While eligibility for means-tested welfare theoretically would have been constrained during the first 10 to 13 years under an amnesty plan such as Hagel-Martinez, each amnesty recipient would have become eligible for welfare during the last 30 to 40 years of their life. Accepting the Census Bureau’s conservative estimate of 11 million illegal aliens currently in this country, Rector concluded that amnesty recipients would impose a likely net cost of $2.6 trillion dollars on American taxpayers.
These costs would mainly occur in two non-welfare programs (Social Security and Medicare) and in one means-tested program (Medicaid). Rector’s results are consistent with a 1997 “New Americans Study” by the National Academy of Sciences. If, as some recent studies have indicated, the actual number of illegal aliens in the U.S. is probably closer to the 20-30 million range, their net lifetime fiscal cost to American taxpayers could be more than double Rector’s estimate of $2.6 trillion.
The pro-mass-immigration crowd argues that today's immigrants are just like immigrants of a century ago: poor people looking for a better life who are expected to advance in our land of opportunity. The Nobel Prize-winning advocate of a free market, Milton Friedman, best summed up the essential difference between the two waves of immigrants. He said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”
Great post kabar.
In a SSOCIALIST regime you MUST have FREE IMMIGRATION to have granted assisted crowds ,high taxes for working middle-class ,high unemployment,and a big nanny-state which is supposed to “take care” of people....That’s also called liberal-fascism where freedom fades away