By Joe Guzzardi
10/31/2003
Last Monday I went to the Woodbridge Medical Center, a local health care clinic, for my TB shot as required by Lodi Unified School District here in California.
What a scene! About twenty-five people and infants were waiting around. Phones rang off the hook.
No one spoke English.
Notifications hanging on the clinic walls reassured visitors that, pursuant to a 1999 law, their immigration status would never be revealed.
Flyers were everywhere:
And indeed it can if you have lived in California for a mere six months, do not have maternity insurance or have a family income too high for no-cost Medical.
See how progressive we are in California? Get pregnant in Mexico; have your baby in California! And we have taxpayer funded health care programs for not only low income but mid-income pregnant illegal aliens, too.
Families pay premiums of $4-$9 per child with a maximum of $27 per family for health, dental and vision coverage. Both AIM and Healthy Families are part of California’s Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board.
When I finally saw the nurse, I asked about the daily patient traffic. She estimated that about 200 people come to see either doctors or nurse practitioners. The clinic, she guessed, received 100 phone calls per day.
Remember that this is in Lodi, a one-horse town of 60,000. Imagine what goes on statewide.
Welcome to the real world of immigration. A handful of powerful industries — agriculture, hospitality and construction — profit enormously. To the rest of us, thanks to ridiculous immigration laws, falls the humanitarian and financial responsibility to nurture the aliens by providing medical care, schooling and subsidized housing.
During the two months that my VDARE.COM column was suspended while I ran in California’s Recall Election, one of the most insightful and powerful articles about immigration reality appeared in the October 10th Wall Street Journal. [Tighter Border Yields Odd Result: More Illegals Stay]The Record (Stockton, CA.) published its version titled, "Immigrants not risking return to Mexico" on the same day.
According to Journal reporter Eduardo Porter, studies conducted by Professor Douglas Massey at the Mexican Migration Project of the University of Pennsylvania, the California Public Policy Institute and the Mexican National Population Council found that what it called "undocumented workers" who come to California (and in this specific case, Stockton) do not return to Mexico.
Consequently, wrote Porter:
And finally, this:
These are the brutal immigration truths as played out in the San Joaquin Valley.
For contrast, let’s visit the immigration la-la land inside George Bush’s head.
We know that Bush doesn’t read newspapers. Bush’s filtered version of world events reaches him via trusted advisors. But you would think Bush would have heard about California’s attitude about pandering to illegal immigrants. After all, we threw out Governor Davis because he signed the illegal alien driver’s license bill.
Yet in a curious speech on a recent California fund-raising trip to Dinuba (in the San Joaquin Valley, near Fresno) Bush addressed the employees of Ruiz Foods.
Bush, identifying himself as a burrito lover, told the 92% Latino work force at Ruiz that he had urged the U.S. Senate to approve a $200 million down-payment fund to make homeownership more attainable. Said Bush:
"We need more counseling and more education to make sure our fellow citizens know what it means to buy a home and can get comfortable with the idea of buying a home."
Bush, as pointed out by VDARE.COM’s Steve Sailer, has had difficulty in the past distinguishing between "citizens" and illegal aliens — some of whom may even be in the employ of Ruiz Foods.
Bush has so willfully disregarded America’s demand for sensible immigration policies that even his own operatives cannot defend him.
In a September 29th interview on "Lou Dobbs, Tonight" Eduardo Aguirre, the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, withered under harsh Dobbs questioning. [Full Transcript]:
DOBBS: "The issue of immigration, illegal aliens, legal immigration, the population crossing our borders by any definition is explosive, is it not?"
AGUIRRE: "Well, indeed it is."
DOBBS: "What is our national immigration policy? It no longer gives us your huddled poor. It is — it is what? Can it be articulated in a simple sentence?"
AGUIRRE: "Well, in a simple sentence, I don’t think so."
DOBBS: Mr. Aguirre, "To go to a million naturalizations each year while we are looking at somewhere around 500,000 to 700,000 illegal aliens in this country, that means that approximately a third of our population growth is taking place through immigration, whether it is legal or illegal. Should that not be concerning to U.S. policymakers?"
AGUIRRE: Well, of course, it is.
Dobbs is a convert to our side of the immigration debate. As part of his regular series, "The Great American Giveaway," Dobbs' powerful voice argues daily for an immediate overhaul of US immigration policies. He has exposed such outrages as the D.R.E.A.M. Act, the watered-down citizenship test, and the refusal of the Bush administration to heed America’s demand for secure borders.
But Bush prefers la-la land. I believe that miscalculation — among many others — will cost him the White House in 2004.
I know it is on the verge of costing Americans their country.
Joe Guzzardi, an instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School, has been writing a weekly newspaper column since 1988. This column is exclusive to VDARE.COM.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.