1.38 million Mexican citizens are waiting in ‘line’ for a United States work visa or an immigration visa through a family member, last year, according to The Huntsville Times.
“But there were only 26,000 visas made available for Mexico that year,” wrote reporter Brian Lawson in the same article.
Anti-immigrant activists believe illegal immigrants are taking American jobs, hurting our economy and that undocumented immigrants should be deported for having committed the great criminal offense of staying in the United States without official permission.
In reality, the deportation of all undocumented workers is not a realistic solution, and illegal immigrants actually help the economic well-being and success of America.
FoxNews guest and radio host Mary Walter claimed undocumented immigrants are “not paying taxes and enjoying all the benefits.”
However, the Congressional Budget Office (the CBO) has found that the 12 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States actually do pay individual income, sales and property taxes.
The CBO further reported over six million unauthorized immigrants file individual income tax returns each year, according to IRS estimates.
Opponents of illegal immigration argue that undocumented people take many jobs from American citizens, because they are willing to do undesirable work for less pay.
While this is true – 96 percent of undocumented men in the United States are employed, according to the Urban Institute– that is not necessarily a bad thing.
“America is totally dependent on the hard work and wages of these workers. They are critical to the economic success and well-being of America,” said Stephen Klineberg, a sociology professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
The Wall Street Journal noted that labor economist Richard Vedder found that higher levels of immigration coincided with lower levels of unemployment for Americans.
This comes at a low cost for native U.S. citizens, since undocumented immigrants are not eligible for welfare, food stamps, Medicaid and most other forms of public assistance.
Another argument often posed by anti-immigrant activists is the effect of immigrants on the economy. However, by allowing immigrants, even undocumented, to remain in the United States actually benefits our economy, say noted economists Angel Aguiar and Terrie Walmsley. The pair have found that full deportation of undocumented workers would cause a considerable loss to the US economy in terms of real GDP.
Just the enforcement costs of a mass deportation strategy would total $285 billion over five years, according to the Criminal Alien Program.
On the other hand, immigrants documented and undocumented have a net benefit to the nation’s total economic output.
In a 2012 report about the economic benefits of comprehensive immigration reform published by the Cato Institute, UCLA professor and immigration expert Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda found that passing immigration reform “would raise wages, increase consumption, create jobs and generate additional tax revenue.”
He asserts that passing the comprehensive immigration reform would add at least $1.5 trillion to the U.S. economy over 10 years.
Undocumented immigrants have also become a source of growth for U.S. banks, insurers, credit card providers and phone carriers, expanding demand for goods and services while creating new jobs.
Even if we tried to deport all illegal immigrants, it would be nearly impossible.
“Despite a record performance on deportations from ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] the past two years, at current rates it would take nearly 70 years to deport all of the estimated 11 million people living here illegally, even if not a single new illegal alien entered our territory,” wrote Tom Ridge, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in a Washington Times article.
Attempting to deport illegal immigrants is not feasible or beneficial for our country.
There has been a lot of recent pressure on the Obama administration to increase deportation of illegal immigrants, even though the President already has deported two million people, which is more than any other president in our history, according to the New York Times.
Two-thirds of those two million deported people had no criminal record, or had committed only minor infractions, such as traffic violations.
Immigration activists are also putting pressure on Obama to grant relief to those illegal immigrants who are hard working and law-abiding (other than their illegal status) citizens.
This is one of the reasons behind Obama’s recent ordering of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to review the existing immigration policy, with the intention of potentially deporting fewer people in the future by focusing only on those with serious criminal records.
President Obama also used his executive authority to grant temporary freedom to undocumented immigrants brought to America by their parents when they were young. These immigrants grew up in the United States and yet legally can’t find a place in the only nation they’ve ever called home.
This program is called DREAM, and while it does give young undocumented immigrants an opportunity to go to college and get good jobs, it has brought about problems of family separation and a limited access to deportation relief.
Deporting illegal immigrants will not solve the problems of the United States, and will only cause harm to our economy, U.S. citizens, and individual immigrants.
