The Heritage Foundation has released a study on "low-skill" immigration that concludes that it will substantially raise welfare costs and poverty levels. They recommend the following:
1. The influx of illegal immigrants should be stopped by rigorous border security programs and strong programs to prevent employers from employing illegals.
2. Amnesty and citizenship should not be given to current illegal immigrants. Amnesty has nega�tive fiscal consequences and is manifestly unfair to those who have waited for years to enter the country lawfully. Amnesty would also serve as a magnet, drawing even more future illegal immigration.
3. Any guest worker program should grant tem�porary, not permanent, residence and should not be a pathway to citizenship. A guest worker program should not disproportionately swell the ranks of low-skill workers.
4. Children born to parents who are illegal immi�grants or to future guest workers should not be given citizenship status. Granting citizen�ship automatically confers welfare eligibility and makes it unlikely the parent will ever leave the U.S.
5. The legal immigration system grants lawful permanent residence to some 950,000 per�sons each year. This system should be altered to substantially increase the proportion of new entrants with high levels of education and skills in demand by U.S. firms. Under current law, foreign-born parents and siblings of natu�ralized citizens are given preference for entry visas. The current visa allotments for family members (other than spouses and minor chil�dren) should be eliminated, and quotas for employment- and skill-based entry increased proportionately.
Meanwhile, LaShawn Barber links us to Politics of Prudence which notes that a Columbuia University study found that over a 5-year period it would cost $340 billion to accomodate illegals, but only $206 billion to deport them.
LaShawn also dug up an editorial from the Gulf Times, a Qatar newspaper. Read this excerpt:
The estimated 1.1 million illegal immigrants currently in the nation's public school system cost taxpayers' $9.6 billion every year in an attempt to educate them (despite the illegal immigrant community's epidemic-scale dropout rates). The 2.2 million children of illegal immigrants in America, often referred to as "anchor babies" to ensure the parents can stay, add an additional $20 billion to that tab.
In California, the 2004-05 state budget spent $9,811 per pupil in the classroom. An estimated 425,000 illegal immigrants in the state's classrooms during that period cost taxpayers' more than $4bn - a figure that does not include the "anchor baby" population in the classroom.
More than 40,000 illegal immigrants jammed California's prison system in 2004, costing taxpayers $1.5 billion in tax funds not reimbursed by the federal government.
In one of the cruellest jokes played on the American taxpayers, illegal immigrants are allowed to claim children living back in Mexico and qualify for the earned-income tax credit that traditionally has helped the American poor (my emphasis).
These numbers are just the tip of a fiscal iceberg that government officials have slammed the American ship of state into - and now they are striking up the band and rearranging the deck chairs.
Americans hear the mantra every day that without illegal immigrants working in jobs that citizens are too lazy to do, everything from a clean hotel room to a head of lettuce would skyrocket in price.
A day without a Mexican - the refrain now goes - would literally lead to the collapse of the American economy. To the contrary, a year without the crushing weight of millions of illegal immigrants on communities and their budgets just may save the American working and middle class.
Yet there is precious little discussion of how a family of six Mexican nationals living in Pomona, California, who soak up nearly $40,000 annually in taxpayer funds just to educate their four children, is contributing more back into the economy. Consider even if the primary wage-earner in this family grossed $35,000 annually, a fortune back in Mexico, most of that income is likely to be off-the-books and under-taxed.
But education is only one part of the social services system meant for at-risk and in-need Americans that illegal immigrants have drilled into: heath-care costs and subsidised housing are two other areas where the crushing cost of illegal immigration is destroying the system.
It is arguments like this that have convinced many Republicans that George Bush, whatever his merits in fighting the GWOT, simply cannot be counted on to do the right thing to preserve this nation from the tsunami that is washing across the Rio Grande. Neither can about a dozen Republican senators and virtually all of the Democrats. That's why some are taking it upon themselves to raise the money and undertake the construction of a border fence.
If you'd like to help construct that fence go here.