"A member of the tree trimming crew revealed to me last fall how concerned he was about the security of his job, especially over the loss of health benefits for his sick daughter. There had been a wave of consolidations recently within the industry and his employer was replacing experienced arborists, like himself, with lower-wage immigrants.

"This morning I awoke to the sound of chain saws and the knock on my door at 8:30 was, surprise surprise, from a Mexican "boss" who, in broken English, told me his crew, now all-Mexican, needed access to my backyard to finish the work begun last fall. And so it goes in America from one industry to the next. Difficult and sometimes dangerous jobs that, nevertheless, used to pay a livable wage sustaining entire communities now go to lower-wage immigrants.

"In a masterstroke of public relations, cunning and powerful business interests who narrowly benefit from cheap labor, wrap our "immigration tradition," a tradition now so distorted by excess that it is, by any reasonably prudent standard, running amok, in the American flag and perpetuate a myth that the necessity of maintaining mass immigration justifies harming our own citizens.

"The potential for disastrous long term demographic consequences should render immigration policy much too important to be formulated solely by the vagaries of the economy. Nevertheless, there is a clear vacuum in DC of political leaders honest or intelligent enough to connect the dots on the true cost of rampant immigration, soaring unemployment, and the fiscal crises of so many states around the U.S."
David M. Bell, April 22, 2003