DioNoZeus said:
Doc Holliday said:
DioNoZeus said:
Doc Holliday said:
Waco1947 said:
Mr President do not enact a National Emergency for an unnecessary wall. It is beyond our democratic principles. It's smacks of dictatorship.
Sir, you lie continually to us. I do not believe in your crisis. Stop scaring and dividing us.
Me and my generation will be personally disenfranchised by massive illegal immigration.
It seems you do not care for people like me.
Both of these statements are gross exaggerations and perfectly illustrate what is wrong with the political discourse in this country.
Oh really? Because spending $150 billion a year on 22 million people and growing isn't playing with fire?
Please explain to me how you will be "personally disenfranchised" by "massive illegal immigration."
When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.
Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.
So yes. My children will be effected.
Somebody's lower wage is always somebody else's higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current "immigration surplus"the net increase in the total wealth of the native population to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.
When we look at the overall value of immigration, there's one more complicating factor: Immigrants receive government assistance at higher rates than natives. The higher cost of all the services provided to immigrants and the lower taxes they pay (because they have lower earnings) inevitably implies that on a year-to-year basis immigration creates a fiscal hole of at least $50 billion a burden that falls on the native population.
What does it all add up to? The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it's not too far fetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all. Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program.
