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Amnesty and America’s Bottom Line—D.C. McAllister
As an Investor’s Business Daily editorial said at the beginning of this year, major businesses are calling for immigration reform because it’s good for their bottom lines even though it’s bad for America’s.
Politicians and big business have colluded in the push for amnesty: “Businesses like cheap labor. And politicians like political contributions from business. So they’ve formed an unholy alliance to push the idea that costs for amnesty for illegals would outweigh the benefits. But they don’t.”
According to the Heritage Foundation, illegal immigrant households cost U.S. taxpayers $55 billion per year. Some argue that those costs would go away after amnesty because illegals would become taxpayers. But that doesn’t pan out. The costs would actually go up to nearly $160 billion. And that’s just for illegals already here.
Why would the costs go up? Because “amnesty would provide unlawful households with access to over 80 means-tested welfare programs, ObamaCare, Social Security and Medicare. The fiscal deficit for each household would soar.”
So why do businesses want amnesty even though it will hurt America? The bottom line is cheap labor. They want to increase the flow of low-skilled workers willing to work for minimum wage and “do the job Americans won’t do.”
But why won’t Americans do those jobs? It’s because they get more money from welfare benefits than going out and working.
It is isn’t that there are jobs Americans won’t do. It’s that there are jobs Americans on welfare don’t want to do.
If we open the borders so that businesses can have their cheap labor (and politicians can continue to get their checks from big business), what happens when all those new workers figure out that they can get more money sitting on the couch rather than working minimum wage jobs?
Human nature is what it is. If we already have a bunch of people unwilling to work because government benefits make it easier not to, it’s logical to assume that immigrants will one day do the same. What happens to our deficits then? What happens to the country?
Both big business and its allied politicians need to look past their short-term interests and consider the future implications of what they’re asking for—because it ain’t pretty. If they don’t, one can only assume they care more about the bottom line than the future of the country.
Published in General
I’m confused by why business leaders are so convinced this is good for their bottom lines. The next time the Dems control congress, they’ll up the minimum wage to at least $10.00 an hour. Many states are already there.
Add to that the requirements to provide health insurance to your employees, and it would seem amnesty is going to be terrible for their bottom lines. No new cheap labor (unless off the books, which they could do now), but new government expenditures that can be used to justify higher taxes.
DC, let’s not lose sight of the other side of the equation: punitive measures driving employers to avoid hiring legal workers.
Obamacare, minimum wage, family leave, OSHA, EEOC, FICA, Medicare, disability insurance, workers’ comp, unemployment insurance–these mandatory costs apply only to some workers. A shadow army of de facto legalized immigrants exempt from these rules functions as a safety valve of sorts for our economy, shielding the consumer from the true costs of ratcheting hope and change mandates imposed on the lower end of the official labor market.
Comprehensive immigration reform as currently envisioned will provide Democrats with the votes they crave, burden the welfare state exactly as you describe, and then drive demand for another wave of illegal immigration to keep the system from collapsing.
Meanwhile, lessening any of the aforementioned mandates–which do not actually apply except to decrease the employment rate–will be characterized as cruel and heartless. Magical thinking is the preferred mode for our political and business elites.
From Wikipedia’s entry on the Roman Republic:
Emphasis mine. Human nature has not changed from 2100 years ago. And once more, we are in the twilight of the Republic unless we act decisively.
That line has already been crossed ,I’m afraid.
Probably, but I remain a sort-of kind-of optimist. I believe we might still be able to reverse it. On the other hand, I doubt we will. Again, there is that human nature thing.
I should also state that the Roman Republic last for maybe another fifty years from that point, although torn by civil wars. And, even after it effectively became an empire, they still gave the Republic lip service for the next thousand some years. Things will look different, and yet may retain the name.
Neither the federal government nor big business give a damn about American citizens.
Eliminating the minimum wage, the welfare state, and opening the borders would be the most moral policy.
I am definitely with you on two out of three. Opening the borders? I am not as sure about. I’m not against immigration, but I do think borders exist for a reason and need to be controlled. I also think that pathways to citizenship should be paths that mainstream people into our shared culture. (Yes, I know, that ship sailed forty years ago.)
I’m on board with this plan. We’d better not hold our breathe though.
The reason is because people have an innate distrust of foreigners and ascribe all kinds of terrible sounding hypothetical scenarios to individuals that haven’t actually done anything wrong. Individuals are not statistics.
“We can’t let Joe in because people from Joe’s country tend to be a little more [negative quality], so blanket restriction and over-regulation are safer than accidentally letting in some of the bad apples, even if it’s grossly unfair to Joe. After all, we’re a country, so end of debate.”
Their children are mostly assimilated, and their grandchildren definitely are. And immigration doesn’t have to mean citizenship.
The Vietnamese have a saying – when the river floods the fish eat the ants, when the river dries up the ants eat the fish. The entire amnesty issue for big business, big labor and the intelligentsia is pretty much summed up in that illustration – we want lower income workers scrapping for any foothold, willing to accept any indignity, when we control the level of supply and demand for their labor. If by some chance immigration laws were enforced the “jobs Americans won’t do” – because of their cushy safety net hammock – would have to pay more, or at least be structured to show the workers a modicum of human dignity in order to motivate them back into the mainstream of society. The minimum wage employer would no longer be able to say I will give you 20 hours of work but you have to set aside 60 hours out of your week for when I want to schedule you. Everyone should read some of the excellent work Senator Jeff Sessions has been doing on this issue lately, and I think Sessions should be on every candidate’s short list for VP in 2016.
You’ve got it 180 degrees wrong. The illegal immigrants coming today are as admirable as the “salt of the earth’ without papers strivers at Ellis Island. The problem is the second, third [and in some instances in the colonias along the border up to the tenth generation,] “assimilate” into the grievance monger, dysfunctional lifestyles of our underclass. A disproportionate number of unwed pregnant 14 year old girls and thugs dropping out of high school are statistically guaranteed with our current policies. Meanwhile ethnic groups that flourish in American society – Asians, Indians, Europeans, Africans – are given a 9 to 12 to 20 year waiting list so we can accommodate the line jumpers.
Let them all in and you solve this injustice. Stop thinking about people as ethnic groups. They are each their own person, with their own backstory, their own trials, their own virtues.
Stop holding people accountable for the sins of their genetic neighbors.
As someone who is Hispanic and was born and raised on the Texas-Mexico border, I can tell you that an open borders policy is rank insanity.
I agree, and my comments about restricted immigration are on this basis. Genetically, there isn’t much difference between a San and a Norwegian and an Ojibwa. (Maybe Whiskey Sam has a bit more variation, but he’s a monkey.) There is a big difference between a guy who belongs to MS-13 and has an arrest record and no skills and an electrical engineer or a medical doctor. I don’t care if they are twin brothers. Welcome to the engineer or doctor. The gang member? Sorry, but no.
Worse, “Rome” lasted centuries even though it declined. Even when the Eternal City itself was sacked, Rome slogged on for another century or so. I think that’s our fate. Continued existence in a Rome-like slow rot.
You use this line a lot. Your personal experience, and especially your heritage, don’t make you an authority. And appealing to yourself is less than convincing.
I agree if you can prove he’s a gang member. But having low skills does not make you unworthy of the same opportunity as those with high skills. I thought this was an American value.
I’ll clarify that what I would be looking for if you could first repeal the welfare state, and then deregulate us labor law, is not open borders per se, but an unlimited number of worker visas allowed.
Such workers should get no special treatment in applying for U.S. citizenship.
All of that is a pipe dream though as the welfare state isn’t going anywhere.
Or simply don’t let immigrants collect welfare. These are called “keyhole” solutions. For every perceived problem, there are (usually several) fixes that are less awful than our current restrictions.
And you can say, but Democrats blah blah… Politics blah blah… That’s fine, but it shouldn’t stop you from seeking out all the policies you would find acceptable.
Then what does make one an authority? With all due respect, that is one of the weakest arguments I’ve read on Ricochet in a very long while.
Come over to my thread on Amusement Park Fence-Jumpers, E. You’ll see more of the same. I don’t know what it is with open borders people today.
Really? Because I think the same thing when people use feelings as evidence. My point is, even if he was an authority, and appeal to authority is fallacious with only anecdotal evidence. And seriously, being hispanic doesn’t add anything. People need to stop bringing up ancestry as if it means something. Especially conservatives, since many of our prefered policies are hinged to the idea that race and heritage do not matter.
You have to live in the real world. And here in the real world, the government forces hospitals to treat illegal immigrant who have no ability to pay, which has driven more then one in border areas out of business.
Implementing a policy because it is part of what you would like to do overall, even though it remains bad policy until several other things have been changes, is short sighted in my opinion.
And yes it plays into democrats hands under our current circumstances, and yes that must be a consideration until circumstances change.
There’s an open borders thread? I’m there! It would be nice to be around the other 2 or so on Ricochet. It’s a lonely position.
Mike H’s argument reminds me of the economics professor that fell down a well, his first response? “Imagine I have a ladder.” Mike imagines we’ll have a world where lassez faire social welfare policies will someday pop out of Zeus’s head so why not let-er-rip with open borders today. And then he tries to spike Mike LaRoche for bringing his personal grounding with reality into the discussion. Bad form sir.
Mexico’s Immigration Laws in Comparison to US Laws
We are so much more open than our neighbors.
I never confuse “feelings” with personal experience (and neither did MLR), but I am a businessperson and you are … ?