% over the decade.
And finally, this:
- “The longer the workers stay,
the more their families grow.”
These are the brutal immigration
truths as played out in the San Joaquin Valley.
For contrast, let’s visit the
immigration la-la land inside George Bush’s head.
We know that Bush doesn’t read
newspapers. Bush’s filtered version of world events
reaches him via trusted advisors. But you would think
Bush would have heard about California’s attitude about
pandering to illegal immigrants. After all, we threw out
Governor Davis because he signed the illegal alien
driver’s license bill.
Yet in a curious speech on a recent
California fund-raising trip to Dinuba (in the San
Joaquin Valley, near Fresno) Bush addressed the employees
of
Ruiz Foods.
Bush, identifying himself
as a burrito lover, told the 92% Latino work force at
Ruiz that he had urged the U.S. Senate to approve a $200
million down-payment fund to make homeownership more
attainable. Said Bush:
"We need more counseling and
more education to make sure our fellow citizens know what
it means to buy a home and can get comfortable with the
idea of
buying a home."
Bush, as
pointed out by VDARE.COM’s
Steve Sailer, has had difficulty in the past
distinguishing between “citizens” and illegal aliens-- some of whom may even
be in the employ of Ruiz Foods.
Bush has so willfully
disregarded America’s demand for sensible immigration
policies that even his own operatives cannot defend him.
In a September 29th
interview on “Lou Dobbs, Tonight”
Eduardo Aguirre, the director of Citizenship and
Immigration Services, withered under harsh Dobbs
questioning.
[Full
Transcript]:
DOBBS: “The
issue of immigration, illegal aliens, legal immigration,
the population crossing our borders by any definition is
explosive, is it not?”
AGUIRRE:
“Well, indeed it is.”
DOBBS: “What
is our national immigration policy? It no longer gives us
your huddled poor. It is -- it is what? Can it be
articulated in a simple sentence?”
AGUIRRE:
“Well, in a simple sentence, I don't think so.”
DOBBS: Mr.
Aguirre, “To go to a million naturalizations each year
while we are looking at somewhere around 500,000 to
700,000 illegal aliens in this country, that means that
approximately a third of our population growth is taking
place through immigration, whether it is legal or
illegal. Should that not be concerning to U.S.
policymakers?”
AGUIRRE: Well,
of course, it is.
Dobbs is a convert to our
side of the immigration debate. As part of his regular
series, “The Great American Giveaway,” Dobbs’ powerful
voice argues daily for an immediate overhaul of US
immigration policies. He has exposed such outrages as the
D.R.E.A.M. Act, the watered-down
citizenship test, and the refusal of the Bush
administration to heed America’s
demand for secure borders.
But Bush
prefers la-la land. I believe that miscalculation—among
many others—will cost him the White House in 2004.
I know it
is on the verge of costing Americans their country.
Joe Guzzardi [email
him], an instructor in English at the Lodi
Adult School, has been writing a weekly newspaper column
since 1988. This column is exclusive to VDARE.COM. |
