I would not be bothered at all by those sneaking in to make a living, if they were disqualified from medical, welfare and driving priveleges. We now live in a socialist state, and the cost to keep illegals taken care of is too much to bear. I have seen studies that say that a vast majority of citizens, take more money from the govt, than they pay in taxes. Telling people that illegals put more into the economy than they take out is therefore a lie.
Therein lies just as big a problem as the border...and that problem is mostly driven by the states. I see some folks from California complaining about the open border but NOT outraged that their counties and state literally protect illegal immmigrants and provide them handsome benefits.
Jeremiah,
I think you are confusing the economy with the government. Fortunately, the former is much larger than the latter. As you said, a vast majority of Americans receive more government services than they pay in taxes. This is also true of illegal immigrants. But this says nothing about whether they are contributing more to the economy than they are getting.
Say What? Do you hava a reference for these studies?
I certainly don't mind immigrants, and I have tried to learn some Spanish so that when I am in the nursing home I will have someone to talk to. Slowly, I have come to the position where I think letting those that are here register and progress toward citizenship quickly might be alright. Where illegal immigrants work, presumably no income taxes or social security are deducted, so we are losing megabucks as a nation because of it. Their pay can be easily 25% lower than a citizen's and still equal or beat the citizen's take-home pay. Much of their income is sent back to Mexico, whereas a citizen might spend it here; and Mexico gets to duck its own economic development problems to some extent by exploiting its own poor and needy in virtually offering them no alternative to illegally crossing the border and finding employment up here. I have come to suppose that if we can identify the illegals and their employers and collect from them what a citizen would pay, they won't displace as many of our own citizens in jobs which don't pay spectacularly, while we will collect from their employers the social security payments they always should have been paying, and maybe some penalties of consequence, and this perhaps might make working cheaply in the U.S. less attractive than heretofore once the field has been levelled vis-a-vis the illegals immigrants and the underclasses of our own citizens who can not make it on the take-home they get, versus the illegal who pays no tax, no social security, and whose employer pays no social security match nor any benefits whatsoever. Meanwhile, aggressively go after employers who are not collecting social security, income tax, or paying their social security match and the federal deficit and the illegal immigration problems will both largely disappear!