President Bush has finally signed a bill to build 700 miles of fencing along the border. Will it ever get built? We don't know. But if it does, it might turn out to be the U.S.' best anti-poverty program ever.
With the election looming, Democrats have been on the warpath about "declining median incomes" and "persistent poverty." It's all about what they further call the "failure" of Bush's economic policies.
Bush's signing of the border-fence bill on Thursday, and Democrats' carping about poverty, might seem not to be linked, but they are. As a new report shows, the U.S. is importing poverty...
mostly from Mexico. That's why real median incomes are lagging and poverty rates are stubbornly high. But few politicians talk about it.
In 2005, U.S. median household incomes rose for the first time since 2000. To Democrats, that was an indictment of Bush's policies. In fact, it was an indictment of years of lax border controls.
Some 500,000 illegals flood into the U.S. each year, more than half from Mexico. This alone is having an enormous impact on the U.S. economy, one that will be felt for generations to come.
Take median income, the Democrats' favorite gauge. Since a median pinpoints the exact middle of a population's distribution, and since those 500,000 undocumented newcomers are virtually all on the bottom end of the income spectrum, soaring illegal immigration tends to push median income down.
A recent study by Heritage Foundation economist Robert Rector, shows that immigrants, though just 17% of the population, represent a quarter of all poverty. But even that figure is deceptive, because by far the highest poverty rate is for Hispanic immigrants... again, mostly from Mexico. Fully one-quarter of Hispanic arrivals earn below the poverty income of $15,219 for a family of three. Most come illegally.
Contrary to Democrats' claims of a "shrinking middle class" and the "end of the American dream," the reality is somewhat starker. The vast majority of American citizens in fact are doing very well, and have been for decades.
Last year, the U.S. median annual household income was $46,326 after inflation... up a third since the mid-1960s, as Forbes.com reporter Tom Van Riper recently noted. Since 1995, average household wealth has soared 35% to $465,970 currently. It's a fact: We're richer than ever... living in better houses, with more and better things to fill those houses, driving better cars, and having more education. It's mostly illegals, whose numbers are pegged from 12 million to 20 million, who are faring poorly.
("Poorly," of course, is itself a relative term. Most Mexican illegals, though considered "poor" in America, are actually quite middle class in Mexico).
Though just 9% of U.S. population, Hispanic immigrants account for 17% of the poor, and their number is growing. So is the percentage of those without health care coverage: 43.6% of all noncitizens versus 13.4% for those born here. For Mexicans, the number is 54%.
Rector's study reveals just how much poverty the U.S. has imported over the years by condoning more or less open borders. Before 1960, he notes, immigrants had education and skill levels roughly equal to those of the native population.
That's no longer true. Today, a third of all immigrants live in families where the head of the household lacks a high school diploma. One of six poor kids in America comes from a family headed by a first-generation immigrant lacking a diploma.
"So what?" open-border advocates say. "Immigrants supply cheap labor, and we all benefit from that." True enough, except for one thing: The National Academy of Sciences estimates that every immigrant lacking a high school degree will cost U.S. taxpayers $89,000 during his life, net of taxes paid. The academy further reckons total costs for illegals economy-wide could be as much as $2 trillion.
When viewed in this context, it's the open-borders platform that sounds expensive, not the few billion dollars proposed for a border fence.
