Comments Elsewhere

… Fortunately, markets do work, so there’s no need to fear doing that.

“You are mistaken. Perhaps you looked at studies that only take into account direct government aid, and do not consider costs like education, health care and infrastructure. Education costs alone, for the children of poor immigrant workers, far exceed the money those families contribute in taxes.”

False. Studies such as Rea and Parker’s or Donald Huddle’s that show net tax deficits from immigrants suffer from numerous errors in estimating both cost and revenue, and inflate costs through the use of phony “job displacement” costs to social services. Perhaps you are looking at studies such as these, which routinely ignore revenues from taxes such as FICA, unemployment insurance, vehicle registrations and fees, state and federal gasoline taxes, etc., which simply ignores nearly $30,000,000,000 in taxes paid by immigrants every year.

In fact, accurate counts show that the annual cost of government schooling for immigrants’ children comes out to about $11,000,000,000 per annum. That’s a lot of bread, but certainly not more than the $70,000,000,000 or so paid in taxes. It turns out that immigrants cause a net local tax deficit due to educational costs; but so do native-born families. State-level impacts vary from state to state; the overall affect at all levels of taxes and spending, including such factors as education costs, comes out to a net annual tax surplus of $25,000,000,000 to $30,000,000,000 per annum once you’ve actually counted up all the taxes that immigrants actually paid. (You can see studies by, e.g., Michael Passel and Michael Fix. (Some of the research is dated, having been produced during the immigration debates in the mid-1990s. But if anything costs of immigrants to taxpayers have largely decreased as a result of measures such as the 1996 welfare reform bill.)

But set all that aside for a moment, in any case. Suppose immigrants did, in fact, cause a net tax deficit. What would follow? That might be a reason to push for measures that restrict the availability of government-funded services to immigrants (and save a cool $4,000,000,000 annually that was formerly spent on La Migra, while you’re at it); but it wouldn’t be any reason at all to justify further enforcing draconian immigration restrictions. So why aren’t you lobbying for restrictions on government benefits to immigrants rather than restrictions on immigration?