[QUOTE=pantom]
magellan01, there is no correlation between high rates of immigration and high rates of crime.
[/QUOTE]
No correlation? Then why did imply a negative one?
[QUOTE=pantom]
If NYC’s experience, only the largest city in this country, doesn’t prove that to you, nothing will.
[/QUOTE]
Can’t you see that it could very well be the case that there IS a correlation, but other factors come into play to obfuscate that fact? Again, you have heard of the dot.com boom, which was felt strongly by Norther Californis and NYC. and that the high emoployment numbers it helped to create go to reducing crime. And are you not aware that the policies of Rudy Guilianni (I suggest Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) are credited with reducing crim in NYC beyond what people believed could be accomplished?
[QUOTE=pantom]
And so, since Hispanic families have fewer divorces, leading to fewer broken families, it would be logical to conclude that this leads to…less crime.
[/QUOTE]
Your findings regarding family strength does not surprise me. But what your data seems to be silent on is illegal immigrants. I think it is safe to say that illegal immigrants are more likely than legal ones to not be part of a family at all. And most of them are male. And males are the ones that commit most of the crime. So it seems, based on the information you provided, we really can’t draw the conclusions you seem so ready to draw. But the info is interesting. Thank you for providing it. Seriously.
[QUOTE=pantom]
So much for the allegedly high cost of immigrants. If they work for lower wages and cost less in terms of crime, it would appear that it is us, not them, who are benefitting from immigration.
[/QUOTE]
Not so fast. Here is some info from a post from a previous thread on the subject. ( I don’t know why, but the links to the FAIR info aren’tlinking to the appropriate pages. They did in the original post. Sorry. The others work. )
Illegal immigrants are a drain on services and our coffers. As of now, they are legally entitled to emergency medical care (which they abuse, treating ERs as doctors’ offices), education (with the added cost of language instruction), and welfare.
Although I have seen in stated on these boards that Illegal immigrants contribute more to the U.S. than they get out of it, the information I’ve found indicates the opposite.
General
In California during 2004, illegal immigrants were responsible for $10.5 billion in government outlays, while paying $1.7 billion in taxes, for a net drain of $8.8 billion. (FAIR)
In Florida during the same year, illegal immigrants were responsible for 1.8 billion in outlays, while paying .9 billion in taxes, for a net drain of $.9 billion. (FAIR)
The Center for Immigration Studies looked at the national picture for 2002. They found costs to the federal government to be $26.3 billion, tax receipts to be $16 billion, for a net drain of $10.4 billion.
Center for Immigration Studies:
California study:
http://www.fairus.org/site/DocServe...s.pdf?docID=141
Florida study:
http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServ...lcoststudy_html
National numbers
http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServ...ch_researchf6ad
Education
Florida spends $1.5 billion a year to educate illegal immigrant children and their U.S.-born siblings. California spends $7.7 billion, enough to buy computers for half the legal school children in the state. (FAIR)
In 2004, illegal alien students and U.S.-born children of illegal aliens cost California $7.7 billion, Texas $3.9 billion, New York $3.1 billion. The bill to all 50 states is over $26.6 billion. (FAIR)
Healthcare
Taxpayer-funded, unreimbursed medical outlays for health care provided to the state’s illegal alien population cost Floridians about $165 million a year. In California, the number is $1.4 billion. (FAIR)
Not to mention hospital closings due to unreimbursed care given to illegals. The only information I have right now is that illegals are responsible for 84 hospital and emergency room closings in the past 10 years or so. I believe that is in the Southwest and West only.
Wages
This from this article: VDARE.com, (which has links to original research done by a Harvard economist and the National Research Council) states that:
“…The 1995 findings of Harvard economist George Borjas [George Borjas, “The Economic Benefits from Immigration,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring, 1995] were confirmed by the National Research Council’s 1997 report The New Americans: essentially all the increase in Gross Domestic product [GDP] brought about by immigration is captured by the immigrants themselves, in the form of wages. Virtually no benefit accrues to native-born Americans.
(And once transfer payments like welfare, education and healthcare are factored in, immigration becomes a net cost—for example, over $1,000 in annual extra taxes per native-born household in California. Americans are financing their own dispossession.)
Even less publicized: the Borjas model reveals the true economic consequence of immigration: a massive redistribution of wealth within the American native-born community—basically, from labor to capital, because of immigration’s impact on wages.
The key variable: the rate at which native-born wages fall as the total number of workers rises—the so-called “price elasticity” of labor. Borjas estimates that each 10% increase in immigrant workers reduces native wages by about 3.5%. About 14% of employed workers in 2002 were immigrants. So the reduction in native wages attributable to immigrants that year was approximately 4.9% (35% of 14%).
As our reader told his dinner companions, it’s true that immigrants don’t do work Americans won’t do—they just do it for less.
But, more importantly, immigrants do indeed do one dirty job: make it easier for Americans to exploit each other.
I’ve recalculated this immigration impact on the basis of the latest government data. This is how it came out:
Net economic gain from the immigrant presence to native-born Americans, before transfer payments: just 0.2 percent of GDP (that is, two-tenth of one percent!) in today’s 10.4 trillion economy – that comes to a mere $84 per native-born American.
Native-born capital-owners’ gain as a result of immigration: about 3.1% of GDP, or $323.8 billion. This goes to employers and, for example, upper-income owners of stocks and employers of servants.
Native-born workers’ loss as a result of immigration: about 2.9% of GDP —$302.9 billion in a $10.4 trillion economy, or a remarkable $2,578 for each native-born worker every year.”
Warning: the original research done by Borjas is true egghead economics. Not for the faint of heart. Admittedly, I was lost through much of it.
Other
Then there’s also money taken out of the economy and sent to the illegal immigrants’ native countries. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that the amount, which does not capture all remittances to Latin America, will go beyond $18 billion for 2005.
Not all “costs” are monetary. The drain on services is creating major problems for our education and medical infrastructures. Schools in border states are becoming overcrowded and are saddled with the increased expense of language instruction. The general student population suffers, as well, because classes have to be slowed down to accommodate so many non-native speakers. Many parents find the need to move their children to private school, increasing the burden on them.
[QUOTE=pantom]
You’re all jumping to conclusions based strictly on anecdotal evidence, none of which has any data to support it. There’s a word for this…
[/QUOTE]
Data, too, can be anecdotal. Which was the cause for my original post.