The Cost of Illegals
The pile of unpaid bills continues to grow. Actually, it is lines, not a pile.
The lines are those caravans of thousands of South Americans walking north to the United States. One line of an estimated seven thousand is already in Mexico and another line is reportedly forming further south.
So how do those lines represent unpaid bills?
Consider these two examples from our own small area of the country.
One of my friends is employed to assist patients with their medical bills. An essential qualification for his job is to be bilingual, English/Spanish.
Because of rules and interpretations under the The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), very little of what this friend does can be made public. This very brief statement of what he sees will have to do.
A substantial majority of his clients are young Hispanic females. Most of those clients are young mothers, some of whom cannot read or write English or Spanish. They have no family physician and get their pre-natal and birthing services from public hospitals.
My friend’s job is to assist them in filing Medicaid claims. When approved, you, as federal taxpayers, pick up and pay the entire bill. That is better service than the working mothers who are “covered” with commercial insurance carhop for.
That is where some of your federal taxes go. Now look how some state taxes are spent.
Another friend, Dennis Barron, experienced that when he was an owner/operator of the Time Well Spent Day Care Center in Brenham. Working mothers who had no one to care for their children as they worked would leave their children at Time Well Spent. If they could not afford the charges, the state picked up the tab through the Texas Work Force Commission.
That Commission contracted with Child Care Management Services to run the program. That contract is just another use of Texas tax income.
There was normally a waiting list for mothers who wanted to enroll their child in Time Well Spent. Under the Child Care Management Services, Dennis was required to take the most financially needy first whenever there was an opening.
Dennis says that many times a working mother who was first on the list would be bumped by an undocumented alien who claimed her income (not substantiated with records) was less than those on the list with reportable income.
This was repeatedly called to the attention of Child Care Management Services, but the answer was always the same. “There is nothing we can do. You have to take the ones with the least income first.”
Are there other programs like the two just discussed where federal and state taxpayers pick up the tabs for men, women, and children living in this country illegally? I believe there are more, but I will not even try to guess what they are, where they are, or how many there are.
Aggravating this system of taxpayers paying some of the living expenses of illegals is the fact that the illegals receiving the benefits are not taxpayers themselves.
Generally, the sales tax is the only tax paid directly by illegals who have to buy some taxed items to survive. Those taxes go to the states and local governments that have no stake in the Medicaid funds.
As illegals have no valid Social Security accounts, there is no practical way for Social Security and income tax assessments to be withheld from their pay and forwarded to the national treasury. So they are getting a free ride on the Social Security and federal income tax wagon.
Multiply those Medicaid and day care payments by even a small portion of the seven thousand now moving in a column toward our border, and there has to be concern about ever balancing the national budget and how to meet the Texas constitutional requirement of a balanced budget.
So here’s the perspective.
Illegal immigration has to be stopped. A wall will not do it. There are always ways over and underneath a steel, concrete, or any other type of physical barrier.
This will require some hard headed hand wringing staffing of the border with enough agents to prevent anyone from setting a foot on U.S. soil without proper documentation. This would mean shutting the doors on so called asylum seekers and children without parents.
Let’s turn them back to Mexico and see how charitable our southern neighbors will be.
This is doable. It just takes a little will power.
enough
