Class to dispel myths about immigrants

Are you certain that Operation Streamline is not working because the Obama Administration is touting their enormous success at reducing the flows of illegal aliens at the border. It seems to me that Operation Streamline might be working as part of the overall strategy although I believe little that Big Sis Nappy has to say about what is happening at the border.

In any case, "tens of millions" is several orders of magnitude short of the $10 billion that the Camarata study finds illegals are costing us. And of course that is only at the Federal level and almost everybody agrees that the real cost burden of illegal immigration falls on the States.

Of course all policy decisions have consequences. You are bemoaning the costs of enforcement. I would contend that these costs are trivial compared to the costs that would come with legalization. Most illegal aliens are already paying about as much tax as poor people ever pay: very damn little! Legalizing them won't do much to increase the revenue stream. But if they are legalized they will suddenly be eligible to tap into the full buffet of social services and that is going to cost taxpayers a bundle. That is pretty much the point of the Robert Rector study. Legalization will cost us hundred of billions.

While my strong preference is to make life so miserable for the illegals that they uproot themselves and leave at their own expense for the same reason they came here which is a better life, if I can't get that kind of enforcement, I am far happier with the status quo where they live in the shadows and are prohibited from tapping into many kinds of welfare programs than with the idea that we would give these criminals legal status that allowed them to latch onto taxpayer funded programs like bloodsucking leeches. We already have more than enough of our own native born poor for taxpayers to support and we don't need to import anymore poverty.

The second study by FAIR is almost entirely about costs. Also, FAIR is notorious for cooking its numbers, quite possibly because it allows its political ideology to shape its research instead of the other way around.

The first study by Camarota is better, but it arrives at its net deficit primarily by including the ever-increasing costs of criminalizing undocumented immigrants, which is a choice of US policy and not the inevitable result of the actions of undocumented immigrants. This is precisely where considerations of power relationships come into the equation. It is also the point of examining the unnecessary price of programs like Operation Streamline, which cost tens of millions of dollars each year and fail to deter undocumented immigrants, the very justification for their creation. There is a self-fulfilling prophesy revealed in the Camarota study that relates to how the US decides to use its resources.

Here are a couple that you can easily google:

The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget - That study just looks at the Federal Budget and shows about a $10 billion annual NET cost after accounting for the taxes they paid. But of course the real heavy costs are incurred at the State level because they bear the brunt of education, healthcare and justice.

The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers - This study looks at both the Federal and State impact NET of the taxes they pay and come up with a total annual cost to taxpayers of about $100 billion.

Off the top of my head I can also remember a study by Robert Rector of the Heritage Org which document the cost of Bush's amnesty in the hundreds of billions, net of the meager taxes they pay and a study by the Congressional Budget Office which concluded that illegal aliens were costing more than they contribute.

And just simple logic is all a reasonable person needs. Illegal aliens are overwhelmingly poor and poor people pay very little taxes but their kids cost just as much (or more because of ESL) to educate as other kids. Poor people are more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system and indeed hispanics (used as a rough proxy for illegal aliens) are over-represented in prison populations and both the Bush and Obama Administrations have been deporting illegal alien criminals by the hundreds of thousands annually and there seems to be an endless supply of these criminals so it is laughable to argue that illegal aliens are not committing crimes. And a very large segment of the uninsured population that is the major cost driver for Obamacare and healthcare generally is illegal aliens. And did I say that poor people pay very little tax?

If you are arguing that illegal aliens benefit us because they make the economy grow there is some tiny truth to that. If you add 100,000 illegals, the country probably needs to build a new Taco Bell, a new Walmart and a few other businesses to service them. More people equals more economic activity. But that is just "junk growth". The pie is bigger but there are also more people eating it. China will eventually have an economy larger than our own but since they have 5 times as many people, the majority of them will still be much poorer than our people. The more people equals more economic activity argument is bogus. If it were correct we would just throw open our borders and invite all of the world's 5 billion desperately poor for our taxpayers to support. Then we would be really well off ..... not!

You are the one making the argument that illegal immigrants are good for the economy and therefore should be accepted. It is akin to the economic argument for slavery in the old south. Just because some people are making money as a result of illegal immigration does not make it acceptable.

"Numerous studies say otherwise." Name one. Name a single study that honestly tallies total costs versus total benefits to the US economy and arrives at a negative net result. There are several that track just the costs, but that is only half the picture.

One of the things I was trying to get across here, Anon, is the power balance in this equation. If you are willing to step back for a second, to get outside of your perspective, to consider the issue more contextually beyond just the moment of "illegality," you might be able to see how imbalanced relationships of power prove the fly in your ointment.

Your conclusion insists that those with the least amount of power and money in the equation bear the largest degree of responsibility for the end result. That is a strange calculus.

And beyond that, there are undirect costs. Unskilled Americans have been suffering wage stagnation for two decades and currently are suffering much higher unemployment. Middleclass American taxpayers are having to support these poorer Americans with social programs that supplement their low wages or with unemployment payments. Meanwhile, 8 million illegal immigrants hold unskilled jobs in America and only a small percentage of them are working in agriculture. Most of them are working at jobs like construction and hotel maids, that traditionally and until recently have been held by unskilled Americans and recent LEGAL immigrants. The illegal aliens are displacing and/or depressing the wages of the poorest Americans which obviously hurts them and additionally are costing the taxpayers who end up supporting these poorer citizens which damages taxpayers. It is a double whammy!