Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[StephanieVanbryce]

THEY COME HERE FOR THE SOCIAL BENEFITS....

free education...

free medical....subsidized housing...

welfare check...

food stamps...

free cell phone...

Simply NOT TRUE ..they come here for work and a better life.

Immigration restrictionists argue, not without some merit, that illegal immigrants don’t fully pay into the social-welfare system from which they benefit. Restrictionists tend to overstate the effect of illegal immigrants on American wages and they understate the amount of taxes even illegals pay. About two-thirds of illegals pay Medicare, Social Security, and income taxes. All pay sales taxes and property taxes (directly if they own property, or, more likely, indirectly via rents that reflect property taxes). And since 1996, the only public funds illegals can really access are for emergency medical care and primary and secondary education (and only 10 percent of illegals send kids to public schools).

But the most efficient way to address those concerns is by making it easier for illegals to function in the light of day, where they would have every reason to pay all the taxes the rest of us do. And to enter the country through official checkpoints (and to leave the country through the same gates). This isn’t just idle guesswork. In October 2005, the National Immigration Forum and the conservative Manhattan Institute surveyed 233 illegal Latino immigrants in Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Fully 98 percent of respondents said they would legalize their status if given the opportunity. (81 percent said they would “live and work in the United States” for the rest of their lives.) Ninety-one percent said they would pay a $1,000 fine to come clean and 96 percent said they would submit to a criminal background check. Seventy percent said they would pay any back taxes they owed as a condition of legalization and 87 percent said they would enroll in an English class. A vanishingly small proportion of illegal immigrants come here to live in the shadows of American prosperity.

Any immigrant, legal or not, will tend to be a producer of some good an American wants to pay him or her for, and simultaneously a consumer of some good an American wants to sell. Businesses can and do arise out of supplying the wants and needs of legal or illegal immigrants; what they directly pay in taxes or take in social services is no meaningful measure of what they are adding to or subtracting from the commonweal; human beings are indeed the ultimate resource, green card or no.

The free market, as it usually does, has created a system of mutually satisfactory interdependence, all of us serving each other and helping each other get what we want.

http://reason.com/archives/2006/08/20/immigration-now-immigration-to/

Close to 8 million of the 12 million or so illegal aliens in the country today file personal income taxes using these numbers, contributing billions to federal coffers.

What's more, aliens who are not self-employed have Social Security and Medicare taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. Since undocumented workers have only fake numbers, they'll never be able to collect the benefits these taxes are meant to pay for. Last year, the revenues from these fake numbers — that the Social Security administration stashes in the "earnings suspense file" — added up to 10 percent of the Social Security surplus. The file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year.

Beyond federal taxes, all illegals automatically pay state sales taxes that contribute toward the upkeep of public facilities such as roads that they use, and property taxes through their rent that contribute toward the schooling of their children. The non-partisan National Research Council found that when the taxes paid by the children of low-skilled immigrant families � most of whom are illegal — are factored in, they contribute on average $80,000 more to federal coffers than they consume.