Do you think illegal immigrants save you money, or cost you money?

In My Humble Opinion
21

[QUOTE=justwannano]
They cost us.
First you need an interperator because they don’t speak English.
Even those that do don’t seem to grasp ideas well.
In a production setting someone must spend extra time explaining or sometimes showing them how to do a job.
They help hold wages down which is probably a plus for them since they do have a place to go where living is cheaper unlike their American co-workers.

[/QUOTE]

Holding wages down is a plus for a LOT of people.

I didn’t really expand in my OP because I didn’t want to color perceptions. But, when I think about daily life. . .

They clean the building and tend the grounds that I work in. They run some of the restaurants I eat at. The places I go, they tend the grounds, maintain the buildings. All of that is hard to measure, but don’t believe for a second that it doesn’t translate into nickels and dimes in your pockets.

And, that’s not to mention the costs of construction, costs of produce. Those things might not directly save you money, but they keep costs down all over.

When I consider what they cost in terms of health care, schools. . .well, I’m sure it’s not nothing, but you gotta realize you’re looking at the marginal costs on top of your taxes. It’s not like everyone’s taxes in Baltimore City went up $100 last year because of an influx of immigrants.

All of that considered, I think I come out ahead, but I realize that to even try to determine it conclusively would require a seriously complex economic analysis. Anyone who thinks they KNOW the answer is fooling themselves.

(also, I tend to assume that a lot of the people I see who don’t speak English, and do groundskeeping and housekeeping and construction are illegal. I might be wrong. I couldn’t say, but there have been some somewhat high profile cases around where businesses have been busted for hiring illegals, and I tend to think that the other businesses with the same models are probably doing the same.)

22

How can they tell that the folks ruining the hospitals are illegal aliens and not residents? Do illegal aliens normally say “Hey, I’m illegal. Please sew my thumb back on. And hey, don’t forget that I’m illegal.”? Los Angeles has a large legal Hispanic population after all.

23

Personally, they cost me money and time.

24

I don’t think illegal immigrants save or cost me any significant amount of money.

I imagine they save their employers a fair chunk o’ change, though, which is why they continue to get hired.

25

[QUOTE=rjung]
I don’t think illegal immigrants save or cost me any significant amount of money.

I imagine they save their employers a fair chunk o’ change, though, which is why they continue to get hired.
[/QUOTE]
This is exactly what I came in here to post. I think the actual costs associated with illegal immigrants are a negligible fraction of my total tax bill, and the actual savings from the lower labor costs are a pretty negligible fraction of my monthly household spending.

I think there’s a lot of selection bias at work when it comes to people’s perceptions of the effect of illegal immigration on social services. As convenient as it would be to blame the illegal immigrants, removing every one of them is not going to change the fact that more and more Americans are uninsured or underinsured at the same time health care costs are sky-rocketing. That’s not to say we should ignore the problem or throw open the borders, but the current hysteria is far out of proportion to the severity of the problem, in my opinion.