Free Republic

Barron's has an important lead article out today on "the underground economy" (password required). According to Robert Justich, a senior managing director at Bear Stearns Asset Management in New York, current estimates of the illegal alien population (most news articles cite the old 8 to 13 million figure) are too low. He puts the figure at 18 million to 20 million. The article's author, Jim McTague, notes some devastating consequences of the failure to enforce our immigration laws--and he does so with a bluntness that is unusual for the usually open-borders-friendly business press: [T]he underground economy is undermining the effectiveness...

AMERICA HAS TWO ECONOMIES, and one is flourishing at the expense of the other. First, there's the legitimate economy, in which craftsmen are licensed and employers and employees pay taxes. Then there's the fast-growing underground economy, where millions of nannies, construction workers and others are paid off-the-books, their incomes largely untaxed. The best guess as to the size of the output of this shadow economy is about $970 billion, or nearly 9% that of the real economy. It should soon pass $1 trillion. What is largely fueling the underground economy, experts say, is the nation's swelling ranks of low-wage illegal...

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's plan to liberalize the nation's immigration laws to allow millions of undocumented workers the opportunity for legal status appears to be on a collision course with newly aroused sentiment among House Republicans pushing for a crackdown on illegal immigration. Bush describes his immigration proposal as one of the top goals of his second term, calling it a humane way to get a handle on the nation's mushrooming illegal immigration problem. Republican strategists, led by White House chief political adviser Karl Rove, also see the proposal as an important element in their plan to expand the party's...