With a name like Hasan Kwame, this guy really must have a handle on what’s American or not.
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Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, has gone on the record saying that Arizona’s new law immigration law is “the most un-American thing that you could possibly imagine being passed in America.”
Claiming that illegal immigration is a benefit to the United States, Hasan Kwame Jeffries tells us we need to encourage lawbreakers and reward them with more welfare and taxpayer funded services:
“When we think about immigration policy going forward, we have to liberalize it, we have to make sure it is humane, and we have to think about the people who come into the United States not as drains, but as assets. The 12 million who are here bring something to the table, and to say that we’re not going to provide them adequate health care, not going to provide them adequate social services, public schools, or once they come out of public schools, if they are undocumented…access to college.”
The facts prove Hasan Kwame Jeffries wrong. Illegal immigration is in fact a “drain” on the financial resources of both Arizona and America. Illegal aliens already take far more from taxpayers than they pay in to they system.
A recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform found that the cost to Arizona for hosting illegal aliens is more than $2.85 billion per year. Only $143 million per year is collected in property, sales, and income tax combined from illegal aliens. The annual cost of illegal immigration to Arizona includes $1.4 billion in K-12 education, $280 million in LEP education, $260 million in Medicaid, $335 million for the SCHIP+ healthcare program, $340 million in costs to the justice system, $86 million in other welfare programs, and $155 million in other costs. The net effect is a more than $2.7 billion cost to Arizona taxpayers.
Arizona’s budget deficit last year was $2.43 billion, and the estimated budget shortfall for this year is $1.4 billion after passing a tax increase. If all illegal aliens left Arizona, their budget would transform from a $1.4 billion deficit to an surplus of nearly the same amount. If Arizona wants to fix its budget crisis, the state would do well to ignore falsehoods propagated by liberal professors, and continue the course to enforce the immigration laws.