Jill Stewart
FOREIGN CONVICTS COST CALIFORNIA $4 BILLION A YEAR
by Jill Stewart
American Reporter Correspondent
Sacramento, Calif.
Printable version of this story (Related)
SACRAMENTO -- Forgive me if I missed the media coverage of the international dustup between California State Senator Gloria Romero of Los Angeles and the Mexican government the other day. The media downplays stories it perceives as "blaming the victim," particularly on the hands-off topic of illegal immigration.
Liberal Democrat Romero has gone against the tide before. Now she's
rattling cages over the 28,672 foreigners in California prisons who cost
taxpayers a staggering sum to feed and house, one-half of whom are
illegal aliens from Mexico.
It's exceedingly rare to hear the term "illegal aliens" in the
bustling Sacramento Capitol. In an example of what George Orwell called
newspeak, California politicians believe that if they don't publicly
name this contributing cause of our ongoing fiscal crisis, it will
vanish.
It's not just silly pols who keep mum. The widely respected Chief
Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill rarely notes any cost to California
taxpayers due to illegal immigrants. It's too difficult, too politically
hot.
So while these largely non-taxpaying residents heavily use
taxpayer-financed services and infrastructure, from our jammed roads to
our overwhelmed courts, hardly anyone says anything.
Chuckles John Stoos, aide to Republican state Sen. Tom McClintock,
the fiscal watchdog from Thousand Oaks, "Oh yes, it will definitely go
away if we don't study it. Works for me!"
This avoidance behavior got a workout at Romero's prison system
hearing in Los Angeles recently. Polite but clearly worried diplomats
representing the local consulates of Canada, Germany, and Sweden all
testified, even though each of those countries has few prisoners in
California prisons.
Nevertheless, they were present to help fix a badly flawed
country-to-country prison transfer program that the Schwarzenegger
Administration hopes can one day send as many as 6,400 eligible
prisoners home - mostly back to Mexico. Each one costs taxpayers $31,000
to feed and house, every single year that they remain in California.
Most diplomats who testified said they want to more quickly
transfer convicted people home so that, as Canadian diplomat Myra
Pastyr-Lupul said, such prisoners can "take advantage of our programs to
reintegrate into Canadian society."
Need I say that the behavior of the Canadians, Swedes and Germans
stood in stark contrast to that of the Mexicans? In a bizarre bit of
public theater that reminded me of my year in Czechoslovakia in 1991,
where I observed bumbling ex-Communist officials firsthand, the Mexican
government boycotted Romero's hearing, offering up one of the lamest
official fibs I've ever heard.
Romero explained to the audience that Mexican officials never
responded to Romero's invitation to testify at the hearing - odd
behavior in and of itself. So that morning, Romero's aide telephoned the
Mexican consulate, down the road in L.A., to find out when they would be
arriving at the hearing.
As Romero noted for the record, Mexican officials responded that
"because of budgetary concerns, they could not fly the appropriate
consulate [official] from Mexico" - so nobody was coming. Said Romero:
"I am very disappointed at their failure to participate ... to first of
all give me even the courtesy of a phone call that they were not showing
up."
The peeved Romero went on to explain that in her invitation to the
Mexican consulate, "We stressed that a local consulate official was
sufficient."
I'll admit, I audibly guffawed over the bit about how Mexico, the
country, can't afford an airline ticket to Los Angeles.
I checked, just in case something had happened to airline prices
in the Known Universe. But nope, a roundtrip from Mexico City to L.A. is
still a bargain.
Mexican diplomats live very well, and the Mexican consulate in Los
Angeles is a classy joint, reflecting its ample funding from the home
office. Let's just say that the federal government of Mexico can well
afford a trip, indeed a very lavish trip, to Los Angeles. Not that
Romero needed a diplomat from Mexico City anyway.
For years, the Mexican government has done nothing but doubletalk
on illegal immigration. On the prisoner issue, Mexico very strictly
limits its acceptance of Mexican criminals from prisons in California
and other states - yet the Mexican government absurdly insists it has no
such limits. Pathetic. According to the California Board of Prison Terms
"all other nations accept all of their prisoners for transfer." All of
them. Except for Mexico.
Thus in 2003, Mexico took back only 109 prisoners from the entire
United States. Yet 17,500 of California's prisoners alone are Mexican
nationals, including some 14,000 illegal aliens. Moreover, Mexico flatly
refuses to take back any prisoner who has managed to lurk in the U.S.
for longer than five years. Just because.
U.S. and California officials are so sick of Mexico's behavior
that proposals are afoot to tweak the various complex treaties between
the U.S., Mexico, Canada and Europe, in order to force Mexico to play
ball.
It's not as if wholesale prisoner transfers will occur. Under
international treaties, prisoners must volunteer to go home. But at a
savings to taxpayers of $31,000 per foreigner per year, we'll take any
volunteers we can get.
During five years of the do-nothing Gray Davis Administration, by
my calculations, California taxpayers spent $4 billion dollars housing
and feeding foreign convicts - roughly half of them illegal aliens from
Mexico. So under Davis taxpayers spent $2 billion just on Mexican
illegal aliens in prison, and that bill is metastasizing as we speak.
You'd agree that kind of dough would pay for scads of road-building in
our decaying cities, tons of school textbooks, and a plethora of tax
rebates to rev up California's economy.
In newspapers the day after this bizarre Dec. 16 public hearing, I
found no coverage of the international dustup between Sen. Romero and
Mexico. Maybe I missed it. But I fear the worst: there was little or no
media coverage.
The California media are complicit, along with Sacramento
politicians, in often keeping mum about illegal immigration and its cost
to California taxpayers. Reporting on a story that news reporters see as
"blaming the victim" makes California journalists very uncomfortable
Media queasiness has effectively shut the public out of this
debate, allowing the discussion to be dominated by the hard-left and
hard-right.
The hard-left, typified by certain blowhard members of the Latino
Caucus in our legislature, in 2003 absurdly demanded driver's licenses
for illegal aliens with no restrictions or background checks. The
hard-right, typified by strident anti-immigrant groups in Washington,
D.C., demands such ridiculous things as a mass military on our border.
If the middle got any real chance to speak, we'd talk about how the
solution won't be found in Washington or Sacramento, but in Mexico City,
with the Mexican legislature and President Fox or, far more likely, his
successor.
Mexicans come here illegally because Mexico's economy is designed
to create very few jobs, as well as to severely repress the creation of
a middle class, which remains small. It's a purposefully sick system
which Mexico's elected leaders and rich ruling families have protected
for decades. No Mexican leader, including the grossly disappointing
President Fox, has shown the stomach for altering a socialist, throwback
economic structure best left in the 1930s.
Equally damaging, the rule of law in Mexico is so weak that few
financial lenders will jump in to help create a major entrepreneurial
class in Mexico - the best way to for the nation to escape Third World
status.
Lenders have little confidence that if they back a Mexican company
that wants to expand, or if they underwrite a plan to develop commercial
property in Mexico, their investment won't be stolen by corrupt mafia
types in some courtroom fiasco overseen by a corrupt judge. That's what
happens when the rule of law is a joke - as it is in Mexico's
courtrooms.
Mexico will remain Third World while China surges forward, as long
as corrupt judges run the legal system and socialism rules the
legislature.
The rich ruling families and legislature clearly prefer that Mexico
not develop itself, but instead rely on cash from California immigrants
who send billions of dollars to home to Mexico each year (making
U.S.-earned cash the second- or third-largest income source for Mexico,
after its oil revenues).
This "crutch economy" is a terrible thing, ensuring massive poverty
even as elected leaders in California and Washington coddle Fox and
Mexico's powerful ruling families
Fox has turned out to be horribly weak - a buckler and flip-flopper
unable to motivate any serious change. Why do I never, ever, read about
these crucial issues in California media? Oh, that's right, it's blaming
the victim.
As long as Mexico's ruling class ducks the responsibilities of the
modern world - even shirking such simple if unpleasant tasks as
attending a hearing into how to fix prison transfer policies - Mexico
will remain its own tragic victim.
But apparently, nobody told Romero that silence is the rule among
elected Sacramento politicians regarding the costs of illegal
immigration. That December day in L.A., she publicly criticized the
Mexican government, presented data on the staggering $500 million to
$800 million a year paid by California taxpayers to house foreign
prisoners, and basically opened a can of worms.
Somebody, please give this woman an award.
Visit AR Correspondent Jill Stewart at www.jillstewart.nethttp://www.jillstewart.net/ (Related) .
She is based in Sacramento, Calif., and lives in Los Angeles.
Copyright 2007 Joe Shea (Related) The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.
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