Exploring an Issue

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-01-21-immigrant-healthcare_N.htm
Article Title: Rising health care costs put focus on illegal immigrants
By: Richard Wolf

- In Texas, where the state comptroller estimates illegal immigrants cost hospitals $1.3 billion in 2006, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston is considering denying cancer care to such immigrants.

- On a national level, an effort to add legal immigrant children to the State Children's Health Insurance Program was blocked in the Senate last year. Instead, lawmakers added language to ensure that illegal immigrants were excluded.

- llegal immigrants can get emergency care through Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor and people with disabilities. But they can't get non-emergency care unless they pay. They are ineligible for most other public benefits.



Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/opinion/25Duk.html
Article Title: Raise Wages, Not Walls
By: Michael S. Dukakis and Daniel JB Mitchell

- Millions of illegal immigrants work for minimum and even sub-minimum wages in workplaces that don’t come close to meeting health and safety standards.

- But if we want to reduce illegal immigration, it makes sense to reduce the abundance of extremely low-paying jobs that fuels it. If we raise the minimum wage, it’s possible some low-end jobs may be lost; but more Americans would also be willing to work in such jobs, thereby denying them to people who aren’t supposed to be here in the first place.