Minutemen Advocate Against Illegal Immigration
The Minutemen say the reason for today’s rally was simply to call the public’s attention to the issue of illegal immigration.
And they did that by calling attention to themselves, holding up signs and flags along Dakota Avenue in South Sioux City.
If you drove down Dakota Avenue in South Sioux City on Saturday, you couldn’t have missed them.
“We could be out here with signs with smiley faces on them,” said Minuteman Mike Narducci. “And somebody would still drive by and say, look at the nuts. Look at the kooks, or whatever.”
Their display of flags and signs prompted reactions from motorists, both in support of and in opposition to the Minutemens’ hardline stance against illegal immigration.
“We want them to see us,” Narducci said. “And we are actually drawing people off the streets. We’ve had multiple requests for applications and information.”
The minutemen believe the public needs to pay more attention to the immigration issue. That’s why they’re bringing the issue out into the public.
“We’re holding out the olive branch today,” Narducci said. “We’re concerned about the open borders. We’re concerned about the eco-terrorism, the potential for maybe another 9-11.”
“And we think the citizenry needs to stand up and realize just how serious the problem is,” said Minuteman David Nettleton.
Demonstrators said responses from motorists was mostly positive. But some people call the Minutemen’s motives and methods into question. The group says they’ve been minsunderstood and stereotyped themselves.
“This organization is not racist,” Nettleton said. “We’re simply talking legal versus illegal. Red and yellow, black and white, they are all precious in his sight. As far as we see it. But we cannot have illegal immigrants coming into our country presenting the dangers that they do to us.”
“We catch a lot of flack for what we do,” Narducci said. “And there’s a lot of gross misrepresentations about the Minutemen — that we’re driven by forces other than love of country. And I can tell you unequivocally, that that’s not the case. I mean, we are driven by love of country.”
And driven to bring awareness.
Around 40 people participated in today’s rally. Some are from Siouxland, while others drove in from Des Moines and Omaha.
After careful review, anyone with a even a modicum of logic can come to no other conclusion: illegal immigration must be halted, illegal immigrants here now must be deported and legal immigration needs decreased from the approx. 2 million allowed in per year currently.
Please review the following report on the FISCAL COST OF IMMIGRATION by economist Edwin Rubenstein just released this past week:
http://www.esrresearch.com/Rubensteinreport.pdf
A partial summary of the report:
The Fiscal Impact on 15 Federal Departments surveyed was: $346 billion in fiscal related costs in FY 2007.
Each immigrant cost taxpayers more than $9,000 per year.
An immigrant household (2 adults, 2 children) cost taxpayers $36,000 per year.
Legal immigrants were not separated out from illegal immigrants for the fiscal impact study, but if they had been, the fiscal cost per ILLEGAL immigrant would be even more shocking than the figures quoted above.
The most extensive and authoritative study, prior to economist Edwin Rubenstein’s “The Fiscal Impact of Immigration” (April 2008) , is the National Research Council (NRC)’s The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (1997).
The NRC staff analyzed federal, state, and local government expenditures on programs such as Medicaid, AFDC (now TANF), and SSI, as well as the cost of educating immigrants’ foreign- and native-born children.
NRC found that the average immigrant household receives $13,326 in federal annual expenditures and pays $10,664 in federal taxes—that is, they generate a fiscal deficit of $2,682 (1996 dollars)per household.
In 2007 dollars this is a deficit of $3,408 per immigrant household.
With 9 million households currently headed by immigrants, more than $30 billion ($3,408 x 9 million) of the federal deficit represents money transferred from native taxpayers to immigrants.
Our national immigration policies have to work for the United States. While improving the plight of the world’s poor is a laudable goal, the finite resources we have available to fulfill that goal would be swamped if there wasn’t some orderly and manageable system in place to limit entry into the United States to what this nation can actually support. The more illegal aliens that are permitted to subvert the immigration system, the fewer immigrants we can accommodate who might actually produce a positive benefit for our country.
The more we become a nation of illegal immigrants, the deeper we fall into anarchy.
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