You want numbers:

http://www.csus.edu/news/poverty.html

http://www.catholiccharities.net/whitepaper/povertychallenges.htm

http://www.jsri.msu.edu/RandS/research/wps/wp06.pdf

Do you wonder why both Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein are against a foreign workers program?

Why is the AFLCIO in agreement with Pete Sessions?

John Kerry talked against outsourcing; so, I guess, it is wrong to move your factory to Mexico but it is OK to bring those desperate workers here.

The economic benefits to immigration are true IF and ONLY IF we are talking about high-skill, educated immigants, many of whom who are from Asia. The economic benefits of low-skill, uneducated immigrants is much less clear. Asian immigrants also tend to climb the educational ladder as well (the Vietnamese restaurant owner whose son or daughter is in school to become a engineer or scientist). Such educational attainment is much less common to the latino immigrants, where both second and third generation immigrants still lag behind whites in both educational level and income.

Comparing Latinos to Chinese is like comparing apples to oranges. I believe the economic benefits resulting from Latino immigration are much less certain than for Asian immigration.

Now only three: Germany, France and Italy limit the working rights of the new EU member states. It was demonstrated that is is a good thing economically to have open borders to the new EU workers, so the other countries just changed their immigration policies.

Unfortunately, Britain’s working rules have some large kinks to work out in their system, as our inkycircus friends recently demonstrated: http://www.inkycircus.com/jargon/2006/05/so_long_farewel.html

I’m still not entirely convinced that the immigration brouhaha in the US isn’t fuelled at some level by a latent racism. It’s truly saddening to watch. What’s even more saddening is that this is one of the (very few) times I’ve agreed with the US president and his plans for guest worker status.

1) accounting for social security and such already does compete with the rest of the budget. All this of budget accounting system arithmatic that gets bandied around is fiction.

2) Auerbach and Oreopoulos (1997) show that immigrent’s impact on the budget is modest.

3) You are assuming that immigrants = low-skill and immigrants = low-pay. This is verifibaly wrong.

4) “Independently of what we may call it; a country in which 25 to 30% of the population identifies with another country, votes and participate in another countries election and remits most of their savings to another economy cannot be called the United States of America.” You are now implying that 25-30% of _everybody_ in the USA is an immigrant and that they are dual citizens. The actual percentage according to the last census (which does try to correct for undocumented workers) is abotu 11%. This may be found by googling “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States”

5) “The immediate economic result of such massive migration is an erosion of the quality of life, an escalation in crime, a diminished life expectancy, literacy rate and infant mortality of our population just to mention quantifiable changes.”

Ancedote and hyperbole do not equal fact. Show me numbers.

6) “he problem with that equation is that low skilled workers pay a smaller percentage of the tax burden while consuming more services. One $80,000 engineer produces more government revenue and uses less government services than four $20,000 agricultural workers.”

see point (5)

This has nothing to do with “renters do not add to the overall property taxbase.” The original point is that immigrant children who go to school are not taking putting a strain on the system. Instead their families are paying the school tax by paying the rent.

The point I am trying to make is that schools are finaced primarily through property taxes. To go to a particular school you must live in the area (forgetting for the moment some form of busing or school voucher programs). So the immigrants living in the area (both illegal or legal) must be paying either property taxes directly or indirectly through rent.

Also if you look at the incidence of the property taxes then it is the renter who are absorbing the full amount and paying the full amount. Think of it as follows. Draw a supply curve of quantity of apartments versus rent. In the short run you can increase or decrease the amount of apartments available in an area so this suupply curve is a verticle line. No draw a downward sloping demand curve for apartments, this can be at any angle but suppose it is 45 degrees. The intersection of the two is the market outcome (the horizontal axis is quantity and the verticle is rental price). Now suppose the town increases property taxes by some amount. Draw an new horizontal line at this new higher rental price. Where it intersects the demand curve is the quantity of apartments demanded and the intersection of the supply curve is the quantity supplied. This is the case you mentioned where even empty apartments are paying this tax. Now the landlords who own the apartments which are empty are making losses (since they are not getting the rent but are losing the taxes. Therefore, over the long run they leave the apartment market and the supply curve for apartments shifts to the left. This process keeps happening until supply equals demand again. Now this new equilibrium is at the new higher price. The landlord gets rent net of taxes while the rentor pays the new rental price, looking you can see the landlord is still gettting the same rent as before and the rentor is the one who is paying the higher amount.

On the health front:

I have never said “deny them the use of a hospital” I am arguing that since they are a small part of the flow into hospitals every day, they are not a major strain on the health care system. I agree with you that kicking them out if they can’t pay is barbaric.

The point here is this The cost of an emergency room visit is not that large. The cost of ICU care and all that is very large. On the other hand the probability that an illigal immigrant will end up in ICU care is very very small while the probability that they will end up in an emergency room is small but not that small. Looking at the _expected_ average cost of health care then the cost is not that big. This is balanced with the tax revenue that they generate and any hospital fees that they pay. On the net these two things balance out, and in situations where they do not the effect it has on american citizen’s taxes is very small.

Independently of what we may call it; a country in which 25 to 30% of the population identifies with another country, votes and participate in another countries election and remits most of their savings to another economy cannot be called the United States of America.

The immediate economic result of such massive migration is an erosion of the quality of life, an escalation in crime, a diminished life expectancy, literacy rate and infant mortality of our population just to mention quantifiable changes.

Notwithstanding that some poor as a whole may benefit from being poor in an environment where poverty is richness as compared as the areas where they originate. In the long run openness to migration results in a disincentive to the needed ethical and political changes in the countries were the migrants originate.

The reason why our politicians are showing no leadership and constantly babble incoherent slogans is due to the fact that very soon; sometime within the next nine years the cost of Medicare-Medicaid and Social Security combined will exceed the revenue from employment taxes that have been used until now to cover for excessive government spending of the last quarter of century. When that event arrives the cost of these services would have to be paid in part with funds from other sources, meaning that Social Security and Medicaid-Medicare will be in competition for money with all other government programs including the military

The meaning of this is that future governments would have no choice but to raise taxes or cut services to an elderly population. Unless they can convince a population of minority third world workers to pay increased taxes while receiving less services. The problem with that equation is that low skilled workers pay a smaller percentage of the tax burden while consuming more services. One $80,000 engineer produces more government revenue and uses less government services than four $20,000 agricultural workers.

Fortress Italy is not very different from Fortress America in assuming a siege attitude to handle immigration, which I find extra strange since non-Italians constitute only a few percent of the total population. Italy’s present immigration policies, the Bossi-Fini law signed in June 2002, are the logical conclusion of an extreme nationalistic (Fini was of the former fascist party) attitude, so lessons can be learned here of what results when bureaucrats mix together xenophobia, nationalism, and technical and economic ignorance and try to forge a national policy. You will find many elements of the following now underway in the US or as part of the new proposal.

Bossi-Fini makes it far more difficult for immigrants: 1) to obtain employment — they must have a finely-detailed job offer from an employer before entering Italy and their entry visa is good for a one-time-entry three months from the job offer, 2) to obtain resident permits — which are closely tied to the permit-of-stay, 3) to gain asylum — mostly impossible, and 4) to bring their families — only children or spouse– to live in Italy, while 5) facilitating expulsion from the country — a suspected immigrant can be picked up at any time and put in one of the new detention centers and ejected. Part of the permit-of-stay procedure is a set of fingerprints on file, that is, a full-pair of fingerprints, and palmprints, and handprints (afterwards your hands will be completely black with ink).

If you are not Italian, or are EU, then quotas exist for what number of work permits are allowed for the country, so get your application form, get in line and prepare to follow the procedure:

http://www.meltingpot.org/articolo6806.html

and that includes those people from the 15 new EU countries. If you are highly skilled (professor, researcher) your procedure is no different. Every immigrant is considered by the police and government workers as a potential criminal, and treated as such at the local police station, which alse serve as local center for processing permit-of-stay documents. Each of the local police stations send their documents to _one_ office in Rome (which handles all of Italy). And while you are having your permit-of-stay processed –which by italian law is supposed to take 6 weeks, you are not legally permitted to travel out of the country. My permit-of-stay has been ‘in process’ since November 2003. After trying to follow the rules for 6 months, I had to finally ignore it because travel is a necessary part of my job. Therefore, I carry with me a large stack of legal documents (work contract, etc) with which I can demonstrate that I have a legal reason to be living in Italy. But my expired permit-of-stay with the tiny ‘renewal-in-progress’ sticker does little to convince other EU border countries. For them, either I’m lucky or not, and I take my chances each time I travel. My scientific workplace has no experience handling immigration issues (because it is rare for a scientist to immigrate into Italy), so there is no help from there.

The new Bossi-Fini laws did not increase the number of personnel or offer new efficiencies to manage the new laws, thus creating a years-long backlong that grows exponentially with time, hence the ‘melt-down’ I referred to earlier.

The Italian economy is a disaster; it carries the highest debt after the U.S. with basic services that did not succeed to modernize from the 1980s and it is rapidly losing its economy to China. In addition, it is probably the only western country where the Brain Drain is an ongoing reality, witness the Italian expats (being much more educated than the national average) who helped vote Berlusconi out of office. Therefore, one would expect that Italy would welcome educated immigrants from poorer countries to help move the economy, but not so. Italian science is usually subsidized by the families of the researchers, so educated/skilled immigrants face a double hurdle of unliveable salaries without a family for support and a political nonstatus, so they don’t last long either. The immigration procedures polarize everyone immediately, those thinking of entering Italy are deterred, those inside of Italy illegally either try and give up the attempt to be legal, or else never try in the first place and live as a nonperson.

In summary: Italy’s immigration laws are the worst models to follow.

Urijah:

Citations for my claims “The coming generational storm” by Kotlikoff and Burns(2004) p. 112-114. THey in turn reference Auerbach and Oreopoulos AER (1997) p.176-180. THe money quote is “The impact of immigration on fiscal balance is extremely small relative to the size of the overall imbalance itself. THus, immigration should be viewed neither as a major source of the existing imbalance nor as a potential solution to it.”

According to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina the average cost of an emergancy room visit is 1029$ which is pretty much the top end of my assumption. They put the low end as 361$, below my estimate.

Also I was talking about labour economists. In addition, read Stephen Jay Gould’s the mismeasure of man hich refutes your point about recial differences. The relevent differences are socio-economic. Also the original post mentioned this was California statistics. The interesting question becomes what is the _relative_ proportion of immigrants who fail the tests.

Cynthia:

“however, from my American municipality, landlords -not renters- pay property taxes. ”

Yes and they pass these onto the rentors. Therefore, rentors pay the municipal taxes as part of their rent.

Also what is the probability that an illegal immigrant will be placed in a six-figure ICU situation? emergency room visits are am ore reasonable estimate and as you can see this is high hundreds; which is paid by the worker.

I completely agree with you on the military part of your post.

Dumb biologist:

RTFA, at the end of the article is a list of references that demonstarte the positive net gain for the US economy.

In addition, a subtle point is that if you have free trade then immigration is much less relevent an issue. Here is the thought experiment, suppose you could close the border completly. In this case all the (assume) Mexican workers are stuck in Mexico, this in turn drives down Mexican wages making them relatively more

Immigration, pro and con, is being argued pointedly in the pundisphere in terms of numbers (albeit fuzzy ones), namely dollars. Most of the loudest claims are con, alleging unjustifiable strain on our public services. If John Q. Public is to support a particular program of robust and effective immigration reform, which nearly everyone purports to desire, it would be nice to get the monetary breakdown of the argument, and hash those points out. Generosity and openness are all well and good, but exhortations to act unselfishly have proven less than persuasive among the general electorate, it would seem. America wants to see the bottom line. If that doesn’t look convicing, supporting uninhibited passage across our borders will be an uphill battle.

What does “otherwise he would not be able to pay for the visit itself” mean? That’s the point–he/she is uninsured and the taxpayers pick up the tab.

One point you make is incontrovertibly wrong

“the research that has been done by Economists in this area shows that once race is taken into account there exists no difference in aptituted on standardized tests. The problem you think is caused by brown skin is actually caused by the fact that they are poor.”

Completely incorrect, as any psychometrician will tell you. For example, poor whites do about as well or better (on AVERAGE) in g-loaded tests as rich blacks. Hispanics are somewhere in-between.