Hanson had the bad luck to have his family homestead located in a region, because of its agricultural past and present, repeatedly overrun with illegal immigrants seeking farm labor work. Interestingly, VDH makes a veiled reference to the region’s last major onslaught of refugee immigrant poor, the dustbowl Okies. Still, these paragraphs are true of CA today:
Privately, residents assume it (illegal immigration) has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.Effectively, federal and state tax money is being used, via various forms of welfare, as indirect foreign aid to Mexico. Tax these remittances, build the wall with the proceeds.
Note a final statistic. A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer.
