To all Candidates, and Elected Officials: Revised, 5/19/, 2008 By winn1955 [0] - Mon, 05/19/2008 - 1:14pm
I wrote this blog yesterday, my questions were as follows.
I do have a Question for all candidates running for the elected offices in Clay County, and the ones who now hold seats in county government.
What is your opinion on illegal immigration in our county?
What are you prepared to do about it?
And how would you fix the problems it creates in our county, and its budget?
Only two people responded to my blog, normally I could care less about a response to the blogs that I Write. The questions that I ask are too important to be ignored, and demands an answer from our local government, and candidates running for office. My mistake in my first blog was I didn’t show how relevant my questions are.
The only one that ask me the question about how it effects the budget was from bloger dmccall His blog is as follows, “If they are illegal then the county needs to enforce the laws Call INS, the sheriffs office, What do you mean by the budget problems ,can you be specific?”My reply too Dmccall was very specific, and to the point, and it also shows just how relevant my questions are for our county officials to answer, along with the candidates. If anyone disagrees with me, please tell me where I am wrong. The following is the answer to Dmccall,
dmccall, I have been doing much research on the cost of illegal Immigration, I hope this is a satisfactory answer to your question.
I have been doing much research on the cost of illegal immigration in our state. And as you will see the stats are quite staggering, especially since the budget cuts in all areas of our county government. I am going to quote a comment made by a candidate running for the office of the Sheriff. As he answered the question from Magnumforce on his blog that he wrote saying; HELLO, and introducing himself as a candidate for that office. The quote is from Braveheart. “The Sheriff's Office is looking at a 9 million dollar loss in operational funding. The SO has to start looking and thinking "out of the box".
It is not my intention to criticize this candidate, or any other, only to make my point on the relevance of my question to all elected officials and candidates running for office.
If the sheriff’s office is expecting a 9 million dollar short fall wouldn’t it be prudent to investigate the cost of illegal immigrants placed in their care, and the effect on their budget?
If 1.7 Billion a year is spent in the state of Florida on the cost of Schools, Medical care, and our law enforcement alone; my question demands an answer of how it affects the county budget from the sheriff, the candidates for his office, the School superintendent, and candidates for that office. To be quite frank, I don’t know who you would ask about the medical cost associated with those statistics.
I will try and be as specific as possible, with my Analysis of the latest Census data. The data indicates Florida’s illegal immigrant population is costing the state’s taxpayers more than $1.7 billion dollars per year for education, medical care and incarceration. Even if the estimated taxes collected from illegal immigrant workers are subtracted, net outlays still amount to nearly one billion dollars per year. The annual fiscal burden amounts to about $300 per Florida household headed by a native-born resident. These statistics do not take into consideration any of the other social services that are offered, private, or public.
This analysis looks specifically at the costs to the state for education, health care and incarceration resulting from illegal immigration. These three are the largest cost areas, and they are the same three areas analyzed in a 1994 study conducted by the Urban Institute, which provides a useful baseline for comparison a decade later.
Other studies have been conducted in the interim, showing trends that support the conclusions of this report. There are other significant costs associated with illegal immigration; federal, state, and local officials should take these into account as well. Even without accounting for all of the numerous areas in which costs associated with illegal immigration are being incurred by Florida taxpayers, the program areas analyzed in this study indicate that the burden is substantial and that the costs are rapidly increasing. The nearly two billion dollars in costs incurred by Florida taxpayers annually result from outlays in the following areas:
Education: Based on estimates of the illegal immigrant population in Florida and documented costs of K-12 schooling, Floridians spend more than $1.5 billion annually on education for illegal immigrant children and for their U.S.-born siblings. About 8.7 percent of the K-12 public school students in Florida are children of illegal aliens.
Health Care: Taxpayer-funded, unreimbursed medical outlays for health care provided to the state’s illegal alien population amount to about $165 million a year.
Incarceration: The uncompensated cost of incarcerating illegal aliens in Florida’s state and county prisons amounts to about $60 million a year (not including local jail detention costs or related law enforcement and judicial expenditures or the monetary costs of the crimes that led to their incarceration). State and local taxes paid by the unauthorized immigrant population go toward offsetting these costs, but they do not come near to matching the expenses. The total of such payments can generously be estimated at about $910 million per year. The fiscal costs of illegal immigration do not end with these three major cost areas. The total costs of illegal immigration to the state’s taxpayers would be considerably higher if other cost areas such as special English instruction, welfare programs used by the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, or welfare benefits for American workers displaced by illegal alien workers were also calculated.
Dmccall I hope I have answered your question specifically enough to your satisfaction. And I would also hope that these statistics open a lively debate on the topic. If it doesn’t and this blog gets shoved to the back pages, I can assure you I will keep bringing it forward until the county government, and the candidates give an answer to my questions.
I for one am tired of a government that chooses to turn their heads on laws while we suffer the consequences of their actions. I am tired of loosing work to law breaking illegals that we can not possibly compete with. I am tired of contractors demanding we carry insurance, and workman’s comp, while they hire the law breakers under the table, and turn our bids down because they can get the work done for pennies on the dollar, and take advantage of the law breakers.
It’s just not right when hard working law abiding citizens loose work, from corporate greed. I am totally discussed with our government, national, and local.
So in summation of this blog I have to ask all who read it, in your opinion, do the statistics as presented show the relevance of the questions I have ask to be answered by our candidates, and elected officials? And if not why?
It takes an unsatisfied person to make things satisfactory: winn1955