VIEW from behind the plow

A longtime friend, Jimmy, told us last week he doesn’t agree with our editorial positions.

That’s okay. We don’t base friendship on agreement about political issues.

The friend cited one point of disagreement as the border wall.

He says “let everybody in.”

We consider that extremely dangerous to our system of government. Neither of us has any say in the matter.

The rule of law (the restriction of the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established laws) has been an extremely important ingredient in the American experiment.

It appears more and more that certain people in America think they have more rights than others. And illegal immigrants seem to consider themselves due all citizen rights without earning them.

We believe that we have plenty of home-grown criminal element in our country without welcoming in the derelicts from foreign countries, very possibly fleeing arrest and prosecution in the lands they come from. There are bound to be some good people among the border violators – but they’re not legal.

America has been basically a Christian nation from its beginnings, accepting Judeo-Christian ethics as the foundation of our governmental and societal behavior.

Yes, we know that former President Barack Obama did not agree with that opinion but he also didn’t believe in much that a majority of Americans believe, including the necessity for maintaining secure borders. (As a side note, Obama created greater division among citizens than any president in history and as ex-president continues to agitate for socialist change to our system. As our first openly leftist president – scorning Judaism, Christianity, the Bible, free enterprise and established immigration law – that should be expected. He was the progenitor of immoral ideas and foolish doctrines. Leftist college professors were more than willing co-conspirators in duping gullible young people placed under their jurisdiction, teaching that our most decent civil society in history is vile – racist, homophobic, xenophobic, bigoted and greedy.)

We don’t say American government is perfect but it is the best one created, yet. That’s one reason foreigners stand in line to emigrate here – and illegal immigrants break the law to cross over into the “Promise Land.”

There is a means of entering the U.S. legally and millions of Americans in the past have used it successfully. To those people – welcome. To others: stay out.

Columnist Dennis Prager wrote recently a concept with which we agree whole-heartedly:

“Belief in God and the Bible were instrumental to the creation of America, the last, best hope of mankind. The rejection of that God and that Bible are instrumental to wrecking America (and the rest of the West). That alone tells me how important that God and that Bible are. The left knows it, too.”

The left is the primary force in opening our borders to allow in individuals they can turn into leftist voters to speed up the process of transforming America into a socialist system. President Trump’s proposed border wall would serve as a hindrance to allowing in people who place increased strains on our economy than the nation can withstand.

And this doesn’t even take into account the Muslims who bring with them their societal and religious values, including a variant type of government that is the antithesis of ours. Terrorism is a successful tool of this group and they have already demonstrated it repeatedly on our soil.

Welcome them in? We don’t think so.

Free health care, education and food at taxpayer expense amount to billions of dollars annually going to illegals.

In 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that 80 percent of the counties with the highest number of illegal immigrants provide them “free” health care services, including surgery and prescription drugs. Extrapolated across the nation, this amounts to billions of dollars in care.

According to the Journal, illegal immigrants receive taxpayer-funded care in Los Angeles, CA (135,000), Santa Barbara, CA (54,000), Boston, MA (103,000), Queens County, NY (71,000), Montgomery County, MD (25,000), ad infinitum. And this is, to borrow a phrase, just the tip of the iceberg. There is still the free care provided to uninsured illegals by physicians, and hospital cost-shifting.

Christopher Conover writes in Forbes, that all of this added up to about $11.9 billion in medical care for unauthorized immigrants with no insurance coverage in 2016. He breaks it down thus:

[U]ninsured immigrants who are unauthorized likely receive about $4.6 billion in health services paid for by federal taxes, $2.8 billion in health services financed by state and local taxpayers, another $3.0 billion bankrolled through “cost-shifting” i.e., higher payments by insured patients to cover hospital uncompensated care losses, and roughly $1.5 billion in physician charity care.

The American Spectator comments:

“This would cover the Trump administration estimate of the wall’s cost in a single year, which brings us back to the number of illegal immigrants it would thwart. Like the cost of the wall, the estimates we get on how many enter the U.S. illegally depends on whom you ask.

“The answer provided by the Center for Immigration Studies differs dramatically from the one we get from the Pew Research Center. The lure of sanctuary cities, the reluctance of the Obama administration to enforce the law, and the kind of chicanery revealed by the WSJ suggest that the figure is higher than reported.

“But the problems with illegal immigration in general, and how much it costs our health care system in particular, aren’t practical. They’re political. One of our two major parties is for open borders and the other is (albeit tepidly) for controlling them. So, as Andrew Sullivan puts it, ‘The Democrats need to accept that they lost the last presidential election for a reason, and that their opponent’s main campaign pledge was to tackle illegal immigration.’ They should heed Sullivan’s advice, and stop fighting President Trump (and the voters) on the wall. It will work and can be paid for with ease.”