A Refugee Crisis Is Real

Several years ago I spent several months on business in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and northern Italy with a short stop in Southeast Asia. I have not been much of a world traveler, so much of the differences of culture in Europe and Malaysia impacted me — at least initially — the way one would expect. But what was common among all those countries was the way European and Malaysian natives viewed immigrants — especially refugee immigrants from the Middle East and Northern Africa — who are primarily Muslim.

I know: discussing religious issues — especially regarding Muslims — is a faux pas and journalists should not do that. But it is time for us to become objective, honest, and serious about immigration.

The “American” Refugee Crisis

Do we have an illegal immigration crisis in the U.S.? It depends on who you ask. First, it is important to remember during this conversation that the U.S. annually allows more legal immigrants into our country than do all the other countries in the world COMBINED. That number is 1 million per year. Illegal immigration is a totally separate matter.

Hopefully, Congress will in 2019 legitimately and honestly tackle outdated and obsolete immigration laws. It is imperative that this South and Central American refugee immigration flood to the southern border of the U.S. be addressed. In spite of promise after promise from politicians from every political party to “fix” immigration laws, NOTHING has been done. When asked why an immigration House bill would not be considered in the Senate, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) explained it by saying, “We cannot allow Republicans or President Trump to win on any legislation regarding immigration.”

Congress’s inaction on the matter so far can be blamed on (at least one party’s) identity politics and its elitist political agenda. That agenda has NOTHING at all to do with illegal immigrants and what’s best for them OR the United States. It’s partisan rather than humanitarian.

Who can forget the back-and-forth during the first year of the Trump Administration when Congress was supposedly poised to consider the southern border illegal immigration crisis? The fake news pictures showing illegal immigrant children being held in cages were passed around among different news outlets to whip up the emotions of Americans to hopefully result in an open-border policy being implemented. Later it was revealed those pictures of caged children were NOT taken during this presidency but during Obama’s tenure in office.

We have written extensively about the critical nature of restructuring our immigration system and the necessity to craft new laws and/or amend old laws to end the horrors experienced by those immigrants in getting to the U.S. and their ill effects. Those effects impact every sector of America, including economics, education, medical, social, and labor. NOT making corrections in immigration law is no different than NOT tackling problems in any other area of public life: Congress should recognize the problem, devise a fix, implement the fix and make sure it works, or watch the beginning of a slide of the U.S. backward.

Is this a cowardly or fear-driven concern? Absolutely not. While it is true that the United States is the wealthiest, strongest, and most powerful nation on Earth, the U.S. does not have the unlimited resources that are necessary to perpetuate the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. Allowing it to continue as-is puts us on the path toward certain destruction.

For some European countries (and a couple in Southeast Asia), their citizens are standing watch as immigration — primarily from North African and Middle Eastern countries — are tearing their countries apart.

Under Angela Merkel’s watch, her country — Germany — has welcomed more than 1 million immigrants on the basis of a real humanitarian crisis. Most of those who have come to Germany are Muslim. And most of those have refused to assimilate into German culture in any meaningful way. That has created mountains of problems in the national sectors mentioned above.

The German medical community is really struggling. Recently, a German doctor wrote a letter explaining what medical professionals and others are experiencing. It’s scary at best. Here’s the letter:

Muslim Immigration issues in Germany

“Yesterday, at the hospital, we had a meeting about how the situation here and at the other Munich hospitals are unsustainable. Clinics cannot handle the number of migrant medical emergencies, so they are starting to send everything to the main hospitals.

Many Muslims are refusing treatment by female staff, and we women are now refusing to go among those migrants!

Relations between the staff and migrants are going from bad to worse. Since last weekend, migrants going to the hospitals must be accompanied by police with K-9 units.

Many migrants have AIDS, syphilis, open TB and many exotic diseases that we in Europe do not know how to treat.

If they receive a prescription to the pharmacy, they suddenly learn they have to pay cash. This leads to unbelievable outbursts, especially when it is about drugs for the children. They abandon the children with pharmacy staff with the words:

“So, cure them here yourselves!” So the police are not just guarding the clinics and hospitals, but also the large pharmacies.

We ask openly where are all those who welcomed the migrants in front of TV cameras with signs at train stations? Yes, for now, the border has been closed, but a million of them are already here and we will definitely not be able to get rid of them.

Until now, the number of unemployed in Germany was 2.2 million. Now it will be at least 3.5 million. Most of these people are completely unemployable.

Only a small minimum of them have any education. What is more, their women usually do not work at all. I estimate that one in ten is pregnant. Hundreds of thousands of them have brought along infants and little kids under six, many emaciated and very needy. If this continues and Germany re-opens its borders, I am going home to the Czech Republic. Nobody can keep me here in this situation, not even for double the salary back home. I came to Germany to work, not to Africa or the Middle East!

Even the professor who heads our department told us how sad it makes him to see the cleaning woman, who has cleaned every day for years for 800 euros and then meets crowds of young men in the hallways who just wait with their hands outstretched, wanting everything for free, and when they don’t get it they throw a fit.

I really don’t need this! But I am afraid that if I return home, at some point it will be the same in the Czech Republic. If the Germans, with their systems, cannot handle this, then, guaranteed, back home will be total chaos…..

You – who have not come in contact with these people have absolutely no idea what kind of badly behaved desperados these people are, and how Muslims act superior to our staff, regarding their religious accommodation.

For now, the local hospital staff has not come down with the diseases these people brought here, but with so many hundreds of patients, every day of this is just a question of time.

In a hospital near the Rhine, migrants attacked the staff with knives after they had handed over an 8-month-old on the brink of death, who they’d dragged across half of Europe for three months. The child died two days later, despite having received top care at one of the best pediatric clinics in Germany. The pediatric physician had to undergo surgery and the two nurses are recovering in the ICU. Nobody has been punished.

The local press is forbidden to write about it, so we can only inform you through email. What would have happened to a German if he had stabbed the doctor and nurses with a knife? Or if he had flung his own syphilis-infected urine into a nurse’s face and so threatened her with infection? At a minimum, he would have gone straight to jail and later to court. With these people so far, nothing has happened.

And so I ask: Where are all those greeters and receivers from the train stations? Sitting pretty at home, enjoying their uncomplicated, safe lives. If it were up to me, I would round up all those greeters and bring them here first to our hospitals emergency ward as attendants! Then they go into one of the buildings housing the migrants, so they can really look after them there themselves, without armed police and police dogs, who, sadly today, are in every hospital here in Bavaria.”

Summary

Let me set the record straight: I am NOT anti-Muslim. I am NOT Islamophobic. I am for LEGAL immigration.

So what’s wrong with this German immigration issue? German political leaders did NOT think through what such a flood of immigrants would do to its thriving infrastructure. Think about it: planning for certainties is one thing, but planning for UN-certainties is more important. Germany’s leadership in error assumed that North African and Middle Eastern immigrants would be much like Germany’s own citizens — would have the same or similar work ethic, social culture, desire to assimilate with others, respect for authority and the rights of others, etc. How wrong they were!

Germany’s immigration crisis began two years ago and remains unsolved to this day. The conditions for German citizens remains just as dangerous and dire as they were when the above letter was written. Angela Merkel has been unable to initiate an effective process to handle this crisis. And it is destroying Germany’s social, financial, medical, and political systems.

How is that different from U.S. immigration?

There are those that will say the big difference is that most of those flooding into the U.S. through our southern border are not Muslim like most of those immigrants in Germany. That’s true;
Some say most coming to the U.S. are looking for work as compared to those entering Germany who are not. That’s true;
MANY immigration pundits claim over and over on national television immigrants bring far more money into the U.S. than they spend of taxpayer dollars. That’s NOT-TRUE. In fact, according to the non-partisan Immigration Council:
The average household headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) costs taxpayers $6,234 in federal welfare benefits, which is 41 percent higher than the $4,431 received by the average native household.
The average immigrant household consumes 33 percent more cash welfare, 57 percent more food assistance, and 44 percent more Medicaid dollars than the average native household. Housing costs are about the same for both groups.
At $8,251, households headed by immigrants from Central America and Mexico have the highest welfare costs of any sending region — 86 percent higher than the costs of native households.
Illegal immigrant households cost an average of $5,692 (driven largely by the presence of U.S.-born children), while legal immigrant households cost $6,378.
The greater consumption of welfare dollars by immigrants can be explained in large part by their lower level of education and a larger number of children compared to natives. Over 24 percent of immigrant households are headed by a high school dropout, compared to just 8 percent of native households. In addition, 13 percent of immigrant households have three or more children, vs. just 6 percent of native households.

So What’s the Problem?

Here’s a story that illustrates the immigration dilemma now faced by every American:

A miner operates a secret gold mine out in the country next to a really shallow river. The only way he can transport the gold that he mines to market is down that river. Everything goes well for a few months. But one day as he rows his heavily loaded boat up the river to market, he sees water pouring into the boat from below. The boat takes on water at an amazing rate and bogs down on the bottom of the shallow river. He cannot get his gold to market that day.

The next day, the miner tries again. This time he does not even get as far up the river as the day before. Holes in the boat quickly fill it with water and it bogs down again.

The miner secretly tells his friend about his mine and how successful he has been at finding gold. He explains to his friend what has happened to the boat and that holes in the boat have kept him from getting to market. His friend commits to join the miner the next day so the pair can get that gold to market.

They tried hard the next day. But they could not get the boat up the river to market. They tried the same thing over and over again. But after no success, the miner was forced to shut down and board up the mine and walk away — even knowing just how much gold there was in that mine.

The miner had to apply for financial assistance because he had no income. When he explained what had happened in his mining operation to the assistance agent, the agent asked him “Why could you working together with your friend not figure out a way to get the boat up the river to market?” The miner replied, “We tried, again and again, to get all the water out of the river so it would stop making the boat run aground. But even though we dipped and poured water out of the river as fast as we could, the river kept filling the boat up. We couldn’t stop the water.”

Conclusion

The story may seem a bit trite, but it gives a true picture of the immigration issue the U.S. is facing today. The boat represents the U.S.; the gold represents the goods and services the U.S. produces for its internal purposes as well as transporting to “market” — the rest of the World — that are sold for money to fund our internal and external operations for the good of the people. In this case, the “water” is the illegal immigrants that flood into our boat through holes in the boat.

Instead of plugging the holes, we continue to deal with the water in the river instead of making certain not too much of it gets into the boat. When that happens, the boat cannot get to market, we cannot process our goods and services, and before long we’re out of a job.

This really is simple: we don’t have a Muslim problem, we don’t have a Mexican problem, we don’t have a Central American problem, and we don’t have a legal immigration problem. We have far too much water in the boat that we are not prepared to handle. And that water — the flood of illegal immigrants — is running our boat aground.

Let’s stop simply bailing water out of the boat. We MUST plug the holes!