Finding Solutions on Illegal Immigration

Fire of Liberty

Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a great Q&A with Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies. If you want to see an intelligent and serious study of the problems that tend to bubble up with regards to the massive illegal immigration at our Southern border, you only have to check out the CIS web-site. For the meantime read what Camarota has to note in the Q&A about what a blanket amnesty being proposed in the Senate would mean to our federal and state public services. Here's a look:

Q: When we talk about social services and whether illegals pay more in taxes than they get in services, the number $10 billion a year is often used.

A: The $10 billion is what I estimated. They use $10 billion more in services at the federal level than they paid in taxes. ... The kicker for me is, if we legalize illegals and they began to pay taxes and use services like legal immigrants with the same level of education, the cost would roughly triple. An unskilled illegal immigrant is costly but an unskilled legal immigrant is a fiscal disaster because, although presumably he is being paid on the books and he pays his taxes like he's supposed to, he is now eligible for everything, or a lot of things, but he still doesn't make any money.

That's the problem. The reason immigrants create a fiscal cost is not because they are illegal. They create a fiscal cost because they have very little education and people with very little education don't pay much in taxes, because they don't make very much. But they tend to use a lot in services. If we legalize them, it makes the problem much worse.

Think about this: every unskilled worker who's paid on the books mostly gets our $32 billion Earned Income Tax Credit. That means that every unskilled worker comes with a bill. That's one of the reasons the costs explode so much if you legalize illegal immigrants. Right now, I estimate that illegals are getting one-tenth of what they are entitled to but if they began to get the EIT fee like legal immigrants, with the same level of education, well, the costs would go up 10 fold. That's a welfare program a lot of conservatives like, but it's also one that's very expensive.

So we can talk all we want about making the 12 million illegals legal but we would be doing a disservice to the American citizenry and the 25 million immigrants who came here legally. Thanks for folks like Steve Camarota and the wonderful folks at CIS for keeping us up on the problem of illegal immigration.