A long time ago I had a couple day stay in the hospital.   My insurance was the kind where you pay the bill and then file it with your insurer and get reimbursed.   So I took a look at the bill when it came to my home and examined each of the charges.   Aside from bills for doctors I had never seen and medicines I had never received, there were some other items of interest.   One in particular was a charge which was applied to every such invoice of people who had insurance.   My insurance company refused to pay it.   So I asked someone at the hospital what the charge was for.   Her answer was, "that's the charge the hospital applies to every bill in order to recoup some of the cost of services provided to illegal immigrants who are uninsured and who will never pay their bills."   It became common knowledge that one should dispute this charge and the hospital would quickly remove it.   Eventually the hospital stopped the practice and I believe it is currently illegal.   But for how long had the hospital been doing this?   How many people had paid the charge without ever questioning it?   How much expense had been shifted to innocent people simply going about their business?

I have some family in southern California.   At one point I had family who worked on a ranch which produced a good amount of fruit.   They had a lot of interaction with illegal migrant workers and as a result, so did I.   It was common knowledge back in Mexico that if you were going to have a baby, the thing to do was to go to California and have the baby there since A) your child would be a US documented citizen and B) you would get high quality healthcare for free.   Well, the care wasn't really free.   Somebody paid for it.   Californians paying their tax bills paid an implicit surcharge to cover the cost of this "free high quality healthcare."   The Washington Times once reported that the state's nearly 3 million illegal aliens "costs the taxpayers of California ... $10.5 billion a year for education, health care and incarceration."

I don't remember all the lessons from my college history minor so I rely on what is out there on the web to delve a little into the history of immigration in this country.   One site says, "For much of its history the United States allowed unrestricted immigration.   Toward the end of the nineteenth century, various restrictions were placed."   The pretty much is what my weak memory tells me.   At one point in time there was little control of immigration in the US.   And there was good reason for this.   The vast expanses of lands and the quickly expanding numbers of factories required more people.   We had something to offer peoples of other countries and they had something to offer us.   They needed us and we needed them.   But at some point we as a nation decided that chaotic immigration had costs we didn't want to bare so we restricted it.   We purposely crafted laws to limit the number of people who came here in a given year.   That was our right as a nation.   At some point the cost of enforcing those laws became too much so we did little to enforce them.   That is where we find ourselves today.

Before I go further, I want to talk just a bit about this new euphemism in the press, "undocumented immigrants."   As Michelle Malkin points out in her commentary on the term "undocumented," these people have plenty of documents.   They have drivers licenses, social security cards and many other forms of identification provided by various governmental agencies.   There is nothing undocumented about them.   The press thinks of them as not having citizenship documents.   That's because they are not citizens!   They are illegal immigrants.   So let's stop coercing the public into thinking of illegal immigrants as people who have lost their wallets and IDs.

Today one of the burning issues facing my state as well as, I believe, most states around the country is the issue of government funded benefits to illegal immigrants (hereinafter "illegals").   A cover story in my morning paper discussing a proposed law providing in-state tuition for "undocumented immigrants" points out that what we are talking about here is children.   One child says, "I came to this country when I was two years old.   It's not like I had a choice."   She says the only country she has ever known is the US.   So why should she be penalized?   Another line of the argument in favor of the proposed law wonders, "if we're not going to get them out of the country, and we're not, then how do we find a mechanism to make them an asset ... to the communities in which they live."   New Jersey Governor Corzine spokesman, discussing the Governor's cutting of the state's higher education budget by hundreds of millions as well as raising of taxes to cover a heavy budget deficit during these times of economic prosperity, says "This bill is just one step in the process which would allow hard-working young immigrant students to become self-sufficient and enable them to contribute to New Jersey's society."

So, there you have it.   We're talking about innocent victims who are not going to be sent back to their country of citizenship, who are hard working, and who need to be made into assets rather than liabilities because they are going to stay here.   That is fine liberal logic but who is going to pay for all this largesse?   Perhaps the Governor of he state of New Jersey can claim there is no cost since he is actually cutting state aid to colleges.   Our taxes won't go up due to such a law because we're just not going to give more money to higher education.   But there is a cost.   The college game is a zero-sum one.   State universities gets so much money to work with and not a penny more.   Their budgets control how many students they can afford to have.   For each and every illegal who attends college and pays the in-state rate, there is an equal and opposite number of "documented" citizens who will not.   The result of allowing more illegals to attend our colleges is an equal an opposite reaction of providing these services to fewer and fewer citizens who, by the way, also pay taxes, almost always in greater amount than the illegals do.

But let's talk a little about illegal immigration at its roots.   You know, there is a mythology created around the "need for illegal migrant workers" to pick fruit and vegetables, and to perform other agricultural work around the country.   They are said to be needed because Americans are unwilling to work these jobs.   That's actually not precisely true.   What Americans are unwilling to do is work these jobs for these wages and/or pay the higher prices for produce which would ensue if farmers had to pay a proper wage for the work.   How do I know this?   Tonight I'm going to go out to dinner and I'm going to have crab legs.   The crabs for my dinner will be caught by fishermen who work the most dangerous job in America.   Several fishermen will die in the process of trying to bring crab dinners to Americans.   Why do they do it?   They do it for money.   There's no shortage of people wanting to work inhuman hours aboard dangerous boats.   And many of these hold college degrees to boot!   They do this because the compensation is incredible.   They are Americans who are willing to stand amongst fish guts in dirty and frigid conditions and risk their lives for compensation.

The truth is Americans would wrestle wild lions, tigers and bears, oh my, for the right amount of compensation.   Americans would wipe feces off of public toilet walls for the right compensation.   I know.   I used to do just that at a place called "Sundance Lodge" where I was employed for many years along with a number of friends including one who perished in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.   He was one of those people Ward Churchill called "little Eichmans."   He was a wealthy bond trader at Cantor-Fitz when he was murdered but I remember him having to go into restrooms at the facility and clean feces from the walls!

Don't tell me there is a job on Earth Americans are not willing to do.   That isn't true.

If all the food in this country were picked by people making 50 bucks an hour including benefits, there would be no shortage of "documented" workers to perform the task.   We need to understand that we make choices.   We are not victims of circumstances.   There is a way to reverse trends, to change things, if we merely find the will to do it.   We usually find the will only when exigent circumstances require us to do so.   Right now the threat of terrorists crossing our borders is providing that impetus.

What we don't need at this moment is a bunch of euphemistic PC-speak which claims we need illegals more than they need us and we have a moral responsibility to provide expensive services to them.   We pay for these services whether it is at the grocery store or the tax window.   They aren't undocumented, they're illegal.   We have laws about this sort of thing, let's either enforce them or change them.   But we cannot continue to live in a chaotic state of things and simply allow anyone who chooses to cross the border illegally to do so carte blanche.   We need immigration reform and since this is a representative democracy, that reform should come from Congress, not from the mouths of illegals themselves protesting in the streets, not from the mouths of euphemism speakers in the press.   We need reality not platitudes.