I’m curious about this. I keep hearing people complaining about “the cost” of immigrants. As recently as a few minutes ago, some guy on Facebook was talking about how liberals should “pay the cost” of illegal immigrants.
My ex-wife’s grandmother was an illegal immigrant. Walked in from Canada. Never left. My ex-wife and, consequently, my three oldest daughters, would never have existed without her illegal action.
So here’s my question: what are the costs, exactly?
Crime? Immigrants don’t commit crimes at any higher rate than do American citizens. Indeed, less so.
They pay their taxes. They work at jobs that many Americans wouldn’t touch.
I have yet to have anyone explain to me just what exactly would happen if we really did throw open our borders? At least not without declaring it a stupid liberal idea that would destroy the country through means unknown. Insults typically seem to be the preferred response, as is not atypical with Trump’s followers.
So what would happen if we at least eased up on all the anti-immigrant hostility and remembered we have a 305 foot statue in New York harbor welcoming them?
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I haven’t got much specific, sourced data readily available so admit I’m not going to be adding much to the argument. At least not in providing hard data to show how much immigration does/doesn’t cost America.
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But the data I have seen (that I’m too lazy to re-search for and vet right now) is that immigration is a net plus for the American economy. For one, were immigrants to leave (or stop coming) farming would take a substantial loss in labor, meaning food prices would go steeply up (due to less food being gathered and/or higher costs associate with getting “real Americans” to be willing to take those jobs).
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In general the arguments I’ve seen in favor of encouraging immigration have been rooted in facts and actual analysis of what immigrants actually do, actually contribute, actually consume.
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While the arguments I’ve seen opposing immigration have been unsupported accusations of terrorism, criminal behavior and the like. Many of which are completely disproven by the actual data.
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In short, on one side you tend to have “But the data shows..” arguments while on the tend to be “But everyone knows all Muslims are terrorists.” nonsense.
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I’m not providing any real support for my own argument here other than my anecdotal experience (as I noted at the start), but when it’s easy to find factual support one one side and just hyperbole on the other, it seems pretty clear as to which side should be listened to.
The only argument against immigration that does not seem to be completely rooted in xenophobia is that illegal immigrants provide cheap labor and wages drop as a result.
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But the hypocrisy in this argument when used by Conservatives is that they’re the Free Market fanaticals that think Adam Smith is a God and Ayn Rand is his high priestess.
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The solution is not to make immigration harder, it’s to make unions stronger and give government more power to stop bosses and capitalists to go overboard in employing people in subhuman conditions and ridiculously low wages.
No real data, and it is late, but this is what I observe out here in CA where my little city is probably 20% illegal…
The biggest cost is probably two fold. First, the immigrants themselves have to live, somewhat, in a continuous state of fear. The knowledge that a mis-step that gets you noticed can ruin the tenuous life you have built is not easy to deal with. By the same token, there is an increase in crime both by and to them, as they are scared to go the police, and that ambivalence and the difficulty in getting work leads some to go into gangs and other crime. I mean, you are already a criminal, what do you have to lose.
The second is somewhat complicated. Let us say I am a contractor building houses. Now I can hire only US citizens or legal immigrants, but I will lose contracts to my competitors who hire illegals willing to work for 30 to 50 percent lower wages, that they often pay in cash to avoid that taxes. If you go to a construction site in California, esp. southern California, you need to speak Spanish to talk to the workers, and don’t even THING about taking their pictures!
Now, as a good liberal, you might say that this keeps the cost of housing down, but the cost to former construction workers out of work is of little benefit to society.
Also, you get situations where 10 years down the road the plumbing in those houses all start to fail as the workers were not really trained in how to handle and install PEX pipe. (Yes, I am paying out $14K next week for a complete repipe after having 6 different leaks in one bathroom in the last 15 months!)
Your mileage may vary.
Sorry for all the typos. It is late out here…
CharlieE….. everything you listed are problems with employment laws, shady employers, and proper enforcement of the laws we already have in place. The immigrants are not the problem in your scenarios, the criminal employers and the fact that we do not properly investigate and prosecute them is the problem.
David,
Interesting idea, but which came first, the shady employers or the pool of cheap desperate workers? But as you point out, the real problem is the entire enabling ecostructure of corrupt government and business workers that allow, nay, encourage employing illegals. The car dealerships that will sell them cars, the landlords that rent them apartments and houses, the forgers that will provide them with documents, the politicians that allow them to get welfare and food stamps. If it was not so easy to be illegal in America, there would be fewer trying it!
The biggest cost I’m seeing currently is the fact that it is not immigration, in general, that is being vilified, but immigration by particular skin tones. I believe the number has dropped in the last couple decades, but we still get a nonzero number of illegal Chinese immigrants landing on BOTH coasts. As you, yourself, noted, Peter, Caucasian immigrants from Canada to Eastern Europe make their way in and no one ever seems to pursue it (or, really, any over-stayed visas).
Meanwhile, my cousin (we’re a very definitely Caucasian family — Scottish, English, Irish, Welsh, German, Jewish, Dutch, French…) is married to a first-generation legal Mexican immigrant. They flew down to Mexico last year to visit his family. Coming back into the US through DFW, he was detained and interrogated for three hours, while she was threatened with arrest for “causing a disturbance” by trying to get their attention that he was an American citizen, she was his wife, and she was holding his passport RIGHT THERE. Oh, also, she was pregnant at the time, and also had their other kids (including the oldest, from his previous relationship) with her. They missed their connecting flight and never got an apology or reimbursement or anything to even attempt to make up for what they were put through for no wrongdoing. Apart, apparently, from his having the audacity to be brown.
That’s just the closest one of those sorts of stories to me that I’ve heard over the last couple years. Legal residents and American citizens and their families and friends are paying the cost of anti-Caucasian fearmongering. And all of that is just scratching the surface, but I’ll leave off there, for now.
Immigration has always been a major dog whistle issue for the racists in the Republican Party, though there has always been “respectable” Republicans that tried not to see that and did their best to sell it as a genuine law enforcement concern and were all surprised that “law-abiding” brown people didn’t agree with them on these issues.
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Obviously, Trump has turned the dog whistle into a very audible shout and made the pretense that it isn’t about race almost impossible to mantain.
Our whole notion of “black” and “white” is messed up from the start.
The only truly white men I’ve ever seen were albino; the only truly black man I’ve ever seen is a physician born in Nigeria who lives and works in the United States.
Barack Obama is considered a black man. My Sicilian maternal grandfather was considered a white man.
Except that Grampa Dominic’s skin was darker than Mr. Obama’s.
Jonah Rapp, the Founders fought a revolution to be independent from Great Britain precisely for tyrannical acts like that.
Oh, DFW is a horror show. That’s the place where I was changing planes and had to go through security, and I showed the TSA agent my passport. She said, “I need to see your driver’s license.” I said, “This is a passport.” She continued to insist on seeing my driver’s license and I kept demanding to know why. Finally she said, “Do you want to speak to my manager?” I said, “Sure.” She called him over and said I wasn’t showing her ID. I held up my passport. He said, “That’s a passport.” She said, “I’m supposed to see his driver’s license.” He looked at me as I shrugged, looked back at her, then back to me and said, “Sir, you can go. Michelle, we need to talk.” Fricking DFW.
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Three out of my four grandparents were immigrants, brought here by their parents as children, two from Bavaria and one from Sicily. The fourth was U. S. born of immigrant parents.
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What would happen?
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We’d be the better for it.
Our whole notion of “black” and “white” is messed up from the start.
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The only truly white men I’ve ever seen were albino; the only truly black man I’ve ever seen is a physician born in Nigeria who lives and works in the United States.
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Barack Obama is considered a black man. My Sicilian maternal grandfather was considered a white man.
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Except that Grampa Dominic’s skin was darker than Mr. Obama’s.
Notions of race are partially social constructs. Here in Brazil, the threshold of “whiteness” is quite different from the one in the US and Northern Europe. There are darker-skinned people that are considered white here and would face discrimination in the US today (I always say that we Brazilians probably have the only non-Aryan-Fascists-who-think-they’re-Aryan in the world)
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These notions even change with time. Desi Arnaz was considered white enough in the 1950s to appear as Lucille Ball’s husband on TV without scandal. Today he would be “Latino”, since Latinos have been racialized as their own distinct group in recent decades.
The cost is threefold:
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1. All the staff working at Trump’s clubs would be doing so legally.
Sources:
* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/us/trump-bedminster-golf-undocumented-workers.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
* https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-pol-fbi-ag-evidence-crimes-trump-golf-20181228-story.html
* https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/6/donald-trump-companies-ignoring-e-verify-hiring-il/
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2. More immigrants would be able to work in the U.S. using the EB-1 visa (the so-called “Einstein visa”, which is usually reserved for people with “extraordinary ability”, like renowned academic researchers, multinational business executives, Olympic athletes and Oscar-winning actors), as Trump’s wife Melania did when she began doing modeling work in the U.S. At the time, only five people from Slovenia were granted green cards under that program, but if our doors were opened wider, presumably more people could, and not just highly skilled people like Melania.
Sources:
https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-workers/employment-based-immigration-first-preference-eb-1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/questions-linger-about-how-melania-trump-a-slovenian-model-scored-the-einstein-visa/2018/02/28/d307ddb2-1b35-11e8-ae5a-16e60e4605f3_story.html?utm_term=.255e5c0ceb35
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3. Immigrants would be able to sponsor their relatives, much as Melania did so that her own parents could become American citizens–a process Trump calls “chain migration” when other people do it.
Sources:
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/925860866767163393?lang=en
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/melania-trumps-parents-are-legal-permanent-residents-raising-questions-about-whether-they-relied-on-chain-migration/2018/02/21/3b573df8-1687-11e8-8b08-027a6ccb38eb_story.html?utm_term=.996f08889cb1
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Actually, these don’t really seem to fit the definition of the word “cost”.
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I think maybe I misunderstood the question.
Not sure if either or both of my father’s grandfathers were legal or illegal immigrants.
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I know that one – just like the-only-President-we-currently-have’s grandfather was a draft-dodger.
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He stayed here, worked hard, and made a good life for himself and his family – instead of {almost certainly} running a whørëhøûšë {a “restaurant” in the Yukon during the gold rush?}, trying to sneak back home after his service obligation years were over, getting caught and deported from his native country and coming back here and establishing a crooked real estate business…
Ultimately, as with many panic-inducing issues, illegal immigration is something used to distract people from the actual source of their problems. Having trouble finding a job, or dissatisfied with your level of employment? It’s those pesky illegals, taking jobs from Americans (or, alternately, it’s affirmative action, or women in the workplace maybe). That way you don’t have to think about adapting to the current economic climate or about exploitive employers. And right now, none of these things is really a national issue, given that we have close to full employment; the whole thing is simply a dog-whistle to instill fear in people who are inclined to be fearful.
As to the idea that illegal aliens take low-paying jobs Americans won’t touch, indeed they do, but that’s kind of a problem, too; it’s essentially arguing that we need undocumented workers because they’re easier to exploit. Some labor reform would seem to be called for.
For “open borders” it depends on what you mean by the term; I suspect when people talk about open borders they’re talking past each other because the term means different things to different people. Is an “open border” like what the US has with Canada, or like what the EU has among it’s member states, or is it a complete removal of all monitoring and restriction?