The true impact of the influx of aliens across our southern border

 

Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven must be smiling to see the mess we're in today.  They authored the so-called Cloward-Piven strategy in the 1960's.  It called for overwhelming the social welfare and entitlement system as a deliberate political strategy.

A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas. By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level.

There's more at the link.

Note that the strategy is specifically oriented towards Democratic Party-controlled cities and welfare structures, and is directed towards enabling a national (i.e. federal) Democratic Party administration to "advance a federal solution to poverty" - thus overriding, by default, the fifty states and their legal right to administer their own affairs.  By empowering central government intervention, this would automatically and inevitably diminish local autonomy, allowing many national policies to be enforced despite any local opposition.

That's precisely the effect that the Biden administration's support of mass immigration across our southern border is already having.  It may as well be deliberately tailored to bring about the full implementation of the Cloward-Piven strategy.  The sheer cost of supporting all these aliens is crippling state and local governments, who are not being reimbursed for their sudden and unexpected expenditures.  City Journal reports:

Even if the southern border were completely secured, the costs of the massive movement of migrants into the U.S. over the last few years will reverberate for decades on city and state budgets. That price will include not merely the short-term burden of housing and feeding asylum seekers, but the longer-term expenditures of providing the newcomers with basic services like health care and education. Just how much these undocumented migrants will contribute, in turn, to America’s economy, given that many are largely unskilled and poorly educated, remains to be seen—though it’s unlikely to be enough to help balance municipal and state books anytime soon.

. . .

The chaos has shaken border state budgets. Several have created their own security forces to disrupt illegal border activity. Texas launched Operation Lone Star in early 2021, for example, spending an eye-popping $4.5 billion in the first two years of the program. So far, Texas officials say, the operation has caught 376,000 illegal border crossers, arrested 28,000 individuals suspected of other crimes, and seized more than 400 million doses of fentanyl. The effort has also tried to slow what one Texas county sheriff calls a “silent invasion” across the border of military men, many armed, whom officials fear work for Mexican drug cartels.

. . .

One of the biggest immigrant-spending items is government benefits, which some Democratic states expanded during the Trump years to cover illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. Those costs are rising as the numbers of migrants increase. Medicaid is a subsidized health-care program for low-income people, with payments shared by the federal government and states. Federal law prohibits funding for illegals, so states like New York, California, and Illinois have decided to finance the entire cost of providing for them. California began covering young adults through Medicaid in 2019, and then extended the program to adults over 50 earlier this year. Next year, the state will give coverage to all illegals in California, with an estimated price of $2.6 billion.

The bill could go much higher, as states discover that their initial estimates understate the price for offering benefits to illegals ... Some states, worried about the burgeoning costs, have cut back ambitious plans to expand programs to illegals ... 13 largely Democratic states provide at least some Medicaid benefits to illegals already. At the rate that migrants are arriving and getting benefits, those states are looking at significant new spending for a program that already consumes a major part of most of their budgets.

. . .

Advocates contend that illegal-immigrant workers are due such benefits because they pay taxes in the United States ... The flaw in this reasoning is that immigrant households already receive tens of thousands of dollars in government benefits, just by virtue of being in the United States, and that what most get in support far outweighs any taxes they pay ... On average, those immigrant households paid far less in taxes than most American households—about $10,300 annually—producing a large net deficit that has likely expanded as states have started offering illegals access to expensive programs like Medicaid and, during the pandemic, unemployment benefits ... On average across the United States, the study found, immigrant households generated a net deficit—that is, they used more in state and local government services than they generated in revenues—of about $1,600 per household annually. The deficit varies substantially by state ... Those numbers, when multiplied by the number of immigrant households in each state, add up to huge drains on public treasuries—nearly $19 billion in California, $8 billion in Texas, and $6 billion in New York. And those numbers are surely higher today, given the surge of migrants of the last two years—many not working—and the expansion of benefits in places like California and New York ... these migrants, even when they become legal, tend to consume far more in government services than the average American household.

There's more at the link.

Once the national purse-strings control state and local policies towards migrants, that control can easily be expanded and extended to cover other areas.  What about policing, for example?  If states can't afford to deal with the rising crime rate caused by illegal aliens, it makes sense - at least to statists - for the federal government to subsidize policing.  However, once the feds fund all police forces, they can use that funding to exert control, insisting on uniform standards, policies, training, and so on.  (They've already done that in education:  just look at the restrictions imposed by federal funding for state, county and local schools, in return for the money.)  Local independence will be undermined, and then effectively abolished, on the principle that "He who pays the piper calls the tune".  The same reasoning will be applied to any area - welfare, entitlement programs, health care, transport infrastructure and systems, whatever - that is subsidized by the central government.

The Greek sage Archimedes said:

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Illegal alien migration is clearly the lever chosen by the Democratic Party to implement the Cloward-Piven vision, and the "fulcrum on which to place it" is central government funding of needs created and exacerbated by such migration that states, counties and cities cannot fund on their own.  Put the two together, and you ensure central government domination of the entire country before long - so much so that it'll be practically impossible to reverse, and revert to the vision of the Founding Fathers of strong states united by a limited federal government.

That's the real purpose behind the Biden administration's open borders policy.  It's not humanitarian at all.  It's an insidious, downright evil (IMHO) effort to change the nature of America as a nation.  Tragically, right now, it looks like it's succeeding, because the chances of reversing the policy without massive internal disruption and chaos appear minimal.  Yet . . . if we don't reverse it . . . we won't have a country left that we recognize as America.

I'm glad I'm getting old.  I'd hate to be a young person facing that conundrum in America today.  I don't think I'll live long enough to see how it works out, but I'm not looking forward to the next few years, to put it mildly.  All I can do (and have done to the best of my ability) is to move my family to a location where such troubles are likely to be less severe than elsewhere, and live in a community that's more likely than others to take action to protect itself against what's coming.  I can only recommend to you, dear readers, that you do likewise.

If America is to survive, it'll have to re-grow from the roots that we - people like you and I - plant deep enough to endure, and survive, the coming storm.  I suspect they won't thrive in our big cities and Blue states - rather the opposite, in fact.

Peter