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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
Isee. Tradingoneprincipleforanotherispartofnegotiating. I’mgladyouseethat’openborders’isimpractical.
You know that you can highlight just the last bit or one sentence and hit the quote button, and that’s all you get? That way, you don’t have to squeeze everything into two words.
Seriously? A willingness to negotiate means open borders itself is impractical? Meaning the practicality of a position is based on opponent’s willingness to accept it? You can’t believe this.
Or do you mean it’s politically impractical? That’s obviously true. But I’m not trading principles by negotiating with an uneducated mob (typical voters who want bad policies) to maximize open immigration. I wouldn’t be giving anything up and I would be getting closer to the status I want.
Is it really ‘open borders’ when you incorporate changes that are far more arbitrary (your proposed treatment of youg male adults) than current immigration laws? This shows that your ‘open borders’ is not only impractical, but also unprincipled.
With this comment, we can also add ‘elitest.’
Thanks for the tip. I_tried_this_old_trick but it doesn’t seem to work in R>2.0.
It’s a good thing “elitist” isn’t a synonym for “wrong.” The Founders were elites, and tried their best to limit influence to those most likely to hold correct views.
Thank you Mike. With that, I humbly dismiss myself from this conversation.
That is pretty much correct; however, rather than the “correct views,” I would say to those with skin in the game, meaning an investment in the future.
I almost used “skin in the game,” I forget why I dropped it. I think skin in the game correlated with correct views at the time. Still does most likely, until people get FU money and want to be well liked by the media.