Barack Obama has taken pains to assure Americans that illegal immigrants won’t be able to buy health insurance on his new exchange. They’ll still get free emergency care but they will be prohibited from paying the world’s highest prices for health care. What else are illegal immigrants going to be denied now? Will they be barred from the Apple Store and prevented from spending $3000 on a laptop? Prevented from buying Leica cameras? No haute couture, only prêt-à-porter?
Meanwhile, we taxpayers in Massachusetts are stuck with the bill for housing Obama’s Aunt Zeituni. The Wikipedia entry on this illegal immigrant has a good explanation of how she has avoided deportation thanks to the U.S. court system taking years to process even the simplest cases, e.g., Should a woman who has already twice been ordered deported, but did not leave, be… deported? (Put some judges and lawyers like that into a tire factory and pretty soon you need tariff walls to protect them against the Chinese.)
Massachusetts taxpayers have been paying for Aunt Zeituni’s housing for six years. Ever since Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the White House, we’ve also been paying for extra police details to deter the curious and the press. The Obama family inflicted further cost and inconvenience on folks in this state during their family vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, when roads and airspace were shut down for up to a week.
What could Barack Obama do to help Massachusetts? He owns a 14-room, 6500 square foot house in Chicago (using fossil fuels to heat 6500 square feet for a family of four in one of the coldest parts of the U.S. is apparently a demonstration of one’s commitment to reversing global warming) that presumably sits vacant nearly all year. The house is guarded 24/7 by Secret Service agents. The street is closed to non-residents. Why can’t Aunt Zeituni live there? She wouldn’t be bothered by the rabble or the press. She wouldn’t be a drain on Massachusetts citizens.
If Barack Obama wants to convince Americans that his health care plan won’t burden national taxpayers with the cost of caring for illegal immigrants, wouldn’t it be good for him to relieve the taxpayers of Massachusetts of the cost of caring for his illegal immigrant relative?
Via this posting I hereby offer to pay for Aunt Zeituni’s round-trip transportation to Chicago. I will pick her up in her public housing complex, drop her off at the new Southwest Airlines terminal at Logan Airport, buy her a ticket on Southwest, and arrange for my friend Jen to pick her up at Midway. Jen will drop Aunt Zeituni off at the Secret Service barriers and they can escort her to Obama’s house. We will reverse the process to get her back to Boston for her February 4, 2010 immigration hearing (source).
Mayhaps she can live here instead:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/us/15chicago.html?_r=1&hpw
I’m sure a few more people in her position can squeeze in there, too.
Great column. Someone should show it to Obama, or relate the gist of it to him at his next press conference — to see what he’d say.
If Obama wants to prove his twin commitments to not soaking the American taxpayer, and to the rule of law, he would pay back all states in which his Auntie Zeituni has lived, and the feds (including the costs of any local and/or state, and/or regional and/or federal police protection she has enjoyed), and pay for her to be picked up at her current address by the Secret Service, and put on a plane with a one-way-ticket to Kenya.
I’m a bit confused as to why this is something President Obama is responsible for. Did he somehow commit to caring for this woman, or is there a law I am unaware of that requires a nephew to be financial responsible for their aunt? I would think that given the apparent conflict of interest, President Obama should stay out of it and let the process work its way through. He shouldn’t interfere, either to help or hinder his aunt.
Jerry: My nephew needed a place to stay for the summer. There was no law compelling me, his uncle, to provide him with free housing. As he has negligible income, being a college student, I could have told him to seek housing at the expense of my fellow Massachusetts taxpayers. However, since I had an extra bedroom I let him stay with me.
Barack Obama, of course, does not have an extra bedroom for the beloved Aunt Zeituni whom he wrote about in his autobiography. He has an extra 14-room house, which is already provided with the security protection that a member of the Obama family apparently requires. Nothing requires him to take Aunt Zeituni off our hands and let him live in his vacant house, but nothing stops me, a taxpayer, from requesting that he do so.
what is most amazing is that obama lectures us on moral issues and uses phrases like ” i am my brothers keeper”, surely with all the money he as made he could pay his aunties way instead of sticking us with supporting yet annother illegal allien. he is without a doubt the most hypocritical man to ever live in the white and shows no respect for that honor and is the most undignifyed man ever elected to such high office