Another thread has looked at crime. What about the economic impacts of illegal immigration to the US? California has been an interesting case study:
One of the issues is that unskilled labour generally has a net cost. The National Research Council looked at this in in 1997, and found that unskilled immigrants on average collect $160.000 net present value (2010 dollars) more in their lifetime than they pay in taxes.
Unskilled immigrants get much more benefits than natives, because they are much poorer, and because the American government in practice gives immigrants, even illegal immigrants, benefits which they are officially not supposed to get.
This will be a problem in the future also because there seems to be a high drop out rate too.
Indeed, I agree. Illegals pay no taxes, and also get health care and welfare, which drains on our already strained system, and they do not contribute anything useful to it. In my opinion, we should take Mexico, that way, the illegals become citizens(TAXPAYERS), and we can solve Mexico’s Drug War, too.
The dropout rate has a cost because people who are uneducated produce less in terms of GDP then people who are. But that’s not really an argument against illegal immigration, since people who aren’t in the country at all contribute nothing to US GDP. Calculated the same way, preventing all illegal immigration would have an even higher cost.
Could you try to limit your discussion to “illegal” immigrants? You seem to be conflating those with unskilled labor in general in order to make your point.
160.00 dollars over their entire lifetimes! There’s apparently something like 10 million illegal immigrants in the US, so thats something like a billion and a half dollars total.
Per year , thats maybe a third of a % of the US federal budget. On a per-lifetime basis, its, I dunno, depending on what the lifetime of an immigrant is, maybe what we spend funding NPR for a month.
Thats pretty close to nothing. We probably spend more money then that futily trying to keep illegal immigrants out then it costs us per year to just let them stay here and occasionally pick up their hospital tabs.
For comparison, the current border fence project is planned to cost something like 50 billion. We could apparently cover the lifetime expenses of 300 million illegal immigrants for that money, which itself is something like three times the entire population of Mexico.
Err…and on rereading, 160.000 is probably a typo for 160,000 (though that seems implausible from the other end). Do you have a cite that isn’t a several hundred page document, or at least a page number.
Many countries write 160,000 as 160.000. I suspect the OP is from one of those countries.
The thing about illegal immigrants is that they give us a better standard of living, since they do jobs for less pay. Many of us probably wouldn’t have gardeners or housekeepers if we had to pay legal residents for those services
You have to be really careful, and really unbiased, when you start calculating stuff like this. My guess is that it’s a net gain for most Americans.
Could be, though it seems kinda weird for a foreigner to be worked up about illegal immigration to the US.
In anycase, I’m kinda curious where the number comes from regardless of its value. The graph on page 344 seems to suggest that the net effect of immigration on gov’t budgets becomes positive pretty quickly, and the table on the next page gives immigrants a net positive value of positive 160,000 dollars (though in 1997 dollars, not 2010 as the OP mentioned, so maybe its just coincidence and not the number the OP was referring to).
I might be reading the graph and table wrong though, and I don’t really have time or interest to read through the preceding 344 pages to see what the terms mean, so hopefully the OP will return to tell us precisely where the number comes from.
Everything I’ve read says that illegals try to stay as far away from the government as possible, so the idea that they are wandering down to the local government office demanding benefits is pretty laughable. They will use emergency room services, but I suspect that legal uninsured people are a bigger problem. Quite a few work in real jobs with forged papers, and so are paying into Social Security despite having no chance on ever collecting it. They are no doubt costing the schools money, but I agree that the best investment is for them to be educated, some number of the children are citizens, and even if legal they are probably paying very little directly or indirectly in property taxes, and so would be costing the system money in any case.
The person could be a former foreigner who is now a legal immigrant. It’s been my experience that few people get more angry over illegal immigration than someone who has had a difficult time with the legal immigration process.
The argument that illegal immigrants consume more resources than they provide isn’t really compelling considering the same can be said for anyone in the bottom tax brackets.
It’s certainly not a net gain for those unskilled workers they displace or drive down the wages of. One thing I cannot fathom is that given that illegal immigrants take jobs from the economic stratum occupied disproportionately by blacks, why the Democratic party isn’t up in arms about it.
Blacks just keep getting dealt a shitty hand. And soon after the legal system was set right to allow Blacks to do well, along comes millions of illegals to keep them down. Sad. And frustrating.
Fair enough, but for all intents and purposes they’re no different than the lower 50% of our tax base. An upside comes from the fact that unlike the lower 50% of our tax base, we don’t also have to subsidize illegal immigrants’ retirement via social security.
That might be true, but I don’t think its obviously so. Many illegal immigrants pay payroll taxes, but presumably will never get medicare or Social Security, and while they probably pay little in income taxes and get a lot out from Medicaid and other welfare programs, I don’t think its exactly obvious that what they pay in overwelms what they get out, on average. Indeed, if I’m reading Chen’s link right, thats not the case. After the first few years, immigrants are a net boon to the federal budget.
Completely agree with you here. In fact, I touched on social security in my follow-up post. Didn’t mention healthcare only because we don’t have a clear view on this given that ERs are obligated to serve whoever walks in the door, but at a high level I think the idea that illegals are a net benefit to our economy is correct.