The Big Lie: Illegal Immigration Benefits Americans
It’s widely been reported that illegal aliens comprise upwards of 27 percent of the US prison and jail population. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — two agencies within the Department of Homeland Security — claim in several reports that they’ve apprehended over 100,000 criminal aliens whose offenses go far beyond violation of immigration laws and regulations.
Sadly, only about 25 percent of expenses for imprisoning criminal aliens is reimbursed by the federal government to state and local governments. This creates a hardship for taxpayers in states with high incarceration rates for criminal aliens. The proponents of open borders or lax immigration enforcement always point to the benefits derived from illegal immigration such as the amount of taxes they pay into the government system. Evidence, however, exists that refutes those claims. For instance, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence that suggests a large number of illegal aliens are paid “off-the-books” therefore those wages are not taxed.
“Californian officials have estimated that the net cost to taxpayers in order to provide government services to illegal immigrants approached $3 billion during a single fiscal year. The fact that states must bear the cost of federal failure turns illegal immigration, in effect, into one of the largest unfunded federal mandates existing today.”
The National Research Council has estimated that the net fiscal cost of immigration ranges from $11 billion to $22 billion per year, with most government expenditures on immigrants coming from state and local coffers, while most taxes paid by immigrants who actually do pay taxes go to the federal treasury.
The net deficit is caused by a low level of tax payments by immigrants, because they are disproportionately low-skilled and thus earn low wages, and a higher rate of consumption of government services, both because of their relative poverty and their higher fertility.
This is especially true of illegal immigration. Even though illegal aliens make little use of welfare, from which they are generally barred, the costs of illegal immigration in terms of government expenditures for education, criminal justice, and emergency medical care are significant.
Californian officials have estimated that the net cost to taxpayers in order to provide government services to illegal immigrants approached $3 billion during a single fiscal year. The fact that states must bear the cost of federal failure turns illegal immigration, in effect, into one of the largest unfunded federal mandates existing today.
In addition, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, even with free trade, the United States continues to enjoy a higher real wage than other nations, due to the superiority of US technology. If taken to an extreme and the US removed all barriers to migration, most foreign workers would move to the United States, lured by the higher wages available here; Foreign labor would essentially cease to exist.
However, with all labor now in the United States, the prices of goods would return to their level of self-sufficiency, prior to the opening of trade. That is, perfectly free migration entirely eliminates the gains from trade that US natives had enjoyed. World income rose with the migration, but the natives of foreign countries in this case received more than all of this rise, since the income of US natives declined. With the world’s majority of low-wage workers in the US, there would be tremendous damage to free trade and its benefits, with US middle and upper-middle class workers suffering the brunt of declining wages.
The urge for a utopian state of existence and a desire to make all things equal by the American Left has given way to a desire simply to make all things equal sans utopia. In their passion for a neo-Marxist level for the masses, they’ve decided consciously or subconsciously that if they could not bring the World’s population up to the American level of prosperity and wealth, then they will bring US citizens down to the World’s level of poverty and misery. For this is a result of seeing free trade as a zero-sum entity, and self-alienation of the American Left from their own country, the USA.
Read more by this author on our site here. (Scroll down)
Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he’s a staff writer for the New Media Alliance. He’s former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed “Crack City” by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations. He’s also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country. Kouri writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer and others. He’s a news writer for TheConservativeVoice.Com. He’s also a columnist for AmericanDaily.Com, MensNewsDaily.Com, MichNews.Com, and he’s syndicated by AXcessNews.Com. He’s appeared as on-air commentator for over 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc.
March 20th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Lars Larson, a great radio talk show host in Oregon, often argues that removing the tax breaks to employers with illegals would be a great start. I agree. Employers get tax breaks for each employee. If that tax break was removed because the employee could not provide valid proof of citizenship/right to work then employers would start to not hire illegal immigrants into jobs like hotels, trucking, food-service (you know, all those jobs that “Americans won’t do”).
This certainly would do little in those employment sectors where payment is under the table, such as a lot of agriculture and construction, but it would send a message, and would be a great start to fixing the problem.
March 20th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Here is the AthlonGuy immigration plan:
To get any results, priority must be with stopping future illegal immigration, not on punishing the ones already here. The plan of making life intolerable for illegals here already, with the hope word will spread to potential future migrants is not workable. These illegals have set up roots, have friends, family, and colleagues here, many of those legal voters.
* Begin building a border fence now, similiar in effectiveness to the Israeli fence, with a goal of ending all 500,000 illegal annual crossings. (Accept the tunnel problem. It only takes 1 phone call to shut down a tunnel, and you can’t run 10,000 people through a tunnel without notice.)
* Increase authorized Mexican immigration by 1%, on the condition the fence construction begin. Challenge the Democrats to match the plan of increasing Mexican immigration. (The only people allowed to legally immigrate will be the rich & smart, the same VISA rules we have for every other country.)
* Distance yourself from the Minutemen. They brought much needed attention to the border problem, should be thanked for that, but they are a liability at this point. Some of these guys may be gun nuts looking for trouble. There’s no point in taking responsibility for them without any control over them.
* Worker reform, arresting non-migrant crimes, and border reform are totally separate issues. People who weld these together have the agenda of sabotaging them all.
* Inaction on this important issue is insulting.