Remember that it is dangerous to open your mouth. indigoblueskies (your source for all things pie), and wee mama (who's got a serious Jones for pooties and home made chocolate) took an innocent comment of mine regarding the societal costs of undocumented workers families and have along with Sardonyx's kind mention in top comments forced me to post a little diary about some of the common myths of Illegal Immigrants on welfare. I'm not gonna link to the original comment because it was in relation to a HR I tossed someone's way in a probably unjustified way and this was my ex-post facto justification. The person I did HR is no doubt a good person.
Moral is people - don't be afraid of teh Jooz, teh Gayz, or Santa Anna's sleeper cells.
OK, let's leave our passports at home...head out into the desert, past ICE, the minutemen...and over.the.fold.
OK...we're in. Now, let's quickly run off to the nearest city, apply for welfare, subsidized housing and start to procreate so that we can put our children in public schools while we are off doing our principal occupation which is destroying American jobs when we have the time from running drugs and getting into DRUG.WARS.IN.YOUR.TOWN!!!!!
This is a fair portrait of all illegal immigrants, well the brown ones from teh mexico...if you are Lou Dobbs. So now that you have all the background you need to discuss, form your opinions and vote/blog/lobby on immigration issues, you can go join the minutemen (motto: getting drunk and shooting at Latinos protecting our borders since 2005).
Myth #1 - Illegal Immigration depresses wages. FAIL
Hordes of immigrants rushed into the state in the last 25 years, competing for jobs with the least educated among the native population. The wages of high school dropouts in California fell 17 percent from 1980 to 2004.....Unlike California, Ohio remains mostly free of illegal immigrants. And what happened to the wages of Ohio's high school dropouts from 1980 to 2004? They fell 31 percent.
<snip> There is scant evidence that illegal immigrants have caused any significant damage to the wages of American workers.
Across the entire labor force, the effect of illegal immigrants was zero, because the presence of uneducated immigrants actually increased the earnings of more educated workers, including high school graduates.
NY Times
Myth #2 - Illegal Immigration drains the government coffers. FAIL
The Center for Immigration Studies, a build more fences kind of organization put out a study that says the following:
Households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household," said Steven A. Camarota, the author of the study.
CASE CLOSED!! except. Camarota, the guy who wants more fences goes on to say that.
The study acknowledged that, on average, the costs that illegal-immigrant households bear on the federal government are less than half that of other households, and that many of those costs relate to their U.S.-born children
And even more telling
the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments, not their legal status or heavy use of most social services," Camarota said.
And these are the guys AGAINST illegal immigration. In fact, illegal immigrants according to this study, and this study is about the worst one says that illegal immigrants get 26 million dollars of the 55 billion that they would be entitled to based on the amount of taxes they already pay, were they legal. i.e. rather than being a drain, they actually claim less than half of the resources a similarly situated legal family would.
Further this study is flawed:
The costs of the children of immigrants are accounted for [in the report], but not their contributions to the economy as workers and taxpayers,
According to Frank Sharry, Director off the National Immigration Forum cited in the same article
In fact most sources acknowledge that illegal immigration is a net gain for governments although there is some dispute that for unskilled immigrants there is a nominal cost.
3 - Illegal immigrants are bankrupting our schools. FAIL.
An infamous LTE in the Oregonian (I can't find the letter online) in Portland Oregon was a righteous complaint from a 'gentleman' in regards to a positive article about the daughter of an illegal immigrant who had been denied a scholarship despite being academically gifted and an honor student. The gist of his point was that even though the girls father had stable employment, that whatever he paid in taxes didn't match the $11K or so that his daughter's education cost the school district (Oregon's average is about $8500). So far, so good. However the gentleman then put in enough information about his own income and rental status to demonstrate that if paying "his share" was the test, then he would have to disenroll his own children on the basis of taxes he paid in. This is a classic red herring argument. The majority of parents don't pay enough in taxes to cover public school education because of the way they are funded. People without children, business properties and so on all help to fund schools.
But the myth underlying this one is Myth #4
4 - Illegal immigrants pay no taxes.FAIL
Most (although certainly not all) immigrants have payroll taxes paid on their behalf. Some of this is fraudulent Social Security Numbers obtained by undocumented workers, much of it is SSN's attached by unscrupulous business' without the immigrants knowledge. Having an 'illegal' found at work (which almost never happens aside from these infamous raids), is a relatively minor issue - fines. Having workers but not paying payroll taxes can shutter a business and put an actual person (as opposed to an undocumented immigrant, they aren't REAL people after all according to these people) in jail. But payroll taxes are merely one of the many taxes that immigrants pay even if they do not pay the employee contribution (medicare, FICA, unemployment, sales taxes and so on), and undocumented workerss claim less than half of the benefits that these taxes pay for. Further, most of the undocumented workers wouldn't owe a significant amount, if any, of the employee portion of income tax anyway. Less, if they have children.
Undocumented workers pay taxes, according to the article in #2 above, some 16 billion dollars in federal taxes alone. And that is just a portion of actual taxes when you factor in sales taxes, state and local payroll contributions, the indirect property taxes paid through rentals and so on.
5 - Illegal immigrants are on welfare. FAIL
he "problem" of undocumented workers accessing the benefits is an exception. Although it is possible that a classroom might have a majority of kids on these services, and it's possible that they could the children of undocumented workers. It would be an extreme outlier and a serious legal breach of confidentiality and/or utterly inappropriate teaching for him/her to have asked the questions to know this. The likelihood is so slim for this to be actually the case a teacher would need to be willfully ignorant of the special status of his/her class - or...perhaps embellishing because of teacher fatigue (often). But even so:
Welfare fraud statistics show an overall downward trend in absolute numbers, even while the US population shows a trend of population increase due to immigration and a positive birth rate
Most statistics that show an increased use of these types of social safety net problems neatly elide 'non-nationals' with undocumented. Non-nationals are just that, people born outside the US. that includes legal immigrants just arriving to the country. Of COURSE they use more social services until they are established. In fact, undocumented use of welfare and other such services are almost non-existent amongst families without children, and not terribly prevalent even amongst families who could legally access such services because of American born children.
Undocumented immigrants AVOID services to avoid deportation.
6 - Illegal Immigrants are forming drug gangs. FAIL
I assume that here on Kos we all now the response to this. The war on drugs causes drug gangs. Enough?
7 - The problem of 'illegal immigration' is illegal immigration.
It's been noted many times that the minutemen aren't so hot on monitoring the Canadian border. The illegal immigration argument has been consistently been shown to often be either latent or conscious false flags for discomfort over racial issues. We've all heard the infamous quotes about how could Cesar Chavez get into the country (answer, he was born in Yuma AZ), but polls consistently show that people consistently overestimate the number of latinos in their communities and elsewhere that are undocumented. In some demographics by almost 10x.
The question of immigration is clearly an economic one. Here, at Kos, most people understand at least the contours of the real discussion (me), and many more know the topic intimately. We do not fall for the 'secure' borders nonsense (the next terrorist attack that comes from an illegal crossing the Mexican border will be the first). The existence of drug gangs is first a function of disastrous war on drugs. Even though the net cost to society of illegal immigration is small to begin with, what cost there is could be mitigated most easily by workplace reforms that ensured living wages and a basic level of benefits that at the very least kept people in preventive care and out of emergency rooms. Not by building fences and foolish efforts to irradicate "illegals" one at a time. The question of undocumented 'welfare queens' is merely a bit of wedge rhetoric, the demonization of an underclass or "other" that's been at the heart of real evil around the world.