It depends. It seemed to me that illegal labour tends to come from low skill populations south of the US. And the evidence is that they impose greater costs overall. Also, there is the issue discussed in the last link of low subsequent educational attainment, which will cause economic losses in future.
Again, can you give the page number from your cite where it says that.
Again, I think your misinterpreting what that means. The economic loses are relative to a person who doesn’t drop out of high school, not a person that never enters the country at all.
So if the average highschool dropout produces a dollar of GDP, and the average highschool graduate produces three dollars, there’s a loss of 2 dollars for dropping out. But if someone sneaks into the country and drops out of highschool, thats still a gain of one dollar for the economy, not a loss of two dollars, since if they never entered the country at all they would’ve produced 0 dollars of GDP.
Yet. When there are great numbers of elderly illegals here, what do you think will happen? Do you think they will be denied care? Food? Shelter? This is something we don’t see yet because the illegals here are younger and working.
But even if this wasn’t a problem looming in the future, why should we be expected to pay an extra cent. Our schools are bad enough. Putting that extra strain ion them does not help. Hospitals get hit in the emergency rooms, raising the cost of care for everyone. Some of them have to close their doors. That’s not good. And we have an unemployment rate in the double digits for unskilled workers. Why the hell is it okay to let illegals take those jobs. It’s friggin’ disgusting. We shouldn’t let a single unskilled worker work here until the unemployment rate for that group fell to about 6%. And them make sure it’s all done legally, so the wages are not driven down artificially.
the question of how the benefit from an immigrant compares to benefit from an American citizen that that immigrant displaced from his job is ignoring the simple and obvious fact that the American citizen is still here. He hasn’t been euthanized or something, knock knock on wood. The American citizen still needs a job to pay his rent, feed his children etc. So instead of the American working here in America and the Mexican working in Mexico (yes, with a somewhat lower standard of living than here) we have the Mexican working here and the American guy unemployed and a burden either on government welfare or else on his family. Or maybe homeless, what with the high rents nowadays.
The point the NRC report makes is that there is a net externality upon taxpayers from unskilled immigration. This article looks particularly at illegal immigration.
Whether there is a slight gain in total GDP is less relevant than GDP per capita. Unskilled illegal immigrants who come to the U.S. contribute slightly to higher total GDP, but they lower the GDP per capita.
Right. You said that the NRC report says that the value of that net cost to tax payers is 160,000. I’ve asked you like three times where in that report that number comes from, as I’m curious as to exactly what it means.
Produced by a conservative think tank. I’d be more interested in a study done by a non-partisan group such as the NRC. Hence my asking for where in that report they calculate their number.
Seems to be a certain amount of goal post moving, since your original quote gave an aggregate economic loss, not a per-capita drop in economic output.
But even using GDP per capita, I’m not sure that its obviously true. Immigrants are certainly less productive on average then native workers, so by that line of thinking they’d lower per-capita GDP. On the other hand, they’re less likely to be retired, and an immigrant worker is more productive then a retired person, so by that line of thinking they’d raise per-capita GDP. On the third hand, they also make native workers more productive by providing cheap labor, so by that line of thinking they’d also raise per capita GDP, even though they themselves would be less productive then average.
So I don’t think its obvious either way. Someone would need to actually sit down and crunch the numbers.
Your own cite says that immigrants are a net economic gain for the domestic residents.
Illegals do not very often work under the table. Any sane employer needs to pay his illegal employees EXACTLY like he pays his legal employees (doing the same job) as then he has “plausible deniability”. I have worked with farm contractors farm owners and farm workers, and yes, a large minority are “illegal” but generally they are all paid the same. In fact most farm workers are paid piecework. It’s very hard work, but a good worker can actually take in pretty nice money for a (long) days work. Of course, they don;t get work all year around.
Voyager is more or less correct, and makes good points.
They do certainly pay taxes: payroll (and they often will never get to collect Soc sec, so that’s a net gain), sales, property, etc. They pay the same income taxes as any low level workers (with a large family) does- which is not very much, true.
Indeed, any farm worker, or fat food worker, or menial worker is a burden to the state. In fact, likely most of the posters here are- if you are not in one of the higher brackets, the governments pays more out for you than it collects in. Simple math.
Illegal aliens are not a special burden over and above others in their income group.
When will the large flow of illegal immigration from Mexico end? With ongoing drug violence our southern neighbor shows no realistic signs of improving living conditions. I, too, would leave if I was a Mexican national.
There must be control of this illegal movement of persons.
So what are the mathematical effects of continually adding to the denominator while keeping the numerator constant or growing at a far smaller rate than the denominator?
I haven’t read through this report from last year, which covers [http://www.fairus.org/site/News2/708226221?page=NewsArticle&id=23190&security=1601&news_iv_ctrl=1761"]federal%20and%20local%20costs"]federal & local costs](http://www.fairus.org/site/News2/708226221?page=NewsArticle&id=23190&security=1601&news_iv_ctrl=1761").
Thats not true. I think your picturing the gov’t as taking all the money that it collects and divying it out amongst everyone in the country, so that person who makes less then average “gets their share”, and collects an average amount, they’ll pay in less then they get out.
But thats not really how it works, especially at the federal level. Military spending, interest payments, NASA, spending on highways, etc, aren’t really dived up. And the two big programs the gov’t does redistribute to the population, Medicare and Social Security, aren’t accesible by illegals.
So while lower then average wage earners may pay in less then average, because only a small portion of everyones contribution is “redistributed”, they don’t get paid out the avearge amount either and so are not necessarily net costs to the system.
Of course, that doesn’t mean illegal immigrants aren’t a net cost (though on the federal level at least, I find it unlikely). To find that out, you need to actually crunch the numbers. Chen claims that the NRC report does this, and finds a net lifetime cost of 160,000. However, I can’t find that number flipping through the report, and given that its some 400 pages and he won’t tell us what page he got that number from, its kinda hard to assess that claim.
Meh, its from an anti-immigration group. Flipping through, they make a bunch of half-assed assumptions to get to the conclusion they want. They claim the IRS over-estimates tax collections from illegals by a factor of six, for example, and give some hand-wavy argument as to why thats the case. But you’d be silly to trust some half-assed justification from a group with an agenda over the federal agency tasked with tax-collections on the subject of tax collections. Especially when the numbers a) vary by such a huge amount and b) favor the groups agenda.
The whole report is like that.
The NRC on the other hand, is a group I’d trust to crunch the numbers, so again, where in the report you cited to they give the 160,000 number you gave.
On the other hand, do illegals flock to large metropolitan areas as a percentage? Or do they mostly still go to the more rural areas to engage in agriculture (I know they do both but I don’t know the numbers)
Because rural areas take more from the government than they pay in in terms of roads and infrastructure*. (Yet of course they still manage to vote red in huge numbers.)
So us metropolitan and suburban dwellers might be subsidizing their more rural lifestyle 
- (not to mention welfare but that’s not pertinent to this discussion)
The biggest costs “imposed” by illegal immigrants come from building fences and sending out the border patrol to try and keep them out, the law enforcement, court, and administrative costs associated with rounding them up and deporting them, and the economic cost of employers having to hire and train new workers.
If we stopped doing that, these “imposed” costs would go way, way, down.
My apologies, the 160,000 figure was in error. It should be about $126,000 (or $89,000 adjusted from 1996 to 2011 dollars).
The $89,000 figure is on page 334 of the report. These figures may underestimate the costs. Since this study was made the costs of welfare services to lower income people has further expanded, especially Medicaid and S-CHIP, and may go further yet.
I’m inclined to agree with you on the possibility that the greatest costs come from border security enforcement. I think you’re making a giant leap, however to assume that we wouldn’t see a net negative economic impact from dropping all border patrol / security measures. Just taking one example - I suspect that a Juarez-style drug war in U.S. cities might have some adverse impact on the economy…
Well, I didn’t say we should drop all border security enforcement (nor did I single that out as the greatest cost). But if your concern is “Juarez-style drug war in U.S. cities” then the obvious solution is to legalize drugs.
Wow, we’re just solving all the world’s problems today, aren’t we? If only the PTB listened to us instead of clinging to the same policies that have failed over and over.
My apologies for misreading your original comment, although if we did in fact take away border fences, border security, courts and other administrative activities I’m not really sure what you’re suggesting we’d keep. Strongly worded signs, perhaps?
A guest worker program with some degree of continued border patrolling and immigration enforcement as needed? I haven’t really worked out all the details, but it didn’t occur to me that anyone would view the issue as completely black and white. I thought reasonable people might recognize a possibility between our current policies and dropping everything completely. Apparently I was wrong.
Totally agree there are a variety of options between what’s enforced now and what’s ideal - it just seemed to me that things like border fences and the existence of a border patrol were pretty necessary in any scenario. Also agree that a lot of the legal and administrative activities don’t add a ton of value.