Welfare is Legal and Illegal Immigration

Whats nice about the information age is that our "opinions" are now pretty well shown to be right or wrong according to the statistics. While statistics can be misleading, they are a higher level of evidence than a guess, and a higher level of evidence than case studies. So, if you want to find out what works and what doesn't, statistics are your strongest tool. I was reading a very interesting article that suggests Germany's immigrant problem may be linked to welfare spending at:
Source: politopinion.com...

Mexico has been next door to the USA for about 200 years, including at least fifty to 100 years of which the USA economy was dramatically better, but moving to the USA seems to have been a relatively recent trend having taken place only in the last few decades as the linked chart below will show. So, what has changed over the past few decades? Well most easily the biggest change is that the USA completed its transition from a capitalist economy to a mixed economy in 1971. This is reflected in an increase in government spending on welfare programs from about 0% of GDP in 1930 as begun under FDR (2nd worst president ever, 1st is Lincoln) to roughly 3.5% of GDP in 1980 where it peaked off and has now started to level off at 2.5% of GDP. So, 2.5% of the American economy is now welfare.
Source: www.usgovernmentspending.com...

So, you have this massive increase of welfare leading up to about 1980, and then a massive increase of Mexican immigration of about 10 million immigrants starting about 1980 and then leveling off in 2006. (Source: www.migrationpolicy.org...). This seems to be fairly strong evidence that the influx is due to welfare. What other differences are there showing 1980 as such a pivotal year? Also, it stands to reason that there are two reasons for the leveling off. One is that the economy in the USA is getting trashed hard, and the second is that everyone who heard about welfare in the USA has moved here.

Many people seem to blame free trade, yet NAFTA according to a Time article (Source: content.time.com...) states that NAFTA was a 1994 agreement, which was in the middle of an already existing trend. The free trade therefore seems to be correlated with immigration from Mexico and not caused by it.

It would appear around 1980 the elites may have actually colluded on a worldwide scale to make this happen on purpose. While Germany is said to have a massive influx from Syria of immigrants, the USA had its own influx of immigrants from Mexico. On a side-note I believe the rich-poor gap started to expand (rather than contract) in 1971 as a direct result of the ending of the gold standard, not in 1980 about when the cheap-labor immigration trend started. In conclusion, welfare seems to cause mass immigration. If anything else was happening in or leading up to 1980 by all means do share what you know!

maybe, just maybe.....
the two are related to a third trend? the desire for cheap labor by this countries employers along with an increase in collusion between business and washington?
and the immigrants are here not only because they want to be here, but the corps and gov't find it advantageous for them to be here. and since they don't want to waste their valuable resources actually paying them enough to keep them alive, they enlisted the help of our gov't to expand welfare programs so that you the taxpayer could do it for them...

and... I lived in texas in the 80's, there were lots of mexican being spoken in the laudrymats at that if I remember right.
and... they really didn't have much of a welfare program. what they had was alot of small business employers who actually thought it was their moral duty to pay their employees a fair wage and make sure that they were taken care of.