Imigration in America

[Jester]

Illegally smuggled cigarettes are much cheaper than legal ones, and sin tax free. What would be different? Bootleg liquor is cheaper than the legal, and highly taxed stuff.

Smuggled cigarettes are cheaper than legal ones because they're exactly the same as legal ones, only without the sin taxes. I wouldn't advocate massively taxing heroin, pot, or meth, because that would just put you back to square one - a tax is just a lesser form of a ban. Put the taxes up high enough, and you create a potential black market equal to the price differential between the smuggled and legal substances. Keep the taxes low, and that differential will be zero or negative - hence, no black market, no profit for gangs.

Bootleg liquor is a quality issue, in addition to a tax issue. Your bottle of JD's is, in the end, a high-quality premium product. Your crazy uncle's backyard moonshine, on the other hand, tastes like industrial solvent and hellfire, and will probably make you blind. If you want super cheap liquor, just buy some bulk alcohol from a chemical supply store, and dilute it with something or another. Wham, cheap liquor. It'll just be totally disgusting and maybe a little dangerous.

Once government, and the pharma companies are involved, they will not be able to make the price competitive with what is available on the street. The illegal trade will continue.

That's crazy talk. Have you seen the price of cocaine on the street? 100 bucks a gram. A *gram*. That's the down payment on a small house per kilo, and for a truckload of the stuff? Millions and millions of dollars. Hiring a couple Bolivian campesinos to make the stuff with plastic buckets and machetes is cheap. Really cheap. It would cost even less if there were no paramilitaries taking a cut.

Only a devout libertarian could possibly think that government regulation costs *that* much, that a legal pharma company couldn't put cocaine on the shelf for less than $100 a gram. I bet they could do it for a tenth of that. No patents to worry about, no R&D, just manufacture and bottle.

Pot, meth, heroin, extacy, etc... all have similar price profiles. Made for peanuts, sold for riches, with all the money going to the layers of smugglers, gangs and middlemen.

I think there is a tipping point where law enforcement gets overwhelmed by the incidence of crime, and investigation becomes nearly impossible. I've seen this happen elsewhere, such as Zimbabwe, or even South Africa.

You're seriously comparing the US, in terms of being potentially overwhelmed with crime, to South Africa, Somalia, or (gods forbid) Zimbabwe? I'm no big fan of the cops in the States, but I'm pretty sure they can keep at least that much of a lid on things, that it doesn't degenerate into Colombia circa 1970. Heck, even Colombia is managing to get a handle on its kidnapping problem, and it still doesn't even come within a mile of the US in terms of enforcement power.

Yes, we are talking about degree. I'm looking at the motivation for human trafficking, which is not about getting poor Mexicans to work in the US. If the reason for coming voluntarily disappears, the trafficking of people will continue (as it does from other places not south of us). We are the destination for victimized peoples from every place where life is cheap.

Well, human trafficking is still about getting poor Mexicans (or Asians, or Africans, or Eastern Europeans) to work in the US. They're just taking it a step further - rather than individuals working voluntarily for employers willing to look the other way (or being deceived), it's families or organizations sending people into quasi-slavery to service willing employers.

But the same concept applies - the easiest way to combat this process is to have a safe, legal alternative. Prostitution is probably the most odious form of human trafficking, although I do always wonder the extent to which there is more compliance than the figures let on. But, allow legal prostitution, and the market for coerced prostitutes diminishes.

Maybe we could pay them to go back and "say" there are no jobs here.

Yeah, there's that whole thing about them not being stupid, though. They'd take your money, go back, say there are a bunch of idiots in the US giving out free money, and be back across the border before lunchtime.

http://www.fairus.org/site/DocServer/ca_...?docID=141

This is an advocacy group. They are plainly not an unbiased source, and this is plainly not an impartial analysis. I'd characterize them as being extreme.

Second, their estimates of revenues from taxes are based on one study from 1994. On this topic, 16 years is a very long time, and with the rise of widespread employer penalties, much larger numbers of illegal migrants are moving to forged documents rather than avoiding taxes. Fake green cards and SSNs are not that hard to get, but if you want to use them, you have to suffer the tax consequences.

Third, this does not challenge the assertion - that most illegal migrants pay taxes, at least the ones that come off your paycheque. (Almost none earn enough to owe income taxes anyway.) It merely asserts that the costs far outweigh the benefits. Fiscally, they are probably right, although I don't think by the margin they give. (Specifically, lumping the education costs of US citizen children of illegal migrants in with the costs of illegal migrants is unfair, since it is also the US who will gain the benefits of their education and labour when they grow up. These are citizens, and dealing with them as exceptional smacks of xenophobia, at best.) Economically, they're wrong. Lower prices and a more flexible labour pool generate substantial revenue to offset the costs. Remember Bastiat! An employer's savings, an illegal worker's wages, or a consumer's cheaper grocery costs go *somewhere*, even if you can't see where.

So, maybe let's try someone else. How about this guy? Or maybe the CBO? Both of them pretty much say that migration is somewhere between a small net cost, and a wash - although the net winner is the Federal Government, and the net losers are the State governments of the border states. In a fair world, that would be easy to fix - just transfer the cost back from Washington to the border states. But that's another issue.

In any case, the amount lost by Joe Average in the US from illegal migration is practically zero. If you're rich and you live in California, it might show up on your tax bill, but even then, it's not a heck of a lot. If migration stopped dead in its tracks tomorrow, I doubt anyone would even notice, in terms of their tax burden.

The lowest 40% of wage earners owe no taxes, and many are "owed" tax credits by those who do pay taxes. I believe we are near the point where the majority of people in the US do not pay income taxes at all.

I presume they can't be "owed" tax credits, since they can't claim anything back - they have no legit social security number. To whom are they going to direct a rebate? To a nonexistent individual?

The only real taxes they'd be paying anyway, even if they were as legal as the Supreme Court itself, are social security contributions, and they don't get those back because they have no legal identity. That's just about 7 billion a year in free money the US Federal government gets, with no way for the worker to ever claim it back.

-Jester