American policy for illegla immigration has gone too far

It's not a matter of whether the labor of one illegal immigrant makes up the cost of any received free health care - it's whether the total economic contribution of all illegal immigrants makes up the cost of the free health care they receive. If anyone can find some estimates of the former, then we can actually determine whether the latter is such a travesty.

I don't like the fact that our hospitals are so overburdened and underfunded, but it seems to me that instituting draconian laws that punish the immigrant rather than the employer waving the dollar bill won't solve this problem. As long as there are no stiff penalities for employers and consumers who use illegal immigrants, we will never solve this problem. Expecting desperate and destitute people to put the law over their well-being has never once worked in human history and won't work now.

Finally, it sounds like the state really screwed up when it took the money away from charity hospitals and gave it to private hospitals. This money was going to illegal immigrants either way, so you can't blame them for budget shortfalls. And if this government gift allows the private hospital to turn an even bigger profit, then maybe we should direct our blame elsewhere.

 

You can whine about the costs all you want, but the fact of the matter is that the economic benefits of having illegal immigrants far far outweigh the costs; This is a basic fact that people like "Americans for Zero Immigration" can't understand, far from being voices of reason.

I don't understand how you can watch somebody clean your toilet or roof your house for 12 hours a day for sub-subsistence wages after risking their lives to get here and then think they want to fall off a scaffolding and break their back so they can "take it easy".

Our economy is dependent on illegal immigrants becuase consumers demand them and the economy needs them. Collectively we have made a choice, and we are stuck with the consequences thereof.

 

Very well put something needs tobe done the illegal immigration .This isn't just about mexicans immigrant is african,asian,cuban there are so many illegal immigrant working for next to nothing this problem is going to continue to hurt real hard working Americans .

 

If you're really interested in stopping illegal immigration then-

A. Throw Y in jail

or

B. Pass laws that require X and Y to pay a high enough wage so that U.S. citizens are willing to take the job.

The only way you're going reduce illegal immigration is to reduce the demand. Trying to reduce the supply will always as effective as pushing back the tide with a broom.

 

I'm pretty certain that every major study, excepting those commissioned by anti-immigration groups, concludes that illegal immigration has a beneficial effect on the economy on balance.

 

You are dead wrong. You are assuming that X is not free to hire cheaper labor too - when in fact it is the exact opposite - X is being a bad capitalist by not selecting the cheaper inputs - inputs which are cheaper due to a more competitive labor marekt. In fact, under the rules of the economy under which we operate - X deserves to go out of business as it is being inefficient. Access to cheap labor is available to all businesses in most regions of the country and they all take advantage of it. This keeps prices low for you and me, and it benefits the immigrants as well. On a microeconomic level, this is a net welfare gain.

This is dead wrong again. You are merely spouting. Illegal immigrants enable us to realize hundreds of billions of value in saved labor costs. If we didn't have them, we would have to import them ourselves at our own cost (unlike the current system in which the costs of getting here (both fiscal and physical) are borne entirely by the migrants.

The ultimate validator in all this is of course the market, which continuously demands them in its ruthless quest for efficiency. It's no different than Wal-Mart and it's oft envied success- as Robert Reich wrote yesterday in the Times (and a similar article in the New Yorker from a few weeks ago.) Wal Mart is not to blame for crowding out small stores or being a powerful buyer, consumers are to blame for being ruthlessly rational and choosing price over all other considerations

If illegal aliens represented such a net negative (especially in a market with such profound cost shifting) - we would no longer be prepared to accept them. But the fact of the matter is that those sums you quoted are a drop in the bucket compared to the economic value of a cheap labor force.

 

Sam, you're making pretty strong statements here that simply do not have any form of consensus in the labor economics literature.

Most labor economists and people that have worked on immigration believe that on net, we lose several billion dollars per year of total welfare due to illegal immigration. While it's true that some of the costs of illegal immigrants are offset by downward pressure on prices, it is by no means clear -- or even apparant -- that there is a net welfare benefit. I'd really like to see some peer reviewed material on that.

 

ahhhh..alas, common ground. i agree wholeheartedly. i haven't seen studies or numbers..just my perception.

 

If you are referring to the accounting cost, than so be it. But that is not what I am referring to.

As far as comprehensive studies, I don't know of any, but then I don't know of any comprehensive study that is from a credible source either that says there is a net welfare loss.

In the absence of evidence either way, given the general preference for free labor markets across the globe (I mean Malaysia is dealing with immigration issues right now as they need them to take low wage jobs - Malaysia!?!) combined with the relatively low level of social services that immigrnats here receive unlike, say guest workers in Scandanavia I find it hard to believe that we are unknowingly bleeding ourselves dry over a supply of deceptively cheap labor.

I do know that if we didn't have illegal migrants, we would have to import them at our own cost - presumably they would then require the same amount of social services. So where does that get us in the end?

 

Yes you are correct in that globalization as a whole presents a race-to-the-bottom scenario as far as living & working standards go -- but this is the system that we chose, voluntarily, as Americans, and the one that we fought the Cold War over and have been pushing for about the last 100 years or so. Hoisted by our own petard ultimately? It's highly possible.

 

{cynic}
I don't agree with this. That money would just be funneled into some other project.{/cynic}

 

A couple of solutions would be to have universal health care, or to allow all aliens to to be legal, and therefore take away the possibility of short changing the workers because they aren't legal.

 

Pros:

1. You don't get the 1 billion back - that money is going to go to presumably pay for either the guest workers we have to import or the native workers who take the same jobs and also fall off roofs & scaffoldings, etc. I don't know how much you'll get back - it's possible that it could cost even more.

2. Ghettos smaller? I don't know about that. It wasn't because of immigrants that whites left Detroit.

3. I think the fiscal shortfall between illegal immigrants taxes paid and costs incurred is, even estimated by anti-immigrant groups in the most favorable terms for your side of the argument, $10 billion annually. This is the figure that the anti-immigrant groups use.

Divided by roughly, 300 million americans, this equates to, at most roughly 33$ annually per American in tax savings - at worst.

You'll need all 33 bucks, because everything else just got more expensive.

4. Crime? Now this is just the height of speculation and presumes certain dispositions so I'm not going to address that. Suffice to say, however, Crime has dropped dramatically over the past decade despite the fact that immigration has continued unchecked. I doubt you could find any correlation there.