I'm with you on this issue, but what you wrote isn't true. We are having an economic boom: unemployment is down, wages are up, and economic growth is high. While illegal aliens are an economic drain, they're really only a disaster for certain segments of society. They are, for example, the principle reason why people without a high school diploma are doing very poorly, even in the face of an economic boom.
And yes, unskilled immigration is a big fiscal drain on some states like California, but it is a bit of a stretch to say it's a disaster for the country as a whole.
I'm on your side on this issue, but I just want to urge you not to use the above arguments. You make our side look a lot better when you use valid arguments, and there are plenty of them.
Not according to what I've researched, read and heard on conservative talk radio. According to the National Research Council, (Center for Immigration Studies), the national cost of illegal immigration is "significant", in terms of expenditures for education, criminal justice, emergency medical care and uninsured drivers. Now add to that the high costs of federal immigration control, where they arrest many illegals and then are forced to release them in a circular game of "catch and release".
Here is a 2002 Center for Immigration Studies statistic you may be interesting in knowing.
"The costs for the federal prison and court system are also significant because, although persons in illegal households account for about 3.6 percent of the nation's total population, illegals now account for almost one-fifth of those in federal prison and others processed by the federal courts. Thus, they impose costs on that system that are disproportionally high relative to their share of the total population."
Now, if in 2002 illegals represented 1/5th of federal inmates, that number has surely increased since then. And this study does not include the costs to Americans for the actual crimes that were committed, it only takes into consideration the costs of prosecuting and incarcerating the criminals.
Here is the annual cost to individual STATES dealing with illegal alien criminals, according to a 2002 Department of Justice’s State Criminal Alien Assistance Program. The federal government distributed $550 million to the states to help defray their expenses, but this was estimated to cover only about one fifth of their outlays. So the annual total for individual States to incarcerate illegal aliens was over $2.5 billion. Again, that was back in 2002.
In 1996, Dr. Donald Huddle, a Rice University economics professor, published a systematic analysis of the cost to American taxpayers for illegal immigration; he estimated that illegals cost American taxpayers about $30 billion dollars yearly, (this was after considering what the illegals contributed in taxes, etc). That was 1996, that estimate now jumps to about $70 billion dollars, when you take into account that illegal immigration has more than doubled since then.
Now, take into account what these illegals cost us in terms of importing drugs into America, and hence increasing the annual costs for the War on Drugs, and you can probably add a couple billion more dollars to the equation; (here I am including the costs for the murders, robberies and other crimes associated with these drugs that are smuggled over our borders by illegals, but that are perpetrated by American citizens who purchased those drugs).
Finally, let's not forget that today we know these illegals are bringing diseases that were once nearly eradicated back into our country. The medical costs will skyrocket even more. The price we ALL PAY to support illegal immagration far outweighs any savings or benefits we might get at the grocery store.