Thanks for your reply, which is not the usual spurious straw man argument commonly used by those that those in support of the President’s Guest Worker Program (GWP). You wonder about my source. I am glad you asked. It is from the Cato Institute’s Willing Workers: Fixing the Problem of Illegal Mexican Migration to the United States . This is report that provides the academic policy underpinnings for the Bush GWP. It was published in excerpt in the pro-GWP Wall Stree Journal.
Please download the .pdf and peruse pages 13-14. There you will find the following:
Because low-skilled immigrants earn lower than- average incomes, they and their households do tend to pay less in taxes and to use means-tested programs more frequently than do American households on average….
Low-skilled immigrants do impose a fiscal cost under current law when all government services used and taxes paid are considered. For immigrants without a high school education, which describes most immigrants from Mexico, the NRC model determined the net fiscal impact to be negative $13,000. The original low-skilled immigrants themselves impose a lifetime net fiscal cost of $89,000 each, but that cost is almost entirely offset by the surplus of $76,000 in taxes that their descendants pay during their lifetimes.
Source cited:
National Research Council, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration, ed. James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston (Washington: National Academy Press, 1997), p. 153.
So, now that you know that my source is unimpeachable, and that each new immigrant in his lifetime will cost the taxpayer $89,000, I await your acknowledgement that illegal workers are a source of private profit for the few, at public expense for the many.
You will probably reply that the next generation will be a boon, so that is why we need them now. Were that the motivations of GWP advocates the long term interest of the U.S. GWP advocates want cheap workers for their private benefit now, this quarter, this harvest, and not for any public or future benefits. They care no more about the future than for the taxpayer that supports the upkeep of their hires. So please spare us any rhapsodizing about how Pedro and Juanita are going to support us all in our dotage, because that isn’t why GWP advocates want them.
The facts are that illegal immigrants cost the taxpayer enormous amounts, and if the employers had to pay the full freight of their costs, they would be as anti-illegal as the rest of us.
Thanks for the link. It was a thorough and comprehesive article with which I have a few disagreements that are only a matter of degree.
Of course the article supports my position that thru time the negative impact of immigrants(legal and illegal) turn positive. Your reply #22 misrepresented the article since you chose to mention only half of the impact and ignore that impact approaches zero thru time.
As I said on the first paragraph of this reply, I disagree with some of this article by degree and this section on economic impact is one of those. Whereas this article states that the impact evens out in the second generation, I suggest that that evening out occurs sooner. Let me explain why.
If you would reread that section you will see that the author first blends legals and illegals, then seperates them, then reblends them. Although he tries to put some numbers to the blend, he omits any numbers for the illegals. There is a good reason for this.
Other articles/studies on this subject point out that since the illegals are a shadowy, undocumented group, no one can say with certainty to what level they participate in health and welfare programs. It is generally accepted that they participate at a much lower level than legal immigrants because legals are entitled and illegals are not entitled
A second thing that skews the number is that a surprisingly large number of legal immigrants, although they are entitled, chose to consume health and welfare benefits at an undocumented level, masquerading as an illegal. They do this because they know that it doesn't count against them.
A third thing that skews the numbers is that in areas/cities/towns close to the border, Mexican citizens consume health and welfare benefits. These people are not illegal aliens but the costs are usually attributed to illegals.
Because of these examples, I suggest that average economic impact of the illegals turn positve sooner than the article indicates.
I have mentioned only health and welfare and ignored education. If you seperate the costs of HEW benefits, you see that, by far, the educational costs are the largest.
I tend to sgree with a number of credentialed anslysts who say that educational costs of the illegal children should not be counted as a negative economic impact.
We have large numbers of legal and illegals in the country for only one reason, a low birthrate. Had our legal immigration policies been more realistic, there would be far fewer illegals and far more legals here and those illegal children we are educating would be children of legal immigrants. Taken a step further, had we maintained a higher birthrate, the children of the legal and illegal immigrants that we are educating would, instead, be the children of native born citizens. Either way, society has to pay the costs of educating them.