Is Illegal Immigration Benefitting the USA?

Posted by Jack

Is Illegal Immigration Benefitting the USA? The answer is yes and no…

In purely economic terms, illegal immigration is harmful because it floods our 21st-century economy with 19th-century-style low-skilled workers.

Almost 60 percent of adult illegal immigrants lack a high school education. That’s more than nine times the rate among native-born Americans.

This has three consequences. First, it means big costs for taxpayers. Workers with little education don’t earn much money, so they pay little in taxes and use a lot of government services.

For example, half of Mexican immigrant families use at least one welfare program. It’s not a question of laziness; it’s just that the average high school dropout cannot support a family in a modern society like ours without government assistance, no matter how many jobs he or she has.

The second problem is that it reduces the wages of low-skilled Americans. As we flood the market for entry-level jobseekers, they lose the ability to demand higher salaries. Research shows that illegal immigration has cut the earnings of poor Americans by 7 percent, and even forced some out of the job market.

Finally, by keeping wages lower, illegal immigration takes away much of the incentive to invest in labor-saving technologies that make workers more productive, thus slowing the innovation that’s needed for continued economic vitality and competitiveness.

What worked for our country 100 years ago is no longer helpful. Cutting illegal immigration levels is vital to ensure broad-based economic prosperity in the future.

Unfortunately, illegal immigrants now compose up to one third of the prison population in some States. Criminal aliens — non-citizens who commit crimes — are a growing threat to public safety and national security, as well as a drain on our scarce criminal justice resources. In 1980, our federal and state prisons housed fewer than 9,000 criminal aliens.1 Today, about 55,000 criminal aliens account for more than one-fourth of prisoners in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities, and there are about 297,000 criminal aliens incarcerated in state and local prisons. That number represents about 16.4 percent of the state and local prison population compared to the 12.9 percent of the total population comprised of foreign-born residents.

The estimated cost of incarcerating these criminal aliens at the federal level is estimated at $1.5 to $1.6 billion per year. 3 That cost includes expenses in the federal prison system and the amount of money paid to state and local detention facilities in the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP). It does not include the costs of incarceration at the state and local level, nor does it include the related local costs of policing and the judicial system related to law enforcement against criminal aliens.

Our fiscal cost study in 2010, estimated administration of justice costs at the federal level related to criminal aliens at $7.8 billion annually. The comparable cost to state and local governments was $8.7 billion.

Illegal immigration does have some undeniably negative economic effects. Similarly skilled native-born workers are faced with a choice of either accepting lower pay or not working in the field at all. Labor economists have concluded that undocumented workers have lowered the wages of U.S. adults without a high-school diploma — 25 million of them — by anywhere between 0.4 to 7.4 percent.

Economic activity produced by illegal immigrant spending employs about 5% of the total US workforce. Illegal immigrants occupy over 3 million dwellings, or just under 4% of the total number of homes in the US. UCLA research indicates immigrants produce $150 billion of economic activity equivalent to spending stimulus every year. The advantages of illegal migration tend mostly to be on the side of the employer. An employer will benefit from the illegal status of a migrant who is desperate for work and therefore prepared to accept poor pay, usually below local norms. Hiring an illegal worker also brings the employer the advantage of paying less in the way of welfare contributions and other non-wage costs. However, would legal US workers be taking up the slack if the illegals were suddenly not available? Chances are they would and at a slightly higher cost, but none the less better than the cost of keeping them on unemployment or welfare.

http://www.fairus.org/issue/criminal-aliens
http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/high-school/top-10-myths-about-immigration
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/upfront/debate/index.asp?article=d090108
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/01/news/economy/immigration_economy/index.htm?section=cnn_mostpopular
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigrants_in_the_United_States