The Children We Never Had
By Steve Kellmeyer (04/06/06)
Illegal immigrants don't pay taxes. They use up an enormous amount of government-subsidized unemployment and medical coverage. They are lawbreakers. They take our jobs. That's the image. Is it true? Well, let's run the numbers.
As Tony Snow recently pointed out, 66 percent of illegal immigrants pay social security, 62 percent pay income taxes. How do they do it? They use false social security numbers. That means illegal aliens are contributing to a system that will never give them back a dime of the money they put in.
And it’s a lot of dimes. In 2003, the Social Security Administration reported that it had accumulated 374 billion dollars in funds from unmatched numbers, 40 billion dollars from 1990 to 2000 alone.
Most illegal immigrants are men who have left their families behind in order to build up money here and send it back to their wives and children. As a result, less than 10% of illegals have children in the public school system, while only 5% receive unemployment or food stamps.
True, nearly 40% of illegals don’t pay income tax, but that really doesn’t make them much different from most Americans. As Bruce Bartlett and Thomas Sowell frequently point out, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay 34 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 5 percent pay 54 percent, the top 10 percent pay 66 percent, and this despite the fact that the top 10 percent only earn 43 percent of the money.
So, given that the top quarter of taxpayers pay 84 percent of all taxes, it follows that seventy-five percent of Americans pay just sixteen percent. In fact, the bottom fifty percent of Americans pay just 4 percent of income taxes, although they make 14 percent of the money. Indeed, the Earned Income Tax Credit actually gives the bottom 30 percent of workers a negative tax rate - that is, they pay no income tax but get a "refund" from the government anyway.
So, illegals pay into the system just as naturalized Americans do, but with one difference: unlike Americans, illegals will never receive a tax refund or a social security check.
But aren’t illegals criminals? Well, as Linda Chavez points out, entering the country without proper papers is a misdemeanor civil offense. Similar civil violations are committed by people who don’t put the lids on their trash cans tightly enough or don’t keep the weeds in their yards properly cut.
And, as Snow points out, illegals actually commit less crime than economically comparable Americans. The crime rates along the border are lower than in comparably sized non-border cities. Indeed, California saw its crime rate halve while its Hispanic population more than doubled.
But illegals take jobs from decent Americans! In fact, one Harvard study shows that wage-earner jobs were depressed 8 percent by illegals!
True. But consider what we get for that 8 percent. New Orleans, for instance, has become a mecca for illegal workers, who labor in respirators 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and sleep six to ten to a hotel room. They work in houses so mildewed and decayed the rotten stench oozes out into the street. The filth is so overpowering, they need a new pair of shoes for each day’s work.
Many prominent voices insist that illegals cut New Orleans non-Hispanic minorities out of jobs. Local residents should be doing this work!
Well, perhaps they should, but they refuse to come back and do it. How is it that native Louisianians, fortified with government aid checks, can’t afford travel back home? How is it that natives of New Orleans can’t locate the city’s hotels once they get there? The illegals can barely find the state on a map, much less the city, and they certainly aren’t getting government subsidies for travel, yet they manage both quite easily.
So, yes, illegal immigrants are displacing Americans born and bred here. But that’s to be expected. For the last forty years, fewer and fewer Americans have been born and bred here. America citizens have had below-replacement level fertility since 1972.
Fully 70% of America’s population growth since 1995 has been due to immigrants and the families they conceive. If it were not for them, America would face Europe’s future: a rapidly aging, enfeebled population.
Without immigrants, we simply wouldn’t have the people we need to do the jobs we want done. Given all they give to this country, we need to get a new vision of immigrants. Instead of looking at illegals as interlopers, we should view them as the children we never had.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Steve Kellmeyer
