The concept that immigration is good for a nation's economy is dogma among economists. It's hard to argue with the notion that skilled, hard working people immigrating into the U.S. would ultimately help the economy grow. But to get that result one would have to ignore the illegal immigrants.
It would be nice to have an immigration policy that only allowed in those people who could actually contribute to the economy. But there has been no such policy for years. However, there have been millions of illegal immigrants.
So it's interesting to see the results of a study on the cost of illegals to taxpayers. See The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers.
Introduction
A continually growing population of illegal aliens, along with the federal government’s ineffective efforts to secure our borders, present significant national security and public safety threats to the United States. They also have a severely negative impact on the nation’s taxpayers at the local, state, and national levels. Illegal immigration costs Americans billions of dollars each year. Illegal aliens are net consumers of taxpayer-funded services and the limited taxes paid by some segments of the illegal alien population are, in no way, significant enough to offset the growing financial burdens imposed on U.S. taxpayers by massive numbers of uninvited guests. This study examines the fiscal impact of illegal aliens as reflected in both federal and state budgets. ...
They calculated that during the period under study the income tax revenue from them was $18,968,857,700 which when subtracted from the total national cost of $134,863,455,364 yielded a net loss of $116 billion.
Read the article for the detailed breakdown. But the conclusion has to be that economists claiming the economic value of immigration have to ignore the illegals.
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1:00 PM 9/27/2017
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