Geraldo Writes a Book!...Hooorah!!!

.
.

WhoooHoooo! Geraldo Rivera has written a brand new BOOK (entitled HIS-Panic)!!!

That, sad to say, is the end of the good news.

The bad news is that in that tome Geraldo Rivera defends a rabidly anti-American “Open borders” viewpoint that boldly claims that America is NOT a nation (a nation requires a common language, a common culture and actual borders). In fact, Geraldo is such an open border extremist that he even opposes deporting criminal illegal aliens.

How extreme is that position?

Well, slightly over 65% (appx. 2 to 1) of Hispanic-American citizens oppose “open borders for America,” and support basic border enforcement.” The most common refrain among that group is, “I came here legally, so should everyone else.”

Moreover, slightly more than 84% of Americans oppose any form of amnesty and support an “enforcement first” approach to dealing with illegal immigration.

While Geraldo ignores the Hispanics opposed to open borders, he makes it very clear that he (the half-Hispanic Geraldo) considers those Americans to be “racists.”

Even worse for the former, “Gerald Michael Rivera,” is that the economics are squarely against him.

* Illegal immigration puts a persistent DOWNWARD pressure on ALL prevailing wage rates. There isn’t a single economist who’d dispute that.

* Illegal immigration’s social costs (health, education, welfare, etc) dwarf the benefits of that cheap labor. It’s estimated that the cheap labor of illegal immigration saves America appx. $150 Billion/year, while the ancillary costs (the costs of all that “free emergency room care,” the costs of imprisoning of illegal felons, education, etc. for their children) are appx. $500 Billion/year. That means that while appx. 1% of Americans benefit to the tune of about $150 Billion/year (that averages out to around $80,000/year each for those lucky few, the 100 million adult Americans in the top 50% of taxpayers are shelling out nearly $3500/year to pay for all those ancillary costs...and many American hospitals are still going broke and closing their doors in response to being overwhelmed by the costs of providing free health care through their emergency rooms for the estimated 12 million illegal aliens here!

I know, I know, open border advocates don’t argue on the economics, they argue on the “morality.”

Utter nonsense!

How “moral” is LYING Geraldo?!

That’s right, Geraldo LIED. Hardly surprising, I know, but sadly it’s true. In one memorable section of his book he indignantly takes on Lou Dobbs over Dobbs’ 2003 claim that “one third of the inmates in our federal prisons are illegal aliens.”

Geraldo called Dobbs a liar and a bigot. I guess Dobbs earned the “bigot moniker” by dint of that particular lie.

Geraldo rebutted by claiming that illegal aliens only comprise 6% of our federal inmates, adding that ILLEGAL immigrants commit crimes at "a lower rate than American citizens do.”

So, the question is, “Who’s right?”

Well according to the DOJ stats, in 2003 (the year that Lou Dobbs made that claim), the 2003 federal prison population was comprised of 71.6 percent United States citizens, and 28.4 percent “other” (?)...apparently non-citizens. http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/30/dobbs.prison/index.html


Well, who’s closer to the truth?

It seems very clear that one-third (33.3%) is certainly closer to 28.4% than it is to 6%. The fact that illegal aliens comprise 6% of the total prison and jail population in America would further seem to indicate that Geraldo didn’t merely mis-speak, he deliberately misled his audience into believing that Dobbs said "one third of all those in prison in the U.S.", in short, he appears to have lied. So, does that make Geraldo, by his own standard, a “bigot”?

At any rate, looks like Lou Dobbs 1, Geraldo River 0, on this score.

Still, what about Geraldo’s claim that illegal aliens commit crimes at a LOWER rate than American citizens do?

Well, there are appx 1.6 million people in America’s prisons. There are 12 million illegal aliens in the country. There are 300 million people in America, of which 220 million are adults. Many estimate that as many as 4 million of the illegal alien population here are children, but let’s say that there are 10 million adult illegal aliens here.

OK, using those numbers; 1.5 million Americans out of the 220 million adults in the country are in prison – that’s appx. 0.7% of Americans in prison.

Six percent of the prison population (appx. 100,000) are illegal aliens. One hundred thousand out of appx. 10 million adult illegal aliens is appx. 1%.

It would seem that 0.7% (the percentage of Americans in prison) is LESS than 1% (the percentage of illegal aliens in prison, so, while it’s certainly close, that too, seems to be a false claim by Geraldo Rivera.

But there’s more...MUCH more!

The ONLY reason that illegal immigration has been tolerated up to now has been that the cheap labor (that $150 Billion/year going to less than 1% of all Americans), so any kind of AMNESTY program would eradicate that cheap labor just as surely as would E-Verify and other forms of immigration enforcement!

Now some would argue (and rightly so) that “some jobs are exempt from minimum wage laws,” but we’re not supposed to know that about many agricultural jobs and some food service positions...but it IS true. So, without illegal immigrants, those employers would have to pay more for those workers and charge more to us consumers, BUT we’d be free of all those ancillary costs!

Beyond that is the fact that a majority of those here illegally DON’T WANT U.S. citizenship. They’d rather have jobs in Mexico, Guatemala and Ecuador, where most of their families still live, and who can blame them? For the most part, they DON’T WANT to become “Americans.”

Well, then what about the “Re-conquista?”

Stop! That’s a canard, an utter pipedream! Less than 10% of Mexicans (many of those who are here, members of that racist group, La Raza – “the race”) believe that any kind of re-conquest of the American southwest is even remotely feasible.

Consider that some 85% of Staten Islanders voted to secede from New York City, in a referendum Giuliani promised them while running for Mayor. Once safely in office, however, Rudy had a change of heart and decided that “all of New York had the right to vote on this issue,” which doomed Staten Island to remaining a part of a city it wanted no part of, just as surely as a national vote would doom the Southwest (no matter how many Mexicans transplanted there) to remaining a part of the U.S.

As history shows, America has a poor track record on allowing secessionist movements within its borders.

In fact, any kind of “re-conquest” figuratively pisses on the graves of the estimated 1600 Mexicans and 400 U.S. Army casualties of the Mexican-American War, rendering all of those, “deaths in vain.” The current arrangement honors the dead on both sides of that brief (1846 – 1848) conflict.

Truth be told, Mexico legally ceded those territories to the U.S.A. with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was signed on February 2, 1848. That Treaty not only ended the war, it gave the U.S. undisputed control of Texas, established the U.S.-Mexican border of the Rio Grande River, and ceded to the United States the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, new Mexico, and Wyoming. In return, Mexico received U.S. $15,000,000, — less than half the amount the U.S. had attempted to offer Mexico for the land before the opening of hostilities — and the U.S. agreed to assume $3.25 million in debts that the Mexican government owed to U.S. citizens.

On top of all this, Geraldo lies yet again, by implying that “Hispanics are turning away from the GOP over this issue.”

Really?

Even though Hispanic-Americans oppose open borders by better than 2 to 1, and they’re angry with Republicans EVEN THOUGH the most recent border enforcement Bill, H.R.4088 (the SAVE Act) was sponsored by a DEMOCRAT (Heath Shuler D-NC)!

That doesn’t make any sense, when you think about it!

Then again, neither does Geraldo’s book.