For those of you whose primary political interest is stopping the growth of government or even shrinking it, you have to contend with national leaders who say they agree with you but who refuse to deal with immigration. They say immigration is a "social" issue that isn't related to government spending and deficit issues. They couldn't be more wrong. . . .
Let's start with this tidbit from government data provided by the Center for Immigration Studies (Table 13: "Immigrant Households with Children Under 18"):
Roughly ONE-HALF of all immigrant households with kids are accessing the welfare system, especially food and Medicaid welfare.
In this case, "immigrant" includes both authorized and illegal foreign citizens allowed by the federal government to settle in our country. Since 2000, that number each year has averaged around 1.3 million a year -- plus another 1 million births to those immigrant households.
With one-half of those households being poor enough to use the federal, state and local welfare systems, is there anybody blind enough to think that adding 2.3 million people a year to immigrant households is not driving huge increases in government?
That is 23 million disproportionately poor and welfare-using people a decade!
NumbersUSA doesn't take a specific stand on whether government should be bigger or smaller. But we do think it is strange that our government has this humongous program that imports massive amounts of poverty into the country each year. And the welfare use is just the tip of the iceberg. If about half of these households are poor enough to qualify for some form of welfare, that means they can't come close to paying the taxes required to provide for all the extra physical and social infrastructure to take care of the presence of these 23 million new residents each decade.
Even stranger is that this gargantuan driver of bigger and bigger government was promoted and continues to be supported by the Republican National Committee and by the Republican leadership of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
Republican leaders every day castigate Pres. Obama for trying to bloat government, but Republican leaders resolutely refuse to even suggest that the government reduce its importation of welfare-using immigrants.
Why?
The reason should be clear: Republican leaders may say they want to shrink Big Government, but not if it gets in the way of pleasing their cheap-labor corporate donors and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Two key drivers of the growth in welfare usage and bigger government are the chain migration and visa lottery categories of our immigration system.
Those two categories would be eliminated by the Gingrey bill and the Goodlatte bill (a couple of Republicans who are sincere in their concerns about the size of government and the burden on taxpayers).
Click on their names above to see if your U.S. Representative has signed on.
Not a single U.S. Senator -- Republican or Democrat -- has cared enough to even introduce a bill in that chamber.
But Republican leaders in Washington will not allow these immigration reductions or any other to be pushed to the top of their agenda. The word from the leaders is that Republicans are to ignore immigration altogether this year. The intent of the Republican leaders is to ensure that 23 million people continue to be added to the heavily welfare-using immigrant households each decade. That is one form of bigger government that the Republican leaders love.
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ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA
