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.

The common-sense opinion piece excerpted below comes from an unlikely source, Roberto Suro, who was the Director of Pew Hispanic Center until 2007 after founding it in 2001.

He employs history (!) to argue that the Statue of Liberty was not meant to be a welcome mat for immigrants, but was instead designed as a symbol of the nobility of representative government, as indicated by the sculptor’s title “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

The Statue of Liberty’s crown is open again for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks. That’s symbolic. It was reopened on the Fourth of July, very symbolic. The decision was announced in May on the “Today” show — hugely symbolic — by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “The economic times we’re going through really call for hope and optimism,” he said, and “nothing symbolizes” those things like the Statue of Liberty.

Icons are handy that way. They’re instantly recognizable. But the meaning of this one has gotten muddled over the years. So, to mark this occasion, I’d like to suggest a little surgery that will make the symbol more appropriate today: Let’s get rid of The Poem.

I’m talking about “Give me your tired, your poor…” — that poem, “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, which sometimes seems to define us as a nation even more than Lady Liberty herself.

Inscribed on a small brass plaque mounted inside the statue’s stone base, the poem is an appendix, added belatedly, and it can safely be removed, shrouded or at least marked with a big asterisk. We live in a different era of immigration, and the schmaltzy sonnet offers a dangerously distorted picture of the relationship between newcomers and their new land.
[She Was Never About Those Huddled Masses, Washington Post, July 2, 2009]

The phrases of that tiresome do-gooder poem (e.g. “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” etc.) are dragged out relentlessly to guilt-trip Americans that we should welcome every hard-luck case on earth.

As a result, when reason fails to convince the citizenry that overpopulating the country with neo-slavery is a good idea, then the open-border hucksters utilize emotional drivel to make their case. For example, Rep. Gutierrez’s recent nationanwide Amnesty Tour was a showboat of tearful kiddies sobbing out their victimhood stories about dear dad possibly being deported. Immigrants and refugees continue to be admitted on auto-pilot even now when 15 million Americans are unemployed.

Back to the op-ed — Suro suggests twice that the Emma Lazarus poem can go away: does he really mean we should take the darn thing down and banish it entirely? What an excellent suggestion.

I’ve long thought that it would be a useful project for our team to demand that the plaque be removed from the statue grounds. The Lazarus poem was put up at the request of the poet’s supporters to memorialize her, and its removal at the behest of concerned citizens could be a fine symbolic act to show that we want the Golden Door CLOSED.

America is full: additional immigrants are neither necessary nor desired by the majority of citizens. In fact, responsibility to future generations compels us to stop immigration. If the nation ever needs to import more foreigners at some future time, then we can start it up again.

As the late nature photographer Ansel Adams remarked, “When the theater’s full, they don’t sell lap-space.” He was discussing congestion in Yosemite Valley, but the principle holds true for the country as well, where environmental sustainability has been trampled by the immigration-fueled population explosion. Our population is rapidly approaching 307 million, including “one international migrant (net) every 35 seconds.” However, the population number that would not damage the regenerative capacity of our natural resources is estimated at 150 million.

In fact, the environmentally correct number of immigrants is ZERO. Developers are paving over farmland to house the expanding population, and America no longer feeds itself, but relies on imported food. Water shortage is a pressing problem in many areas, where additional users draw down on the finite supply more rapidly. In Crowdifornia, public transportation planners plot a future of standing room only for riders.

Plaque removal — it’s not just about dentistry any more. Let’s demand that the Park Service retire that dinosaur to a dark closet.

NPR has been accumulating a series of mostly sob stories, Immigrants’ Children: A Foot In Two Worlds.

In an earlier America, the actual immigrants were understood to perhaps have remaining ties to the old country, but the kids were expected to become assimilated Americans through their school experience and just living here.

One example, noted elsewhere by NPR was jazz musician Benny Goodman, whose 100 birthday is now being celebrated. Besides his clarinet mastery, Goodman’s band was the first to bring in black musicians, including Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton and Charlie Christian, plus he used many arrangements by Fletcher Henderson. In short, Goodman immersed himself in American culture.

These days, maintaining tribalism is highly valued, and assimilation to American values is not… at least according to the liberal Gospel of NPR. The latest episode concerns finding a marriage partner of the correct diversity flavor [Weighing Ethnicity When Picking A Spouse, NPR, May 31, 2009].

Overall, interracial marriages are becoming more common in America, according to recent U.S. Census data. But those numbers mainly reflect the increase in black-white marriages. The same data show that since the 1990s, fewer American-born children in Asian and Latino families are marrying outside their ethnic group.

Take Jessica Nghiem, a UC-Berkeley student from Sacramento, Calif. While her parents are from Vietnam, Nghiem describes herself as thoroughly “Americanized.” In high school, she says, she dated “white and Latino guys.” But her current boyfriend is Asian, and Nghiem says both she and her family are very comfortable with that.

“I think my boyfriend gets brownie points because he does speak Vietnamese,” Nghiem says. “And my parents can speak to him in a different language. So I think they’re much more accepting. I definitely got a better response with a Vietnamese guy than, for example, a white guy or a Hispanic guy, you know?”

Nghiem’s friend and fellow student, Elaine Ly, has had a somewhat different experience. Her parents are ethnic Chinese from Vietnam. Her boyfriend is Asian, but he’s Mien, descended from refugees in the Laotian highlands. And Elaine’s parents have issues with that.

“They come to me and say, ‘How come you didn’t find a Chinese boy or something?’ ” Ly says. [...]

None of this surprises Daniel Lichter, a Cornell University sociologist who studies interracial marriage patterns. Lichter says America’s growing immigrant population gives today’s children of immigrants more choices when picking a partner.

So! Another advantage of excessively multicultural immigration is more opportunity for young people to choose a marriage partner of their precise tribe! Note how the ethnic Chinese family rejected the Mien boyfriend — Asian, but not the correct variety.

Anything to avoid assimilation, except for the money part. Immigrants like the money well enough.

As an antidote to multicultural silliness, here’s son-of-immigrants Benny Goodman and his orchestra, playing Sing Sing Sing from Hollywood Hotel. The official website has some tunes as well.

The previously arrested drunk-driving illegal alien who killed 7-year-old Marcus Lassiter in North Carolina last year was quickly found guilty and sentenced. (For background on this case, see my 2008 blog Another Child Sacrificed on the Altar of Open Borders.)

A Johnston County man was found guilty this morning of second-degree murder and driving while impaired for hitting and killing a 7-year-old Selma boy in April 2008.

Hipolito Camora Hernandez of Parkertown Road in Four Oaks was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison.

A witness told the state Highway Patrol that Marcus Lassiter was standing on the side of two-lane Heath Road north of Four Oaks when a car lost control on a curve, ran onto the shoulder and struck him. Investigators determined the driver came into the curve at about 70 mph, 25 mph above the posted speed limit.

Hernandez had been charged with drunken driving at least four times before the accident that killed Marcus, but he had never been convicted. At the time of the crash, he was wanted by police for failing to show up in court to answer to one of the previous charges, according to prosecutors.

A judge sentenced Hernandez to at least 16 years, 4 months in prison and to a maximum of more than 20 years.
[Johnston man convicted for murder, DWI, News & Observer, Raleigh NC, May 21, 2009]

If it were up to me, any drunk-driving illegal alien who causes a death should get a mandatory life in prison.

The open-borders gang is hustling up its next media campaign for the upcoming amnesty push.

Naturally it will be filled with teary-eyed Mexican kiddies (as shown by the sniffly example), preferably with an illness, whose suffering is made all the worse because of jack-booted ICE officers tearing families apart willy-nilly.

Nobody in the press cares about the millions of unemployed citizens who might need one of the jobs held by seven million illegal alien workers: Americans, ho hum!
[Religious campaign seeks immigration stories, Houston Chronicle, March, 4, 2009]

Religious and community leaders want U.S. citizens and legal residents who have been separated from family members by deportation or detention to come forward with their testimonies ahead of meetings next week in Texas to push for immigration reform.

Those with the most compelling stories will be asked to speak during church meetings that are part of a national campaign to show the public that current immigration policies affect not just immigrants but American citizens, Pastor Freddy Santiago, one of the organizers, said during a news conference Wednesday.

“Our people are being split up,” Santiago, of Chicago’s Rebano Companerismo Cristiano Church said in Spanish. “We are seeing how our government is violating the laws of God.”

Pastor Freddy must be thinking of a different religion than the one I learned in church, or perhaps he regards Marx as his apostle-in-chief.

And Freddy, where’s your concern about the abandoned wives and children in Mexico? The ones whose breadwinner went to El Norte and was never heard from again. (See As men go north, wives get forgotten from the Christian Science Monitor.) Sending daddy home to his family in Mexico would be the decent thing to do.

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.

The excellent illegal alien crime series now running in the Houston Chronicle has sobering details of a justice system chained by political correctness.

Today’s article is an examination of the failure of the bail system in the city [An abuse of freedom: Many illegal immigrants out on bail commit another crime or vanish before trial, by Susan Carroll, Houston Chronicle, Nov 17, 2008].

The release of illegal alien criminals on bail is absolutely an invitation to abscond, but judges don’t always know the status of accused persons. Sometimes authorities do know the status and let the bad guys go anyway, particularly in sanctuary cities like Houston and San Francisco (see A system’s fatal flaws) — and there is no excuse for that.

The Chronicle examined arrest and immigration records for 3,500 inmates who told jailers that they were in the country illegally during a span of eight months starting in June 2007, the earliest immigration records available.

The city’s criminal alien records only go back to June 2007? That in itself is a jaw-dropper. I suspect that the public furor following the murder of Houston PD Officer Rodney Johnson by a previously convicted illegal alien may have had a part in finally bringing the sanctuary city of Houston a small step closer to sanity by keeping records of their permissiveness.

The cases make you wonder what is going on in Houston when dangerous illegal alien criminals, including child rapists, are freed to walk the streets.

• Jose Blanco, a 64-year-old accused of repeatedly sexually molesting a 6-year-old girl in southwest Houston, told jailers when he was arrested in June 2007 that he was in the country illegally. He was charged with indecency with a child and posted $10,000 bail. That charge was dismissed and replaced with more serious allegations: two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child. Blanco absconded after missing a court date in October 2007 and remains a fugitive.

• Juan Fernando Villalon, 43, told Harris County jailers twice in 2007 he was an illegal immigrant from Mexico — both times after being arrested on suspicion of assaulting his ex-girlfriend. He posted $10,000 bail in December 2007 and was released from Harris County Jail. In January, while out on bail, he tracked her down and punched her, leading to another felony assault charge. He was arrested in June and is serving a two-year prison sentence.

• Arturo Munoz Osorio, 62, was charged in August 2007 with aggravated sexual assault of a child. He told jailers he was in the country illegally when he was booked into jail Aug. 2, 2007. He posted $10,000 bail four days later and missed a September court date. A warrant for his arrest was issued in January.

How dreary that law enforcement will not even protect us from the worst of the worst.

It’s good to see a very liberal fellow like Andy Ostroy get serious about immigration law enforcement. It is tragic that he had to learn in the hardest way imaginable that illegal immigration is not a victimless crime.
He lost his wife, filmmaker Adrienne Shelly, when she was murdered by an illegal alien because he feared being deported.

The husband of murdered actress Adrienne Shelly is suing the contractor who employed her murderer, contending she’d still be alive if the company hadn’t looked the other way while hiring illegal immigrants.

The Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit filed on behalf of Andrew Ostroy also seeks to hold the owners and management of the building where she was killed accountable, calling them “vicariously liable” for her death.

The indie actress, who also directed the acclaimed movie “Waitress,” was working at her office in 15 Abingdon Square on Nov. 1, 2006, when Diego Pillco, who was doing renovation work on the apartment downstairs from her, attacked and killed her during a robbery gone wrong.
[Kin Sues Firm in Actress Murder, New York Post, November 4, 2008]

This case was disturbing for many reasons, including how at least one blogger blamed the victim, accepting the killer’s story that Shelly smacked him and called him an SOB out of feminist pique. Why anyone would believe the fabrications concocted by an admitted illegal alien murderer is beyond me. Pilco lied up a story to his own advantage, period.

The New York Times also accepted killer Diego Pilco’s original falsehood as reasonable: In Guilty Plea, Actress’s Killer Changes Story to Robbery [Feb 15, 2008].

His original confession had the ring of truth: He was an illegal immigrant working on a renovation job in a Greenwich Village building when the imperious woman upstairs confronted him over construction noise.

The killer’s original confession didn’t have the “ring of truth” to me — far from it. Women’s rights and safety routinely get thrown under the bus at the New York Times when weighed against the all-important concerns of illegal aliens. Continuing…

They argued. She scratched him. Panicked that she would call the police and that he would be deported, he punched her and pushed her to the floor. Mistakenly thinking he had killed her, he hanged her from the shower rod of her bathroom, in a staged suicide.

At least the abominably weak plea deal (25 years for manslaughter) brought out the true story from the cold-blooded killer.

In fact, Pilco broke into Adrienne Shelly’s office where she caught him stealing her purse. He killed her to protect himself and staged the crime scene to make it appear a suicide. The medical examiner reported that Shelly was alive when Pilco hanged her. He wanted her dead so she couldn’t report his thievery to the police.

Andy Ostroy is to be congratulated for challenging the cheap-labor employers who attract immoral and dangerous foreigners like Diego Pilco into our communities.