Illegal immigration is a problem, plain and simple. I could cite about a thousand reasons why, but instead I am going to cite two specific ways that illegal immigration has impacted me personally.

Several years ago, while living in Monterey California, my wife was pregnant and I was a nervous nineteen year old soon to be father. Our medical insurance referred us to a wonderful facility in Salinas known as the Natividad Medical Center.

Before I go any further, let me tell you a little bit about Salinas. According to the Census Bureau (census.gov), at the time Salinas had a population of 393,000 souls. The Census Bureau’s statistics are used for many things, among them helping to determine how to allocate State and Federal funds for various facilities (such as community Hospitals like Natividad). According to the same article, Salinas has 121,000 households. This means that there are a little over 3 people to every 1 household. Anyone who has spent time in Salinas, however, would confidently tell you that the average house holds a family of 5 or more members of the Latino persuasion.  A quick glimpse at google maps (http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=salinas&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=36.686041,-121.654358&spn=0.120864,0.346069&om=1) would show you that the city and outlying areas has much more than 121,000 households. In fact, spend enough time there, and you would guess that the number of the population would be closer to 600,000. Why would observation and statistics differ so greatly? Because it is impossible for the Census Bureau to count how many illegal immigrants live in every legal house. So for every house hold with 3 legal residents, there could easily be 3 or more non-legal residents coming out of the wood works.

Back to Natividad… So, now we have a medical facility built to service a population of about half the size of what the actual population is. On top of that, illegal immigrants (because of low income work and a lack of ability to acquire legal health insurance) are much more likely to use public medical facilities. This raises the percent of population estimated to use such facilities.

We arrived (my wife and I) to our first pre-natal appointment to find a small waiting room with a line of close to 100 (mostly teen) expecting mothers waiting for the same thing. We were shuffled through a chain gain and brought into a room where an overworked burse took our information, took our vitals, and told us to come back if there were premature contractions.

“Who will our doctor be?” we asked, ignorantly.

“YOUR doctor?” the nurse said in a demeaning tone, “Whatever doctor happens to be here when you come in for complications or birth will handle any issue you might have.”

“How will you keep track of our baby’s progress?” we asked.

“If there are any complications, you can come in and we will see.”

Shortly after that, we began to speak with friends about their experiences at the hospital. One young mother had been “forgotten” for a day after she gave birth. No post-natal care was done during that 24 hour period, and as a result she has had several corrective surgeries to correct various problems. Another told us of how the suture operation was botched and she almost died of an infection in the weeks following the birth. After about a half dozen first hand stories, we decided to seek care elsewhere.

Fortunately, we were able to finagle our medical insurance (at nominal personal expense) to transfer us to a better hospital with (my word) a doctor who would track our baby’s progress. Not as many tax paying, law abiding citizens were so lucky.

So, in that case, we have a facility paid for with taxpayer money being abused and overrun by non-taxpayers. When it comes time for a citizen to cash in on the fruits of their taxes, they have already been picked clean by those “just here to find work”.

Page 2…. I was sitting at my computer the other day, and I get an e-mail from a credit reporting website I subscribe to saying “potentially negative information has been posted to your credit report.”

When I looked at this information, low and behold I apparently have a Victoria Secret account that has hundreds of dollars charged and is months past due. A little further inquiry and I found out that a woman by the name of Amelia Gutierrez had opened an account (using my social) in late 2005 in Las Angeles, California.

That is funny because (1) I am not a woman, (2) My name is not Amelia Gutierrez and (3) I was in Hawaii during that entire period.

Turns out that this woman was able to exploit a loop hole in World Financial Network National Bank’s credit application process allowing her to open a credit account with my social without them actually running a credit report to verify her identity. (as a side note, my fraud claim id was the day’s date plus the number 16.  I had filed the claim at about 8am California time.  “Does this number mean that I am the 16th fraud claim today?” I asked.  “Yes, it appears it does.” The WFNB representative replied.)
Stolen Social Security number + Las Angeles + Amelia Gutierrez = illegal immigrant? I think so.

The long and short of it is, these people have already displayed disrespect for us and our laws by being here and working illegally. What makes people think they will stop at that? If they are so hard working and industrious, why don’t they try to put that effort into fixing their own countries?

Furthermore, they are using OUR money that we worked hard to earn to benefit their families and livelihood. This may seem noble, unless you have ever been in a position that requires you to use a public service you have paid for in taxes. Everything from schools to hospitals to public transportations to the prison system has been raped by the flood of illegal immigrants.

Not to mention the fact that 30% of our inmate population is comprised of illegal immigrants. That means that 30% of the people who are robbing you, murdering you and raping you are illegal immigrants (not to mention the money spent to keep them in prison).

This issue has nothing to do with Xenophobia. My entire family legally immigrated from Greece, Italy and Ireland. They all went to the effort to learn the language and assimilate legally into society. My wife’s entire family worked for 20 years from 1980-2000 to legally emigrate every member of their family from China. You think it is hard to legally emigrate from Mexico? Try adding a commnunist country and a $2000 plane ride to the equation.