If you build it, they'll still come (Part I)

If you haven't heard, a lot of people want to build a wall between the US and Mexico. In Virginia, people who are frustrated with the federal government's handling of immigration are taking things into their own hands. These people don't like illegals coming into the US for several reasons. According to many of these people, illegal immigrants burden us with costs (hospital fees, schooling for their children, etc.) and don't pay taxes. They're taking jobs away from US citizens. They also burden us with high amounts of crime, they're responsible for most gang violence, and our prison system is filled with illegals. And we need to secure our border to protect ourselves against the terrorists, like the 9/11 terrorists that came across the Mexican border. However, it turns out that most of these claims are false and are nothing more than thinly veiled racism.

The first myth: illegals are costing US taxpayers billions of dollars by using our hospitals through Medicare, enrolling their kids in our schools, accepting welfare and many other things that they aren't paying for. The simple answer to this question is that they are paying for it. Illegals pay taxes just like anyone else. Some don't pay everything because they work "under the table" jobs, while others pay too much because they don't file their tax returns, even though they're legally allowed to. But with all these costs are they really paying enough in taxes to cover all the benefits they're receiving? According to Donald Huddle, an economist from Rice University, illegal immigration has a net cost (total cost minus total taxes collected from illegal immigrants) of $42.5 billion from 1970-1992, and $69 billion as recently as 1997. However, those numbers have been disputed by several sources, one of which is the Urban Institute, which published a study saying that through many errors of assumptions and calculations you can turn the $42.5 billion loss into a $29 billion surplus. The biggest of mistakes by Huddle was he did not include their Social Security taxes taken out as the taxes they were paying, which was about 15% of each of their paychecks. That alone would cut the $42.5 billion cost down to $12.5 billion. You can check out the other details of their report here.

The right-leaning (although they claim to be bi-partisan) Center for Immigration Studies has claimed that illegal aliens cost the US $10 billion, they pay $16 billion and use $26 billion in services. My first concern with this study is, since they are linked to Republican Party immigration restrictionists on Capitol Hill, how fair can their numbers be? Did they use some of the biased techniques used by Donald Huddle? Even if their study is completely fair, they admit themselves that "with nearly two-thirds of illegal aliens lacking a high school degree, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments, not their legal status or heavy use of most social services." Which means that if they are costing us money, it's because they're poor and therefore pay less taxes, not because they're using our schools or on welfare. By the way, no illegal immigrants are on welfare. They can't get approval for that with their illegal status. If they're raising a child that is a US citizen then they can get funding for the child but not for themselves. Yet, CIS considers this $1.9 billion cost a benefit received by an illegal rather than a citizen. In fact, many of the other costs they consider are for their children that have citizenship. Even so, if we're criticizing the illegals because they cost us money, and the reason they cost us money is because they're poor, we might as well ship all of our poor people to Mexico, legal or not, Mexican or not, because they're such a drain on the government. Plus, it sounds like the legal poor are costing us a lot more than the illegal poor, because they actually know how to use the programs and are not scared of deportation.