I’m sure it is to border communities, but how about at the national level?
I really don’t know, and I have no fodder for a debate. I’m interested in factual answers that show the harm that makes illegals an important detriment to the country as a whole. What is the real cost of illegals being here, not counting the cost of trying to keep them out?
Just the facts, ma’am. 
Peace,
mangeorge
Harking from the northeast, I would say that immigration is still very important here but framed differently.
The most public debate of recent times took place in Danbury, CT over the large population of legal and illegal immigrants, mostly Brazilian (although many other Hispanics as well as Mexicans). There were many heated debates and rallies that climaxed when Brazil had won a major soccer victory. The result was a spontaneous, nonviolent march down Main St. In the end, no real legislation was passed.
I guess it’s not that unlike the debate going on in the border states, but I think (this is a feeling, not a scientific fact) we get slightly more of the Hispanic population here than we do Mexicans. I also think (again, just a feeling) that folks around here are less concerned with the impact on job losses (in contrast to the city of Danbury, where that was a very real concern of the native population) and more concerned with the impact on services that our taxes pay for (unpaid hospital bills, the burden on schools, etc.).
By the way, FactCheck.org filed a very enlightening report recently worth checking out before anyone else posts here: Does Immigration Cost Jobs? - FactCheck.org
When you try to figure out the cost of immigration, illegal and legal you have to consider all things.
Direct costs, which are relatively easy to figure out, and indirect cost, which are not so easy, but still count. And most important you have to figure out levels of cost as well.
For example, immigrants (legal and illegal) have a tendency to send anywhere between 25% and 50% of their income earned back to their native lands.
You often hear about immigrants spending money and generating income that way, but this is all too often overestimated. If an illegal alien makes $5.00/hr, about $1.25 to $2.50 is going out of the country.
Illegal immigrants also allow for bad people to exist. For instance, a slum lord can keep conditions in a block of flats at near intolerability. Why? 'Cause illegals won’t complain. Without this the slumlord couldn’t get away with it.
These are indirect costs that are hard to estimate.
On the flip side you have to realize costs are not always measurable in terms of money. For instance, if we had to pay “real” wages to farm workers the cost of food would rise. This would be especially dramatic in the Winter when most of the fresh veggies and like come from California.
But wait a minute…
Couldn’t we import food. Yes, and surprisingly the cost would be about the same as employing the illegals. So why don’t we just stop using illegals and import food.
Because America is a great nation and you cannot have the nation subject to the whims of other nations. Imagine if we got into the habit of importing food and then war broke out and the nations we import food from cut us off. You already see how vulnerable we are to oil, imagine that with food.
So you see there’s no real money cost involved but using illegals to ensure that food will be grown in the USA, makes sense, from a political viewpoint, not a humanitary one.
Do immigrants take jobs from Americans? Certainly, of course they always say these are jobs no one wants. Huge myth. I personally can name you high paying jobs in hotels I worked at (over 50K) that were being done by immigrants. Last month I worked a temp job in a factory for minimum wage. I was working under immigrants who were making $15.00 hour and had came over here about a year ago, from Poland, Mexico, the Philippines etc.
Those people are here legally but it makes no sense Americans who were born here are being displaced by foreigner who legally come here. Can you imagine how worse it is with illegals?
The best example is in Uganda when they threw out all the Asians. Of course everyone predicted the collapse of the country. And for a few years it was bad, but in every case local Africans simply and eventually replaced all the displaced Asians. Today Uganda, has problems and a lot of them, but they also have one of the largest middle classes in Africa.
So a lot of the arguments used to measure and count costs are not correct. People feel “America is a nation of immigrants” but forget there is legal and illegal immigration. They also fail to distingush between a service economy (now) and a manufacturing economy (for a hundred years) and an agricultural economy (at the nation’s founding). Agriculture and manufacturing lend a hand to immigration (both legal and illegal) while service industries do not
food security issue that Markxxx brings up sounds like a myth. There are different sorts of farming in America with different labor requirements. Grain farming which is essential to national security is not a labor intensive process. By contrast, growing of some of vegetables and fruits, yes, absolutely, labor intensive - but not strategically significant.
Potatoes are relatively labor intensive during harvest. But they will be less so if some pretty basic mechanization is introduced to assist pickers. And somehow Americans never had trouble picking them before, all the more so during periods of high unemployment like right now.
In any event, when farmers or other bottom feeder employers get cheap labor from migrants, the local governments end up paying medical bills of these migrants in our overpriced hospitals, incarceration fees in overpriced prisons and education fees in overpriced schools. While the migrants themselves are not unionized, all sorts of people who provide “services” to them at government expense sure are. Needless to say, many of these nanny state people very much like this situation and lobby for more of the same.
I don’t know about Markxxx’s food claim, but I pretty sure we have enough oil reserves for military purposes. It’s good crude that’s in short supply locally. That we don’t want to ration is the problem. We’re spoiled.
Besides, the wars we’re involved in right now are about as big as we’ll probably ever see.
Anyway, back to the subject. What I’m wondering about is whether we’re getting our money’s worth from the war on illegal immigration. Can this be compared to the futility of the war on drugs?
Would a cleaned up version of the Bracero Program serve our purposes better? I don’t know. I do know that what we’re doing now isn’t working.
I have a few reasons for being against illegal immigration, but since you want to strictly stick to economic reasons I’ll just give this one. Employers who hire illegals get an unfair competitive advantage because they get cheaper labor. This hurts the law abiding businesses who only hire, or at least as far as they know only hire, citizens or people legally authorized to work in this country.
I’m curious if you have a citation for either of those figures.
I can believe a legal immigrant with a work visa and a good job sending back 25-50% of their income. However, I find it highly questionable that anyone can live in this country on $2.50/hr (before taxes) and still be healthy and stable enough to hold down their job/jobs (not to mention all of those who have families in this country to feed along with their overseas relatives).
Your example is certainly backs your claim, however to frame the debate as simply as “Illegal immigrants…allow for bad people to exist” oversimplifies the situation. If the illegals were all deported, it wouldn’t make evil go away. That same slumlord would start renting to the 1 in 6 Americans in poverty (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=8869779), and then they would be in similar situations.
Or else he would get a job working in the home lending/credit default swap business. Or maybe BP spokesperson?
Very true, but it should be pointed out that many illegals create the jobs they’re in. And looking past that minor point, the legal workers taking those jobs would then gain disposable income to put back into the economy.
As you said, the costs are hard to measure. However, it’s been proven many times over that lifting people out of the lower class and into the middle class creates an economic boon for the whole society. That being said, there is a delicate balance when it comes to redistribution of wealth, and I can’t say what the result would be without the numbers and a degree in macro economics.
As code_grey says, America’s breadbasket can feed the world over. And besides, our main health problem is obesity, not malnutrition.
Your example is noted, but I suggest you read the FactCheck article I posted: Does Immigration Cost Jobs? - FactCheck.org
Apparently all of the economists who study immigration say that immigrants create jobs (or at least have no effect on jobs) due to the demand they create spending money. Remember that in a capitalist, free market economy speed and movement of money turns the cogs.
They also had a bloody war and a change in leadership that led to it’s most stable government since Uganda gained independence. To say that removing an ethnic minority is solely responsible for Uganda’s economic success two decades later is a complete oversimplification.
I still agree with you that the costs are difficult to measure, but I again take issue with some of your details. I’d like to know why you think illegals don’t work in the service industry.
There are countless numbers of illegal immigrants working in hotels, restaurants and telemarketing jobs. Recently a Taco Bell near me uncovered 17 (I think) illegals working there. They’re stereotyped as working at Wal-Mart, and apparently they’re in our slightly more upscale stores as well: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/4831076-target-requires-employees-to-provide-legal-papers-40-workers-quit
I’m sorry if it seems as though I’m attacking you, but I’m just interested in seeing what your rebuttal might be.
I don’t post a lot, but I just couldn’t let this go unchallenged. While Amin did kick out the Asians out in 1972, it’s practically impossible to find any argument these days that this was a good move. The exodus so contributed to the destruction on the Ugandan economy that one of Yoweri Museveni’s first acts after taking power was to invite back the Asians who were kicked out to the degree of returning their confiscated properties. Many still did not bother to return. That Asian diaspora forms the backbone of Uganda’s middle class today.
Here’s an nyt article that gives a little more perspective: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/world/once-outcasts-asians-again-drive-uganda-s-economy.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss.
I’m also curious for a cite that Uganda has one of the largest middle classes in Africa. Anecdote only, but having lived and traveled extensively in East Africa, my gut feeling is that that honor would belong to Kenya, and Uganda’s middle class would be on par with that of Tanzania or Rwanda (adjusted for overall population size.)
Of course its important. CRIME! Even if illegal immigrants were responsible for <10% of crimes committed across the board, that fraction alone would still create a HUGE, uneccesary expense. As they make up significantly >10% of the prison population, le sigh.
Le cite?
But crime is an issue. The illegality of immigration is causing people who would otherwise be law-abiding to commit a crime. This is bad because it places them in a vulnerable position where they can be exploited. It’s bad because it supports a criminal infrastructure which in turn supports other more serious crimes. It’s bad because it diverts law enforcement resources. And it’s bad because it diminishs respect for the law.
Compare it to the criminalization of alcohol during prohibition or the current criminalization of marijuana. The law didn’t stop the consumption of alcohol or marijuana but it did help organized crime make a fortune supplying these products.
Yeah, those numbers seemed fishy to me. I didn’t think we incarcerated illegals (I assumed we just held them in ICE detention and then deported them). It turns out it’s true, though.
27% of the prison population in 2004 was immigrant (legal AND illegal combined): http://immigration.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000783
In that same year 17% were illegal: http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/3/27/114208.shtml
I’m not wild about that second source since I can only track down a lot of blogs referencing the same Justice Department report/IBD article but not the actual report or article. However, it seems correct.
How does this happen? I couldn’t find anything spelling it out to me in black and white, but apparently it has to do with the fact that most local prisons don’t check for their legal status until the sentence is up, not when they’re first incarcerated. It sounds like privately-owned prisons that don’t care who they lock up, but I really couldn’t find any good research on this.
That’s kind of the point of my musings here.
You guys need to understand that not all prisons are federal prisons - and most prisoners are not in federal prisons.
So according to these statistics, the overall American population in 2003 was 93.1% citizens and 6.9% noncitizens. The overall prison population in 2005 was 93.6% citizens and 6.4% noncitizens. So a noncitizen is statistically less likely to be in prison that a citizen is.
We have a very large immigrant population here in Nashville. Law enforcement officials here said that there aren’t so many crime problems from the illegal immigrants because they don’t want to cause a problem and get sent back home.
Immigrants aren’t just in border towns, btw. The Catholic Church helped Mexican immigrants to settle in two areas in particular in the United States: Nashville and somewhere in the Dakotas. The ones who moved to the Dakotas weren’t very happy there because of the cold and so they moved to the sunny South to be with their friends in Nashville.
I like having them here and they are good for local business. I wish that I spoke Spanish so that I could help to teach some of the young mothers English. Their children will be learning in school. My mind is beyond absorbing a new language though.
There is a Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood that is rated in Fodor’s! No kidding! They do comment on our ratty neighborhood though. But the food is worth it!
We have many different ethnic groups here including the second largest group of Kurds in the world. Cambodians, Indians, Koreans, blacks, Mexicans, Hispanics…I’m leaving out a couple of groups. Maybe Ethiopians and Vietnamese or possibly Greeks and Russians. And Celts!
Numerous studies show that immigrants do not “take jobs from Americans”, they tend to create new jobs that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
Thank you for the citation. This puts those 27% and 17% figures into perspective.
(Although in my eyes, I would conclude that a noncitizen is approximately as likely to commit a crime -half a percent is significant, but it’s also comparing 2003 and 2005 numbers.)