California is a den of waste, mismanagement and superfluous spending. That’s not news. However, the amount of money that one county in California is spending on welfare for illegal immigrants may surprise you. An estimated $650 million in welfare will be doled out to the illegal immigrant parents of children in Los Angeles County in 2013.
The numbers come from  the Department of Public Social Services which uncovered that more than $376 million in benefits and food stamps had been given to illegal alien parents for their American-born children through July.

Los Angeles County is living testimony to the fact that the scourge of illegal immigration is a huge impediment to our own financial well being. How can we ever hope to recover fiscal sanity when we just one county is forced to spend over $1.6 billion on the illegal immigration epidemic?

That’s right, over $1.6 billion.

“When you add the $550 million for public safety and nearly $500 million for healthcare, the total cost for illegal immigrants to county taxpayers exceeds $1.6 billion dollars a year,” Department of Public Social Services Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich said in a statement.  “These costs do not even include the hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually for education.”

An estimated 100,000 children plus about 60,000 illegal alien parents comes to a grand total of 160,000 people. This is just a drop in the bucket when compared to the over 11 million illegal immigrants living in America today. Consider the costs… just 160,000 of these people cost one county in California almost $2 billion a year! How much more can we afford to spend throughout the nation and 10.8 million more new residents?

It’s not as if sudden amnesty of these 11 million will solve the problem either. Without some measures to increase border security and stem the flow of illegal immigrants, we’ll simply be facing down a new crop of 11 million illegal residents 20 years from now. No, the stopgap measures currently being bandied about in Congress by men and women who are worried for their job security just won’t work.

What is necessary is real border reform. What is needed is real legal immigration reform. What must happen is that real steps to welfare reform must be taken… again. The politicians in Washington are playing a game with your financial well being, and they are hoping that you won’t notice. We have Democrats and some Republicans searching to get amnesty through any way that they can. They think they can buy 11 million future voters with one sweeping amnesty bill. The majority of the rest of the Republicans want nothing to do with immigration reform at all, because they want to make sure not to anger anyone and by so doing … keep their precious jobs.

Then there are a few -- a small group of Republicans -- who understand that border security must come first, but after that we must develop a modern method of accepting immigrants from around the world. Because we are still the shining light on a hill to the poor and huddled masses of the world yearning for freedom and opportunity. Our current immigration laws are short-sighted and ineffective; we must be willing to accept more immigrants legally, and we must be willing to be less politically correct about the need for assimilation into our culture.

Racism is evil in all of its forms, but asking for assimilation as a requisite for citizenship is not. It may be politically incorrect in today’s world, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong idea.

We can’t afford to continue to be mired in this ridiculous debate over illegal immigration. Los Angeles County is proof of this. The time to act is now.