From Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance

Ø We continually hear from supporters of unrestricted illegal immigration that we need open borders because illegals are willing to do jobs “Americans won’t do.” Well, it turns out that jobs in agriculture have been abandoned by illegals – leaving growers with crops they cannot harvest – for more lucrative work in the construction industry, meaning, as my wife pointed out, that ag jobs are now jobs that “illegal aliens won’t do.” The New York Times reports that the housing slump, which has meant fewer jobs in the construction industry for illegals, is driving them back into agriculture for lower paying jobs. As the Times puts it, “As building jobs have grown scarce, many of the workers who left farm labor a few years ago are returning to where they came from. They can be seen once again hunched in clusters under the unremitting sun, cutting heads of lettuce or slicing off spears of asparagus for minimum wage, clinging to the hope that home building will resume again.” Illegals account for approximately 20% of all construction workers, work, by the way, which Americans are obviously willing to do, since they hold 80% of the jobs in the industry. The Hispanic Pew Center estimates that 60% of the million new construction jobs created from 2004 to 2006 were taken by immigrants. (For Illegal Immigrants, Housing Slump Takes Toll – New York Times)

Ø Protecting American jobs is obviously one reason for secure borders. Protection from the traffic in illegal drugs is another. Some of the nation’s top law enforcement officers are saying that in influx of methamphetamine from Mexico is overshadowing recent successes in curtailing homegrown meth labs and is fueling a crime wave in such things as computer crimes, identity theft, and sex crimes, committed by addicts who can literally stay awake for days. One expert estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the meth found in his home state (Virginia) is actually coming into the U.S. across the Mexican border. (Import of Methamphetamine From Mexico Offsets Local Progress – washingtonpost.com)

Ø Another reason for secure borders is to protect the health of American families. The Village Voice reports on a tuberculosis outbreak at a Bronx hospital, which exposed 700 people, including 238 infants, to the infectious disease. The disease was carried by an unidentified foreign-born woman, who continued to report for regular duty in the maternity ward and the nursery at the facility well after she had developed the cough that spread the disease. Officials have not been able to track down over 100 of her potential victims. According to health care officials, the majority of health care workers with infectious TB are foreign-born female nurses, many of whom acquired the disease in areas of the world where TB persists in epidemic proportions. Despite this sad reality, many health care workers are not tested for TB when they are first hired, and even half of those who are diagnosed with latent TB never get treatment for it, and will lie about their condition in order to get or keep a job. (village voice | Runnin’ Scared: A Nurse’s Cough Turns Into a Public Health Crisis by Jeneen Interlandi)

Ø John Stossel reports that Americans spent 6.4 billion hours complying with the tax code in 2005, which, if time is money, represents $265 billion, more than the 2006 federal budget deficit. If you did your taxes yourself, you spent, on average, anywhere from eight to 27 hours on mind-numbing paperwork. The solution? A flat tax, in which all citizens are taxed at the same flat rate. Remarkably, nations from the former Soviet Union are pacesetters here. Estonia has had a flat tax for 12 years, and the average Estonian needs 10 to 15 minutes to file his income taxes, with 84% of them taking care of it online. There a few simple deductions, for things like mortgage interest, educational expenses, and charitable donations, and very low incomes are exempt. Estonia’s economy is expanding at more than 11 percent per year. The flat tax has drawn international investment to Estonia, and government revenues have increased as the economy has grown. The “Fair Tax,” which is a national sales tax base on consumption rather than income, is similar in concept, and either would be vastly preferable to the labyrinthine and oppressive system currently in place. (The 16th Amendment would have to be repealed to make the “Fair Tax” work – otherwise our friends in Washington would simply add the sales tax to income tax.) The IRS code currently runs to more than 66,000 pages, and over 100 new tax forms have been created in just the last six years (when the Republicans were in power, by the way.) (Townhall.com::Springtime for Taxes::By John Stossel)

Ø The current Social Security and Medicare system in America is so entitlement top-heavy that, according to the Government Accounting Office, at the current rate of growth the government will do “nothing but pay interest on the debt and mail checks to retirees” by about 2040. To balance the budget at that point would require the federal government to double its take from the Gross Domestic Product from its current level of 18.4% to 40%. State and local taxes, of course, would be tacked on to that. The solution clearly must involve using Social Security taxes to create personal retirement accounts, phasing out Medicare, and moving health care in the direction of high-deductible health insurance plans coupled with Health Savings Accounts, which will allow citizens to keep every dollar they don’t spend. (Townhall.com::McCain’s Secret Plan::By Terence Jeffrey)

Ø The principles of the modern environmental movement conflict directly with the view of man’s relationship with the world that is given to us in Genesis 1-3. We are seeing renewed declarations, for instance, from environmental groups that the “most crucial factor” in reducing global warming is limiting population growth. This despite the clear biblical directive for mankind to “be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.” As the Family Research Council points out, “population control” is simply “code for abortion, condom distribution, and mass sterilization.” (Group Calls for Population Control to Stop Global Warming)

Ø Al Gore is so convinced of the link between global warming and hurricanes that the cover of the DVD of “An Inconvenient Truth” has a hurricane forming out of the top of a smokestack. Unfortunately for Mr. Gore, and as further proof that the much vaunted “scientific consensus” on the subject is highly overrated, word now comes that global warming may in fact reduce hurricanes through creating wind shears that will tear apart tropical cyclones and keep them from growing into monster storms. The study was done by scientists at the University of Miami and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Princeton, New Jersey. (Global warming may spur wind shear, sap hurricanes | Reuters.com)

Ø Now we are being told that food is causing global warming. The latest fad in environmentalism is to push us all into a “Low Carbon Diet” on the grounds that “food – and all the energy it takes to make it – is one of the largest human activities contributing to global warming.” This is because “The average American creates 2.8 tons of CO2 emissions each year by eating, even more than the 2.2 tons each person generates by driving.” The fashionable diet will slash consumption of meat, tropical fruits, imported foods, and imported water. The Bon Appetit Management Company will soon produce a carbon point system so guests at their restaurants can calculate the damage that their personal food choices are doing to the planet. (‘Low Carbon Diet’ Aims to Take Bite Out of Global Warming)

Ø Worse even yet for global warming hysterics, it turns out that ethanol may contain serious health risks, as a new Stanford University study says pollution from ethanol could end up actually creating a worse health hazard than gasoline, especially for people who struggle with respiratory illnesses. Ethanol-burning cars will boost levels of toxic ozone gas in urban areas, leading to a 9 percent increase in the annual rate of respiratory deaths. Ethanol generates far more ozone – “a serious air pollutant,” according to a Cornell University scientist – when it breaks down in the atmosphere than gasoline does. Ozone is so corrosive it can crack rubber and wear away statues. The Cornell scholar went on to say that the burning of ethanol fuel releases at least four carcinogens into the atmosphere, all of which “are a threat to public health.” (Study warns of health risk from ethanol)

Ø Lastly, as I have written you before, it turns out that environmentalists are now saying there are serious environmental hazards associated with the now-trendy and soon-to-be-mandatory Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs). A Maine woman is facing a $2,000 bill to pay an environmental company to clean up the mercury spill in her daughter’s bedroom when a CFL broke. When it broke, Home Depot told her to call a poison control hotline, which in turn told her to call the state department of environmental protection, which in turn sent her to an air testing expert, who determined that the air in her daughter’s bedroom had unsafe mercury levels, and told her she needed to bring in a specialist to clean it up. Since she doesn’t have the $2,000, her daughter’s room is now sealed off from the rest of the house with plastic. (Another woman who dropped and broke a CFL sensibly vacuumed up the spill and resumed her normal life.) Cuba, Venezuela, Australia, Canada, the European Union, and the states of California, Connecticut, North Carolina and Rhode Island are all in fast track mode to ban the old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs in favor of CFLs, despite the fact that we will soon be hearing over-hyped stories about all the environmental destruction that will be caused when the mercury-leaching bulbs are disposed of. (WorldNetDaily: Consumers in dark over risks of new light bulbs)

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