Tea at Trianon: Cost of Illegal Immigration

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Cost of Illegal Immigration

In money, not in all the American lives lost. In lives lost, the cost is incalculable. Meanwhile, when we have a homegrown crime problem, why do we keep taking on criminals from other countries? From The Federalist Papers:

According to the Washington Examiner, when federal costs are included, illegal immigrants cost $135 billion a year. Liberals like to justify their opposition to the deportation of illegal immigrants due to their estimations of initial costs for actually enforcing our federal immigration laws. But considering that current data suggests over a trillion dollars spent supporting illegal immigrants a decade, leftist arguments that deportation is too expensive crumble rather quickly. Furthermore, Democrats like to point out that illegal immigrants pay some taxes, such as sales tax. According to the social security administration, about 3.4 million illegal immigrants (out of 11.1 million people illegally residing in the U.S.) pay social security taxes. (Read more.

Breaking the law is expensive for everyone. But it's always easy to be cavalier with other people's money. From the Center for Immigration Studies:

In a prior analysis, we estimated that the average net fiscal cost (taxes paid minus services used) of an illegal immigrant was $65,292 during their lifetime — excluding their U.S.-born children. This came to $65.3 billion per million illegal immigrants. The figures were expressed in 2016 dollars. Adjusted to 2018 dollars, it would be $69,570 per illegal immigrant, or $69.6 billion per million illegal immigrants.

This net figure is based on estimates of the fiscal impact of immigrants by education level developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS). My analysis takes the education level of illegal immigrants and applies it to the lifetime net fiscal deficit, or fiscal surplus, created by immigrants at each level of education. As we pointed out in the earlier analysis, the cost of a deportation (technically referred as a removal) is much less, averaging only about $6,000 to $11,000 per person.

The reason illegal immigrants are unambiguously a net fiscal drain is that less-educated people, native-born or immigrant, earn on average modest wages and as a result they tend to make modest tax contributions, while needing significant social services. As we pointed out in our prior study, research by the Center for Immigration Studies, the Pew Research Center, the Heritage Foundation, and others have all found that a very large share of illegal immigrants have relatively few years of schooling — most have not completed high school or have only a high school education. The fiscal drain illegal immigrants create is not because they are all lazy and on welfare, nor it simply because they often work off the books and don't pay taxes. Rather they tend to earn wages commensurate with their education levels and, as result, they typically have low incomes on average, though there are individual exceptions. Those with low incomes as a group, regardless of legal status, use more in public services than they pay in taxes. It's why cities and states worry so much about losing their middle- and upper-income tax base. It is middle- and upper-income residents who pay most of the taxes, which does not describe the average illegal immigrant. (Read more.)