by Donald Trump
The reason prices vary so much from state to state is because states differ wildly on the kinds of mandates they require in their coverage plans. As Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, puts it: “If consumers do not want expensive ‘Cadillac’ health plans that pay for acupuncture, fertility treatments or hairpieces, they could buy from insurers in a state that does not mandate such benefits.”26 Increasing competition is common sense. We need to pass laws that encourage it.
Real Tort Reform Right Now
The other way we can drive down costs is by recognizing that doctors today are practicing “defensive medicine.” In other words, doctors often order unnecessary tests and procedures to avoid being sued. Pricewaterhouse Coopers did a study to see how much defensive medicine adds to overall medical costs. They found that this phenomenon accounts for at least 10 percent of all medical costs.27 That’s huge.
It’s not hard to understand why doctors engage in defensive medicine. Just look at disgraced Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards. In his former life, Edwards was a world-class ambulance chaser. In just twelve years, Edwards won $175 million in malpractice judgments by suing doctors, insurance companies, and hospitals for causing infant cerebral palsy. And this despite the fact that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has stated that the “vast majority” of cerebral palsy cases have nothing to do with the way a baby is delivered.28 It’s just one more example of what a disgraceful human being John Edwards is.
“The courts are clogged up with these cases,” says Dr. Cecil Wilson of the American Medical Association. “Physicians are afraid of being hauled into court and as a result order tests they ordinarily would not order.”29 With sleazy characters like Edwards lurking around every hospital corner, it’s no wonder doctors feel forced to add all those expensive tests to protect themselves. Doing so, however, jacks up our health-care costs by at least 10 percent. That’s why we need serious tort reform. Specifically, we need to cap damages for so-called “pain and suffering” at $100,000. We also need “loser pays” laws that make the loser pay the legal bills of the winner if the charges are deemed baseless—a system followed by almost all other western democracies. This will help cut down on frivolous suits that artificially raise health-care costs and clog up our courts. The state of Texas recently passed loser pays legislation. Other states should do the same.
There’s a reason most Americans oppose Obamacare: it’s a total disaster. Barack Obama has put us so deep in the debt hole that America can’t afford another one of his $2 trillion spending programs. Obamacare is already making health-care costs rise, and the thing hasn’t even gone into full effect yet. Worse, it’s absolutely slaughtering jobs. No businessperson with a brain would consider serious expansion with this regulatory nightmare hanging over them. Whether through a Supreme Court ruling or a presidential election, America must repeal Obamacare once and for all.
Destroying the world’s finest health-care system so that Obama can have his socialized medicine program is reckless and foolish. The proper way to bring the cost of health-care down is to make insurance companies compete nationally and get defensive medicine under control through serious tort reform that includes loser pays provisions.
We need a president who will get tough and repeal Obamacare on day one. When they do, they will have accomplished more with one stroke of the pen than Obama has accomplished in his abysmal presidency. 2012 can’t come soon enough.
NINE
IT’S CALLED ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION FOR A REASON
We’ve been inundated with criminal activity.
It’s just—it’s been outrageous.1
—Arizona Governor Jan Brewer
Illegal immigration is a wrecking ball aimed at U.S. taxpayers. Washington needs to get tough and fight for “We the People,” not for the special interests who want cheap labor and a minority voting bloc. Every year taxpayers are getting stuck with a $113 billion bill to pay for the costs of illegal immigration.2 That’s a bill we can’t afford and wouldn’t have to pay if people in Washington did their jobs and upheld our nation’s laws.
Too many Republicans in Washington turn a blind eye to illegal immigration because some of their business supporters want artificially cheap labor. Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, look on illegal immigrants as another potential Democrat voting bloc eager for their big government agenda of welfare handouts, class warfare, and “affirmative action.” What do taxpayers get? They get the shaft.
Illegal Criminals Have Got to Go
Both sides need to grow up and put America’s interests first—and that means doing what’s right for our economy, our national security, and our public safety. According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) 2011 report, America’s prisons house 351,000 criminal aliens who committed a crime after having already broken the law by entering America illegally. Making taxpayers pay for 351,000 criminals who should never have been here in the first place is ridiculous. The GAO says that the annual price tag to incarcerate these thugs is $1.1 billion. And get this: criminal aliens have an average of seven arrests.3 That’s at least seven crimes committed against American citizens by each of these criminals who should never have been allowed across our borders.
According to the New York Times, one out of every three federal prison inmates is a Latino, and three quarters of these are here illegally.4 As one Phoenix, Arizona, assistant federal defender put it, “I have Anglo and Native American clients who tell me about being the only non-Spanish speaker in their pod. Ten years ago, it just wasn’t that way.... A lot of times the guards don’t speak the language. How do you safely guard people who may not understand your orders?”5 A better question is why should we have to guard them at all? Have we suddenly become an annex of Mexico’s prison system? If so, Mexico should pay for it. I actually have a theory that Mexico is sending their absolute worst, possibly including prisoners, in order for us to bear the cost, both financial and social. This would account for the fact that there is so much crime and violence.
We shouldn’t want lawbreakers as citizens—and that’s what illegal immigrants are by definition: lawbreakers. Yes, America is a nation of immigrants, but that doesn’t mean we have to offer citizenship to everyone who crosses our borders. I’d guess just about every poor person in the world wants to come here. Who wouldn’t want to come to the greatest nation on earth? But that obviously is crazy. What is not crazy is having an immigration policy where we decide which potential immigrants are entitled to citizenship, where we choose the best and most productive people who want to come here for that honor. We should not let ourselves become the dumping ground for other countries’ undesirables. Instead we should roll out a welcome mat only to those who can make our country better—and illegal immigrant criminals don’t do that.
The illegal immigrant crime problem is far more serious and threatening than most people understand. Along our southern border, our citizens, police, and border patrol agents are being attacked with increasing brutality and regularity. Did you know that three border patrol agents are assaulted every day along America’s southern border? And it’s getting worse. According to the Justice Department, assaults against U.S. border patrol agents have spiked 46 percent.6
Then there is the “most dangerous gang in the world,” the Mara Salvatrucha, more commonly known as the MS-13 gang. The gang, comprised mostly of Central American immigrants, is known for its extreme viciousness. Besides smuggling (and abusing) illegal immigrants into the United States, MS-13 might be conspiring with terrorists. Al Qaeda is always looking for a way to smuggle terrorists into our country, and American officials know that a top al Qaeda lieutenant (who had also been in Canada seeking nuclear material for a so-called “dirty bomb”) met with leaders of MS-13 about ways to infiltrate America through our border with Mexico.7 Intelligence agencies have also spotted several known members of the Somalia-based Al Shabaab Islamic terror group in Mexico and have warned that they are planning
to penetrate the United States.8
MS-13 represents a lethal threat to both our citizens and illegal immigrants. The gang brags that they are “immigrant hunters.” They lie in wait at immigration checkpoints knowing that illegals will jump off trains. MS-13 then holds the stranded illegal aliens for ransom. With 22,000 illegal immigrant kidnappings occurring each year, it’s estimated that gangs like MS-13 could be raking in upwards of $50 million annually.9
Obviously not all illegal immigrants are members of violent gangs. Many aliens are just seeking a better life for their families. Who could fault them? But again, we cannot become a repository for all the poor and desperate people of the world. For America to change its culture and way of life, to give away American jobs at a time of high unemployment to non-citizens who have broken the law to come here, is to commit economic and cultural suicide.
And not enforcing our laws leads directly to the deaths of American citizens. Here is a poignant example. In 2010, Carlos Montano, an illegal immigrant, killed a 66-year-old nun, Sister Denise Mosier, and critically injured two others when Montano was driving drunk in a Virginia suburb. Incredibly, Carlos Montano had been arrested not once but twice before on drunk-driving charges and had other traffic-related arrests. But when Montano got handed off to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation, the Department of Homeland Security inexplicably let Montano walk. “We handed him over to the feds assuming he would be deported,” said Corey Steward, chairman of the Prince William County’s Board of Supervisors. “But instead federal authorities released him back into the neighborhood and he killed a nun. . . . Blood is on the hands of Congress for not properly funding immigration enforcement.”10
The needless death of Sister Denise Mosier is hardly an isolated case. There are countless stories of driving fatalities and serious injuries by people who should not have been on American roads in the first place. When liberals like Barack Obama hear tragic stories like that of Sister Mosier, they come back with, “Yes, and that’s precisely why we should grant ‘undocumented workers’”—that’s illegals to you and me—“driver’s licenses and teach them the rules of our roads!” It’s a level of cluelessness that borders on delusion.
Look, my wife is an immigrant—a legal immigrant. Did she have to jump through legal hoops? Of course. Did she complain about it? No, she didn’t. She is grateful for the chance to live in America. So she complied with the laws of the land. She worked hard to become a U.S. citizen—and the U.S. got a good one.
Illegals Are Breaking Our Bank
In purely economic terms, however, one of illegal immigration’s biggest costs to taxpayers involves the monies paid to educate the children of illegal aliens. Illegal immigrant children often require special classes and language specialists, and take time and resources away from our own students. On this point I strongly disagree with Governor Rick Perry. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reports that U.S. taxpayers shell out $52 billion annually to educate illegal aliens. Liberals like to say that illegal aliens pay taxes too in the form of sales taxes and the fees and taxes that get folded into the costs of things like gasoline. But this argument fails—big time. According to FAIR, on average, less than 5 percent of the public costs associated with illegals are regained through taxes paid by illegal aliens.11
The fact is when it comes to taxpayer-provided social services and welfare, illegal aliens have elbowed their way to the front of the line. In 2011, the Houston Chronicle reported that 70 percent of the illegal immigrant families living in Texas received welfare assistance. That’s compared to the already too high 39 percent of native-born Americans who receive welfare.12 That’s insane. People who broke into the country use our social safety net with greater regularity than our own citizens! How can we ever expect to get a handle on the illegal immigration crisis when we incentivize and reward it with free welfare checks and health care?
“We can no longer afford to be HMO to the world,” says Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich. He says that the total cost to taxpayers for illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County is $1.6 billion, “not including the hundreds of millions of dollars for education.”13
The root cause of all the welfare payments to illegal aliens is the so-called “anchor baby” phenomenon, which is when illegal immigrant mothers have a baby on American soil. The child automatically becomes an American citizen, though this was never the intention of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states, “All citizens born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside.” The clear purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, was to guarantee full citizenship rights to now emancipated former slaves. It was not intended to guarantee untrammeled immigration to the United States.
Some 4 million anchor babies are now officially U.S. citizens. This has to stop. The only other major country in the world that issues citizenship based on where one’s mother delivers her child is Canada. The rest of the world bases citizenship on who the kid’s parents are, which is of course the only sane standard.14 If a pregnant American mother is traveling to Egypt on business and goes into delivery, do we instantly declare her child an Egyptian? Of course not. But that’s precisely what goes on every day in America: women who have zero connection to the United States cross the border, deliver a baby, and their kid magically becomes an American citizen eligible to receive all the rights and benefits of those who have lived, worked, and paid taxes in our country.
Republican Senators John Kyl of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have discussed introducing a constitutional amendment to clarify and restore the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s long past time that America joins the rest of the world in granting citizenship along rational lines.
Liberal Myths
But in restoring sanity to the interpretation and enforcement of our laws, we’ll have to fight liberal myths every step of the way. We’ve all heard a million times: “We need illegal immigrants because they are willing to do jobs Americans just won’t.” To that one I say, “Says who?” We have 25 million citizens who need jobs, and 7 million illegal immigrants holding American jobs. Do the math. If illegal aliens weren’t holding these jobs, American citizens would, because these jobs need to be filled, and guess what? Those jobs would pay more than they do now, because illegal low-wage workers drive down wage rates. Even the Washington Post has conceded that “an influx of immigrants has helped depress the incomes of low-skilled workers in recent decades, many economists agree.”15 As research by Harvard University economist George J. Borjas has shown, “the primary losers in this country are workers who do not have high school diplomas, particularly blacks and native-born Hispanics.” Borjas found that from 1980 to 2000, illegal immigrants lowered the nation’s average wages some 7.4 percent for America’s 10 million native-born men who lack a high school diploma.16 You would think that Obama, who talks a good game about caring for the poor, would try to help raise wages for people at the bottom of the economic ladder. But with black teenage unemployment now at a staggering 46.5 percent, and with the overall black underemployment rate at a breathtaking 18.8 percent, it’s outrageous that the president continues to mock Republican efforts to reduce illegal immigration and boost wages.17
“All the stuff they [Republicans] ask for, we’ve done,” said Obama at a 2011 immigration rally in El Paso, Texas. “Maybe they’ll need a moat,” Obama said to laughter. “Maybe they want alligators in the moat! They’ll never be satisfied.”18
Mr. President, you might think the border deaths, narco terrorists, and waves of violent illegal criminals into America are a joke, but the people who live along the border and the communities under siege do not. We need a president who will get tough, enforce our laws, protect our people, and pull wages up.
One of the biggest myths we have been told is that illegal immigrants actually produce a net gain ec
onomically. This is a cute argument, but it’s a complete joke. It assumes, among other things, that illegal workers keep their money here in America. But they don’t. In 2006, 73 percent of Latino immigrants regularly sent money back to their home countries, amounting to $45 billion. For countries like Mexico, illegal immigrants in the United States are a cash cow. In fact, Mexico’s second biggest source of foreign income, just behind oil exports, comes from—you guessed it—remittances from illegal aliens. In 2008, Mexico got $25.1 billion in money sent back home. Remittances have skyrocketed over the last decade. They went from $9 billion in 2001 to $26 billion in 2007.19 That’s money that American workers could be earning, saving, and spending here in the United States.
So what to do?
Reform Our Illegal Immigration System
Before I lay out what needs to be done to get our illegal immigration mess fixed, it’s worth first discussing what America needs to do with our legal immigration system. It, too, is backwards and in need of a total overhaul. Thankfully, our neighbors to the north, Canada, have a smart, merit-based plan that America should adopt.
Canada’s legal immigration plan starts with a simple and smart question: How will any immigrant applying for citizenship “support the development of a strong, prosperous Canadian economy”? Economic benefit should be our chief aim. America doesn’t need freeloaders who come here to live off our welfare system. We need legal immigrants who bring skills, prosperity, and intellectual capital. In Canada, aliens applying for permanent residence are awarded points based on their skills and how they will benefit the Canadian economy. Only 40 percent of the overall determination on whether permanent residence will be granted depends on family relationships or refugee status. The remaining 60 percent of the decision hinges on how the immigrant will add value to Canada’s economy. Our system is almost exactly the opposite. In fact, it’s worse. Seventy percent of the one million permanent resident admissions the United States grants every year are based on family relations. Only 13 percent depend on employment (the remainder are for refugees and diversity visas).20 This makes no sense whatsoever.