Are all those so adamantly against a barrier in favour of an open border? Hayes is, so far, the only one who has proposed that.
Illegal immigrants don't pay taxes. However; they benefit from social services (county hospitals, education systmes, sanitation & water, etc...). Thus they are in fact a burden as it the more illegal immigrants come in, the more taxable services they use without contributing. These services are not free and come at a cost to taxpayers.
Illegal immigrants lower labor expenses. US farmers would have much more difficulty competing if it weren't for illegal immigrants. And the average tax payer would shoulder the burden as the gov't would have to subsidize their crops even more. Manufacturing, construction, janitorial services, restaurants - anything which requires cheap labor. These workers are much more motivated than the kid at McDonalds and are more productive because of the leverage against them. That said, we should discourage any additional illegal immigration and do everything we can to stop people from coming here illegally. And children of illegal immigrants should not be granted automatic citizenship.
I don't mean your anecdotal analysis. That is too simplistic and doesn't evaluate whether there is a NET burden or not. I don't own a corporate farm. Corporate farms get subsidies which come at a cost to taxpayers. Can I conclude that corporate farming is a burden or an asset to the country from that? No.
This is a false stereotype propagated by corporations who get nicer margins circumventing minimum wage laws. Greater profits for them, but that money is flowing out of the U.S. and no tax is being paid on wages. It's a double drain. Not only are the illegal immigrants being exploited, but so are the workers they are displacing. Are you in favor of exploitation? Are we a freaking banana republic?
Workers being displaced? And who are these skilled laborers being displaced and where were they before these immigrants arrived? Where is the 20 foot line waiting to pick crops and wash bathrooms? Where are the skilled laborers waiting to put up drywall and sheet rock and put on new roofing? And where is that ad on Monster waiting to peel potatoes and wash dishes? Some workers may be exploited but many are not as companies pay them minimum wage. They may accept it whereas if they were legal they wouldn't - but that helps keep costs down. There is a reason India and China's economies are growing at a much faster rate and why everything is being outsourced. Cheap skilled labor. They keep costs low which allows companies/business owners to make profits so they can stay in business and hire more people. And yes money does flow out of the country but these people also add to the economy with purchases and sales tax. So Western Union is not charging them to wire money? Take economics 101. It may help.
Illegal Immigrants help stave off Social Security collapse. STOCKTON, Calif. - Since illegally crossing the Mexican border into the United States six years ago, Ángel Martínez has done backbreaking work, harvesting asparagus, pruning grapevines and picking the ripe fruit. More recently, he has also washed trucks, often working as much as 70 hours a week, earning $8.50 to $12.75 an hour. Not surprisingly, Mr. Martínez, 28, has not given much thought to Social Security's long-term financial problems. But Mr. Martínez - who comes from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico and hiked for two days through the desert to enter the United States near Tecate, some 20 miles east of Tijuana - contributes more than most Americans to the solvency of the nation's public retirement system. Last year, Mr. Martínez paid about $2,000 toward Social Security and $450 for Medicare through payroll taxes withheld from his wages. Yet unlike most Americans, who will receive some form of a public pension in retirement and will be eligible for Medicare as soon as they turn 65, Mr. Martínez is not entitled to benefits. He belongs to a big club. As the debate over Social Security heats up, the estimated seven million or so illegal immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a subsidy of as much as $7 billion a year. While it has been evident for years that illegal immigrants pay a variety of taxes, the extent of their contributions to Social Security is striking: the money added up to about 10 percent of last year's surplus - the difference between what the system currently receives in payroll taxes and what it doles out in pension benefits. Moreover, the money paid by illegal workers and their employers is factored into all the Social Security Administration's projections. Illegal immigration, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, co-director of immigration studies at New York University, noted sardonically, could provide "the fastest way to shore up the long-term finances of Social Security." It is impossible to know exactly how many illegal immigrant workers pay taxes. But according to specialists, most of them do. Since 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act set penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, most such workers have been forced to buy fake ID's to get a job. Currently available for about $150 on street corners in just about any immigrant neighborhood in California, a typical fake ID package includes a green card and a Social Security card. It provides cover for employers, who, if asked, can plausibly assert that they believe all their workers are legal. It also means that workers must be paid by the book - with payroll tax deductions. IRCA, as the immigration act is known, did little to deter employers from hiring illegal immigrants or to discourage them from working. But for Social Security's finances, it was a great piece of legislation. Starting in the late 1980's, the Social Security Administration received a flood of W-2 earnings reports with incorrect - sometimes simply fictitious - Social Security numbers. It stashed them in what it calls the "earnings suspense file" in the hope that someday it would figure out whom they belonged to. The file has been mushrooming ever since: $189 billion worth of wages ended up recorded in the suspense file over the 1990's, two and a half times the amount of the 1980's. In the current decade, the file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year, generating $6 billion to $7 billion in Social Security tax revenue and about $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes. In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social Security Administration, nine million W-2's with incorrect Social Security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages. Social Security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. But they suspect that the portion is significant. "Our assumption is that about three-quarters of other-than-legal immigrants pay payroll taxes," said Stephen C. Goss, Social Security's chief actuary, using the agency's term for illegal immigration. Other researchers say illegal immigrants are the main contributors to the suspense file. "Illegal immigrants account for the vast majority of the suspense file," said Nick Theodore, the director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Especially its growth over the 1990's, as more and more undocumented immigrants entered the work force." Using data from the Census Bureau's current population survey, Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group in Washington that favors more limits on immigration, estimated that 3.8 million households headed by illegal immigrants generated $6.4 billion in Social Security taxes in 2002. A comparative handful of former illegal immigrant workers who have obtained legal residence have been able to accredit their previous earnings to their new legal Social Security numbers. Mr. Camarota is among those opposed to granting a broad amnesty to illegal immigrants, arguing that, among other things, they might claim Social Security benefits and put further financial stress on the system. The mismatched W-2's fit like a glove on illegal immigrants' known geographic distribution and the patchwork of jobs they typically hold. An audit found that more than half of the 100 employers filing the most earnings reports with false Social Security numbers from 1997 through 2001 came from just three states: California, Texas and Illinois. According to an analysis by the Government Accountability Office, about 17 percent of the businesses with inaccurate W-2's were restaurants, 10 percent were construction companies and 7 percent were farm operations. Most immigration helps Social Security's finances, because new immigrants tend to be of working age and contribute more than they take from the system. A simulation by Social Security's actuaries found that if net immigration ran at 1.3 million a year instead of the 900,000 in their central assumption, the system's 75-year funding gap would narrow to 1.67 percent of total payroll, from 1.92 percent - savings that come out to half a trillion dollars, valued in today's money. Illegal immigrants help even more because they will never collect benefits. According to Mr. Goss, without the flow of payroll taxes from wages in the suspense file, the system's long-term funding hole over 75 years would be 10 percent deeper. Yet to immigrants, the lack of retirement benefits is just part of the package of hardship they took on when they decided to make the trek north. Tying vines in a vineyard some 30 miles north of Stockton, Florencio Tapia, 20, from Guerrero, along Mexico's Pacific coast, has no idea what the money being withheld from his paycheck is for. "I haven't asked," Mr. Tapia said. For illegal immigrants, Social Security numbers are simply a tool needed to work on this side of the border. Retirement does not enter the picture. "There will be a moment when I won't be able to continue working," Mr. Martínez acknowledges. "But that's many years off." Mario Avalos, a naturalized Nicaraguan immigrant who prepares income tax returns for many workers in the area, including immigrants without legal papers, observes that many older workers return home to Mexico. "Among my clients," he said, "I can't recall anybody over 60 without papers." No doubt most illegal immigrants would prefer to avoid Social Security altogether. As part of its efforts to properly assign the growing pile of unassigned wages, Social Security sends about 130,000 letters a year to employers with large numbers of mismatched pay statements. Though not an intended consequence of these so-called no-match letters, in many cases employers who get them dismiss the workers affected. Or the workers - fearing that immigration authorities might be on their trail - just leave. Last February, for instance, discrepancies in Social Security numbers put an end to the job of Minerva Ortega, 25, from Zacatecas, in northern Mexico, who worked in the cheese department at a warehouse for Mike Campbell & Associates, a distributor for Trader Joe's, a popular discount food retailer with a large operation in California. The company asked dozens of workers to prove that they had cleared up or were in the process of clearing up the "discrepancy between the information on our payroll related to your employment and the S.S.A.'s records." Most could not. Ms. Ortega said about 150 workers lost their jobs. In a statement, Mike Campbell said that it did not fire any of the workers, but Robert Camarena, a company official, acknowledged that many left. Ms. Ortega is now looking for work again. She does not want to go back to the fields, so she is holding out for a better-paid factory job. Whatever work she finds, though, she intends to go on the payroll with the same Social Security number she has now, a number that will not jibe with federal records. With this number, she will continue paying taxes. Last year she paid about $1,200 in Social Security taxes, matched by her employer, on an income of $19,000. She will never see the money again, she realizes, but at least she will have a job in the United States."I don't pay much attention," Ms. Ortega said. "I know I don't get any benefit. http://www.casademaryland.org/press/april5-2005.htm
Immigration is what made this country great. BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY Monday, July 2, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT Reformist Mexican President Vincente Fox raises eyebrows with his suggestion that over a decade or two Nafta should evolve into something like the European Union, with open borders for not only goods and investment but also people. He can rest assured that there is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision. To wit, this newspaper. We annually celebrate the Fourth of July with a paean to immigration, the force that tamed this vast continent and built this great Republic. This is not simply history; immigration continues to refresh and nourish America; we would be better off with more of it. Indeed, during the immigration debate of 1984 we suggested an ultimate goal to guide passing policies--a constitutional amendment: "There shall be open borders." The naysayers who want to limit or abolish immigration look backward to a history they do not even understand. Each new immigrant group has been derided as backward, unclean, crime-ridden and so on; each has gone on to adopt the American dream of a free and independent people, and to win advancement economically, politically, socially. The ability to assimilate is the heart of the American genius, precisely the trait that sets the United States off from other nations. Immigration makes the U.S. what it is. On this Fourth of July we celebrate this history more forthrightly than we have in two decades. Anti-immigrant hysteria peaked in 1996, when the California Republican Party self-destructed with anti-immigrant themes. Today the GOP is led by George W. Bush, who told campaign audiences "family values do not stop at the Rio Grande." The employer sanctions in the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill are now recognized as windmill tilting. Congress has repeatedly raised the limits on H-1B visas for engineers and such, to 195,000 a year from an original 65,000. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court twice held that aliens are people too, entitled to such basic rights as the presumption of innocence, petty 1996 legislation notwithstanding. At the same time, the U.S. is gradually relearning the secret of assimilation--every informal recognition of cultural differences but no formal ones. "Bilingual education," which trapped schoolchildren in a Hispanic ghetto for the benefit of ethnic politicians and a few teachers, is on its way out. Racial quotas generally are under increasing suspicion. In the next census, in 2010, increasingly meaningless and irritating questions about ethnicity may be abolished. This too bodes well for future acceptance of immigrants. Immigration now runs about a million a year against a population of 275 million, a rate that remains below the historical average. The proportion of immigrants with postgraduate education is three times the native rate. New immigrants are no longer eligible for welfare, removing that bugaboo. A study by the National Research Council in 1997 found that while unschooled immigrants are net recipients of taxpayer money in the first generation, their children repay these costs. About half of current immigrants are Hispanic, though the Asian component is projected to grow rapidly. By far the largest single source is President Fox's Mexico, a Third World nation of nearly 100 million inhabitants sharing a 2,000-mile border with the U.S. The opportunity north of the border is inevitably a huge magnet for the poor but ambitious. There is no realistic way to stop the resulting flow of people--certainly no way that would be acceptable to the American conscience. This was headlined last May when five sunburned and dehydrated survivors staggered up to Border Patrol agents in a desert called "The Devil's Path" about 25 miles north of the Arizona-Sonora border. Searchers found six more survivors, then 14 bodies. Smugglers had abandoned the group in 115-degree heat without water. This is no isolated instance; last year 491 souls perished trying to immigrate. With the U.S. Border Patrol doubled by the 1996 act, these victims were forced to risk death in increasingly desperate corridors. Sealing the border against people willing to risk death is not a practical option, let alone a morally attractive one. The only hope is to manage the flow of people in a constructive and humane way. As President Fox says, "By building up walls, by putting up armies, by dedicating billions of dollars like every border state is doing to avoid migration, is not the way to go." Item one in any agenda to ease border problems would be rapid economic development to provide opportunity within Mexico. It's entirely possible that Mexico will become the next tiger economy. It has the huge advantage of free trade with the world's largest market. For all its poverty, it has a large first-world economic sector and a technocratic elite educated at the best American universities. Contrary to stereotypes, the general population is exceptionally hard-working. Politically President Fox promises a fresh start after ending 71 years of one-party rule. If Mexico can avoid the currency depredations that have marred its last quarter-century, the immigration problem may start to fade. North of the border, the solution to the problem of illegal immigration is to make it legal, or at least to normalize the movement of people. A program of temporary work visas would allow Mexicans to go home; the incentive for undocumented aliens now is to stay rather than face the border barrier a second time. Laws and regulations can generally be made more generous. The 1996 Border Patrol expansion is a dubious expense, expanding a cops-and-robbers game that sometimes turns deadly. After the 14 deaths in May, the Mexicans promised to patrol their side of the border in especially dangerous areas, while the Border Patrol promised to arm agents with pepper balls rather than bullets. During the campaign, President Bush talked of dividing the Immigration and Naturalization Service into two agencies, one to police the border and another to aid immigrants already here. Another amnesty for undocumented aliens is already in the air; every decade or so Congress somehow or another faces this reality. Even opening Nafta borders completely, I would dare to suggest, might not unleash a new flood of immigrants. There is a limit to the number who actually want to come, and experience suggests that many of those who do already can find a way. And after all, we did have a long history of unlimited quotas for Western Hemisphere immigrants, ending only in 1965. President Fox is nothing if not a visionary. Many scoffed at his ambition to unseat the machine that had run Mexico for generations; now they scoff at his proposals on immigration. But over the decade or two he mentioned, a Nafta with open borders may yet prove not so wild a dream. Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=95000738
Your confusing legal immigration (those with some skills) versus illegal immigration - which is usually the poorest and most uneducated. No - you won't find those jobs advertised on monster - not because no one wants to be a builder, but because it would be illegal to advertise a job for below minimum wage. Sorry - this country is not a sweat shop.
Thanks for the laugh - what a great theory that illegals will never collect benefits. Do you know that after a certain number of years these illegals become legal?
Once again, thanks for a big laugh... I'm not against immigration silly. I'm against ILLEGAL immigration. Do you know what the difference is? Apparently not.
What basis do you have to believe that illegal immigrants have no skills? You can argue that illegal immigrants are criminals - technically they are. You can argue they shouldn't be here - technically they shouldn't. However, many illegal immigrants who are here do have skills. They may not have the time to wait 8 years for a green card and go through the beauracratic nightmare or have relatives who can help expedite the process. And what proof do you have that illegal immigrants don't make at least minimum wage? Maybe some apple pickers but not everyone. There is strong demand for day laborers with skills and I doubt they're working for $1.50/hr. I can guarantee you that if illegal immigrant has fake papers (which many obtain), corporations who hire them are paying them minimum wage.
this myth has been debunked numerous times on this thread. they pay taxes. the only taxes perhaps most illegals wouldn't pay are payroll/income taxes. and given that federal income taxes are progressive aint like most illegal immigrants would be paying 35% income taxes. and given that local taxes are mostly regressive they do pay their share if not more. county hospitals/education are paid for by local taxes. sanitation/water bills are paid by those who use those facilities. do your research for once.
Have you had a problem with illegal immigrants pushing you out of your home? Me neither. Is the presence of illegal immigrants forcing you out of your job?? Me neither. Am I suffering because of all the "handouts" that I supposedly am giving to illegal immigrants?? Not that I am aware of. Apparently you are...
At least somebody read them. Even if one were to grant the total made up number from the anti- lobby, what is that 'drain' in comparison to the trillion dollar economy? Even if you were to prove a net deficit, that would still leave you the task of showing it was a significant enough deficit to worry about (rather than a populist hot button issue). IF you did that you'd still have to overcome the moral/historical rationale for encouraging this immigration. That history goes suprisingly far back to the Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson cited King George III’s obstruction to immigration to the colonies as a grievance: He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
