My attention perked up when I ran across a reference to taxing immigrant remittances, even from a whiny open-borders blog: ImmigrationProf Blog: “Oklahoma Tax Unfair to Immigrants”.

Boo hoo alert!

Appleseed is mobilizing to oppose a recently enacted Oklahoma tax on remittances, passed by the state legislature in June. The first of its kind, the law imposes a five dollar fee on each remittance transaction made through a licensed money transmitter, plus an additional fee of one percent of amounts greater than five hundred dollars.

Having long advocated for fairer practices in the remittance market, Appleseed Centers have already helped block similar measures in Texas, Nebraska and Georgia. In response to the new tax, Appleseed is working with Centers, the White House, industry, and grassroots groups on strategies to overturn or ameliorate the effects of this bill and to ensure that similar bills are not replicated elsewhere.

As far as I know, my 2002 opinion piece in the Washington Times (Should immigrants be taxed?) was the first suggestion that taxation might be utilized to make illegal immigration more troublesome to the practicioners. The inspiration was the saga of how gangster Al Capone was brought down by prosecution on tax evasion. (See The Untouchables for more.) Plus the general principle that heavy taxation has a dampening effect on behaviors so targeted.

Five dollars and a one percent tax on remittances larger than $500 can hardly be considered onerous, but the open-borders squawk machine is blasting at full throttle. One example is evident in an Oklahoma news report [Journal Record, July 6, 2009]: Officials defend wire transfer fee for funding drug-enforcement activities.

OKLAHOMA CITY – State officials say a fee on wire transfers of money is needed to help fund drug-enforcement activities. Others say the fee is discriminatory and will harm the ability of low-income people to send money to their families in other countries. [...]

David Landsman is executive director of the National Money Transmitters Association, based in Great Neck, N.Y. He said the organization is made up of about 30 smaller money-transfer companies.

“I’m concerned for my industry and I’m concerned for the consumers that use our industry,” Landsman said. “We work through agents and we help people send money to their countries of origin. There are some undocumented aliens among our clientele.”

Landsman said several states have attempted to adopt such laws.

“Most of them are doing it in order to punish undocumented aliens,” he said.

Landsman termed the income tax-based refund process “cynical.”

What a crybaby. You would think the new tax was a massive burden, but it’s a dinky one percent plus change. Oklahoma state sales tax is 4.5 percent, by comparison. If illegal aliens don’t like paying a tiny tax to aid drug enforcement (made more necessary by Mexican cartels increasing activities in America), then they can mosey on home, which they should do anyway.

My original suggestion in 2002 was that a remittance tax of 10 to 15 percent on foreign money transfers could help pay for the free-to-them healthcare costs which aliens incur.

According to the World Bank, immigrants working in the U.S. sent more than $50 billion back to their native countries last year. Requiring that a small premium be paid on strip-mining at that level hardly seems excessive.

Here is another tragic story about drunk-driving illegal aliens killing a young American, in this case Josh George (pictured) of Bluffton, South Carolina.

The 17-year-old high school student was struck apparently by a carload of of illegal aliens as he was driving home from the prom and died three days later in a Savannah hospital.

The identity of the driver remains unclear. The police arrested an illegal Mexican, Juan Roman, aka Juan Olague Rodriquez, but the DNA evidence on the beer cans in the vehicle didn’t match up. So the guy is going to be deported rather than prosecuted. He lived in a house with several others who have since left town.

Investigators believe three men were inside the Subaru that night. The trio had been drinking at Palomas, a predominately Hispanic bar off S.C. 46.

All of the people living in the Vista View home left within two days of the fatal wreck, leaving police with two unknown DNA profiles and no witnesses.

Their employer, a local painting company, began checking their immigration status the following Monday. The landlord told police the group had moved out quickly and he had no idea where they went.

Police and prosecutors remain interested in finding them.

“We’ve spent the better part of two-and-a-half months trying to locate them to no avail,” McAllister said.

Authorities aren’t even sure if the names they provided are real.

“That’s an ongoing challenge with undocumented immigrants,” Stone said.

The DNA profiles gathered from the beer cans inside the car will be loaded into a national database, in case the two other men in the car are ever involved in a crime.
[Solicitor drops charges against man first suspected in crash that killed Josh George, Island Packet, July 16, 2009]

Hopefully the real killer will be caught at some point through the DNA evidence. But that won’t change the loss of a young man with his whole life ahead of him in a totally preventable crime.

The fatal wreck stunned the community because it claimed the life of what Josh George’s high school principal called a “top-shelf kid.” George was a gifted student and captain of the varsity soccer team.

His family had known tragedy before.

George’s father died in 2001 when the F-16 he was piloting crashed near Edwards Air Force Base in California. Father and son are buried next to one another in Huntington, W.Va.