Chicago's Illegal Alien Lobby Getting Millions to Enroll Immigrants in Obamacare

The Chicago Lampoon has stumbled on a little-known State of Illinois grant notice which reveals that Chicago's chief lobby group for illegal aliens, The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) and a number of ancillary immigrant lobby groups are getting millions of dollars in grants to enroll immigrants in the Obamacare socialized medicine scheme.

The feds are handing out big wads of your tax cash to hire "In-person counselors" and "Navigators" at $13 an hour to run around and sign up people for the Obamacare program. They've designated a gaggle of "Community Action Agencies" to hire the counselors and navigators.

Here's a list of the Chicago area immigrant groups and the amount of federal cash they'll be raking in:

Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights -- $1,250,000.00
Illinois Migrant Council -- $385,000.00
Pilsen-Little Village Community Mental Health Center-- $650,000.00
El Hogar del Nino -- $225,000.00
Asian Health Coalition -- $115,897.33
Alivio Medical Center -- $66,560.00

Now ICIRR has been the chief pimp operation for illegal aliens in the Chicago area for the past 25 years.

They pushed through the "sanctuary city" and "sanctuary county" measures, whereby the cops and the Cook County jail can't cooperate with ICE to deport illegal alien suspects that they apprehend.

They pushed through the so-called "Dream Act," giving in-state college tuition to illegal aliens.

And they've been the rabble rousers behind all the noisy rallies of leftists demanding "rights" for the squatters who snuck into our country.

And now Obama & Co. have deputized them and are giving them cash to go out and sign up bodies for his medical scheme.

Obama and his allies, of course, have proposed another scheme to amnesty the 11 to 20 million illegal squatters here. They have assured us that the amnestied illegals won't be able to cash in on his free medical scheme for 8 years.

If you believe that, I have 2014 Cubs World Series tickets I can let you have -- cheap.

Daley Laments Dearth of Youth Summer Jobs In "Sanctuary City" Chicago

Speaking yesterday in the heavily Hispanic Pilsen neighborhood, outgoing Mayor Richard Daley announced that the city would be unable to provide summer jobs for youth at last year's levels.

Due to a cutoff of the one-time-only federal stimulus subsidy, the city would be able to provide 4,000 fewer of the summer make-work jobs, a 22% decrease from last year, Daley said.

At the same time, the Evanston outplacement firm Challenger, Grey & Christmas Inc. projected that this would be among the toughest summers for finding summer jobs in recent memory.

I don't see why this comes as any great surprise to anyone. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, in 2005 Illinois was home to more than 609,000 illegal aliens, the 4th highest of any state, with most concentrated in the Chicago area. Since then, the totals may well have doubled.

Yet Chicago and Cook County remain a "sanctuary city" for illegals. By legislative dictat, police, hospitals and providers of city services are instructed not to ask about the legality of one's presence in the country. By court order, no Illinois schools can ask.

So now, Chicago kids find themselves competing against a formidable army of unskilled, illegal foreign labor when they try to find that summer job, which may determine whether or not they'll be able to continue their own education.

When working summers to help pay for college some years back, W.W. Grainger hired me and another college kid to cut the lawns and landscape at the 3 plants that they had then in the area. It was a full-time and reasonably well remunerated seasonal job.

It was the kind of job that ICIRR and the rest of the illegal alien lobby tell us that Americans won't do.


Last summer, I happened by one of W.W. Grainger's expansive warehouse facilities in Niles. The job once given to college kids, was being done by an outsourced crew of Latinos.

W.W. Grainger probably doesn't knowingly hire illegals for this. But with a wink and a nod, the independent landscape contractors likely assure them that their people are legal. They seldom are, but the principal firm then has plausible deniability before ICE.

On March 10, the Tribune's ever-ridiculous, Mary Schmich, was blubbering about the unfairness of deporting the adult offspring of illegal aliens. That day, at Daley Plaza a gaggle of illegals shamelessly and defiantly announced their illegal status and called for passage of the "Dream Act" illegal alien amnesty scheme.

That measure would have granted amnesty to any illegal alien up to age 35, who had been to a school in the US -- including such things as hairdresser school.

The sensitive souls can blubber on all they like about the woes of Chicago's ever-growing illegal alien population.

But they can't then come back and lament the fact that many of our American kids will be idle this summer and, perhaps, unable to afford college in the fall.