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Follow me on this. Let’s suppose that we could shut the borders completely to all illegal immigration. Supposedly there are a lot of jobs that Americans just don’t want to do because they pay poorly etc. So in our pretend world, where with perfect borders, we now have no illegal immigrants. This would also mean that we don’t have enough workers to pick farm products, build houses, etc. So what would happen? Employers would be desperate to find workers, so they would raise wages, maybe even start offering benefits or better benefits. Suddenly those jobs would be more desirable and Americans would fill those jobs. Also, employers would start a serious lobbying campaign to improve the process for getting guest workers with special skills.
Of course this would ripple through the economy. The farmers and contractors would have to charge more for their products to offset the extra pay and benefits that they were now giving their workers or the cost of bringing in guest workers. This would cause prices to go up for consumers. On the workers side, you would now have more workers in the economy who were paying more taxes and better able to provide for their families, and so on.
Now let’s consider the way things are right now. Those jobs are filled by illegal immigrants. They pay some taxes, but not as much as the first situation we considered. They are not able to provide as well for their families. They use welfare services and ER provided “free” healthcare. Illegal immigrants bring crime and uninsured drivers. But, we consumers have cheaper farm products, cheaper houses, and so on.
In one case we pay more for our goods and services as consumers, but we have more self-sustaining families, who feel good because they can better provide for their families.
In the other case we pay more taxes and more social costs to provide welfare, healthcare costs for uninsured, and other social costs; and we have people living in the shadows of society not able to fully integrate, not able to honorably provide for their own house and so on, but we get cheaper goods and services.
It seems to me that we as a society pay either way so I guess you have to decide what you want to fund; more taxes and social costs or higher goods and service costs, but with better integrated more self-sustaining members of our country.
The choice is clear to me. Let’s have real immigration reform!
So, part of that is the recognition that if we really forced good e-verify or something like that many illegal immigrants would have to go home, so much so that we may not have enough jobless Americans to fill the jobs. That would force us to have a more comprehensive legal immigration or guest worker program. That is a good thing! You would still get people to be better paid, honorably able to take care of their own and more productive. Not only is having people to come here while paying them substandard wages only to treat them as barely 2nd class citizens cruel, but it borders on slavery.
The choice is clear to me. Let’s have real immigration reform!
Remember: The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. (From, Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt)
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