I just received this racist email from my Dad....

[alstephenson]

We've never agreed on politics, but I guess I didn't realize he was an enthusiastic racist. I have a sick feeling in my stomach today.

Has anyone else received this email? I couldn't find anything on Snopes about this particular email, just about the one debunking the one quoting the L.A. Times. Here's the email:

"$ 338.3 Billion / Year

Boy am I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us.
I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them.
I have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts.


1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year.

http://tinyurl.com/zob77


2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html


3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.

http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/%20fiscalexec.html

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born ch ildren of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html


7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html


8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html


9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, Their children, are go ing to make a huge additional crime problem in the US

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal Aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U.S. from the Southern Border. Homeland Security Report: http:// tinyurl.com/t9sht http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National Policy Institute, 'estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average Cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.' http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm


14. 'The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States '.
http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml


The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR


Are we THAT stupid???

If this doesn't bother you then just delete the message. If, on the other hand, if it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you
forward it to every legal resident in the country including every representative in Washington, D. C. - five times a week for as long as it takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and enforcement thereof."

Wow, Dad, just wow.

[colonel odis]

1. i've gotten that in various forms lately.

my hometown paper occasionally runs the email addresses of people who write letters to the editor. some wingnuts have put me on their racist email lists in an attempt, i guess, to help straighten me out.

morans.

[Cant trust em]

2. Legitimate concerns always get muddled up with racism in these e-mails

That's how you know that the motivation behind the anti-immigrant movement isn't about our country's resources or respect for laws.

[alstephenson]

19. I'm not Latino, but

I've worked for the National Council of La Raza for more than five years - and my Dad knows that. It just burns my butt that he would send me an email like this. He's so disappointed (disgusted?)to have raised a liberal daughter. Sorry, Dad, but I'm PROUD to be a liberal!

[Cant trust em]

21. The only political conflict I've had in my family is that my mom is Clinton and I'm for Obama

We didn't even argue over it. But more importantly she calls me today to tell me about some anti-Bush thing she saw.

[alstephenson]

24. Ah! What a lovely lady!

Politics and religion have always been taboo topics. I guess I can officially add immigration reform to the list.

[Cant trust em]

26. There's another reason that my mom rocks

She's a practicing Christian. Goes to church and everything. She doesn't let her Christianity get in the way of her belief in gay rights, pro choice or any of the other tenets of liberalism that we have.

I love my mom.

[beezlebum]

3. yeah

my granny sent that to me last week, after i put her in her place with "illegal isn't an adjective and it's dehumanizing to categorize people, including children, as such."

i love the threat at the end- harbinger of bullshit/nonsense emails. i tend to check for it before reading her emails, kinda like the effing debunked andy rooney crap she sends at least once a month since she found out i was a liberal nightmare.

you might want to put the "email" portion in blockquotes btw...

[alstephenson]

6. Thanks, beezlebum.

I put the email in quotes, but I don't post often enough to know how to put it in block quotes! Duh!

[Jed Dilligan]

4. Before some jackass waltzes in here singing the e-mail's praises,

I will point out what is racist about it.

Drugs and sex crimes aren't economic issues. The statistics (or "statistics") for these are included only to whip up fear and hatred against Latin American immigrants.

Do they make the case that illegal immigrants in the U.S. are the ones primarily responsible for drug traffic on the border?

Did they compare the statistic for sex crimes within the same population of non-immigrants filtered for similar economic and education status?

The e-mail is racist no matter how accurate the statistics are.

[alstephenson]

14. Good points, JD. Thanks.

[chixydix]

18. Latin Americans are all the same "race"? My 4th generation Mexican friend,

Edgar Behrens, is more Caucasian than I (3rd gen. German-American) am.
:eyes:

[Jed Dilligan]

35. Illegal immigrants are, in the vast majority, mestizo or indio

And your friend does not absolve you from racism, if that's what you're implying.

[WhollyHeretic]

29. The statistics are crap too. The prison stat is one put forth by Lou Dobbs

but is totally untrue.

"According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population)."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/business/30leonhardt.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=29f50592f7548c44&ex=1338177600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1180553851-rF%20BtSmowR1tB4/Nr3da0A

[Rage for Order]

37. Actually, that statistic is not untrue

The statistic said 30% of "federal" prisoners, not 30% of all prisoners in the country. It's actually 26.3%, so a little exaggerated, but much closer to 30% than 6%.

http://www.bop.gov/news/quick.jsp

Citizenship

United States: 147,843 (73.7 %)
Mexico: 34,104 (17.0 %)
Colombia: 3,053 (1.5 %)
Cuba: 1,700 (0.8 %)
Dominican Republic: 3,070 (1.5 %)
Other/Unknown: 10,893 (5.4 %)

[Juche]

5. Ask him why he's mad at illegals

most of that is because of corporations, not illegals. The $200 billion is due to corporate malfeasance, not illegals. They have lots of ways to drive down wages. Union busting, outsourcing, H-1B visas, firing the elderly. As Obama put it in his speech, we should be focusing our anger where it goes, at international corporations with no concern for people or the environment. If they couldn't use mexicans to drive down wages, they'd find some other way to do it.

As far as spending on healthcare & Education, immigrants pay huge amounts of income in taxes (esp FICA taxes for social security & medicare). They pay up to $56 billion (probably less than that) in SS taxes alone

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.html

Add in other taxes like fuel taxes, sales, medicare, income, etc. and it may be closer to 100+ billion a year.

Tell him that a guest worker program that gives better treatment to mexicans and that allows them to organize will drive up wages for US citizens.

FTR, its not all bad in the long run. The more the GOP openly expresses their disgust for mexicans, the fewer latinos that will vote republican anytime soon. Its machiavellian, but true. In fact, GLBTs and latinos now vote democrat about 70-80% of the time, in (large) part due to the naked disgust the GOP shows anyone who isn't a white heterosexual. Considering that the GOP has lost the black vote due to their open disgust of blacks (in the form of states rights, hatred of welfare, harsh anti-crime initiatives) the GOP has now lost almost 25% of the electorate for a long time (blacks, latinos, GLBTs). The only people left really are middle age, married white christians. The more they push everyone else out of the party, the smaller their party gets. Yeah I'm a machiavellian jerk for pointing that out, sue me.

It is offensive, back during the new Deal blacks were exempt from many of the benefits that the new deal tried to bring. This is no different. Mexicans can pay taxes, but they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the benefits. That is the mentality of these emails. As a society we've learned nothing from our treatment of blacks who experienced the smae thing. They paid taxes, worked low wage jobs and were excluded from the benefits that their taxes paid for. Then they were blamed for taking jobs because they were so low on the SES totem pole that companies could get cheap labor that wouldn't/couldn't demand better treatment.

If immigrants are allowed to exercise their labor rights under a guest worker program, then wages will rise.

[alstephenson]

25. Thanks for your comments, Juche.

You make some excellent points.

[EFerrari]

7. This has been posted here a bunch of times.

It's cr@p. When you try to run down the numbers, you can't.

[XOKCowboy]

8. I miss my dad. In Oklahoma in the 60s he taught me that people are people

He gave everyone an even break and didn't see color. I'll thank him forever for teaching me that.

His only racist trait... Unfortunately he never forgave the Japanese for what he saw in WW2. I guess I can forgive him for that.

[KamaAina]

9. What utter bilge. Thanks to the former repuke Congress, even legal residents are excluded

from most Federally funded benefit programs.

That's right, you now have to prove citizenship in order to receive most public benefits, even if, as a legal resident (green card holder), you've paid payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security.

[Coexist]

10. in re #9 - the big $200 billion one - is from a Lou Dobbs transcript.

so that knocks $200 billion off that $338 billion right off. You should check the other links. That one jumped out at me. I didn't follow any of the other ones.

[tanyev]

11. I received virtually the same email a couple months ago and spent some time researching it.

My comments are in bold italic. I never received any reply from the person who sent me the email. In fact, she hasn't sent me anything since.


This is a perfect illustration of why Rense.com is not a credible source for information. There are some serious problems with the logic, or lack of it, in this article.

IF, and this is a big if, we accept that all of the numbers from 1-6 are correct, I come up with a total of 56.8 billion. (Number six converts to about 1.1 billion when multiplied by 365.) In 2006, the cost of the Iraq war was estimated at nearly $2 billion a week. Two billion x 52 weeks = 104 billion a year. So, not costing more than the Iraq war.

Please see below for further problems.


Subject: WHAT COSTS MORE PER YEAR THAN THE IRAQ WAR


http://rense.com/general79/seniors.htm

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I have included the URL's for verification of the following facts:

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year. http://tinyurl.com/zob77

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
This claim adds nothing to the total of 1-6. It is also not completely accurate in its summary of the quote from the transcript. "30 percent of federal prisoners are not U.S. citizens. At a cost of $63 a day, taxpayers spend more than $3 million every day to house non-U.S. citizen dollars in our federal prisons. Most are thought to be illegal aliens."

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is! spent o n illegal aliens for Welfare and Social Services by the American taxpayers. http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html
This link does not work, so I cannot comment on its accuracy. However, it would seem that either this is true, or numbers 1-5 are true.

9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
The quote actually reads, "That economy, we know the estimates by the most authoritative and recent study put the suppressed wages at $200 billion a year, as a result of immigration, both legal and illegal." (Mr. Dobbs goes on to say that the estimated costs for services are around 50 billion, which again would suggest that there is a problem with #8.) An estimate of suppressed wages is highly subjective and it is irresponsible to include it in an estimate of actual monies that are being spent. Furthermore, I would propose that the most damaging wage suppression comes from the millions and millions of high-paying jobs that are being outsourced to India and China, with the full blessing and encouragement of our government.

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two-and-a-half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US . http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html
Actual quote: "Hispanics in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-Hispanics".

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4! to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border. Homeland Security Report. http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National Policy Institute, 'estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.' http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf
This is a theoretical cost for a mass deportation, which is not currently being done.

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. http://www..rense.com/general75/niht.htm
14. 'Th! e Dark S ide of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States '. http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml
The page cannot be found.

Total cost is a whooping... $338.3 BILLION A YEAR!!!
"whooping". The spelling is no better than the math.


If this doesn't bother you then just delete the message, but on the other hand, if it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, then forward it.

Snopes is provided for doubters:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/bankofamerica.asp
This Snopes link goes to a story about Bank of America giving credit cards to illegal aliens and has absolutely no other connection to the rest of this email.


BELOW IS THE MOST IRRESPONSIBLE PART OF THE EMAIL. HERE IS THE ACTUAL SNOPES LINK FOR THIS ACCUSATION:

http://www.snopes.com:80/politics/immigration/socialsecurity.asp



It refers to a specific case and a specific group of people who were once illegal and have now become legal citizens. "In a nutshell, the amendment referenced above wasn't about 'giving illegal aliens Social Security benefits'; it was about whether formerly illegal aliens (who had since become legal) should be credited for monies they themselves had paid into the Social Security fund while they were in the U.S. illegally. The senators listed above did not vote in favor of this proposition; they voted to withdraw the amendment from consideration."


Social Security Change For 2008

The United States Senate voted to extend! Social Security Benefits to Illegal Aliens beginning in 2008. The following are the senators who voted to give illegal aliens Social Security benefits. They are grouped by home state. If a state is not listed, there was no voting representative.

Alaska : Stevens (R)

Arizona : McCain (R)

Arkansas : Lincoln (D) Pryor (D)

California : Boxer (D) Feinstein (D)

Colorado : Salazar (D)

Connecticut : Dodd (D) Lieberman (D)

Delaware : Biden (D) Carper (D)

Florida : Martinez (R)

Hawaii : Akaka (D) Inouye (D)

Illinois : Durbin (D) Obama (D)

Indiana : Bayh (D) Lugar (R)

Iowa : Harkin (D)

Kansas : Brownback (R)

Louisiana : Landrieu (D)

Maryland : Mikulski (D) Sarbanes (D)

Massachusetts : Kennedy (D) Kerry (D)

Montana : Baucus (D)

Nebraska : Hagel (R)

Nevada : Reid (D)

New Jersey : Lautenberg (D) Menendez (D)

New Mexico : Bingaman (D)

New York : Clinton (D) Schumer (D)

North Dakota : Dorgan (D)

Ohio : DeWine (R) Voinovich(R)

Oregon : Wyden (D)

Pennsylvania : Specter (R)

Rhode Island : Chafee (R) Reed (D)

South Carolina : Graham (R)

South Dakota : Johnson (D)

Vermont : Jeffords (I) Leahy (D)

Washington : Cantwell (D) Murray (D)

West Virginia : Rockefeller (D), by Not Voting

Wisconsin : Feingold (D) Kohl (D)

SEND THIS TO ALL YOU KNOW. THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES NEEDS TO KNOW THIS INFORMATION, UNLESS THEY DON'T MIND SHARING THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY WITH FOREIGN WORKERS who didn't pay in a dime.

[alstephenson]

13. Thanks for the info, tanyev.

I can see that you spent a lot of time on this and that the email must have upset you as much as it did me. I was going to respond to my Dad, but I'm not sure it would do any good. As you might imagine, our relationship is already strained.

[dysfunctional press]

40. "...DON'T MIND SHARING THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY WITH FOREIGN WORKERS who didn't pay in a dime..."

that is totally untrue- many illegal aliens work with false SS cards, and the fica money is still taken out of their checks and put into the system.

[benddem]

12. You have to look at the sources

They don't tell where they got their information. It's all from wingnut websites or wingnuts.
People in this country illegally or legally all contribute to the tax base. It is ludicrous for people to state they aren't.

[chixydix]

15. It's ugly and xenophobic but there isn't any racism in it.

:eyes:

[Hamlette]

16. #1 is BS

If you go to the fair article, it says $11 to $22 B is spent on IMMIGRANTS annually. It does NOT say illegal aliens.

I'm legal counsel for the welfare office in my state. No one, and I mean NO ONE gets welfare if they are an illegal alien. Emergency medical care is provided and schooling. But not food stamps. We check each social security number in a data base against so many things I simply can't figure how an illegal could do it. (We check name, date of birth, SSN, motor vehicle records, property, work records, social security records. If one thing does not match up, like the birth date is wrong in one of the records, no benefits.)

[NNN0LHI]

17. Notice he links a lot to proven liar and swindler Lou Dobbs a lot?

That should tell you all you need to know.

Don

[Hamlette]

20. most of the links are to Lou Dobbs shows

30% of prisoners are ILLEGALS? I don't buy it one bit. We'd deport them rather than kept hem in prison. Sheesh

Tell your dad the problem is employer hire them. They wouldn't come here if they couldn't get work. Cause they can't get welfare. Honest.

But when you try to prosecute employers, they scream like stuck pigs. We tried that several times. The employer always go to politicians who put pressure on the prosecuting agency to back down.

Until we are ready to put the employers in jail, you're gonna have illegal immigration.

Period.

[Fountain79]

22. Exactly how is this racist?

It's arguing about illegal immigration not mexicans.

[alstephenson]

23. Yeah, right.

If you are really interested, go to the links the email is based on. The first one, for instance, "confuses" legal immigrants with illegal aliens. So LEGAL IMMIGRANTS = ILLEGAL ALIENS. Nothing racist about that!

[Cant trust em]

27. "they cannot speak a word of English!"

This is where the xenophobia creeps in. With this we can see how it's not really about the financial costs.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

28. My personal fave...

I browsed through the Center for Immigration Studies papers, which are basically a series of poorly sourced essays written by rightwing cranks from places like the Olin Foundation.

One diatriabe states that 95% of all homicide warrants in LA County involve illegal immigrants.

Hard to believe? The author apparently thought so, too, because she included the caveat that one shouldn't "go looking for the numbers" because the LAPD won't release them. How she ascertained this number is left up to the readers' imaginations.

What drivel!

[WhollyHeretic]

30. The "facts" are bullshit. The links lead to racist sites. This email drips with racism

[EFerrari]

33. No basis in fact and slanted to attack Latinos?

Just a wild guess!

Oh, and enjoy your stay on my ignore list. You have several comrades there.

[BlooInBloo]

39. Oh come on. As long as no *explicitly* racist terminology is used, EVERYBODY knows....

... that it's not racist.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

34. Please tell me something: Have you read the many thorough debunkings in this very thread? -nt

[Irishonly]

31. It's Been Around For A Couple Of Years

Sometimes I am speechless when I get it and I have more than once. In a million years I would have never thought that some of the people sending it to me did.

[jmowreader]

32. Let's play with this...

According to MSGOP.com, the Iraq War costs $93 billion per year.

Now...take your dad's $338.3 billion, subtract the $45 billion they send home, and the $46 billion it would cost to Deport All The Mexicans, plus the $200 billion in suppressed wages and the $90 billion in welfare they can't get...hey! The illegals are MAKING us $43 billion a year!

I think I understand the Right's pathetic hatred of Bill Clinton: unlike the people who write these chain liefests, the Big Dog got a blowjob and didn't get his brains sucked out.

[tuckessee]

36. How long have you known your dad?

There must be something seriously wrong with your relationship if you've known him for more than 8-9 years and are just now finding out your old man is raving ku kluxer.

[BlooInBloo]

38. Thanks for spreading the distribution of it.