WASHINGTON (April 24) - The government's plan to crack down on illegal workers could cost employers more than $1 billion a year and legal workers billions in lost wages, a study commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says.
WASHINGTON (April 24) - The government's plan to crack down on illegal workers could cost employers more than $1 billion a year and legal workers billions in lost wages, a study commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says.
There never was a good war or a bad peace.
Benjamin Franklin





the wages referred to in the article are only 'lost' to legal US workers who are currently unemployed because an illegal alien fraudulently used their social security number to illegally obtain a job with a US employer ! The only additional 'cost' to US employers would stem from being forced to pay higher wages in order to attract 'legal' workers away from sitting home and collecting social welfare benefits to replace the illegal aliens they would be forced to fire if existing federal laws are actually enforced.
Also, the article does not mention that by firing illegal workers and setting a clear policy that illegal workers will not be hired by 'reputable' US companies, the federal, state and local gov'ts will save far more than a billion dollars. The savings will come from the illegal aliens deciding that there isn't any cushy job (comparatively speaking versus Mexico or wherever) waiting for them in America, such that some percentage will decide to return to Mexico or wherever. For every illegal alien family that leaves the USA, the federal + state + local gov'ts stand to save over $3000 per year in social welfare benefit costs, 'free' medical care costs, 'free' education costs etc.
(snip)""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, author of the study.
The costs outlined in the report include government services such as Medicaid, medical treatment for the uninsured, food assistance programs, the federal prison and court systems, and federal aid to schools."(snip)
also note that the federal $2,700 per year net figure is in 2002 dollars, and does not add in state and local gov't costs !
from
... edit to add a more recent study result that does include federal + state + local gov't costs ...
(snip)"Posted: April 11, 2007
1:00 am Eastern
© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON – Someone has finally fixed an approximate taxpayer cost of between 12 million and 15 million illegal aliens residing in the U.S.
A new study by the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector found a household headed by an individual without a high school education, including about two-thirds of illegal aliens, costs U.S. taxpayers more than $32,000 in federal, state and local benefits. That same family contributes an average of $9,000 a year in taxes, resulting in a net tax burden of $22,449 each year.
Over the course of the household's lifetime that tax burden translates to $1.1 million."(snip)
from
Based on Prof. Rector's 2007 dollar figures, if increased enforcement of illegal alien employment laws resulted in even one million illegal alien families returning to mexico or wherever, that would translate into a $22.5 BILLION dollar annual savings to federal + state + local gov'ts !
Last edited by Melonie; 04-24-2008 at 06:42 PM.





It's probably wishful thinking, but I would love to see a US foreign aid policy designed to assist the Mexican government in raising the standard of living of Mexican citizens. I don't know, perhaps something like this exists already through other channels....business development..whatever.
It seems to me that it would just be more effective to find solutions for why they need to leave their country, rather than pouring resources into rounding them up or catching them at the border.
If the existence of so many illegal immigrant workers is actually an economic drain on the country, a business case could be made for spending a like amount on fixing the problems causing the exodus. imo. I guess it's more convenient to demonize them.





^^^ actually, it's more convenient to encourage Mexican illegals to exit via our northern border rather than our southern border ...
(snip)"Refugee costs over $300,000
Don Lajoie, with files from Doug Williamson, Windsor Star
Published: Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Costs of taking care of the 300 Mexicans who have arrived in Windsor exceed $300,000, Mayor Eddie Francis said Monday.
Francis, speaking to media after council, lashed out at the federal government for not yet responding to the city's pleas for financial assistance to handle the tide of refugee claimants who have come from Florida following a crackdown of illegal immigrants in that state.
He said Ottawa must provide information to counter rumours that Canada provides free and easy refuge."(snip)
now if only we can encourage that 300 to become 300,000 ... and the cost to canadian taxpayers to go from CDN$300,000 to CDN$300 MILLION, Canadians might have some idea of the true financial impact that Mexican illegals are having on the US economy.





Hey, wait a minute...didn't we have that discussion already? haha.
But seriously, if an american legal worker was doing the job currently done by an illegal Mexican worker, and heading a family like in the study you cited, why wouldn't that family be a net $26,000 dollar a year drain on the tax coffers? Is it really assumed that every Mexican illegal = one american on welfare?
Sending them all up to Canada is again dodging the real problem. The "three Amigos" just met and had talks. Guaranteed one thing they didn't talk about was sensible solutions to the plight of Mexicans. Money for big business no doubt was the big concern.





^^^ oh agreed ... Canada has adopted an official policy of deporting illegal aliens with minimal 'due process' , something you and other Canadians are criticizing the USA for even beginning to emulate ...
(snip)"Canada has begun deporting its illegal immigrants with only a few days notice - and the result:
Portugal's ambassador to Canada, João Silveira Carvalho, has publicly told people to avoid trouble and to "stop feeding the myth" in Portugal that you can come to Canada without documents, several community members said
Some estimates hold that 15,000 people are working illegally in southern Ontario's construction and hospitality industries, and the Canada-wide figure is 300,000.
Immigration Canada said there will not be an amnesty. The federal agency said they have a legal duty to remove people who have come to this country without following the proper procedures.
Many in the group deported Sunday say they will try to return to Canada and resume the lives they have built.
"Shame on the Canadian government for deporting people who are working hard. We need those people here," Barata said.
"We have an obligation to the hundreds of thousands of people who play by the rules," Immigration and Citizenship Minister Monte Solberg said Sunday on CTV's Question Period.
In February, Immigration Canada notified the Portuguese embassy in Ottawa that it would continue with the current law and be strict in applying it, Maria Amélia Paiva, the consul-general in Toronto, told the Star's Isabel Teotonio. "(snip)
from
because they would receive the same social welfare benefits, and create the same costs to federal + state + local gov'ts regardless of whether they were sitting home or working at a low paying unskilled job. The difference of course is that the low paying unskilled job would still result in the collection of some amount of taxes to offset the cost of benefits consumed, whereas zero taxes are collected if they are simply sitting at home.if an american legal worker was doing the job currently done by an illegal Mexican worker, and heading a family like in the study you cited, why wouldn't that family be a net $26,000 dollar a year drain on the tax coffers?
If the legal American worker is unemployed, sitting home collecting benefits, and an illegal alien is working at an unskilled American job and also collecting benefits, you have a net contribution of one measure of tax revenue (from the illegal alien worker) but TWO bills for social welfare benefit costs.
BTW the only real point I was trying to make by bringing up the social welfare benefit cost equation again was to emphasize that the US Chamber of Commerce report deliberately ignored huge portions of the overall financial equation and selectively included only specific financial aspects in order to produce a result which is what their sponsors (i.e. US businesses who benefit from employing illegal aliens) wanted to hear !!!
~
Last edited by Melonie; 04-24-2008 at 07:31 PM.





I see your 30,000 Mexicans, and raise you 50,000 Europeans.
We're no saints either. We could be doing things better. With worsening economic conditions on the horizon, illegal immigrants will likely be scapegoated here too.
I still feel strongly that improving conditions for Mexicans in their country is a sensible way of dealing with the influx of Mexican illegal immigrants...and Canada should be assisting in this as well.
Homeland security says it will cost less than $100 million, the US Chamber of commerce's guy says it is going to cost anywhere from $8 billion to $37 Billion.
I'd have to say consider the source. Who is the US Chamber of Commerce anyway? According to their website
This sounds a little be like big tobacco saying that the evidence that smoking causes cancer is inconclusive.The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world's largest business federation representing more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions. It includes hundreds of associations, thousands of local chambers, and more than 100 American Chambers of Commerce in 91 countries.
I think an independent study should be done before we make any major decisions.
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We need to figure out how to close the borders. The most important reason is not illegal aliens. It's the other stuff coming over them. If people can cross, so can weapons, drugs, nuclear material, anything imaginable. I could sneak into Mexico tommorow and sneak back the next day without any trouble, and without ever seeing another living soul. So if I could get a bomb into mexico, I stand a pretty good chance of being able to get it into the U.S.





^^^ I agree that the porosity of America's borders is indeed a serious problem. It's not only a concern over 'what' border jumpers may be bringing with them, but even more seriously WHO those border jumpers might actually be (i.e. islamic extremists with both a death wish and Iranian nuclear material in a suitcase). But this thread is about illegal immigrants as workers.
Along those lines, there is a huge problem when 2/3rds of the border jumpers are unskilled, uneducated, functionally illiterate in English etc. Via 50 years worth of past gov't policy, America's economy has driven out most industries where an unskilled worker is able to produce enough added value thus justify a large enough paycheck to support a family without 'public' assistance. Those few high paying low skill opportunities remaining in the American economy are generally unionized and shrinking, thus limiting future employment opportunities for legal American unskilled workers as well as illegal unskilled workers.
In recent years, unskilled illegal workers were still able to easily find relatively high paying unskilled work in the housing / construction industry and in some other businesses where the US 'employer' was complicit in their crime i.e. paying them 'off the books', avoiding high taxes, avoiding high employee benefit costs, and cutting labor costs, which allowed the complicit US 'employer' to unfairly compete versus 'legal' US businesses. However, the housing crash plus intensified DHS enforcement have pretty much brought the demise of these sort of opportunities.
So today you have a situation where, at the very least, the pay rate for work that unskilled illegal immigrants are able to find in America is grossly insufficient to support a family. And thanks to various court rulings, those unskilled illegal immigrants and their family members are eligible to receive a cornucopia of social welfare benefits. Thus in an absence of available work, and with gov't mandates in place that illegal aliens must be subsidized by US taxpayers, every additional illegal alien entering the USA is an additional 'drain' on the American economy. So unless the US is planning to reduce the size of social welfare benefits / subsidies it provides to ALL poor Americans, and/or unless the US is planning to reduce the legal US minimum wage to stimulate greater employment opportunities for unskilled workers legal and illegal, illegal aliens entering the USA are worse than 'useless' in today's economy.
Arguably the study put out by the US chamber of commerce cherry-picked certain cost statistics in an effort to paint a picture that recent strict DHS enforcement against US employers of illegal aliens was costing those US employers lost profits. This is undeniably true in a narrow view. However, that same study made no effort to also include costs generated by illegal aliens to the rest of American society ... which FAR outweigh potential costs to US employers who will be forced to hire LEGAL workers, who will be forced to pay proper minimum wage + employee benefit costs etc.
Arguably the Mexican government has no interest whatsoever in limiting incentives for mexicans to illegally immigrate to the USA. After all, remittances to Mexico from mexicans illegally working in the USA is the country's #2 source of income (after oil exports). Working conditions and pay rates for most mexican job opportunities suck and will continue to suck, because the country simply does not have a sufficient degree of law and order - and mexican workers simply do not have a sufficient work ethic - to justify the huge foreign investments being made to turn that situation around. I have heard innumerable comments from corporate types that their recently constructed Mexican factories have been disappointing from a profitability standpoint despite the far lower labor costs compared to closed down US factories ( for reasons such as high mexican worker turnover rates, lack of worker 'common sense' or 'sense of responsibility' for the work they perform etc). Many of these corporate types have also commented that they are closing their Mexican factories in favor of even lower labor and energy costs available in Asia. Thus Mexico is now being stepped over in terms of globalization because it provides all of the 'bad' aspects of doing business in the 'third world', but at significantly higher costs than are available in Asia or farther south in South America.
Last edited by Melonie; 04-25-2008 at 03:44 AM.
What makes you think Mexico is poor? They border two oceans, have plenty of agricultural land to grow food, and are an oil producing country.
NAFTA is a foreign policy that was suppose to help but apparently it didn't help anyone.
Mexico receives billions of dollars from ex-patriots working and living in the United States when they send money back home. Exporting people is a profitable cause for Mexico.
The problem with Mexico is it is neck deep in corruption and lack of education for the populace.
^^Somewhere on the order of 52% of the population lives below the poverty line. At least according to the CIA fact book (online resource).
Make a note that our own country is on that path as well with the rapid redistribution of wealth that has been occurring over the last 30 years.
The real problem isn't the border being so porous, but the reason why the people of Mexico and Latin America want to come here in the first place. If there was no motivation to come to the US, then we could easily see who are the dangerous criminals that are crossing illegally and the hard working citizens will have the means to enter legally.
Closing the border is treating the symptom while ignoring the disease.
I've had many heated debates with my husband on this very topic. His arguement was: "Mexico isn't the US's problem. They need to solve their own problems."
Granted, I'll give him that. In a Utopian world, that is how things should be. But back to reality...
As an analogy (because I love analogies) What if you lived next door to a meth house? At first the problems might be so minor that it wouldn't even bear noticing. It isn't your house, so what can you do about it anyway? Maybe call the cops and report it as a meth house, but the cops need evidence, not speculation of the neighbors to actually do something.
Then things get worse. Your neighborhood starts to fall into disrepair due to all the drug addicts. The traffic is there at all hours. There are mild "chemical" smells coming from the house. You call the cops again, and again they need more than just a neighbor reporting a suspicion.
Then you start to experience health problems. Nothing serious, but enough to make you suspect the neighbor's chemicals may be the cause. You give up on calling the cops and talk directly with your neighbor. Of course they deny everything and you are afraid to challenge them (they are criminals after all).
Then one day, you return home to find that your house (along with several others) has been burned to the ground due to a chemical fire started in a meth lab. Because you didn't completely address the situation with your neighbor, now you don't have a house anymore.
I see this as the problem with the US and Mexico. If the US doesn't address the problem of the corrupt government in Mexico, the inattention will destroy our nation's economy as a by product (like the fire in the analogy).
Why has this been ignored for so long? Probably (like in the analogy) the US is afraid of a confrontation with Mexico leading to a war zone situation. Meaning, a battleground on US soil. Before we can address that situation, we would have to be sure that the illegal immigrants wouldn't side with Mexico.
Is there another way to get the problem solved? Sure, we begin economic development projects in Mexico for the Mexican citizens. Make the projects conditional on the removal of corruption. But the US isn't in any shape to be developing other economies when our own is such a mess.
We are in big trouble, folks. I hate to say it, but if we keep on this same road, economically speaking, the 1930's will look like a rough patch in comparison.
Promote yourself and earn more money! This is a business that is owned by strippers for strippers. Let's make that money!
^^^So you are saying we should burn down the Meth House that is Mexico before they burn it down themselves??





These are things for which Canada and the United States are uniquely positioned to help with. Our countries consistently rank among the highest in the world in terms of having a trustworthy civil service, and educating our citizenry. Aside from this, we rank among the wealthiest nations in the world, have a highly integrated trading regime, are conveniently located geographically, and have the greatest motivation to help them give their citizens a reason to stay home.
You've identified the root problem, and I think most of us agree about at least a close variant of this. The symptoms are apparent too. The question is what are we going to do about it? Treat the symptoms, or the cause? And that's what this thread is kind of all about.
That is the big question - how do we treat the cause?
Using the meth house example from above - we can simply call in the "guns" - aka the police - and clean up the neighborhood. No rehab = go to jail.
What are we to do? Invade Mexico and say it is for the better of the population? Already most of them blame their woes on a war from 100 years ago where they ceded unpopulated territory full of revolutionists (the Alamo, for all it's "American history" - WAS Mexican fighting Mexican.)
Do more trade with them? Simply reward the crooks that run the place anyhow?
Or, when you have bad neighbors, you build a wall.





Again, the US and Canadian private sector had originally poured a ton of development money into new industries near Mexico's northern border. For the reasons I stated earlier i.e. poor work ethic, high turnover rates, essentially zero common sense or sense of responsibility on the part of Mexican workers, failure of Mexican state and Federal gov'ts to actually 'rule' their citizens and maintain law and order / private property rights (to the point where kidnapping rich / influential Americans and Canadians and holding them for ransom is now Mexico's second most profitable domestic industry, after drugs !), Mexico has managed to 'piss away' hundreds of billions of dollars worth of development money already.The question is what are we going to do about it? Treat the symptoms, or the cause? And that's what this thread is kind of all about.
Left to their own devices, Mexico will never change this situation on their own ... if for no other reason than there is simply too much payola at stake for everybody from the president all the way down to the local cop on the beat in Tijuana. Thus the only effective way to change this situation is to send in the (already hated) Gringo NAFTA army. If this were to happen, while 95% of Mexicans would privately applaud the 'invasion', mainstream media would start screaming Colonialism and Vietnam / Iraq all over again.
Circling back on point, if US and Canadian laws were actually enforced to the letter, Mexicans would NOT have a strong incentive to try and border jump (i.e. the famous constitutional words 'or under the jurisdiction thereof' - which arguably makes babies born to Mexican mothers who are on US soil illegally citizens of Mexico not America). Arguably our own compassion for the plight of poor unskilled Mexicans and their children only aggravates the problem and makes an eventual solution more difficult.
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