Monday, May 26, 2008

Study: Loss of illegal immigrants would cripple economy

Another study showing we need immigrant reform so we have enough workers, especially for the lower paying jobs. DP

By JENALIA MORENO, Houston Chronicle

chron.com: Eliminating illegal immigrants would cripple the national economy, according to a study backed by Houston business leaders.

Kicking the 8.1 million undocumented immigrants who work as bus boys, landscapers and other jobs out of the country would cost nearly $1.8 trillion in annual spending, the study by the Perryman Group said.

Texas would be the second-hardest hit state after California if the state's 1.2 million undocumented workers disappeared, the study said, removing $220.7 billion in spending within the Lone Star State.

The study was released Monday by the Americans for Immigration Reform, a group spearheaded by the Greater Houston Partnership.

The group hopes to convince politicians and the public that the nation's immigration laws must be changed. It plans to raise $12 million by December to campaign for immigration reform and so far has raised about 10 percent of that goal in pledges.

Local business leaders want an immigration reform plan that would give employers a way to hire immigrants legally.

"We need comprehensive reform that looks at our needs and addresses those needs," said Ray Perryman, president of Waco-based Perryman Group.

Perryman said that many with the nation's baby boomers retiring and a low unemployment rate, undocumented immigrants perform the jobs other American workers could not.

Although Congress has not passed an immigration reform bill, Americans continue to debate the issue.

Groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Federation for American Immigration Reform support restricting immigration and disagree with the argument that Americans won't do the jobs immigrants do.

"In many cases, there were people doing the jobs before the illegal immigrants showed up," said Ira Mehlman, national media director for the federation. "In many cases, these are just subsidized jobs because the employer can get away with whatever he's paying."

A 2007 report by that organization indicate said the costs of education health care and incarceration of undocumented immigrants in six states including Texas exceeds $27 billion annually.

5 comments:

zeezil said...

As further proof that the American news media contemptuously regards the American people as being abysmally stupid, the Houston Chronicle published, as credible news, the findings of a study by the Perryman Group, a Waco-based economic analysis firm, regarding the economic impact of deporting all illegal aliens from the United States. The study was commissioned by the immigration advocates known as the “Americans for Immigration Reform,” and their obviously biased conclusion is that if the United States eliminated all of its 8.1 million illegal aliens instantly, the nation’s would lose nearly $1.8 trillion in annual spending and the economy would suffer.

To begin with, there are nearly three times that number of illegal aliens in the United States and even the federal government admits to the fact that there are at least 12.7 million illegal aliens and that number hasn’t decreased or increased since 2005 despite admissions by authorities in the Border Patrol that more than 8,000 illegal aliens are coming into the country every week. The simple fact remains that while no one really knows how many illegal aliens we have living here in the United States. A credible estimate would be based on the last accurate count plus the annual rate of illegal entry for each year following reduced by the nearly non-existent apprehension and deportation rate. Anyone willing to sift through the necessary data for the numbers will tell you that a better estimate is probably somewhere between 25 and 35 million illegal aliens. However, considering the totality of the Houston Chronicle’s report, mis-stating the estimate of illegal aliens in this country is nothing compared to the claim that we would lose $1.8 trillion in annual spending if we drove them all off. Obviously the editors of the Houston Chronicle didn’t bother to check the math before publishing the results of this study or they would realize what a completely absurd claim they were perpetuating by publishing this tripe as though it were factual.

To see just how absurd their claim really is you have to look at the loss per individual illegal alien which is derived by dividing the total loss by the number of illegal aliens they claim are residing here. The easiest way to accomplish this is by entering the following problem into the Goggle search box, 8,100,000/1,800,000,000,000= , and hit the enter key on your computer. The resulting answer to this calculation is 4.5 × 10 to the 6th power. To get a straight number translation of the response you enter 4.5 x 10^6= and again hit the enter key to get back the response 4500000. For anyone unwilling to do the math I will cut through the BS real quickly. The study published by the Houston Chronicle is claiming that every illegal alien in the United States results in $4.5 million dollars of spending. That is a fairly phenomenal claim to make about a group of people whose average annual income is less than $15,000 per year, but then again, the editors of the Houston Chronicle are well aware that most American citizens wouldn’t question what they read in the paper, let alone do the math themselves to see what it looked like.

A 2007 report by the Washington, D.C.-based Federation for American Immigration Reform found that the costs of education, health care and incarceration of undocumented immigrants in six states, including Texas, exceeds $27 billion annually and that is a very conservative estimate for only six states.

Significantly more scholarly and far less biased studies have credibly demonstrated that because of their lower level of educational attainment, illegal aliens earn far less income and therefore pay less income tax than the average American citizen. In 2002 it was estimated that illegal aliens paid a total of $16 billion in federal taxes, however, the same illegal alien households imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government during the same year. Those costs were the result of Medicaid, medical treatment for the uninsured, food stamps, WIC, free school lunches, federal aid to schools and various social services. By subtracting the taxes paid from the cost of services rendered it is easy to see that in 2002 the illegal aliens cost the federal government more than $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household. That was in 2002. In 2008 the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. has more than doubled, the cost of providing them with the services they demand has significantly increased, and in comparison to the average American household, the illegal aliens are still paying a mere 25% of the taxes they would be legally responsible for if they were citizens. As a consequence, every illegal alien in the U.S. now represents an annual deficit of more than $9,000 per head. Do the math yourself. If we have 25 million illegal aliens living in the U.S. and each one is costing us $9,000 per year then we are talking about an annual loss of $225 billion dollars. If the illegal aliens were given amnesty, the cost of the upkeep would be even higher because they would then have access to more government services.

The simple fact of the matter is that you can’t reduce the problem of illegal aliens into mere dollars and cents alone because the cost is far greater to the American people. Illegal alien predators are swarming across this nation’s southern border every day and the countless American citizens who have been victimized by these freeloading parasites defy all attempts to place an exact value on our government’s failure to effectively address the problem. Thousands of American citizens are murdered every year by illegal aliens and thousands of American children have been raped, strangled, abused and traumatized by illegal aliens who have been repeatedly deported only to re-enter the U.S. weeks later. There is no possible way that anyone could put an accurate value on the damage and destruction they have caused in our society and any attempt to demonstrate the value of illegal aliens in the U.S. through economic analysis is utterly foolish.

A man provides his wife and children with a fine modern home, all the clothes and shoes they can wear, more food than they could ever eat and a plentiful supply of money to take care of anything they wish to purchase. The only thing he demands in return is that his wife submits to daily beatings without complaint, and all of his children are required to provide him with whatever demented sexual pleasures he can dream up. Using the same arguments that our representatives in Washington use to advocate on behalf of the illegal aliens, we should all assume that this wife and these children are extremely lucky to have so much good fortune, and they should consider the economic benefits they are receiving before doing anything to mess up what is obviously a good situation for them. If you can agree with that then you are obviously genetically predisposed to being a Democrat.

http://fungazi.com/wordpress/?p=510

JODY OAKMAN said...

Ms. Poisl,
The key word here is ILLEGAL. I am a nurse. The burden on our healthcare system ALONE is mind boggling.Illegal Aliens are the reasonand directly responsible for why Americans cannot afford healthcare insurance....Small businesses whom are the backbone of America cannot afford to offer their employees the option of insurance, because THEY cannot afford to offer it....because it is astronomical. So what happens, people all leave to the big companies for benefits alone. Do you know what that does to the small business owners??? Wake up. Whenever I was a new nurse in California, I was holding my breath praying nothing happened to me and my 2 children, BECAUSE I COULNT AFFORD INSURANCE AS A SINGLE MOTHER. AGAIN, I AM A NURSE PLACING MYSELF IN DANGER BY TAKING CARE OF AND BEING EXPOSED TO PEOPLE WITH TB AND OTHER DISEASES.Anchor babies plug the family into all the social programs...schools, healthcare, justice systems,and NOT TO MENTION,the 95% influx of chemicals used to produce METHAMPHETAMINE come from Mexico. ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE THE REASON WHY WE CANNOT AFFORD HEALTHCARE OR ANYTHING ELSE. Go to Mexico ans see just how far you get, and how you fair...I am ALL for LEGAL immigration...key word and subject is ILLEGAL. This is not fair to the LAW ABIDING TAX PAYING AMERICAN MEMBERS OF SOCIETY. I go to work everyday to pay for all those social programs that I dont want to FOR ALL THE LIBERALS.... WAKE UP AMERICA. Look at all the statistics of the complete circle of damage it causes.The ripple effect keeps going and going..... I am just sick of the whole thing to the point that AMERICA IS GOING TO LOSE ANOTHER NURSE TO THIS. I am changing professions and joining the circus. Oh, I forgot, reality check...I am in the damned circus. I challenge anyone to a debate on this subject....I see it FIRST hand EVERYDAY I step into the hospital...Any comments???
Jody Oakman

zeezil said...

Not only is our immigration system ineffective in keeping ILLEGAL ALIENS form swarming here in mass, it is allowing far to many legal immigrants (over 2 million a year) for our sustainability. It is time for an 'immigration timeout' to decide how many immigrants we actually need and what skills they should posess before going any further.

U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050

If current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050 (and reach 1 billion by the turn of the century), from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants, according to new projections developed by the Pew Research Center.

Of the 117 million people added to the population during this period due to the effect of new immigration, 67 million will be the immigrants themselves and 50 million will be their U.S.-born children or grandchildren.
Among the other key population projections:

• Nearly one in five Americans (19%) will be an immigrant in 2050, compared with one in eight (12%) in 2005. By 2025, the immigrant, or foreign born, share of the population will surpass the peak during the last great wave of immigration a century ago.
• The major role of immigration in national growth builds on the pattern of recent decades, during which immigrants and their U.S.-born children and grandchildren accounted for most population increase. Immigration's importance increased as the average number of births to U.S.-born women dropped sharply before leveling off.
• The Latino population, already the nation's largest minority group, will triple in size and will account for most of the nation's population growth from 2005 through 2050. Hispanics will make up 29% of the U.S. population in 2050, compared with 14% in 2005.
• Births in the United States will play a growing role in Hispanic and Asian population growth; as a result, a smaller proportion of both groups will be foreign-born in 2050 than is the case now.
• The non Hispanic white population will increase more slowly than other racial and ethnic groups; whites will become a minority (47%) by 2050.
• The nation's elderly population will more than double in size from 2005 through 2050, as the baby boom generation enters the traditional retirement years. The number of working age Americans and children will grow more slowly than the elderly population, and will shrink as a share of the total population.

The Center's projections are based on detailed assumptions about births, deaths and immigration levels--the three key components of population change. All these assumptions are built on recent trends. But it is important to note that these trends can change. All population projections have inherent uncertainties, especially for years further in the future, because they can be affected by changes in behavior, by new immigration policies, or by other events. Nonetheless, projections offer a starting point for understanding and analyzing the parameters of future demographic change.

The Center's report includes an analysis of the nation's future "dependency ratio"--the number of children and elderly compared with the number of working age Americans. There were 59 children and elderly people per 100 adults of working age in 2005. That will rise to 72 dependents per 100 adults of working age in 2050.

The report also offers two alternative population projections, one based on lower immigration assumptions and one based on higher immigration assumptions.

http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=85

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