Concerning FAIR, I did some research on them that involves more than looking at their website and actually reading their articles and seeing if they were valid. What I found was that most of their work was pure garbage. To quote myself at length in a discussion about this, (sorry for not having time to edit it)

'About 2/3 of illegals pay social security and medicare taxes, even though they are ineligible for those benefits, the IRS gives illegals a special identification so that they can pay. The largest segment of the population that eats up healthcare are called “Old people”. This is a major problem in Old Europe, it is really old. As birthrates lower, there's less of a tax base to pay for the increasing costs of the elderly. So, how do immigrants stack up on that?

Well, if you compare direct costs, they pay into medicare they do not receive. They have a birthrate of about 3.5, which helps boost the US to a steady rate of 2.1 children per household. What most studies do is look at the costs to the state without noticing that illegals tend to have children who are US citizens, who can then be conveniently omitted from data about costs. Thus the National Academy for Sciences and the Cato Institute concluded that immigration costs are usually skewed because they don't factor in that most of the costs are from their children, (citizens), and most of the benefits are from their children in later tax-earning years as citizens. So they count costs by the children in one group and omit the benefits from children in another. That's a major methodological flaw in a cost-benefits analysis.

Concerning healthcare, from the CBO:

“The total costs for illegal immigrants served is less than 1% of Medicare costs and less than 1% of total costs.”

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/87xx/doc8711/12-6-Immigrati...

Do you think this 1% cost is breaking the bank at hospitals?

On the trend for fertility rates:

http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/pdf/79_PDF.pdf

And on Europe's population decline, well, wikipedia is good enough for this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Europe

If you start restricting them, you'll have even more crisis of long-term debt as an increasingly geriatric population expands without a necessary upkeep in reproduction or immigration. European populations as a whole have been shrinking in size and expanding in debt. You're repeating back to me a lot of myths that I have already documented.

Patrick: “Curious – do you have source for the 17-year waiting period comment?”

From the immigration website. To first apply to become a citizen, you must be a lawful resident for five years.

Then, break it down by the backlog from the Visa Bulletin which looks like this, which has cases still pending from 1992.

http://travel.state.gov/visa/frvi/bulletin/bull...

Category Family 1 (F1): Unmarried sons and daughters (21 years of age or older) of U.S. citizens

Number of Visas allowed: 23,400 Wait time: 6–7 years.

I'm being really nice here, under Mexico it says “01JUL92″ meaning they are processing claims filed on July 1, 1992. At that rate, we have a wait time of a whopping 23 years.

Category F2A and F2B : Unmarried sons and daughters (21 years of age or older) of lawful permanent residents

Visas allowed: 26,266 Average wait time: 8–9 years. For Mexico, 22MAR92, 23 years. Unless it is for a child under 18, in which case, it is 01MAY02. That's 8 years.

I already looked at that study. What it says in health care spending is no reliable data exists and the only one that actually does control spending is one state, which spends 1% of its cost on illegals. None for Medicare, which is 25% of the federal budget.

What the CBO budget estimate shows is that most costs are from one area, education. Since the children of illegals born in the US are Constitutionally considered legal, they get all the state education benefits. That's why recent talk has been around trying to get the fourteenth amendment repealed, designed to protect the children of slaves that were brought over.

This is bad reasoning because they count them as illegal when costs are for children, but then exclude them whenever benefits are accrued for their children. If I did that same method with every other group of people, I could find that everyone drains billions of dollars. Mathematical hokey-pokey doesn't impress me very much.

The same thing occurs when you look at the health care costs. From what that link shows, the majority of the care goes to children, who would get it regardless because they're legal citizens. From your own links:

“Data on health care costs for illegal immigrants are sketchy because hospitals and community health centers don't ask about patients' legal status. In California, a 2004 study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform put the state's annual cost at $1.4 billion. Similar studies in Colorado and Minnesota in 2005 came up with much smaller estimates: $31 million and $17 million, respectively. “

So, how is California coming up with excessively high numbers when no information is given? The most common method I've seen is to assume that illegals act just like regular United States citizens and to factor in the number that are uninsured against the costs for an uninsured US citizen. The quote from FAIR does just that, which this is the link:

http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=...

All of the “research” listed at the end comes from newspaper op-eds and other such sources, so it doesn't seem very reliable. None of the derivates are supplied in the article, which is even more suspect.

If you assume that illegals and US citizens use emergency care at the same rate, you're already in trouble. Your own article notes that:

“For many illegal immigrants, the fear of deportation outweighs the pain of illness or injury, so they live with their afflictions rather than seeking help until their health problems become critical.”

In other words, illegals rarely go to the doctor, while Americans do quite often.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/24/news/economy/he...

According to the CBOs report, the main reason illegals go to the hospital is for childbirth. I'm somehow skeptical that childbirth alone in California is really costing 1.4 billion dollars. So I went to the Kaiser institute to see what they said, pulling from the NHIS data:

http://www.kff.org/uninsured/upload/7651.pdf

“Regardless of insurance status, low-income non-citizens were less likely than low-income citizens to report an emergency room visit in the past year. Uninsured low-income non-citizens were the least likely to use the emergency room with only about one in ten reporting a visit in the past year.”

So what we know about emergency health care is:

1.) Small groups of people abuse it the most, known as “frequent fliers.”

2.) Illegal immigrants are the least likely group to use it at all, and they are ineligible for any other services.

3.) Legals use it more often and in greater numbers.

I checked that against the Public Policy Institute of California's report and the same thing emerged:

http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_80...

What it reports:

“Although undocumented immigrants are not eligible for most public insurance programs, Medi-Cal does pay for emergency services to undocumented immigrants. In addition to the funds provided through the Medi-Cal program, the federal government also allocated funding in the 2003 Medicare
Modernization Act (Section 1011) to reimburse hospitals for
emergency health services provided to undocumented immigrants.

California has received the largest share of this funding, with
about $70 million allocated in 2007 (Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services, n.d.). Although noncitizens are a difficult
group to study, our finding that noncitizens (some of whom
are presumably undocumented) are less likely to visit an emergency department is consistent with other research showing that the foreign-born, and especially undocumented immigrants, use less medical care and contribute less to health care spending relative to their share of the population
(Bitler and Shi, 2006; Goldman, Smith, and Sood, 2006). Undocumented immigrants also pay considerably more of their medical costs out of pocket (36%) than the native-born (20%) and the foreignborn as a whole (27%). This is
likely due to their lower rates of health insurance coverage (Goldman, Smith, and Sood, 2006).”

Also of note:

“Medi-Cal and Medicare patients are among the highest
users of emergency departments. The uninsured are no more likely than privately insured Californians to report a recent visit to an emergency department, in part because the uninsured are expected to pay the high price of emergency services out of pocket.”

So they aren't getting free health care, they have to pay out of pocket and they only use it when necessary. The only groups that get free health care are US citizens, who are unemployed in large numbers thanks to the recent housing bust, same thing happened in the late 90s with the dot com bust, which also brought increases in emergency care spending.

The only group with a high cost estimate, FAIR, is a group that is dedicated to eliminating illegal immigrants from the States, and their methodology's raw numbesr are undocumented, and where they are pulling them from is very suspect. Since every controlled study contradicts them, I opt for Occam's razor and assume the outlier is a statistical anomaly.

“As a nation or Republic 'by the people, for the people', 70-some-odd(?) percent of voters recently approved and voted for the new Arizona law.”

Well, they did not vote for the law. They approve it though. At the time of the Iraqi war, over 80% of Americans approved of it. Right now, that number is much, much, much lower. People who vote make decisions that are subject to change. Hence my comment that it was not a divine right commandment. If your chain of reasoning thus far is emblematic of the majority of people, then the support for the law is based upon a faulty understanding of the economic consequences of immigration, fueled by certain groups for certain purposes to prevent people from focusing on what really drives high health care costs and what really drives massive unemployment.

I had to dig around some more, but here's what I found from the Border Counties Coalition listed above.

http://www.bordercounties.org/index.asp?Type=B_...

It says that in 2000, illlegal immigrants c…ost $79 million in California. Full quote:

“The study reports that, in 2000, border hospitals spent more than $200 million to provide emergency health care to undocumented immigrants – $79 million in California; $74 million in Texas; $31 million in Arizona; and $6 million in New Mexico.”

Looking at California's budget for 2000, I find this:

http://www.dof.ca.gov/budget/historical/2000-01...

“Projected Medi-Cal costs for 2000-01 are $24.1 billion
($9.3 billion General Fund).”

So 79 million in costs from immigrants compared to 24.1 billion in medical costs for the state equals .3% of the costs of health care. Both numbers are skewed, only considering border hospital costs for California and only looking at medi-cal, but the point seems to be the same. The same report indicates that 75% of these costs are to US citizens, not illegals, 200 million for cost to illegals if you add up five states, and 600 million in costs from US citizens. Again, it seems odd to keep focusing on the costs of illegals while ignoring the costs of everyone else.

The assessment of costs agrees with everything else I've seen:

“As discussed elsewhere in this report, Emergency Medicaid covers emergency medical services delivered to individuals that would otherwise be categorically eligible for Medicaid if it were not for their immigration status. The primary categories of Medicaid eligibility are children 19 years of age and under, pregnant women, indigent single-adult families with minor children,45 and the aged and disabled. In addition, all applicants must prove that they are “residents” or intend to establish residency in the U.S. in the state where they are applying for benefits.

A significant percentage of individuals crossing the border do not fall within these eligibility categories or cannot prove they reside in or plan to reside in the U.S. As a result, many of the undocumented immigrants that arrive in border hospital emergency rooms do not qualify for Medicaid coverage. During our field research, one hospital told a story of a migrant worker who had been crossing the border for 20 years to work illegally in this country. She was categorically eligible for Medicaid and had a home and family in the U.S. When her cancer progressed she arrived at the hospital’s emergency room. However, Medicaid denied reimbursement for services because the worker only spent part of the year in the U.S. and could not “prove” she intended to remain in this country although she had been
here for 20 years.

Hospitals in all four states reported that even when an undocumented immigrant falls within an eligibility category they often refuse to complete paperwork that would enable a hospital to receive reimbursement. Undocumented immigrants do not want to complete Medicaid paperwork because they fear they will be “found out” by the INS or
lose a future opportunity to become U.S. citizens because of their use of “public benefits.” This problem was reported most often during interviews with hospital administrators in California where signs had been posted at one time in hospitals stating that information provided on applications for public benefits would be reported to the INS.”

That confirms, again, what I've said. Illegals don't use the services very often and usually only do it for child-birth.

So to top it off, the Kaiser Institute, the Public Policy Institute of California, the National Academy of Sciences, the Congressional Budget Office, the Cato Institute, the Border Counties Coalition, the Government Accountability Office, the Migration Policy Institute, the Economic Policy Institute, and several independent economists all peg the costs pretty low. The only high figure comes from one report, by an ideologically suspect group using some math that is very suspect.

Also, I agree with the assessment that the Border Counties give. Given that illegals pay into Social Security and Medicare that they can't use, the government should use these funds to reimburse states that pay for health care for immigrants.

Some of the FAIR associates are into Eugenics NOW. Not 100 years ago. But now.

And just because some fool derived eugenics from darwinism (so you say) does not delegitimize Darwin's theory of evolution.

People who promote the inherent inferiority or superiority of one racial or ethnic group over another are just fucking stupid. As are the folks that try to defend them by attacking their detractors.

Now, that is not to say that you can't take pride in being Irish, African-American, Jewish, French, Chinese, Cherokee or whatever. But there is a big fucking difference between having pride in your ancestry and thinking you are better than others because of it.

The sanest approach would be to plan for it, and adapt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb62cxq6Smg

As an FYI it appears the Judges ruling does allow police to ask for proof of immigration (the controversial part) but says the state can not force the police to do so…

I am told it is in the Judges footnotes…