According to data collected by Iowa Republican congressman Steve King, 12 US citizens die in robberies and brawls, 13 lives are claimed in car accidents by unlicensed illegal drivers (for example, in California, which borders Mexico, foreigners without driver's licenses are involved in 5 out of 6 accidents).
In total, more than 9,000 Americans die at the hands of 'foreigners' every year. This figure significantly exceeds the sum of the victims of the terrorist attacks carried out by Islamists on September 11, 2001, and the soldiers killed in US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Counting the victims of illegals since September 11, 2001, King provides even more horrific statistics: 21,900 Americans killed by illegal immigrants, 23,700 people died in accidents caused by illegals. The number of these victims is seven times greater than the total losses suffered by America on September 11, 2001, and in Iraq and Afghanistan!
And that's not all. According to the same King, 2,900 American children are sexually abused by illegals every year. According to another source – the Institute for the Study of Violent Crime, based in Atlanta – there are currently about 240,000 foreigners in the US who have already committed a sex crime. According to a study conducted from 1999 to 2006, the increase in the number of illegal immigrants greatly influenced the rise in such crimes – from child abuse to serial rape. Moreover, the number of illegal sex offenders has long exceeded the number of local maniacs.
Other official bodies are also sounding the alarm because US penitentiaries are overflowing with illegal immigrants. According to Edwin Rubinstein, president of the ESR Institute for Economic Research, more than a quarter of a million foreigners who have committed crimes in the US are currently held in American prisons. Moreover, according to US authorities, these prisoners are for the most part not just people who have strayed from the righteous path, but repeat offenders. For example, in 2003, a study of 55,000 illegal prisoners found that each of them had committed an average of... 143 crimes. 36% of these criminals had been arrested by police at least five times.
In total, according to official data, at least 350,000 illegal immigrants have entered the US since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Unofficially, this figure is an order of magnitude higher. All this, as well as the fact that the federal authorities have decided to start building a wall on the border with Mexico, indicates that the fight against illegal immigration may well become the key issue in the next presidential elections.
As recent elections to the Senate and the House of Representatives showed, Americans are tired of the fight against terrorism overseas and prefer to deal with domestic problems. The theme of fighting illegals is logically connected with 'counterterrorism'. The fact is that about 45,000 immigrants from countries of the so-called 'axis of evil' and countries pursuing anti-American policies received US citizenship between September 2001 and December 2005. According to the Department of Homeland Security, during this time, 91,516 illegals from these states tried to enter the US, and half of them managed to stay in America. Virtually none of these people underwent a proper 'thorough' check, and this despite the fact that about 30,000 newly minted citizens of the bastion of world democracy could potentially pose a threat to US national security.
As sources in the US immigration service note, the lack of budget funds does not allow for a thorough check of each candidate for citizenship. However, some Republican senators are confident that the problem is not money, but that the authorities are eager to quickly deal with tens of thousands of accumulated citizenship applications and cases of detained illegals. Each request to the intelligence services takes too much time, and work stalls. Meanwhile, temporary detention centers for illegal immigrants are chronically short of places. This means immigration services must rush to make decisions on illegals' appeals. Iowa Senator Charles Grassley notes that this poorly justified haste could cost the US several '9/11s'.
For now, the theme of the threat posed by illegals is being actively promoted by Republicans, but Democrats may also adopt it as part of their program to shift the policy focus to domestic affairs. If this theme indeed becomes key, some experts predict that a possible scenario could be the revival of the doctrine of isolationism, which involves shielding America from external influence, restricting immigration, revising overly active foreign policy, ending participation in military operations abroad, and reducing the number of US bases outside the US.
However, that is still a long way off, and today the main action to protect the American people from 'foreigners' is the construction of a wall on the Mexican border. The problem is that its construction will take not just one or two years. And by that time, the border states of the US may finally turn into 'branches of Latin America' – due to the influx of illegals and the outflow of 'native' Americans to the north.
Alexander Kogan.
Rosbalt News Agency