The financial costs of amnesty

In an interview with Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reprinted at FrontPage Magazine, Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies brings out a crucial point on the amnesty issue that will be new to many of us. The legalization of illegals, far from making illegal aliens less of a burden on our society, would vastly increase the financial burden they pose, because as legal residents with a very low level of educations and skills, they would become elibible for the vast network of government assistance, ranging from the earned income tax credit to Medicaid to the Women Infants and Children’s program. Camarota estimates that illegals currently use $10 billion more in services at the federal level than they pay in taxes; if they were legalized, that number would triple.

Mark Krikorian of CIS, also writing at NRO, makes two additional points that are new to me. First, the guest worker program, designed to welcome immigrants who will work for lower wages than others are willing to work for, will result in an influx of non-Mexican immigrants who will undersell the Mexicans, whose wages are comparatively high for the Third World.

Second, a guest worker program would “Europeanize” the Muslim population in the U.S.:

The inevitable drift toward Asian and Middle Eastern guest-workers would have important security implications. America has been fortunate to have a comparatively small Muslim population that is well-educated, prosperous, ethnically diverse, and geographically dispersed—all factors making radicalism and alienation less likely. But a new foreign-worker scheme could replicate Europe’s experience, by importing large numbers of poor, uneducated, ghettoized Muslim peasants. And there would be little chance of thorough security screening, given the combination of administrative overload in our immigration agencies and intense pressure from employers to rubber-stamp their cheap labor.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 11, 2006 05:07 PM | Send