I thought we pretty much had a national debate about cheap labor some time back. Seems to me that we had really cheap labor (ie, an upfront capital cost, with minimal ongoing expenses), then some people got all fired up about the immorality of cheap labor, then there were some absurd court findings that cheap laborers weren’t people, some idiotic rantings about states being the sole arbiters of who was a person and who was merely cheap labor, then the turds hit the turbine blades and we had a hugely expensive civil war to resolve the issue of “cheap labor.”
In the end, cheap labor ended up being not all that cheap.
And if we look at the aftermath of that previously imported cheap labor, it has been a financial drain upon this nation ever since.
When are we going to learn that, as a historical trend, cheap labor is never all that cheap?
That is true. Here's the data.
LAPD Most Wanted = 74% Hispanic
Immigration Counters (Real-Time Data Resource Center)
The Unpleasant FACTS ARE
>>Both studies found that immigrants used government services at a greater rate than native-born residents did. The New Jersey study found, for instance, that the typical immigrant family received about $4,044 annually in government services, about 11 percent higher than the average native-born family. At the same time, immigrant households paid about 8 percent less in taxes. The net result was that “the average native household generated an annual fiscal surplus of $232” to government, while “the typical foreign household was a net burden of $1,484.” The gap was even wider in California, where immigrant households produced a net deficit of $3,463 each, because so much of that state’s recent immigration had been in the form of low-wage, low-skill workers.
Though the study did not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, it did break down foreign-born households by the regions of the world from which they had come. In both states, the study found the steepest deficit in Latin American households, which in New Jersey consumed 26 percent more in government expenditures than the average native-born family, but paid 38 percent less in taxes. By contrast, immigrant households in New Jersey that hailed from Europe or Canada actually consumed, on average, less in government services than the typical native-born family, and paid nearly as much in taxes.<<
Source: http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-08-29sm.html
Exactly. We still haven't solved all the problems from the cheap labor that was ended in 1863.