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Catholic Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Costs of Illegal Immigration

When is an invasion not an invasion?

The good Catholic Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas has a most novel concept of invasion. As quoted in The Kansas City Star of March 15, 2008, he told lawmakers that if illegal immigration is to be considered an invasion, it is indeed “the strangest invasion in history, where the invaders clean our houses and harvest our crops.”

The Archbishop, of course failed to add that they also, along with legal immigrants, lower American wages by 5.4% and the wages of American high school drop-outs by 7.4%, as well as rob the American working class of $152 billion annually in depressed wages and job displacement. All according to the data collected by Harvard’s Dr. George Borjas. In fact Borjas found that a 10% increase in the labour force from immigration reduces wages for native Americans by 5.25%. Naumann failed as well to cite a UCLA Chicano Studies Research Centre report that found that Americans and established immigrants suffer an 11% wage drop simply by working alongside new Hispanic immigrants.
 
It is evident that the illegal “invasion” that conservatively has increased by 5.3 million , or 79% under George Bush, has grown the labour pool and weakened labour’s hand vis a vis the employer. Lower wages are only one consequence, the other was determined by Cornell’s Vernon M. Brigg’s when he found that the percentage of the foreign born population in the United States is inversely proportional to the percentage of union membership. Yet organized labour prefers to chase phantom Hispanic recruits rather than defend the dues paying members it has.
 
One wonders if Archbishop Naumann’s assessment of immigrants’ contributions would be modified had he had a preview of Edwin S. Rubinstein’s report for the Manhattan Institute, released a  month after his comment to the Kansas City Star. That report found that U.S. taxpayers were giving more than $9,000 in cash or benefits to each immigrant in excess of what they were receiving in taxes, and a third of those immigrants were illegal. Total cost $346 billion. Each immigrant pupil cost taxpayers $1030 or $3.4 billion since they comprised 19% of the student body. It presently costs $1.5 billion to incarcerate 267,000 criminal aliens in federal prisons, 27% of the prison population, so 80-100,000 are prematurely released due to overcrowding to commit a disproportionate number of offences. 29.2% of immigrant households receive Medicaid compared to 14.8% of native American households.
 
The foregoing statistics are not exhaustive but are surely sufficient to convince us that immigration---legal or illegal---is not a philanthropic enterprise, except of course to employers. For them, as always, it is manna from heaven. The puzzle is that liberals, trade union leaders, socialists, human rights advocates and clergymen should also see it as such and jump on the corporate welfare bandwagon. The bandwagon of taxpayer subsidy—education, health-care, law enforcement—to cheap labour employers who really don’t have to foot their share of those costs.
 
 
In the context of Matthew 22:39 and Leviticus 19:10 one can forgive the Archbishop for his belief that the common good cannot be defined strictly by national borders and that a sense of solidarity with other human beings is required to understand the plight of illegal immigrants. However could he not earmark some of his boundless Christian love for the hardworking low-income American worker whose livelihood the illegals threaten? 1st Timothy 5:8 instructs us after all to love our own family and attend to their needs first.
 
In the meantime, I am intrigued by Archbishop Naumann’s notion of what actually constitutes an invasion, because this could be the basis of moral and legal precedent. He apparently argues that if 38 million liars knowingly break the law, enter your country and seek illegal employment, they aren’t invaders if you judge their impact to be beneficial.
 
By Neumann’s measure then, the British did not invade India because they built railways, roads, hospitals, the telegraph system and public works. Nor did the Norsemen invade the north of England because they cultivated new lands and opened up the rural economy. And I suppose the Germans really weren’t invaders in northern France because they gave a real shot in the arm to the construction industry of Normandy when they built the Atlantic Wall.
 
So when is an invasion not an invasion? When your clerical job is secure and you’re standing in a comfortable pulpit.