🚀 go-pugleaf

Toni - the money paid in to income taxes and SS barely scratches the 
surface of of the cost in schools and health care.

In fact, there are estimates that illegals cost $30K for every $10K they 
"pay"

Anthony Martinez wrote:

> Rush Limbaugh has been expecting liberals to start "whining" about the
> $5000 fine undocumented immigrants will have to pay to gain
> citizenship under the new immigration bill, but most liberals have
> been too busy chortling about the immigration-induced split in the GOP
> to make their own case against the bill. So let a mighty whine rise
> over the land: Undocumented workers shouldn't be fined; they should
> get a hefty bonus!
> 
> All right, they committed a "crime"--the international equivalent of
> breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a
> much worse crime, like robbery or rape. What have the immigrants been
> doing once they get into the US? Taking up time on the elliptical
> trainers in our health clubs? Getting ahead of us on the wait-lists
> for elite private nursery schools?
> 
> In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos
> have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning
> the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to
> mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and
> poultry-plucking.
> 
> CONTINUED BELOW
> The punitive rage directed at illegal immigrants grows out of a larger
> blindness to the manual labor that makes our lives possible: The
> touching belief, in the class occupied by Rush Limbaugh among many
> others, that offices clean themselves at night and salad greens spring
> straight from the soil onto one's plate.
> 
> Native-born workers share in this invisibility, but it's far worse in
> the case of immigrant workers, who are often, for all practical
> purposes, nameless. In the recent book There's No Jos� Here: Following
> the Lives of Mexican Immigrants, Gabriel Thompson cites a construction
> company manager who says things like, "I've got to get myself a couple
> of Jos�s for this job if we're going to have that roof patched up by
> Saturday." Forget the Juans, Diegos, and Eduardos - they're all
> interchangeable "Jos�s."
> 
> Hence no doubt the ease with which some prominent immigrant-bashers
> forget their own personal reliance on immigrant labor, like Nevada's
> Governor Jim Gibbons, who, it turns out, once employed an undocumented
> nanny. And as the Boston Globe revealed late last year, Mitt Romney's
> lawn in suburban Boston was maintained by illegal immigrants from
> Guatemala.
> 
> The only question is how much we owe our undocumented immigrant
> workers. First, those who do not remain to enjoy the benefits of old
> age in America will have to be reimbursed for their contributions to
> Medicare and Social Security, and here I quote the website of the San
> Diego ACLU:
> 
> Undocumented immigrants annually pay an estimated $7 billion more than
> they take out into Social Security, and $1.5 billion more into
> Medicare.... A study by the National Academy of Sciences also found
> that tax payments generated by immigrants outweighed any costs
> associated with services used by immigrants.
> 
> Second, someone is going to have to calculate what is owed to
> "illegals" for wages withheld by unscrupulous employers: The homeowner
> who tells his or her domestic worker that the wage is actually several
> hundred dollars a month less than she had been promised, and that the
> homeowner will be "holding" it for her. Or the landscaping service
> that stiffs its undocumented workers for their labor. Who's the
> "illegal" here?
> 
> Third, there's the massive compensation owed to undocumented
> immigrants for preventable injuries on the job. In her book Suburban
> Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights, Jennifer Gordon reports
> such gruesome cases as a Honduran who died from inhaling paint while
> sanding yachts in Long Island and a Guatemalan worker whose boss
> intentionally burned him with hot pans of oil for not washing dishes
> fast enough. "Death rates for Latino workers," Gordon reports, "have
> risen over the past decade even as workplace fatality rates for
> non-Latinos have fallen."
> 
> When our debt to America's undocumented workers is eventually tallied,
> I'm confident that it will be well in excess of the $5000 fine the
> immigration bill proposes. There is still the issue of the original
> "crime." If someone breaks into my property for the purpose of
> trashing and looting, I would be hell-bent on restitution. But if they
> break in for the purpose of cleaning it--scrubbing the bathroom,
> mowing the lawn--then, in my way of thinking anyway, the debt goes in
> the other direction. 
> 
> Barbara Ehrenreich
> 
> 
> On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:27:23 -0700, Anthony Martinez
> <anthony77123@hotmail.com > wrote:
> 
> 
>>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5bEhN7_abc&mode=related&search
>>
> 
>