When it comes to healthcare on the public tab, big-ticket items like organ transplants immediately get people’s attention. The initial surgery is enormously expensive and the procedure requires a lifetime of anti-rejection drugs. It was reported in 2008 that the “cost of a liver transplant and first-year follow-up is nearly $490,000, and anti-rejection medications can run more than $30,000 annually.”

There is no question that foreigners illegally enter the country to get million-dollar transplants not available at home, e.g. Ana Puente and Jessica Santillan, who received at least seven organs between them. The Chicago Tribune recently reported, “Liliana Cruz, 16, and her family came to the U.S. illegally in 2005, trying to get a kidney transplant for her.” She hasn’t gotten a transplant and complains about receiving free-to-her dialysis provided by taxpayers. So inconvenient.

A new illegal alien poster boy for free-to-them healthcare is Omar Castillo. Predictably, the press put on a full-tilt sob story to snooker the public, since Americans don’t want rare organs given to lawbreaking aliens instead of citizens; every organ given to a freeloading foreigner is one not given to a sick American who may die without it. In this case, Omar’s brother donated a kidney, but that’s unusual.

[Debate heats up on healthcare for illegal immigrants, Chicago Tribune, August 11, 2009]

Reporting from Chicago - Pushing around a cart filled with steamed corn, sliced cucumbers and other street food, Omar Castillo is the embodiment of what has become a third rail in the healthcare debate.

The 19-year-old, who received a kidney transplant last year, is in the U.S. illegally and has no ready access to long-term medical care. So peddling snacks is how he pays for the expensive drugs he needs to stay healthy.

What a load. Omar doesn’t pay for his expensive medicine, the taxpayer does, albeit indirectly in this case.

To cover the needs of an estimated 6.8 million uninsured illegal immigrants, some advocates have proposed broadening the healthcare overhaul legislation now before Congress.

But fierce opposition has kept the idea off the table.

Another lie. Congressional Democrats have voted against requiring identity verification to receive Obamacare. As legislation stands now, illegal aliens will indeed get freebie medical care on the backs of citizen taxpayers.

Castillo received his transplant and a year of free medicine as part of a hospital study at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago after lobbying by Latino activists and a call from the governor’s office. With the study over, his last free prescription is running out.

“We don’t know what we’ll do when the medicine is gone,” said Castillo, holding two nearly empty bottles of the immunosuppressants he takes to ward off an organ rejection.

Aliens quickly become accustomed to first-world medical care and come to see it as their rightful entitlement. Illegal alien and multiple tranplant recipient Ana Puente declared, “They should take care of me at UCLA for the rest of my life because I’ve been there since I was a baby.”

That idea was essentially the same argument used against the Florida hospital that deported an illegal alien patient back to Guatemala after it spent $1.5 million treating him.

It is immoral, immigration activists say, for hospitals and doctors — as well as a nation — to deny healthcare to the seriously ill, no matter their legal status. But proponents of tougher immigration enforcement and others fighting to contain runaway costs fear that providing such services would encourage more illegal border crossings.

Immoral? Liberals are so virtuous with other people’s money.

If voters think we have a budget problem now, just wait till word gets around that America is the free Obamacare medical center for the world, no questions asked. There will be no sick people left overseas.

An August 7 WSJ article (France Fights Universal Care’s High Cost) included a sidebar of 30 nations’ healthcare expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Mexico (5.9%) ranked just above rock-bottom Turkey (5.7%). Mexicans evidently think they can more easily outsource their expensive medical cases to the stupidly obliging Uncle Sucker to the north.

The Chicago ABC affiliate put up a video last year about the pre-surgery complain-a-thon, but nothing more recent that I can find. It shows more of Omar than you might want to see, including his gangsterish haircut and plaintive appeals in Spanish.

Here’s a disquieting thought: a sob-story case will be heard by the Supreme Court to decide whether alleged gang violence in the home country can be added to the list of excuses to claim asylum.

Three recent high school graduates from South St. Paul who fled gang violence in their homeland of El Salvador are in the middle of a deportation battle that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case is expected to set a national precedent on whether resisting forced recruitment into violent gangs in other countries is grounds for asylum here.

Pablo, Rene and Silvia Mira left El Salvador in 2004, illegally crossing the border to live with their mother in Minnesota. Arrested by immigration agents shortly after entering the United States, they argued they were fleeing recruitment by the notorious MS-13 gang, whose criminal activities include drugs, human trafficking and murder.

Although their case was still making its way through judicial appeals this summer, the Miras were unexpectedly seized at their family apartment July 6. Deportation was slated for this week — until their appeal was referred to the full U.S. Supreme Court by Justice John Paul Stevens.
[Immigration law: El Salvadoran family fights deportation, Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 30, 2009]

Of course, there’s no proof at all that the forlorn fable recounted by the family is true. Former Assistant Commissioner of the INS Jan Ting estimated that “95 percent” of refugee and asylum applications are fraudulent.

Some officials have cautioned against widening the asylum window, warning that it could lead to unwanted immigrants, including possibly gang members fleeing violent lives.

Or gang members looking for more profitable territory. Criminals from around the world come to America because there is so much here to steal.

Below, the illegal alien Mira family hopes their gangster sob story will get them gilt-edged green cards.

Here’s my candidate for Sob Story of the Day…

PLAINFIELD, N.J. –- Dozens of unemployed Central American immigrants who lost their jobs and can’t afford to pay rent have moved into caves, reports El Diario/La Prensa. Immigrants have been living in the makeshift homes in Plainfield and North Plainfeld, N.J. for three months, and call their new residence the “Devil’s Cave.”[Inmigrantes desempleados en la ‘Cueva del Diablo’] Their decision to move into caves is a testament to the harsh climate of the current economic crisis, which has had a greater impact on the undocumented who have more difficulty accessing government aid after losing their jobs.[Unemployed Immigrants Move into Caves, January 24, 2009]

Say, why don’t they move into the nearest comfy Mexican Consulate?

Here’s a sob story with above-average arrogance and stupidity: it concerns the unhappy state of poor Hispanic foreigners who can’t wangle a legal way to immigrate: [Immigration policy: Law gives many no shot at U.S., Des Moines Register, November 29, 2008, by Tony Leys].

As if immigration were some sort of universal right.

As Steve Sailer has pointed out, there are five billion persons on this planet who live in countries poorer than Mexico; most of them would like to come here, given the chance.

Many Guatemalans considering immigration to the United States have two choices: Try to sneak into the country illegally or stay home.

Marilu Cabrera, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said most unskilled workers from Guatemala and similar countries have no practical way of legally immigrating to the United States. The exceptions would be for those who have immediate family members already living here legally, or for those who would take temporary jobs at employers who prove they can’t find other workers.

“You do need that sponsorship. You can’t just decide ‘I want to live in the United States,’” said Cabrera, whose federal agency helps coordinate the supply of permits.

Even if they had immediate family members here legally, would-be migrants from Guatemala and most other countries would have to wait four to 11 years for a visa, Cabrera said. People from Mexico could expect a longer wait, because of the huge demand from that country, she said.

The rules have not stopped Guatemalans from making the trip, however. The country, which is about three-quarters the size of Iowa, has about 13 million people. Federal experts estimate about 500,000 are living in the United States illegally. By comparison, only about 18,000 Guatemalans obtained permanent-resident permits, or “green cards,” last year. Only about 8,000 became U.S. citizens.

Big surprise — they newbies are not interested in becoming Americans. It’s money that they love.

Where I live in overpopulated California, Alameda County already has mandatory water restrictions, and the rainy season is not starting out well — the Oakland area has received only half the normal amount of rain so far. Water supply alone means that the billions of Earthlings who might wish to move here cannot. Not to mention the other issues of sovereignty, infrastructure, employment, schools, healthcare and social comity.

Oh, and what the citizens want. Americans want immigration to be legal, controlled and reduced.

Persons living in poor countries should avail themselves of strategies like microlending, because America can’t rescue the unhappy billions. See my blog item, Microlending Creator Says His Strategy Outshines Immigration.

This Wall Street Journal piece begins by laying out a sob story about a poor Guatemalan illegal (sniff!) who was so broke from lack of work that he had to return to his own country. What is America coming to when we can’t supply a middle class life for tens of millions of illegal alien foreigners?

So in January, Mr. Carrillo sliced open the green plastic piggy bank he’d bought at Wal-Mart and counted $3,100 in change and bills. “There was enough to buy a plane ticket home and ship my truck to Guatemala,” recalls Mr. Carrillo, 37 years old. Now back in San Juan Alotenango, a town of dirt streets and sporadic running water, he hauls fruit, firewood and recyclable metal for a few dollars a trip. [Latest Immigration Wave: Retreat, By Miriam Jordan, October 2, 2008]

But once you wade through the sob story tripe, there are some interesting facts.

The Census Bureau reported last month that the income of U.S. households headed by non-citizen foreigners dropped 7.3% in 2007 from the previous year, after rising 4.1% in 2006. Pew Hispanic says that among households headed by Central Americans, the drop in income has been in the double digits.

As a result, flows of money to Latin America from U.S.-based workers have slowed for the first time since the Inter-American Development Bank began tracking remittances in 2000. The rate of growth in remittances to Mr. Carrillo’s home country of Guatemala has slowed in each of the past four quarters. The bank estimates that in the last quarter of this year, remittances will fall for the first time.

Some 1.35 million Guatemalan citizens — 10% of the country’s population — live in the U.S., according to the Central American Institute of Social and Development Studies, an independent think tank in Guatemala. Some 3.5 million people back in Guatemala depend on these remittances to get by, the group says. Remittances are the top foreign-exchange earner for Guatemala, at $4.12 billion in 2007, ahead of coffee, sugar and other exports.

Such income fuels everything from construction and appliance sales to spending on services. When the remittances shrink, “the first things to go out the window are education and health care — things that determine a family’s long-term earnings potential,” says Robert Meins, a remittances specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank.

An immigrant exodus wouldn’t be unprecedented. As many as one-third of the nearly 30 million foreigners who arrived in the U.S. between the Civil War and World War I returned to their native countries. Arrivals from Latin America also ebb and flow, with the influx to the U.S. last slackening during the 2001-02 recession.

Yes, some go home–it’s normal! Let’s encourage that trend.

And about those remittances… note that at least in some countries it’s only the rate of growth that is not increasing. Foreigners are still stripmining and removing billions of dollars from the United States every year.

The theme throughout this Boston Globe article is to Blame America for the suffering of immigrant and illegal alien women.

Wrong!

The real problem is the sub-standard social status of women in the diverse cultures which those foreigners bring with them.

Check it out: Troubling link in domestic violence cases (Sept. 12, 2008)…

Immigrants account for a disturbingly high share of domestic violence deaths in Massachusetts, advocates say, raising fears that the nation’s heated immigration debate is deterring abuse victims from seeking help.

In Framingham last week, an undocumented immigrant whose husband had beaten her for two days called a hot line in tears, saying she was too afraid to call police. In Boston’s Chinatown, women fear becoming burdens to relatives back home if they leave their husbands.

In some cases, the fallout affects families far from Massachusetts. In hurricane-ravaged Haiti, relatives of Norma Dorce Gilles are struggling to survive without her frequent care packages of spaghetti, peanut butter, and $400 in cash. Gilles, a Malden beautician, was smothered and dumped in the trunk of her car in February, allegedly by her former boyfriend, Lesly Cheremond, an illegal immigrant who had been ordered deported and is now awaiting trial in the killing. He has pleaded not guilty.

“We need to shore up services or this will continue,” said Mary Lauby, executive director of Jane Doe Inc., a statewide coalition of sexual assault and domestic violence programs. “What we are afraid of is the deeper isolation felt by immigrant victims. That is the danger point.”

Immigrants make up an estimated 14 percent of the state’s population, but accounted for 26 percent of the 180 domestic violence deaths in Massachusetts from 1997 to 2006, according to the most recent figures from the state Department of Public Health. Nearly all of the 47 victims were women and children.

One false premise is that battered illegal alien women would report crimes if they weren’t afraid of deportation. On the contrary, the government gives special visas and social services to that group; see my article Victim Visas - How America Stupidly Rewards Misfortune and Fraud.

The other cases are varieties of the sob story genre, i.e. misery about which the MSM urges extra concern just because those suffering are non-Americans.

Should I care that Chinese women are treated like animals in their culture at home and don’t want the “shame” of being sent back to the parents? I do care that China’s misogynous culture is here with millions of representatives, dragging down the progress that American women have made to achieve opportunity and social equality.

The article further notes that the small state of Massachusetts is increasing funds for the Refugee and Immigrant Safety and Empowerment Program to $1.1 million for translators and other “advocacy.” Another Immigration Tax for long suffering citizens!

Here’s a classic mega-sniffler headline from the Associated Press: Mexicans deported from US face shattered lives (August 24, 2008).

Oh, the horror of Mexicans forced to live in Mexico! Is there any more abominable cruelty?

The AP apparently believes not, as it notes every tear on every tiny cheek of every illegal alien child. Dreams are being crushed, families are forced to live apart and returnees must sleep on mattresses strewn on cold cement floors — all because of Americans’ stubborn insistence on law and sovereignty.

Actually, only a small percentage of Mexicans and other illegal foreigners are self-deporting and being repatriated by ICE–an 11 percent decline in illegal residers since last August according to the numbers crunchers at CIS. While welcome in these quarters, the movement does not yet amount to a major re-population of Mexico with its outsourced citizens.

The towering black gate opens silently to an alley with walls of corrugated metal. Scrawled in large white letters on one wall is: “The End.”

For those deported from the United States, the words are an unnecessary reminder. Nearly every hour of the day, guards unlock this gate that leads back into Mexico, clicking open the padlocks hung on each side, in each nation.

Every time the gate slams shut, it wipes out a dream, divides a family, ends a life lived in the shadows of the law.

Of course, there is no need for families to be separated. It’s only the Mexicans’ greed for American freebies that causes parents to be split from their kids. No one in the US government is keeping any dad or mom from taking little Jose Jr. back to the beloved homeland when the parent is deported.

After the obligatory recitation of sob story stuff, a few relevant statistics are revealed:

U.S. deportations have jumped by more than 60 percent over the past five years. Mexicans accounted for nearly two-thirds of those deportees, helping to roll back one of the biggest migrations of recent history. All along the border, shelters once full of people trying to cross into the United States are now home to thousands of deportees who sleep on mattresses strewn inches apart on cement floors. [...]

There are also criminals. The U.S. does not break down figures by country, but it has deported about 55,000 prisoners so far this year. One man walked through the gate in slippers with 80 cents in his pocket, after being picked up by police during a violent fight with his wife in their backyard.

Typically, even criminals are given vaguely sympathetic treatment by the AP, as seen in the previous paragraph. No kudos to ICE for deporting dangerous people, whose repatriation may prevent some terrible crime, like the San Francisco murders of three member of the Bologna family by a previously arrested MS-13 gang member and an illegal alien from El Salvador (Edwin Ramos).

I’ll say it: Thanks, ICE, for deporting 55,000 bad guys. Let’s have lots more of same!

Is there no end to immigration as a source of social pathology? the Washington Post tries its hand at a medical sob story, but the brutal facts detract from any heart-tuggy aspect.

Though Hispanics make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population, they represented 22 percent of new HIV and AIDS diagnoses tallied by federal officials in 2006. According to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, [Fact Sheet: Latinos and HIV/AIDS] Hispanics in the District have the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country.

So far, the toll of AIDS in the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority population has mostly been overshadowed by the epidemic among African Americans and gay white men. Yet in major U.S. cities, as many as 1 in 4 gay Hispanic men has HIV, a rate on par with sub-Saharan Africa. [AIDS Among Latinos on Rise, By Ceci Connolly, July 23, 2008]

We learn that gay foreigners come to America in search of a better life. (Mexicans are  violently homophobic.) But they get AIDS because they are oppressed, according to the liberal script of the Post, so we should feel sorry for them.

Growing up gay in Mexico, the 35-year old felt the pain of his family’s shame. He fled north of the border, as many do, in search of a better life. There, he thought, he could live openly and thrive. [...]

“As immigrants, many times we lose our identity when we cross the border,” said De La O. He worries that harsh policies toward HIV-positive immigrants create “another underground in which people cannot access treatment but will not leave the country.”

Mauro Ruiz is one of them.

Now fluent in English and having advanced to shift supervisor at the restaurant where he works, he is hoping for the law to change. Until then, he keeps to the shadows of society.

“If I’m able to work, I can stay here,” he said. “But if not, I will have to go back to Mexico and I will die.”

Most of the “immigrants” profiled in this article are apparently illegal aliens, yet somehow they receive expensive AIDS drugs and treatment. But there is not a peep about the cost, just a lengthy sob story after the initial statistics are laid out. It’s really amazing the propaganda that passes for reporting these days.

In other public health news, Foreign-born TB cases need better control, US says.

While most TB cases come from recent arrivals, a significant number involve people who have lived in the United States for at least 20 years, the study authors said. Most of these likely resulted from latent infections acquired years earlier abroad, they wrote. Latent, non-contagious infections mean germs are present but the body is able to fight off symptoms. Latent infections can morph into active disease, causing contagious illness, at any time, particularly as people age and their immune systems weaken.

Latent infections are detected with skin tests and treated with nine months of antibiotics. Foreign-born U.S. residents aren’t routinely tested for latent TB. And with more than 37 million foreign-born people living in the United States, giving all of them skin tests “would be daunting to say the least,” Cain said.

The Los Angeles Times was on a roll yesterday with the headline Denver promise of free college is breaking some hearts, along with a classic sob story (discussed below).

The idea that Americans are “breaking… hearts” by not handing out hard-earned tax dollars to illegal aliens is just absurd. Normal responsibility requires people to take care of their own before getting generous with foreigners, but liberal newspapers believe in an unside-down worldview. If parents and teachers didn’t inform the non-American Denver students that they didn’t qualify for the same benefits as citizen youngsters, that’s unfortunate. And the mayor definitely put his foot in it.

DENVER — A lot of kids sat up and took notice the day the mayor showed up at Cole Middle School, offering to make a deal: If they’d study hard and stay in school, he’d find the money to pay for college. Four years later, the first of those students are ready to take him up on his offer — and Mayor John Hickenlooper is ready to deliver.

But the deal has soured for some students in the group: those who are illegal immigrants. Because they would be required by Colorado law to pay out-of-state tuition, it would cost much more to pay for their college educations.

Although the mayor says he will give the students the same amount of monetary support that legal residents will receive, it’s far less than what they will need to cover tuition. At least 10 of the 38 who graduated are affected, according to a private group helping the students.

Some now say the mayor has backed away from a commitment that boosted their hopes for the last four years. “We acknowledge the fact the mayor is giving us partial help, but that is not what he promised,” said Yadira Zubia, 19.

Say, that’s a pretty high proportion of kiddies in one Colorado class who are illegal aliens.

Elsewhere in the June 8 Times was a sob story based on a La Raza “report” from a year ago (as admitted in the article): U.S.-born children feel effects of immigration raids.

I can recall no instance of newspapers taking a similar interest in the well-being of American children whose parent has been arrested and imprisoned. Of course such outcomes of criminality are traumatic on kids (like Yolanda Mendez, pictured here), but it’s the bad behavior of the adult that’s to blame, not the normal execution of laws.

But La Raza (“The Race” in English; “Das Volk” in German) uses emotional appeals about children to convince citizens to soften their resolve about immigration law enforcement. Should parents of minor children be exempt from normal legal penalties for crime? Apparently so, according to Raza types, as long as the perps are Mexican.

In another case, Yolanda Mendez, 12, called her father one day in March 2007 to tell him that her mother, an epileptic, was sick and that she needed help. But her father didn’t arrive home.

“I thought something bad had happened to him,” she said.

The family reported him missing and searched throughout the city. Three days later, Yolanda said, her father, Santiago Mendez, 39, called to tell them that he had been arrested by immigration officers during a traffic stop and that he was in a detention center.

Yolanda said she was relieved that he was alive but scared about him being deported. She and her 7-year-old brother began sleeping in their mother’s bed. She didn’t want to go to school. She wrote letters to her father daily.

Sorry, Yolanda. Life is tough, particularly when your parents are illegal aliens determined to break American laws in order to enrich themselves. I’m saving my tears for the American victims of illegal alien crime, who get little attention in the press.

In the southwest and other parts of invaded America, our stupidly generous medical system continues being bled dry by freeloaders from around the world. Today’s article is a mix of sob story plus a helpful examination of the cost of one injured illegal alien to the American community — nearly half a million dollars.

ECATEPEC, Mexico - When the motorcycle that illegal immigrant Laura Velázquez was riding slammed into a concrete wall, it cost a Phoenix hospital $478,000 to save her life.

The hospital is footing the bill. But Velázquez’s life in America is finished after hospital officials sent her back to Mexico.
[Weak immigrant sent home after free treatment in Ariz., Arizona Republic, March 17 2008]

If the hospital did indeed absorb the cost of this young woman’s treatment rather than charge the taxpayers, then that cost is passed on to all patients in terms of more expensive medical care. Otherwise the hospital would quickly be forced to close its doors like many others. There are other costs at patient level — services cut back, departments closed, techology purchases shelved. Citizens get a lowered quality of healthcare and are forced to pay more for it because of illegal foreign deadbeats.

The cash outlay alone is mind-boggling. A recent study found that San Diego County spent $155 million in unpaid medical care for foreigners in 2006.

But the Arizona Republic is telling this story, so the Mexican is portrayed as an innocent victim of circumstance because she was brought here as an 11-year-old child by her parents. That’s true up to a point, but Miss Velazquez is an adult now who must accept her life as a Mexican citizen.

But Velázquez’s case also shows how innocent people can get ensnared in the illegal-immigration controversy. Velázquez, now 22, never asked to come to the United States; she was brought as a child. She wasn’t driving the motorcycle; she was only a passenger.

Her journey home has attracted the attention of Mexico’s national media. Government officials in Ecatepec, her hometown on the outskirts of Mexico City, say she should have been allowed to recover in Phoenix, and they have accused the United States of indifference.

In this case as in others, Mexicans believe Americans should provide free medical care and social services for them because they are “here struggling for this country.” The only cure for such a misplaced sense of entitlement is negative reinforcement — like sending patients home — repeated thousands of times.