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08/18/08 - A Reader Writes About College As A Four Year Social Event
From: Susan Shipley (e-mail her)
Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb (e-mail him) has come up with a new one!
Without any substantiation, and taking a pot shot at the Center for Immigration Studies in the process, Robb claims that illegal immigration is better for the environment than legal immigration.[Immigrating illegally is better for the environment, August 18, 2008]
I wonder how Robb would respond to VDARE.COM letter writer Brian Riordan, who in May 2008 summed up Arizona's environmental disaster and its relationship to illegal immigration quite differently.
Unlike Robb, Riordan does offer facts to support his case:
Millions of our taxpayer dollars (and much work provided by American volunteers) has been spent in a futile attempt to clean up the growing piles of garbage left by illegals as they sneak across the border from Mexico into Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California.
According to a Fox News story, in 2006 alone more than 1.18 million pounds of trash was collected along southern Arizona border, much of it in the meeting spots where aliens rest, change clothes and wait to hitch a ride further north with a smuggler.
Arizona officials have spent approximately $4.4 million over five years to clean up the mess that continues to build with each crossing. An additional $1 million was spent for 2007 from a base Bureau of Land Management appropriation. Read the BLM's comprehensive report on environmental damage caused by illegal immigration here.
Border Patrol's Tucson sector, which covers most of the Arizona border, doesn't have exact statistics about how many people cross through each year. But on average, agents apprehend 1,500 people a day, with 378,000 total undocumented immigrants caught in 2007 alone.
Shipley recently returned to Arizona from Stockton, CA. Her previous letters to VDARE.COM are here.
