By Ron Maxwell

FRANCE HAS A population of 60 million. What would you say if one third of France’s population, or 20 million people, decided to move to the United States for better jobs and government benefits?

What if they insisted on coming here, despite our wishes and in violation of immigration laws? Would you just roll out the red carpet? Would you sit idly by as 20 million jobs were taken from American workers?

This is what’s happening in today’s illegal immigration con game. Difference is, most of these migrants are from Mexico and Central America and they arrived during the last 20 years, about a million a year. Note that this illegal immigration has been in addition to the more than 1 million a year admitted legally, by far the largest legal immigration program on earth.

Republican and Democrat administrations have done nothing serious to stem this tide. Why not? Because both national political parties are in thrall to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its offshoot, the Essential Worker Coalition — composed mainly of multi-national corporations in the agriculture, hospitality, food processing, construction and financial services industries.

These businesses love illegal immigration and the millions of poor workers arriving from the Third World. They get to pay bottom dollar, depressing the wages of average low-skilled workers, saving hundreds of millions of dollars over the cost of hiring Americans and legal immigrants. They pass the social costs on to the American taxpayer: healthcare, education, welfare, housing and crime.

That’s what makes it a racket and a con game. Stripped of their phony humanitarian rhetoric, it’s a huge transfer of wealth, from middle-class taxpayers across the backs of illegal alien labor into the coffers of multi-national bank accounts. No wonder the Chamber of Commerce supports amnesty. It would constitute a bright green light to the next 20 million illegal immigrants.

Local communities bear the brunt of these massive and escalating costs. Counties and municipalities across the country are organizing to reclaim our sovereignty. They understand that illegal immigration is not a victimless crime.

In fact, there are two sets of victims: the illegal immigrant lured to leave his home and family, exploited by the Wall Street corporations; and the American citizen struggling with 10 percent unemployment, shrinking wages, compulsory bilingual education, collapsing school systems, overcrowded roads, overwhelmed hospitals and rising crime.

Not least of this crime is gang violence. The MS-13 gang is one of the most violent, ruthless and deadly criminal enterprises in the country. Virginia is home to the second-largest concentration of MS-13 members. They are in Culpeper, Page, Shenandoah, Rockingham, Warren, Prince William, Loudon and Fairfax counties. Most of their victims are Hispanic.

Why has Gov. Timothy M. Kaine refused to sign up state police in the 287g program, thereby empowering them to work with ICE to identify and detain criminal illegal aliens? Must we tolerate human trafficking, child prostitution, drug smuggling, extortion, intimidation and gang violence in our own backyard?

Not as widely understood is the negative economic impact of illegal immigration on African- and Hispanic-Americans who work in the low-skilled jobs displaced by illegal workers. Still, the illegal alien is not the central culprit in this colossal Ponzi scheme. It’s the multi-national corporations and their enablers in Congress.

With this in mind I contacted both candidates for the 15th District seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates, John Lesinski and Todd Gilbert. I sent them links to 11 short films on the illegal immigration crisis and asked for comment. These informative documentaries, free of polemics, cover every aspect of the issue, from jobs to national security. Of particular interest to Valley residents is the chapter on the environment and open space: