From: pal@xanadu.wpd.sgi.com (Anil Pal)
Subject: Re: our school problems
Reply-To: pal@wpd.sgi.com
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Distribution: ca
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 18:37:40 GMT

First, my apologies for mis-identifying Mr. Berry's gender in my previous post.

In article <1992Oct5.145158.14896@sactoh0.sac.ca.us>, kberry@sactoh0.sac.ca.us (Kim A. Berry) writes:
|> 
|> Yes. Business Week has a vested interest in providing corporate
|> america with a surplus of labor, thus they failed to provide
|> the numbers of the control group. If U.S. citizens paid
|> $900 billion in taxes and received $25 billion in welfare, 
|> couldn't we still conclude that immigrants are a burden?

If we don't have statistics, can we make them up to support our point?
But to answer your hypothetical, no we couldn't make that conclusion.
You would have to take into account the totality of government spending
that goes to immigrants, and compare that against the $90 billion to
determine whether they are a net drain or boost.  Considering that
Social Security and Medicare comprise a huge proportion of the federal
budget, and go primarily to non-immigrants, I think you'd be
hard-pressed to make such a case.

|> think Simon's reasoning is warped. Does he consider education a
|> service? How about national defense?

As I mentioned above, what about Social Security and Medicare?  How
about interest on the deficit?

I think of education as an investment.  The dollars spent on educating
a child are repaid handsomely when that child becomes a productive,
tax-paying member of society.  And without those productive youngsters,
there isn't going to be any way to sustain your standard of living when
you retire.

|> What about farm laborers
|> who pay basically $0 into public coffers, but receive millions
|> in Medi-Cal benefits at taxpayer expense each month?

I strongly disapprove of the whole migrant-labor business.  It is
barely distinguishable from slave labor.  Agribusiness can only get
away with this because the laborers are *not* immigrants, and so have
essentially no rights.  The *real* beneficiaries of this system are not
the porr laborers, but the agribusiness interests and the local
consumers of the produce.  To grudge the laborers the relatively
trivial medical aid they receive for being sprayed with pesticides
seems a trifle churlish.  It would probably be fairer to include the
cost of the medical benefits in the price of the produce, but then it
would also make sense to charge agribusiness a fair price for their
water as well - the problem here is government subsidization of
agribusiness, not giveaways to immigrants.

|> Hardly. I have studied the issue extensively over the past 
|> several years.

Extensively enough to find a scapegoat, but apparently not extensively
enough to have any statistics available, other than the hypothetical
numbers you toss around.

|> My conclusion: Much of California's current
|> economic and environmental problems are due to population
|> growth and immigration over the past 20 years.

Certainly population growth has greatly changed California.  Some of
this change is for the better (economic boom), some is for the worse
(environmental degradation).  Some of it (real estate boom) is thought
be a positive, but really amounts to a transfer of wealth from current
residents to ex-residents (for example, a large part of my salary goes
towards paying off a mortgage, the proceeds of which support a couple
retired in Arizona).

On balance, you may feel that the overall change has been for the
worse.  I disagree, but you are entitled to your opinion.

What I object to most strenuously, is when you single out immigrants
from the other sources of population growth in California (migrants
from other states, for example), and blame them exclusively (or
primarily) for all the ills, without crediting them for any of the
improvements.  That scares me tremendously, because it leads to (in
fact has already led to) hate-mongering, racism, and discrimination.
From there, it is but a small step towards pogroms and ethnic
purification.  When societies in economic depression refuse to look at
their failings critically, and instead look for convenient scapegoats,
it is time to watch out.  It happened in Germany in the 30's, and I
fear it may happen again.

-- 
Dr. (Mr.) Anil A. Pal
pal@sgi.com	(415)-390-5279
Newsgroups: ca.general,ba.general