Transcripts from the CNN Lou Dobbs Broken Borders special from San Antonio Texas last night
Lou Dobbs does a nightly show on CNN…watch it, tape it, TEVO it…but don’t miss it.
The country has a long and honorable tradition of welcoming legal immigrants to this nation, but in recent years there’s been a huge influx of illegal aliens. By some estimates as many as 20 million live in the United States right now. Those illegal aliens are, among other things, depressing wages for U.S. citizens and draining local and state and federal budgets of much-needed funds for the education and the healthcare and social services of and for Americans.
“The tab is growing. California spends half a billion dollars a year on illegal alien healthcare, only 11 percent is reimbursed by the federal government. Forty-four of California hospitals have closed since 2000. Education for the children of illegal alien costs the state $6 billion a year, California’s public school system ranked 29th nationally in 2002. It’s now 47th”.
Even New York spends $5 billion a year on education, healthcare and incarceration of illegal aliens. There are also human costs. A growing number of groups are protesting the deaths of American citizens and law enforcement officers at the hands of criminal illegal aliens. The federal government is either unwilling or unable to deport.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Police are being murdered at alarming rates and no one seems to care.
WIAN: Seventy-five people have been killed in the past decade on this one stretch of California highway near the border by illegal alien smugglers fleeing law enforcement.
DIANE JACOB, SAN DIEGO COUNTY SUPERVISOR: There’s been no will in Washington to stop the illegal traffic across the border. As a result, you see these travesties.
WIAN: American workers, especially those at the lower end of the pay scale are also victims.
One Harvard study found illegal immigration lowered the wages of American high school dropouts by eight percent. Another released last month, now the link between the influx of low-scaled immigrants and low wages, high unemployment and high incarceration rates of African Americans.
Yet some economists continue to cling to the theory that the economic benefits of illegal immigration including cheap labor and illegal alien purchasing power outweigh those costs.
(on camera): But there’s strong evidence illegal immigration is turning the United States into an hour glass society. Big business and the wealthy who benefit from cheap labor are the top. Illegal aliens and the American workers they’ve displaced are the bottom and the middle class continues to disappear.
Casey Wian, CNN, San Antonio, Texas.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
Read the entire transcript here.