OUR VIEW: Illegal immigrants don't bleed us dry (vote in poll)
Much of the most recent rise in anti-illegal immigration sentiment is rooted in anger and resentment. Those emotions are fueled by silly math, regarding the costs of aliens coupled with recession anxiety. Most Americans aren’t bigots on a crusade against people with brown skin, as critics of anti-immigration hysteria too often charge. More typically, activists who fight against illegal immigration are overtaxed, overburdened and underpaid Americans, of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, who have bought false arguments that say immigrants add to their pain by costing them money. Their anxiety is easy to understand.
Jack martin, director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), told ABC News that illegal aliens cost each American household “in the neighborhood of a couple thousand dollars a year.” Accepted at face value, that stands to enrage working Americans who barely cover their mortgages and the costs of food and health care.
Instigators of rage are easy to find on this issue, and they deal in funny math that dismisses the value of work. Take Dean Martin, for example, who’s the Arizona state treasurer. Martin says his state loses up to $2.5 billion a year to illegal immigrants. It’s infuriating, if true. But it’s not true.
Most conservatives would be embarrassed if they understood the truth behind the hysterical, statist money claims they react to. The numbers are based on the estimated costs to society of schooling illegal immigrants and providing their medical care, incarceration and various social benefits (i.e., food stamps and other direct welfare subsidies) that millions probably receive and should not receive. Anger toward those costs is perfectly justified. Added to those costs are the highest possible estimates of what government isn’t collecting from illegal immigrants in taxes.
What’s never factored in are the monumental economic contributions made by illegal aliens as humans who work. Conservatives, especially students of Austrian or Chicago School economics, should understand this. When an alien cleans a motel room, he or she creates wealth by providing a service that moves society forward. When he or she nannies a child, that person helps create wealth. Illegal farm workers create wealth. Nobody could afford to pay them more than their value, so their jobs are not social gifts. The majority of illegal school children, educated at public expense, will grow to create more wealth than they consume because that’s what human beings do. By producing wealth in excess of consumption, humans improve the social condition.
The funny-math claims also neglect to account for earnings illegals spend in the United States, paying sales taxes, promoting trade and driving the production of wealth. By some estimates, illegal immigrants compose 5 percent of the U.S. economy.
Illegal aliens aren’t the only targets of funny math. The Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, issued a report in 2009 that said every tax dollar spent to fund abortion would result in a $4 savings to society. How so? By saving society the medical and social costs associated with unwanted pregnancies.
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It’s irresistible, on the surface. But it’s funny math. The study completely neglects the fact most humans mature to produce far more wealth than they consume in the course of a lifetime — whether or not they resulted from an unintended conception. If that weren’t the case, society would never have progressed economically and we’d all live in caves. The government estimates the average life-long value of a human to society at between $3.7 and $6.1 million — after all costs and subsidies are accounted for. Stanford economists estimate the value of the average human at $129,000 a year. If humans did not produce more than they consume, we couldn’t have public infrastructure, a national treasury or even a national debt. We would have no material wealth.
We do not need less immigration, because that would mean less wealth for all. We need less illegal immigration. That means we must secure the border and reform immigration laws. Reform must safely maximize the number of law-abiding immigrants allowed to migrate here legally — to produce wealth in our free market economy.
— Wayne Laugesen, editorial page editor, for the editorial board. Friend him on Facebook
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