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I am not buying into any of the other discussions about illegal immigrants – it seems that approving of ILLEGAL immigration is as crazy as approving of anything else illegal.
I just want to challenge all these economic arguments.
“They steal jobs”
“They cost billions”
and so forth. All these arguments on economic grounds are grossly overstated.
For a start, they ignore consumption. Millions of residents, both legal and illegal, live on some kind of benefit. They spend virtually all of it; the general rule is that the less you have, the less you save and the more of it goes into daily consumption. Try taking all these people out of the shopping circle, and you’ll see a storm of bankruptcies and rising unemployment, and a lot less flowing back into government coffers. In fact, because money goes around, the net cost of an underpaid worker or a welfare recipient is only a fraction of what they “receive.”
Second, “stealing jobs and depressing wages.” It would be silly to say they don’t, but it is not so obvious what that means to the rest of us. The poorest take some jobs that would not otherwise go to a higher paid local – instead, the job would go away. If it cost more to have a nanny, a pool cleaner or gardener, you might do without. In another set of jobs, paying more will increase the cost of goods, and that normally leads to less demand and consumption – again, an increase in unemployment. In a third set of jobs, “illegals” make up the seasonal reserve – employed when things are busy, the first to be laid off when things go quiet. They are not “stealing” anyone else’s job – at least not anyone who needs to be in full employment all the time. They do, on the other hand, allow some things to be produced that might otherwise be impossible logistically.
Finally, and this is a two-way sword: if they do depress wages, then it brings USA closer to the Indian model, producing for less. You could say it makes the country more competitive. I don’t buy that argument, however, because it cannot be a great goal to make your country competitive by making your people poorer. Any industrialized nation must compete on better technology, not lower wages, or else it is behaving like a third world country.
So, of all the money reasons given against immigrants, the only I’d really pay credence to is that it builds an underclass and ultimately a more backward country.
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