[ By: Andrew Romano ]
First Published in Newsweek on Sep 14, 2009

Wait a Second. Why Shouldn’t We Insure Illegals? — Insuring undocumented immigrants might be unpopular, but it would be good for the economy.

Wilson’s vulgarity. Wilson’s apology. Wilson’s “dirty health-care secret“. Wilson’s charming effort to make American politics more British.

And that’s just at NEWSWEEK.

Few of us, however, have actually bothered to address the issue that provoked Wilson’s outburst: health insurance for illegal immigrants. The line he objected to–”The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally”–is, in fact, not a “lie.” The current House bill makes it very clear that “individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States” will not be allowed to receive subsidies. To wrangle assistance, illegal aliens would have to commit identity fraud, something that rarely happens in our current public-health-care system (a.k.a. Medicare). And Democratic senators have just announced that they’ll require those who participate to show proof of citizenship. So it’s a nonissue.

But let’s just assume, for argument’s sake, that we all live in Wilsonville, where Obama is the lying liar his critics allege him to be–the sort of psycho who has chosen to sacrifice his political future on the flaming pyre of anti-immigrant sentiment by concocting a secret scheme to cover the nation’s estimated 11.9 million illegals. Would that really be so bad?

Of course, insuring undocumented workers is ethically murky and politically impossible. Some people argue that if we’re hiring illegals to, say, shingle our roofs, we have a moral obligation to care for them if they fall off. But more people, it seems, simply want them out of the country. Given that illegal immigrants have, by definition, broken our laws, it makes sense that large numbers of upstanding citizens oppose any measure that would encourage more foreigners to sneak into America or make their lives easier once they’re here.

The only problem? From a purely economic standpoint, insuring illegal immigrants makes a lot of sense–and not just for them, but for everyone.

Consider a few statistics. According to a July article in the American Journal of Public Health, immigrants typically arrive in America during their prime working years and tend to be younger and healthier than the rest of the U.S. population. As a result, health-care expenditures for the average immigrant are 55 percent lower than for a native-born American citizen with similar characteristics. With the ratio of seniors to workers projected to increase by 67 percent between 2010 and 2030, it stands to reason that including the relatively healthy, relatively employable and largely uninsured illegal population in some sort of universal health-care system would be a boon rather than a burden. “Insurance in principle has to cover the average medical cost of all the people it’s serving,” explains Leighton Ku, a professor of health policy at George Washington University. “So if you add cheaper people to the pool, like immigrants, you reduce the average cost.” More undocumented workers, in other words, means lower premiums for everyone.

The actuarial advantages don’t end there. As it is now, undocumented workers (and others) who can’t pay their way receive free emergency and charitable care–a service that costs those of us with health insurance an additional $1,000 per year, as Obama noted. But if illegals were covered, this hidden tax would decrease, further lowering our premiums and “relieving some of the financial burden on state and local governments,” says Harold Pollack, a University of Chicago professor who specializes in poverty and public health. What’s more, employers currently have a clear economic incentive to hire undocumented immigrants: they don’t require coverage. A plan that mandates insurance for native workers but not their illegal counterparts actually makes life harder on the blue-collar Americans competing for jobs (and railing against immigrants) because it means that hiring them will cost more than hiring a recent transplant from Mexico City. As The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein recently explained, “If you’re really worried about the native-born workforce, what you want to do is minimize the differences in labor costs between different types of workers. A health care policy that enlarges those differences–that makes documented workers more expensive compared to undocumented workers–is actually worse for the documented workers.”

At this point, you’re probably wondering whether taxpayers would have to foot a bigger bill for these newly insured illegals. Not necessarily–at least in theory. As Obama said in Wednesday’s speech, “Like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects” to fund whatever care it provides. Given that many undocumented workers leave the country before they’re old enough to require much medical care, says Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, “you could set up the system in a way that that they wind up contributing as much or more than they receive” in low-income subsidies, especially when the “offsetting savings of lower emergency-room use” are factored in.

But despite the potential economic upside, the right shouldn’t stress: America won’t insure its illegal immigrants any time soon. “The hard thing here is that the current state of perception on immigration is eroding our sense of social solidarity,” says Longman, who believes, like the rest of the experts quoted in this story, that covering undocumented workers is both politically and logistically impractical. “People simply don’t want money going to people on the other side of the tracks.” That pretty much explains why Obama was so determined to clear up the confusion–and why Joe Wilson was so determined to keep it alive. Never mind that our wallets would be better off if Wilson were right. Money, after all, isn’t everything–even in politics.

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March 2, 2010
Dear Friend,

Today, we’re releasing our annual report on the number of active hate and extremist groups in our nation. The figures are alarming, and I’m deeply worried about what this means for our country.

This sign was photographed at a recent demonstration in Washington D.C.

We’ve documented a 244 percent increase in the number of conspiracy–minded, anti–government “Patriot” groups in a single year. Militias — the paramilitary arm of the “Patriot” movement — were a major part of the increase. Like other extremists, “Patriot” groups have been fueled by anger over immigration, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama.

This extraordinary growth is cause for real concern. During its 1990s heyday, the “Patriot” movement produced an enormous amount of violence, most dramatically the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead.

Racist hate groups are at record levels — rising from 926 in 2008 to 932 in 2009. The increase caps a decade in which the number of neo–Nazi, racist skinhead and other hate groups surged by more than 50 percent. We’ve also seen a sharp increase in “nativist extremist” groups — vigilante organizations that actually confront or harass suspected immigrants.

These three strands of the radical right — the hate groups, the “nativist extremist” groups, and the “Patriot” organizations — are the most volatile elements on the American political landscape. Taken together, their numbers increased by more than 40 percent, rising from 1,248 groups to 1,753.

There are already signs of a resurgence of radical–right violence like the kind we witnessed in the 1990s. Right–wing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers since Obama’s inauguration. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the president. Most recently, a number of individuals with antigovernment, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases. And, tragically, a man furious with the government crashed his plane into an IRS building.

With your help, we’ll continue to track and expose these groups’ activities and provide law enforcement with the information they need to keep our communities safe. Thank you, once again, for your commitment to stand with us as we fight the hate that threatens to divide us.

Sincerely,

Morris Dees    Founder, Southern Poverty Law Center

P.S. SPLC President Richard Cohen and Intelligence Project Director Mark Potok will host an interactive webcast and take your questions on this and other SPLC work on March 17th. We’ll contact you soon with details. Also, please visit our updated Hate Map to find out what groups are active in your state.

You can donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center online.

•   Follow SPLC on Twitter.
•   Become our fan on Facebook.

We welcome your feedback.
Contact us online.

Or by mail:

Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Ave.
Montgomery, AL 36104

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   By: Michael Lind [ Enlarge ]
Why is the Republican Party insisting on gridlock in Washington? Why is the Republican minority in California blocking necessary change? The Beltway pundits who attribute everything to electoral cycle gamesmanship do not understand the deeper cause of this scorched-earth policy: demographic decline.

Having lost much of the white professional class to the Democrats (perhaps temporarily), the Republican Party is increasingly the party of the declining white working class. Non-Hispanic whites are shrinking as a percentage of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, the traditional skilled working class and lower middle class are shrinking as a proportion of the workforce, while the service sector proletariat and college-educated professionals increase their share.

To add insult to injury, the Democrats, instead of reaching out to white working-class voters, often have snobbishly dismissed them, as Obama did with his patronizing discussion of the “bitter” people.

In these circumstances, the American white working class quite naturally is experiencing “demographic panic.” Declining groups experiencing such anxieties generally focus on blocking adverse change, using the political institutions they still control. Apart from hanging on to their power as long as they can, they usually do not have programs for governing the country, something they do not expect to be able to do in the long run.

This was the strategy of the antebellum Southern planter class, beginning in the 1820s. As immigrants poured into the North, where native white farmers also had high birthrates, Southern whites were increasingly outnumbered. By threatening to secede in 1820 (the Missouri Compromise) and 1850 (the Compromise of 1850), Southern politicians forced the rest of the country to acquiesce to the rule that slave states and free states must be equal in number in the Senate, even though slave-state whites were a shrinking minority of the population. When the rise of the Republican Party convinced them that this delaying tactic was doomed, the Southerners tried to secede and form a smaller union they would forever control.

Demographic panic also afflicted old-stock British Protestants in Northern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their fear that they would be displaced socially and politically by European immigrants, particularly by hated Irish Catholic immigrants, inspired Protestant nativism as early as the 1840s.

The Protestant nativists, like the Southern planters, sought to booby-trap Congress to maintain their political power in spite of their dwindling relative numbers. From the founding onward, after every census the size of the U.S. House of Representatives was adjusted upward, in order to accommodate the growing population. However, after the 1920 census, rural Protestant representatives in Congress prevented an expansion of the House that would have increased the influence of European immigrants and their descendants in the big cities.

In 1929, the size of the House was capped at 435, the number it reached after the 1910 census. Many democracies have lower houses of 600 to 800 members. The Anglo-Protestant nativists long ago lost their battle against Euro-Americans, but the small size of the U.S. House of Representatives is the legacy of their struggle to maintain their status and power.

This history underscores the irony that yesterday’s ascending demographic force often becomes today’s declining minority. The Anglo-American Protestants in the North and Midwest who crushed the Confederacy and dreamed of sending colonists to demographically and culturally Yankeeize the defeated South were themselves panicking half a century later over the prospect of becoming outbred and outnumbered by Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans in New England itself.

Many of the children of the European immigrants whom the old-line WASPs feared and despised moved up and moved west to California, where, assimilated and affluent by the 1970s, they pulled the plug on the funding of public education, once black and brown children who did not look like their kids began to fill California classrooms.

In a hundred years perhaps the relatively declining descendants of today’s growing Latino constituency will unite with other groups to oppose the empowerment of 22nd century immigrants from other parts of the world.

If you believe that there is a long-term national interest distinct from that of particular groups, then the challenge is to prevent the groups that are in relative decline — be they regions or ethnic or racial groups — from trying to preserve their relative political power by using the veto points in U.S. government to bring the machinery of a government to a grinding stop.

The increasing mismatch between population and power in American government that underlies the present gridlock needs to be addressed by structural reforms. Here is what needs to be done.

Reforming the U.S. Senate: The radical yet perfectly constitutional solution to addressing the gridlock imposed by the small-population states is to subdivide increasingly under-represented large-population states like California, Texas, Florida and New York into smaller states, each with two senators.

The Constitution permits a state to voluntarily subdivide itself as long as Congress approves. In an article in Mother Jones a few years back, I proposed the voluntary subdivision of the large states to turn our present 50 states into 75 states. But the small states in the Senate would try to block any attempt to dilute their grotesquely disproportionate power by this voluntary and constitutional method.

The immediate goal of Senate reform therefore should be the abolition of the filibuster, which exists only because of the Senate’s own rules and has no basis in our constitutional design. Small state populations would still have disproportionate influence even if all Senate legislation were passed by 51 percent majorities, but less than they do now, when the Democrats rule the Senate 41 to 59.

The House of Representatives: It is much easier to adjust the other house of Congress to make it more representative of the 21st century American majority. The membership of the House needs to be expanded. It is time to unfreeze the upper limit of 435 members.

Creating more congressional districts, each with a much smaller number of voters, will make it easier for you to actually meet your representative. And smaller districts reduce the need for out-of-state special interest campaign money to buy media in elections. The clock that the WASP nativists stopped in the 1920s should be restarted. After every census, the size of the House should be expanded, until it reaches 600 or even 800 members.

Gerrymandering: Congress has the power to take away the right to redraw congressional districts after every census from state legislatures. It should do so. Districts should be drawn by neutral commissions. Not only partisan gerrymandering but the creation of majority-minority districts should be outlawed.

Majority-minority districts, intended to elect more black and Latino representatives, backfired by allowing Republican legislatures to divide white Democratic voters from one another and cram them into Republican-majority districts. Along with more Republicans, more black and Latino Democrats are elected, but at the price of fewer Democrats overall. The goal should be actual empowerment of minority voters, not rigging safe seats for minority politicians.

A single national primary: Why should candidates who appeal to the disproportionately white voters of Iowa and New Hampshire have an advantage over those with appeal in states like California and Texas, where non-Hispanic whites are now a minority? The presidential primaries should be replaced by a single national primary. Would this help candidates who are known quantities with name recognition? Let’s hope so. No more Jimmy Carters.

The Electoral College: The white microstate advantage in the Electoral College should be ended by replacing the Electoral College with direct election of the presidency, whether by conventional plurality voting or “instant runoff” (single transferable vote).

I have written elsewhere that out of this time of troubles, as out of the Civil War and the Depression, may arise a reinvented and reinvigorated America — a Fourth American Republic. But success is not foreordained. The demographically declining white constituencies who benefit from gridlock may prevent necessary reforms from being made by Congress for a while.

But needed reforms will be undertaken — if necessary, by means of executive orders by future Caesarist presidents who circumvent the paralyzed Congress in order to get things done. And if the situation is desperate enough and the obstructionists in Congress are sufficiently despised, the new system of rule by presidential decree will be supported by public opinion and ratified by the federal judiciary, which generally follows public opinion.

If this came to pass, it would mark the transition from democratic republicanism in the United States to plebiscitary presidentialism. We would still have free and fair elections every four years, but in between presidential elections the country would be governed by decrees drafted by powerful but little-known White House advisors, many of them not subject to Senate confirmation.

The conversion of the U.S. into a banana republic would be complete, as the president became el presidente and the House and Senate were reduced to honorary debating societies. Instead of the Fourth American Republic, we would have the First American Principate.

Sarah Palin was the headline speaker at the recent Tea Party Convention, but I won’t risk a migraine by attempting to analyze her drivel. Ya know, what I’m talking about?

Tom Tancredo, the former congressman from Colorado, also spoke at the teabagger convention, and his speech is a fair representation of the mindset of the teabaggers.

Let’s examine a paragraph from that speech in which Tancredo questions the very legitimacy of the 2008 election results:

“People who could not spell the word ‘vote‘ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House – (his) name is Barack Hussein Obama. The revolution has come. It was led by the cult of multiculturalism aided by leftist liberals all over who don’t have the same ideas about America as we do.”

The 2008 election wasn’t a replay of the controversial 2000 campaign, Obama won a clear and decisive victory. At this juncture the only ones who question the legitimacy of Obama’s mandate are racists who can’t accept a black man in the Oval Office. A constant refrain at teabagger events is the illegitimacy of the Obama presidency.

Tancredo is unable to make a speech without taking a swipe at Hispanics in general and undocumented workers is particular. The failed presidential candidate claims that people who can’t even say “vote” in English helped put Obama in the White House. This anti-Hispanic sentiment is rampant at teabagger shindigs, no wonder you won’t find any Latinos at teabagger meetings.

Tancredo like most teabaggers has a European-centric perspective, thus his dig at multiculturism and his mention of Obama’s middle name. Everything European is good, Everything Mexican, Arabian, Chinese, and African is bad — according to the teabaggers. America is a pluralistic society, made up of immigrants not only from Europe, but from everywhere in the world.

Whites will soon be a minority in America, and America will soon be surpassed by China and India in the realms of economics, science and military might.

Sarah Palin, Tancredo and the teabaggers are Neanderthals on the losing side of history, they will soon be overwhelmed by demographics.

Follow Robert Paul Reyes on Twitter: http://twitter.com/robertpaulreyes

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While talking about families who are in the government’s free or reduced-price school lunch programs (Blacks, Immigrants, Poor Whites), Lieutenant Gov. Andre Bauer, R-S.C., claims participants should be deprived of food to prevent them from breeding.

Americans Should Be Deprived of Free or Reduced Prize School Lunch
Programs To Stop Them From Breeding!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

More Republican Psycho-Talk:

Rush FAT Limbaugh: Obama is “Raping” The Banks

Sarah Palin | Scott Brown

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Hannity calls State of the Union address a “big propaganda speech“

FAT Dick Morris using Fox to raise money to run ads attacking 23 Democrats in Congress

Sick Mother-Fucker Sean KLANnity calls White House press secretary Robert Gibbs “the propagandist“

During an event for their Bold Fresh(sick) Tour, portions of which aired during the January 25 edition of Fox & Friends, Bill O’Reilly asked Glenn Beck why progressives “want to hurt us,” and Beck replied: “If you can’t win the argument, you have to shout them down, you have to call them racist, you have to call them names. You have to do whatever it is you have to do.” In fact, Beck himself has a history of calling people, including President Obama, “racist,” shouting at those who disagree with him, and resorting to calling progressives names like “evil,” socialists, communists, and Marxists.

Hypocrisy: Beck says progressives resort to name-calling, shouting, and accusations of racism

Limbaugh: Obama “ran for this office … to destroy the capitalist system of this country … and he is succeeding”

Limbaugh: Obama admin. is “destroying the middle class,” “destroyed black families,” and “kept people in poverty“

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