You want numbers:

http://www.csus.edu/news/poverty.html

http://www.catholiccharities.net/whitepaper/povertychallenges.htm

http://www.jsri.msu.edu/RandS/research/wps/wp06.pdf

Do you wonder why both Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein are against a foreign workers program?

Why is the AFLCIO in agreement with Pete Sessions?

John Kerry talked against outsourcing; so, I guess, it is wrong to move your factory to Mexico but it is OK to bring those desperate workers here.

The economic benefits to immigration are true IF and ONLY IF we are talking about high-skill, educated immigants, many of whom who are from Asia. The economic benefits of low-skill, uneducated immigrants is much less clear. Asian immigrants also tend to climb the educational ladder as well (the Vietnamese restaurant owner whose son or daughter is in school to become a engineer or scientist). Such educational attainment is much less common to the latino immigrants, where both second and third generation immigrants still lag behind whites in both educational level and income.

Comparing Latinos to Chinese is like comparing apples to oranges. I believe the economic benefits resulting from Latino immigration are much less certain than for Asian immigration.

Now only three: Germany, France and Italy limit the working rights of the new EU member states. It was demonstrated that is is a good thing economically to have open borders to the new EU workers, so the other countries just changed their immigration policies.

Unfortunately, Britain’s working rules have some large kinks to work out in their system, as our inkycircus friends recently demonstrated: http://www.inkycircus.com/jargon/2006/05/so_long_farewel.html

I’m still not entirely convinced that the immigration brouhaha in the US isn’t fuelled at some level by a latent racism. It’s truly saddening to watch. What’s even more saddening is that this is one of the (very few) times I’ve agreed with the US president and his plans for guest worker status.

1) accounting for social security and such already does compete with the rest of the budget. All this of budget accounting system arithmatic that gets bandied around is fiction.

2) Auerbach and Oreopoulos (1997) show that immigrent’s impact on the budget is modest.

3) You are assuming that immigrants = low-skill and immigrants = low-pay. This is verifibaly wrong.

4) “Independently of what we may call it; a country in which 25 to 30% of the population identifies with another country, votes and participate in another countries election and remits most of their savings to another economy cannot be called the United States of America.” You are now implying that 25-30% of _everybody_ in the USA is an immigrant and that they are dual citizens. The actual percentage according to the last census (which does try to correct for undocumented workers) is abotu 11%. This may be found by googling “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States”

5) “The immediate economic result of such massive migration is an erosion of the quality of life, an escalation in crime, a diminished life expectancy, literacy rate and infant mortality of our population just to mention quantifiable changes.”

Ancedote and hyperbole do not equal fact. Show me numbers.

6) “he problem with that equation is that low skilled workers pay a smaller percentage of the tax burden while consuming more services. One $80,000 engineer produces more government revenue and uses less government services than four $20,000 agricultural workers.”

see point (5)

This has nothing to do with “renters do not add to the overall property taxbase.” The original point is that immigrant children who go to school are not taking putting a strain on the system. Instead their families are paying the school tax by paying the rent.

The point I am trying to make is that schools are finaced primarily through property taxes. To go to a particular school you must live in the area (forgetting for the moment some form of busing or school voucher programs). So the immigrants living in the area (both illegal or legal) must be paying either property taxes directly or indirectly through rent.

Also if you look at the incidence of the property taxes then it is the renter who are absorbing the full amount and paying the full amount. Think of it as follows. Draw a supply curve of quantity of apartments versus rent. In the short run you can increase or decrease the amount of apartments available in an area so this suupply curve is a verticle line. No draw a downward sloping demand curve for apartments, this can be at any angle but suppose it is 45 degrees. The intersection of the two is the market outcome (the horizontal axis is quantity and the verticle is rental price). Now suppose the town increases property taxes by some amount. Draw an new horizontal line at this new higher rental price. Where it intersects the demand curve is the quantity of apartments demanded and the intersection of the supply curve is the quantity supplied. This is the case you mentioned where even empty apartments are paying this tax. Now the landlords who own the apartments which are empty are making losses (since they are not getting the rent but are losing the taxes. Therefore, over the long run they leave the apartment market and the supply curve for apartments shifts to the left. This process keeps happening until supply equals demand again. Now this new equilibrium is at the new higher price. The landlord gets rent net of taxes while the rentor pays the new rental price, looking you can see the landlord is still gettting the same rent as before and the rentor is the one who is paying the higher amount.

On the health front:

I have never said “deny them the use of a hospital” I am arguing that since they are a small part of the flow into hospitals every day, they are not a major strain on the health care system. I agree with you that kicking them out if they can’t pay is barbaric.

The point here is this The cost of an emergency room visit is not that large. The cost of ICU care and all that is very large. On the other hand the probability that an illigal immigrant will end up in ICU care is very very small while the probability that they will end up in an emergency room is small but not that small. Looking at the _expected_ average cost of health care then the cost is not that big. This is balanced with the tax revenue that they generate and any hospital fees that they pay. On the net these two things balance out, and in situations where they do not the effect it has on american citizen’s taxes is very small.

Independently of what we may call it; a country in which 25 to 30% of the population identifies with another country, votes and participate in another countries election and remits most of their savings to another economy cannot be called the United States of America.

The immediate economic result of such massive migration is an erosion of the quality of life, an escalation in crime, a diminished life expectancy, literacy rate and infant mortality of our population just to mention quantifiable changes.

Notwithstanding that some poor as a whole may benefit from being poor in an environment where poverty is richness as compared as the areas where they originate. In the long run openness to migration results in a disincentive to the needed ethical and political changes in the countries were the migrants originate.

The reason why our politicians are showing no leadership and constantly babble incoherent slogans is due to the fact that very soon; sometime within the next nine years the cost of Medicare-Medicaid and Social Security combined will exceed the revenue from employment taxes that have been used until now to cover for excessive government spending of the last quarter of century. When that event arrives the cost of these services would have to be paid in part with funds from other sources, meaning that Social Security and Medicaid-Medicare will be in competition for money with all other government programs including the military

The meaning of this is that future governments would have no choice but to raise taxes or cut services to an elderly population. Unless they can convince a population of minority third world workers to pay increased taxes while receiving less services. The problem with that equation is that low skilled workers pay a smaller percentage of the tax burden while consuming more services. One $80,000 engineer produces more government revenue and uses less government services than four $20,000 agricultural workers.