08-31-2007, 05:27 PM
Quote:I agree with Eppie here: Aren't we all assuming, rather than demonstrating, that illegal immigrants constitute a drain on the economy of the US?
I suspect that they are a slight net surplus, even in terms of tax dollars generated vs. consumed.
-Jester
True you can't just assume that they are a liability. It's beyond the capacity of even the best statistician to figure it out.
And the impact is much much more then just tax dollars in vs tax dollars out. You have a whole second generation of people who substantially underperform the general population in school - chances are very high that they will **in general** underperform socially the rest of their life - less likely to go to college, lower average income, etc.. Also, there is a very real social cost to the rest of the students in a school when a sizable minority has poor to nonexistant English skills.
Then there is health care - 4$/hour lettuce pickers cannot possibly afford US style health care. Instead they go to ER's for flus and other inappropriate things, and people who have paid into the system and have real emergencies face 8hr waits. I don't know what the real solution to healthcare is (and lord knows we need one), but adding 12-20 million low income people who speak marginal English can't possibly be good for it.
They also represent a huge "unfunded liability" for retirement benefits. I haven't seen any actual research, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that very few are sitting on big 401k's. All the SS taxes they have paid (when they pay them - many don't) are going to somebody else. Adding them to the SS system would further destabilize a system already heading for big trouble. Not that SS can really support somebody.
Amnesty now, and then enforcement like the OP wants has a certain logical and humanitarian ring to it, but faces a very real historical hurdle - it was tried in '85 and failed miserably. The prospect of amnesty sets off a land rush of people attempting to gain it, while the enforcement provisions are chipped away by business and immigrant groups. Do you have any solution for the mistakes of the past, other then "This time, no fooling, no tricksies, for ever and ever, we really mean business on enforcement"? And do you have any reason why poor Latin Americans would believe you even if you called no tricksies?