Recently I delivered a speech that reviewed the first year of the Obama Presidency. While I tried to cover all the relevant topics over the past 12 months, a friend who attended later wrote me to express surprise that I had not spoken about illegal immigration.
He stated that he felt it was the nation’s most critical issue, and wondered why the subject seems to have been put on the backburner by many Republicans. I replied with sympathy for his position, but ultimately I’ve come to the conclusion that the most critical issue facing America – and the one driving our budget problems at the local, state and federal level – is public employee unions and their related costs. The debate began.
There is no question that the issue of illegal immigration has multiple aspects to it, many of which give rise to significant costs to the taxpayers. First, there is the overarching fact that even though laws are clearly being broken, our government passively condones the illegalities with very little enforcement. Second, illegal immigrants generate enormous public expenses: Public hospitals are stretched by emergency rooms being flooded with illegal immigrants, our school systems are fiscally challenged to educate their children, and our prisons are disproportionally populated by “undocumented” criminals. Finally, we seem to be unwilling to address the issue of anchor babies, which corrupts the concept of how to define an American citizen.
Despite all that, I still believe that public employee unions are still the greater threat to our society and our financial future. This country has been absorbing immigrants – legal and illegal – for decades, and we have generally adapted our economic realities and public expenditures in an appropriate manner.
But let us remember that it was not until 1958 that New York Mayor Robert Wagner signed into law the right of New York’s public employees to unionize. President Kennedy quickly followed, allowing federal employees to form their own unions. And now – 5 decades later – the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2009, for the first time, public employees comprise over half (51.4%) of all union members.