I regularly hear about how illegal immigrants are a huge drain on Americans since they don’t pay taxes and their kids attend public schools, etc.
But, at the same time, isn’t it possible that their cheap labor has directly resulted in cheaper products/services for Americans to the point where this savings is equal to the money not paid by them in terms of taxes? Or am I missing a fundamental point here? I know the taxes go to the government and presumably their cheap labor results in less money spent by American citizens, but on a whole, could this be the case?
Have illegal immigrants depressed wages? If so, is that a good thing, or a bad thing? It depends on if you’re an employer, who wants to keep his labor cost down, or a consumer who wants to keep prices low, or a worker who doesn’t want to have to work under the table and wants to have his employer pay for the employer’s share of Social Security taxes, unemployment insurance tax and workers comp assessment. Is it good for American society to have 20 illegals living in a rental house, many of whom ship a lot of their earnings back home to Mexico or El Salvador for their families to live on, and or who drive without licenses or auto insurance? I don’t know. How do you factor those things into the cost benefit analysis?
I would guess one possible approach would be to take two U.S. states of comparable population and economic base but significantly different immigrant population.
Who says that illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes?
Unless they are working under the table, they are on their employers payroll, and they are paying all the same payroll taxes that I am. If they buy anything in the stores, they are paying sales tax. They are living some place that is being assessed property taxes.
Now they may well be paying a smaller amount of those taxes, but that’s because they make less money, spend less money and live in cheaper places.
It isn’t only possible, it is a fact. The benefit to the Federal Budget from illegal immigrants paying taxes on things they can never benefit from is $9 billion per year for the Social Security Administration alone. They get that number based on taxes filed with non-matching SSNs, non-existent or long-since dead numbers, as well as ITNs, Individual Taxpayer Numbers, which is a way you can pay taxes without having an SSN. http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2008-04-10-immigrantstaxes_N.htm http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.html
*In 2006, then IRS Commission Mark Everson told Congress that “many illegal aliens, utilizing ITINs, have been reporting tax liability to the tune of almost $50 billion from 1996 to 2003.”
An IRS spokesman said more recent figures aren’t available.
The Social Security and Medicare taxes from mismatched W2s for the same period was $41.4 billion, Hinkle said.
That adds up to roughly $90 billion in federal taxes during they eight-year period.*
If illegal immigrants hurt the economy there’d be a Berlin wall the length of the southern border for a century now. There’d be two walls with a patrolled road running between them and people getting over it would be rarer than people escaping from East to West Berlin.
Exactly. And this is why our government, Democrat or Republican, will never do anything substantial to address this issue. Exploiting people is too good for business.
Of course illegal immigrants impose a cost on society, in facts immigrants as a whole impose a net dollar cost to society. We still have a relatively graduated tax system. The bottom half of the country imposes a net dollar cost on society and recent immigrants clump up in the bottom half pretty consistently. Sure we attract a lot of doctoral students and stuff like that but the majority of our immigrants fall into the category of:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door"
They are showing up for economic opportunity. Period. That’s fine because we need immigration to keep our economy growing but we must be able to control the rate at which we absorb new Americans. I sympathize with folks who are here illegally and pursuing the American dream and I think that if we were to have an amnesty, the amnesty should be limited to folks who can show that they have been gainfully employed for the last 5 years and their immediate family.
They said the same thing about the Irish and the Italians but after a few generations, things seem to get better.
Here’s the thing, there are some jobs that simply cannot get outsourced to China ot India. Building homes and serving hamburgers cannot be exported but there are other jobs that can be exported. WAG but if we didn’t have migrant farm workers, we would end up importing most of our produce. The choice in the agro industry isn’t higher wages for legal residents in the agro industry versus hiring illegal immigrants. The choice is domestically produced agro using illegal immigrants or importing agro from the countries these illegal immigrants come from.
There used to be a guest worker program run by the department of agriculture that allowed for temproary work visas for agricultural workers.
Immigration has effectively no impact on unemployment, never has. The absorption of labour into the market is precisely offset by the corresponding increase in demand for goods and services created by the new immigrants that create demand for more labour.
The concept of legal versus illegal immigration as you currently understand it did not exist during most of the Italian immigration flood to America. The distinction between people who came in “legally” and those who didn’t was not an issue, or even legally relevant most of the time, until after World War I. Such immigration laws as existed prior to then were mostly aimed specifically at Asians.
There was certainly a great deal of concern about Italian immigration; I’m shocked anyone doesn’t know this, but the perception of Italians, and the effect they had on society, at the time was much the same as the perception of Mexicans today. They didn’t start imposing quotas based on existing ethnic percentages just for giggles.
To which I replied. Borjas is discussing illegals (see excerpt of article). Damuri Ajashi’s comment goes to the large wave Italian immigration during the first part of the last century. Illegal immigration was not an issue as they came in through and Ellis Island and were processed. So, my comment was to point out that he was comparing apples and oranges: legal immigrants and illegal immigrants.
It strains the imagination to think about more workers coming into a country and taking a percentage if the available jobs and that not effecting employment numbers. Especially when they often work for below market wages and displace native workers.
Three things I am aware of:
-teenagers cannot get summer jobs (in landscaping, mowing lawns, etc.) These jobs are all taken by landscaping contractors, who employ illegal aliens
-remittances to S. America, and Mexico: Brazilian illegals send home >$7 billion/year-this is money lost to the US economy
-public housing is jammed with illegals (see Obama’s illegal alien aunt (Ms. Zeituni)-she has a taxpayer paid, rent-free apartment in Boston, plus welfare, food stamps , and free health insurance (MASSCARE))
We can prove that illegal immigrants send a statistically significant portion of their dollars out of the country. So the money they have left for obtaining goods and services here is less than the same jobholder would expend if his entire family were here.
It might be interesting to compare the impacts to the national economic resources from illegal immigrants living and working here and sending money home to their families, and corporations owned across multinational lines outsourcing jobs to coutnries with a lower cost of living and hence a lower typical expected pay rate. I’ll bet you the latter is far more deleterious to the economy than the former.
Another factor is the decline in the number of children people are having, making a top heavy society, far fewer people entering the work force, in many ways immigration helps that, replacing entry level positions that can’t be filled with a sort of underclass work force.
