Here’s a letter that I sent earlier this week to the Washington Post. It’s in response to this column by the generally very thoughtful and sound Robert Samuelson.
Robert Samuelson misses an important point when he discusses immigration ("Seeking Sense on Immigration," May 2).
Anti-immigrationists
who worry so raucously about immigrants using taxpayer-funded welfare
should lead the charge to eliminate the countless restrictions aimed at
preventing immigrants from working legally. It’s phony to insist that
immigrants’ employment options be severely restricted and then, in the
next breath, to pontificate about the need to keep immigrants from
using welfare.Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Podcast RSS Feed
Full EconTalk Text
{ 14 comments }
That's odd. I'm not aware of too many restrictions on "immigrants" working. As for illegal aliens, if we made it easier for them to work, they'd still use welfare in the general sense: public schooling, etc.
On another note, has any economist estimated the cost of PoliticalCorruption? Isn't massive IllegalImmigration a very strong indicator of massive PoliticalCorruption? Doesn't that have a cost.
Please quantify it for us. Thanks.
I think we're having a serious breakdown in communications here.
Are we speaking of illegal immigration, all immigration, only legal immigration? This needs to be clarified.
On the point of illegal immigrants using our welfare system, yes it is a problem.
But in my view, that's not much of an issue in context to the overall problem we have with illegal immigration.
IF our welfare system wasn't so easily abused, no one would be able to unfairly use it. Be they illegal immigrants or legal citizens.
On this whole issue, there seems to be a lumping together of disparate though related problems, and two main sides have emerged calling for all or nothing reform.
Kind of like the Newt Gingrich's of our country trying to focus on the employer who hires the illegals, whenever it is the govt that has allowed the situation to be where it is at.
A private citizen who owns a business has no obligation or responsiblity for ensuring a secure border. If a potential worker comes to them with a drivers license and SSN, that should be enough. But the govt is wanting to lay ever increasing burdens on the private citizen in order to cover up their own incompetence on the matter.
I agree wiwth this article and disagree with it becasue I feel that we should give immigrants jobs becasue they need to support their families the same way we do. But I also disagree with it because they are free-riding in using our tax money by getting welfare and everythin.
If there were fewer restictions on employing illegal immigrants there would be improved income opportunities for illegal immigrants. This would increase the incentive for people to illegally emmigrate to the US.
With a larger pool of illegal immigrants there would be heavier demands on US health, education and welfare services. Work is not always and not just a substitute for welfare.
Maybe Don's challenge needs to be reversed. Maybe those people who support providing H.E.W. services to illegal immigrants need to advocate greater legal immigration instead. The whole debate seems to me to be a proxy for the real debate as to what America's legal immigration intake should be and how it should be managed.
If it is a good idea for reasons of equity and humanity that poor foreigners be given access to US labor markets, why should Mexicans rather than say Bangladeshis or Somalis, who may 'deserve' the opportunity more, get first dibs thanks to an accident of geography? To provide equity of that sort would require effective and enforceable controls over illegal immigration.
There exists a conflict outside of welfare in Mr. Samuelson’s argument, by displaying a comparison in job availability for college graduates to non-high school graduates. Seeing as even before the immigration "problem" arose I'm pretty sure this discrepancy existed, meaning that whether you have illegals or not the job availability is still substantially greater with a college degree as oppose to not even having a high school degree. It isn’t as if when illegal immigrants leave that job availability increases, because with them leaving you also loose a consumer, meaning that while his job might become available somebody else’s job is lost.
Free marketeers and libertarians generally favour relatively free and easy immigration in a context of easy access to relatively unregulated jobs, and a minimalist welfare provision (the minimalism applies to all citizens). They also favour the rule of law, and so would I guess be against illegal immigration on this basis. This is pretty much the package I advocate – and it seems coherent. The US and the UK are, relatively, situated failrly close to this pattern.
The only other kind of coherent policy is that of national socialists who favour a large and highly-regulated welfare state available only to national citizens, combined with a highly restrictive immigration policy. This is also a recipe for economic decline and probably other bad things too – but it is coherent wrt immigration. France and Germany are closer to this.
But the issue has become clouded, because legal immigration is too slow, complex, uncertain; labour markets are over-regulated (eg minimum wage laws), and welfare provision too inclusive and easy to access (for everyone) – so that illegal immigration has become a compensatory necessity in some domains.
And the personal plight of illegals relative to citizens is poor, which has mobilized the left – while the right emphasize the view that illegals are generally better off as US illegals than they were in the societies from which they originated.
It still still seems to me the whole welfare argument begs the question. If welfare was intended to help the disadvantaged (whether you agree with the results, that is the justification), then why are illegal immigrants any less deserving? Because they broke immigration law? That presupposes that breaking immigration law is a heinous enough crime to deny them help. But why is breaking immigration law so heinous? Because they might use welfare! It's a circular argument.
"But illegal immigrants don't pay taxes!" they answer. Even if that were true, most welfare beneficiaries don't pay taxes either. So why raise a fuss over just the illegals? Seems to me they're just applying a different set of standards to a group they've already decided they oppose, whether that opposition is otherwise justified or not.
There may be perfectly valid reasons to flip out over illegal immigration. I've yet to hear any, but let's just say for the sake of discussion that these good arguments exist & I've missed them. I still think the welfare arguments holds no water when even casually examined.
xteve,
Your argument appears to assume something like welfare rights. All poor people have a right to support, and there is no reason why illegal immigrants have any less right than anyone else.
If, instead, someone opposes expansion of welfare because of the burden it places upon taxpapers, then immigration by poor people, assuming they do in fact collect welfare, is a bad thing because it causes more harm to taxpayers. While they are perhaps no worse than any other receipient in the harm they cause, that doesn't mean that it is wrong to combat the burden on taxpayers by preventing an expansion of the problem by restricting illegal immigration.
Of course, there are advocates of welfare for "our people" only. Immigrants are using up the limited funds that are needed for our own people. From this perspective, the illegal immigrants are less deserving because they are not part of our people.
I believe when you combine these two groups, you pretty much sum up the critics of immigration on welfare expenditure grounds. (Of course, why should the foreign poor need to move to the U.S. to collect welfare. Someone trully committed to welfare rights would favor world welfare!)
For what it’s worth, unless they are paid cash “under the table”, illegal immigrants do have federal, state and FICA payroll taxes withheld from their wages.
In the article, it is said that “immigrants using taxpayer-funded welfare should lead the charge to eliminate the countless restrictions aimed at preventing immigrants from working legally”, I agree with it. However, I also think that the US government should allow immigrants jobs because they need to support their families, or it may cause tempests, because there are too many immigrants in the US currently. Therefore, I think the government should balance it carefully.
After reading some post I just do not understand why it is the United States responsibility to allow immigrants jobs because they need to support their families. First of all in most cases they are hear illegally and free riding on the system. They are not paying taxes like other citizens but they do collect some of the benefits that American workers are not.
On the other hand the United States government does not have the ability or the resources to pay a lot in anti immigration policy's. We also do not have resources to provide health care and government programs for illegal immigrants. It is not about helping people because I do feel the need to help others but it comes down to the point of resources and money, which in this case are being use for things other than items that can maximize the US economy.
It seems to me that the US is trying to eliminate illegal imigrants by taking money away from all imigrants and I do not think this is fair.
Bill,
Any welfare rights I assumed were for the sake of discussion only, but I think my argument's just as valid if you assume no uniform right to welfare at all.
If the argument was that illegal immigrants were simply one group to cut from the welfare rolls, that would seem like a more logically sound argument, even if I disagreed with it, which I don't. But it wouldn't be an immigration argument (legal or illegal — some people think that distinction is important). I could get behind an argument like that, because I think state welfare harms all parties involved. My objection is when people make the leap in logic that when illegal immigrants benefit from welfare then it says something about the nature of their immigration status.
Even if you looked at them as "not our people" & declared welfare to be only for "our kind" or whatever, then the fact that they may benefit from welfare would not demonstrate that their "them-ness" is worse or more threatening than your "us-ness". Anti-immigration (legal or illegal) people who use the welfare argument make this logical error time & again.
I think my point is that if it costs too much to give a certain group of people free money, then stop giving them money. Don't try to use it as evidence to justify some other idea regarding any other aspect of their lives, because it's actually not evidence of any such thing.
Remove restrictions on employment for everyone, south and north of the US/Mexico border. Illegal immigrants largely come here either to work or to receive welfare. Inhibit both for them. Why would they come here, those that are here, why would they stay here? The problem seems to be politics on both side of the border as nobody in government wants to do anything about it. I guess that too many of them vote.