Advocates of unrestricted immigration often argue that the American economy depends on laborers who stream across our largely unguarded borders. But a new study by the conservative Heritage Foundation soundly refutes that claim. It turns out that low-skill immigrants here legally or otherwise depend on American taxpayers, not the other way around.
In the first major study to quantify the hidden costs of immigration, Heritage analysts Robert Rector, Christine Kim and Shanea Watkins crunched the numbers and found that a typical household headed by an unskilled worker lacking the equivalent of a high school diploma earns $20,564 and pays $9,689 in taxes per year on average. But the same household collects $32,138 in direct and means-tested government benefits. Over 50 years, that adds up to $1.3 million per household — a largely hidden, but dramatic transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers.
“Immigrants do make the pie larger,” Rector told The Examiner, “but they eat the additional slice they create.” And then some. If, as appears likely, Congress allows the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 to expire, the present annual tax burden of $32,706 per household will climb substantially. Allowing more low-skill immigrants to enter the country will simply drive that burden even higher. Note that a bill currently in the House would allow 4 million additional unskilled workers into the country over the next decade.
This “cheap” labor also depresses wages and benefits for low-income Americans, particularly native-born minorities. Instead of lifting our own citizens out of poverty, we’re importing millions more poor people.
The Heritage team concluded that government transfers to low-skilled workers already in the United States represent a net economic loss of $100 billion a year. That figure will be much higher if immigration reform allows millions more to enter the United States. In order to make immigration “fiscally neutral,” the study found, it would be necessary to “eliminate Social Security, Medicare, all 60 means-tested aid programs and cut the cost of public education in half.” Barring such draconian measures, immigration — both legal and illegal — will continue to “generate deep fiscal deficits for the foreseeable future.”
Even if the borders were sealed tomorrow, the long-term outlook for entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicaid is already grim. Rector warns of an even larger welfare state comparable to those in Europe as our nation’s incoherent immigration policy “selectively draws the least competent workers into the U.S.” — and sends taxpayers the bill.
Slowly, but inexorably, we are allowing agenda-driven activists, clueless corporate suits and dissembling government officials to dismantle the world-class standard of living it took generations of hard-working Americans to build.
