Quote:
Originally Posted by Perfectlap
a few points...
You aren't "paying for the undocumented" if you don't actually pay any federal income tax. Unless a family of four earn more than $75k they pay no federal income tax. Last I checked only two hardliner states on immigration had household income averaging above $75k. (Wyoming and Idaho if memory serves).
Sure the undocumented consume healthcare, send their kids to public schools and SOME receive public assistance (mostly in sanctuary cities that do well from high income earners). But show me a single wave of European and Eastern European immigrants who never went to a hospital or had kids in school on dirt poor wages. And workers get hurt on the job and need to go to a clinic what's new about that in our history from the industrial revolution onwards? But now it's a problem when it wasn't before? Actually it was a problem before.. you had anti immigration blowhard politicians stirring nativist resentment against the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the "Chinamen", etc. and now it's the Mexican and other Latin Americans turn. Except this time we actually need an immigrant labor force like never before. The current American labor force Participation rate sits at an alarmingly low 62%. Near 40% of this entire country do not work for a living. Then they wonder why we're stuck at 2-3% GDP growth. Can't grow an economy 5 and 6% like in the Bill Clinton 1990's if you don't have enough freaking workers!!
Back to this tax burden you complain about from the undocumented. What exactly do you think happens with the fruits of undocumented labor? It is flipped for "billions and billions" (as professor Trump likes to say) in profits by their employers, mostly in agriculture. Those low wages (for high levels of productivity) is what allows millions of small and medium sized businesses to get to and expand profit margins which they then pay taxes on! Win Win?? Yes! What does the undocumented get for being a block in the creation or successful business? 401K? Health insurance benefit? Paid paternity leave? Vison and dental plan? Carried interest/deferred compensation? Oh yeah that's right he's undocumented... his reward is that his boss won't call ICE if he asks for a 50 cents raise.
The question should be how much more tax you'd be paying if our entire manual labor force up and quit depriving millions of small and medium sized farmers from earning enough to even pay federal income tax. And by the way it's these farmers in these predominantly Republican states that fight adoption of an e-verify mandate in their states. It takes DHS less than a week to verify whether an undocumented worker's papers are bogus or not. But the Republican Congresspersons want nothing to do with any e-verify because these small population states would have no way of replacing that many workers who actually show up every day without a huge increase to their costs. And with Trump's trade war costing the farmers $20 billion in short term agriculture bailouts and billions more in actual lost revenue the last thing they need is to lose their reliable and 100% illegal workforce.
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We're not helping the situation with hyperbole from both sides. Perfectlap, you make many good points, but you project them across too broad of an expanse. (But you're much closer to reality than the fear- mongering that comes from "my side")
Here's the deal:
As long as legality remains so difficult to attain, we will have illegal immigration. Who can blame them?
As long as there are people willing to hire undocumented workers (objecting to e-verify) we will have low- wage, undocumented workers.
As long as there are central- and- south American illegal immigrants moving 4 families and 11 cars into a single- family home, who don't teach their children why it was so important for them to come to the U.S. in the first place, and who skirt the system and take advantage of the social programs the rest pay for.... yes, there will be animosity.
There needs to be a solution that includes easier access to legal status. There needs to be mandatory e-verify in every work place. This in turn means higher wages for those immigrants, and more access to social programs. It also will allow them to actually PAY-IN to the system, and get something back out of it later.
Get them out of the shadows where they can enjoy the full American dream they came here for. End the resentment on both sides by embracing their new country with love that demonstrates the reasons they came here. End the resentment from the right by letting these immigrants make a decent wage, regulated (and taxed) the same way the rest of the country is.
Our inability or unwillingness to enact reasonable immigration policies has created a caste system every bit as disgusting as those of middle-age Europe. Those immigrants who hide in the shadows and "steal" from our pockets are lower-class citizens in every sense but one: their innate rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They have those rights because they're human; but we aren't letting them exercise them here.
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