FOIA

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which can be found in Title 5 of the United States Code, section 552, was enacted in 1966 and provides that any person has the right to request access to federal agency records or information. All agencies of the United States government are required to disclose records upon receiving a written request for them, except for those records that are protected from disclosure by the nine exemptions and three exclusions of the FOIA. This right of access is enforceable in court. The federal FOIA does not, however, provide access to records held by state or local government agencies, or by private businesses or individuals. All states have their own statutes governing public access to state and local records; state agencies should be consulted for further information about them.

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SAC Atlanta
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The Hill
Washington D.C.
By Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas)
Posted: 08/03/09

Healthcare scheme would benefit illegal immigrants

While much of the public debate surrounding the Democrats’ healthcare plan has focused on the massive costs to be paid by American taxpayers, another flaw has stayed under the radar — until last week. That’s when the National Council of La Raza and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus pushed to include illegal immigrants in the president’s healthcare effort.

Despite statements to the contrary, the Obama administration could force the American people to pay for the healthcare of millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S.

The Democrats’ bill in the House, H.R. 3200, contains gaping loopholes that will allow illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded benefits. And these loopholes are no accident.

The legislation contains no verification mechanism to ensure that illegal immigrants do not apply for benefits. Republicans offered an amendment to close this loophole — it would have required verification using the existing methods that are already in place to verify eligibility for other federal benefits programs. But, when they were asked to put the language of the bill where their words were, in a party-line vote, House Democrats rejected the amendment to require verification and close this loophole.

The bill also leaves open the possibility that if one citizen family member is eligible for benefits, then the entire family — including illegal immigrants — is also eligible for the benefits.

If Americans aren’t already concerned enough about the astronomical costs of the healthcare proposal, this taxpayer-funded benefit for lawbreakers should sound the alarms.

Take just the uninsured: According to the latest research from the Pew Hispanic Center, 59 percent of all illegal immigrant adults lacked health insurance in 2007. These figures are dramatically higher than the 14 percent uninsured rate for U.S.-born adults. The children of illegal immigrants are also uninsured at extremely high rates — 45 percent of their foreign-born children are uninsured!

Of course, when it comes to illegal immigration, taxpayer-provided health insurance represents just part of the cost. Healthcare for illegal immigrants costs Americans at least $1 billion each year, not including health costs for children and the elderly. In my home state of Texas, just the price tag of educating the children of illegal immigrants adds up to around $4 billion annually!

The president claims that there is an easy solution to this problem: legalize the millions of illegal immigrants in America today. But amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants would have a disastrous impact on the American economy.

First, as we saw in 1986, amnesty only serves to encourage more illegal immigration. Our economy is already stretched thin without having more millions of illegal immigrants draining our limited resources, making less available for citizens and legal immigrants.

Second, if we legalize 11 million illegal immigrants today, what will happen when they decide to retire in the future? Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation found that the net governmental cost for elderly immigrants with low skills amounts “to $17,000 per person per year … half of this cost was medical expenditures under the Medicare and Medicaid programs.” The foundation estimates that the eventual cost of amnesty in terms of all government retirement benefits could exceed $2.6 trillion.

Spending billions of taxpayer dollars to overhaul a healthcare system that provides Americans with the best care in the world makes no sense. And using those taxpayer dollars to provide benefits to illegal immigrants is inexcusable.

The Obama administration and Democrats in Congress should not force American taxpayers to provide healthcare benefits to illegal immigrants.

America’s healthcare system isn’t broken. But it will be if the Democrats’ bill passes Congress.

Smith is the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee.

Read the rest HERE

National Review Online
James Edwards Jr.

Importing the Uninsured

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has insisted the Senate will deal with immigration and health reform separately. And Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.) told the Dallas Morning News in May, “We’re not going to cover undocumented aliens, undocumented workers. That’s too politically explosive.”

But it’s hard to envision how health reform can avoid tripping the immigration booby trap. Approximately 15–22 percent of the 46 million residents of the United States without health coverage are illegal aliens. That’s about 9 or 10 million people. More generally, a third of the foreign-born are uninsured, Census data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies show. That means something like 12.6 million people, or more than a fourth of the total uninsured, are immigrants, both legal and illegal. Since 1989, immigration is responsible for 71 percent of the rise in those without health insurance. The fact is, the problem of the uninsured would be a more manageable one if the U.S. were not admitting millions of uninsured immigrants.

Two health-care plans working their way through Congress — the bill from the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), and a draft outline put together by Baucus’s Finance Committee — could suffer because of this interaction between immigration and medicine.

For example, the HELP bill’s proponents hope to expand Medicaid so that everyone earning up to 50 percent above the federal poverty level can enroll (currently, Medicaid income requirements vary by state, with the poverty level being the usual limit). Since immigration law only requires relatives who sponsor someone for an immigrant visa to earn 25 percent above the poverty level, the end result would be that someone poor enough to qualify for Medicaid would be able to sponsor new immigrants to the U.S. What are the chances that these newcomers sponsored by Medicaid recipients would be able to afford health insurance when their sponsors can’t? MORE HERE

National Review online
Julky 22, 2009

‘You Cannot Simultaneously Have Free Immigration and Socialized Medicine’ [Mark Krikorian]

I’ve taken liberties in the title above with Milton Friedman’s frequent observation that open borders are incompatible with a welfare state, but the principle is the same. Both Michelle Malkin and FAIR write today about how the Democrats have stopped even pretending to try to keep illegals from being covered by Obamacare — they rejected an amendment that would have required Obamacare applicants to be screened with the same eligibility-screening database as used for welfare applicants, thus guaranteeing that lots of illegal aliens would receive taxpayer-funded health care. Even legal immigration would be subsidized. Jim Edward’s NRO piece exposed a fascinating wrinkle — you can sponsor an immigrant so long as your income is 25% above poverty but Obamacare would expand Medicaid to those earning 50% above poverty. So, as Jim wrote, “The end result would be that someone poor enough to qualify for Medicaid would be able to sponsor new immigrants to the U.S. What are the chances that these newcomers sponsored by Medicaid recipients would be able to afford health insurance when their sponsors can’t?”

Obviously the Obamacare proposal is an abomination and Congress needs to throw it out and start from scratch. But whatever they come up with, the lesson for immigration is unchanged — in an era when we have massive transfers of taxpayer funds to the poor, whether through Medicaid or food stamps or public-education funding or whatever, you just can’t keep importing more and more poor people. The libertarians will say the answer is to abolish all of these taxpayer-funded programs; but even if that’s true, until we do abolish them, ongoing mass immigration is simply unjustifiable.

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Robert J. Samuelson — Washington Post

California’s reckoning…. and ours
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..Here’s the national lesson. There’s a collision between high and rising demands for government services and the capacity of the economy to produce the income and tax revenue to pay for those demands. That’s true of California, where poor immigrants and their children have increased pressures for more government services… [See Cal Meltdown Watch] HERE

London Guardian

Mexico on the brink

Last month, President Felipe Calderón announced that Mexico was at a crossroads: the country’s drug cartels had grown so powerful that they now posed a threat to future of Mexican democracy. As if to underscore his point, the country was last week gripped by a fresh wave of brutal violence…

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Let’s merge? HERE

State Sen. Russell Pearce — Ahwatukee Foothills (Az.) News Taxpayers have a right to know how many illegals are in public schools

I authored Senate Bill 1172 to require all Arizona school districts to count and report yearly their illegal alien students and seven legislators joined as co-sponsors. I was sorry to read Beth Lyon’s July 10 letter (“Federal law doesn’t ask student’s immigration status”) that centered on non-issues and personal attacks rather than the bill’s provisions and true intent…

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