Ann Coulter: Surprise! That 'cheap' immigrant labor costs us a lot
BY ANN COULTER,
OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
We could pay for
every idiotic boondoggle proposed by the 300 Democratic presidential candidates
if the current president would simply keep his central campaign promise to
build a border wall and deport illegal aliens. (Back off — “illegal alien”
is the term used in federal law.)
BLOG: JUDICIAL WATCH
ESTIMATES THAT THE INVASION COST US $135 BILLION JUST IN WELFARE. THIS DOES NOT
INCLUDE THE MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE OR $50 BILLION IN REMITTANCES.
A 2017 study by
the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found that illegal aliens
cost the American taxpayer — on net — $116 billion a year.
That’s pretty
high, but the actual number is more likely triple that.
Straight out of
the chute, FAIR assumes that there are only 12.5 million illegal
immigrants in the country, approximately the same number we’ve been told
for the last 15 years as we impotently watched hundreds of thousands more
stream across our border, year after year after year.
The 12 million
figure is based on the self-reports of illegal aliens to U.S. census
questionnaires. (Hello! I’m from the federal government. Did
you break the law to enter our country? Now tell the truth! We have
no way of knowing the answer, and if you say yes, you could be subjecting
yourself to immediate deportation.)
BLOG: NOW DO THE MATH!
More serious
studies put the number considerably higher. At the low end, a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Yale study last year put the number of illegals
at 22 million. Yet Bear Stearns investment bank had
it at 20 million back in 2005, and Pulitzer Prize-winning
investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
reported in 2004 that 3 million illegals were crossing each
year — so
simple math would put it at well over 60 million today.
So, right there,
the FAIR study underestimates the tab for illegal immigration by at least a
factor of three, meaning the real cost is about $350 billion a
year. That’s triple what Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) free college tuition plan
will cost in a decade.
I don’t mean to
bash FAIR. It’s sweet how immigration restrictionists always bend over
backward to be impartial. But their circumspection doesn’t mean the rest of us
have to ignore reality.
Journalists’
usual method of determining the cost of “unauthorized entries” — as they
say — is to phone some fanatically pro-illegal immigration group, such as
Cato or CASA, and get a quote sneering at anyone else’s estimate of the costs.
In a deeply
investigated 2017 Washington Post article, for example, the Post cited the
“belief” that illegal aliens “drain government resources.” Without looking
at any facts or figures, the reporter disputed that “belief” with a quote from
Cathryn Ann Paul of CASA: "It's a myth that people who are undocumented
don't pay taxes."
So there you
have it! Cathryn Ann Paul says it’s a “myth.” Now let’s move on to
the vibrant diversity being gifted to us by illegal aliens.
Earlier this
year, The New York Times mocked President Trump’s tweet saying illegal immigration costs "250 Billion
Dollars a year" by quoting big-business shill Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato
Institute: "There's no basis to any of those numbers about the
fiscal cost." Am I doing OK, Mr. Koch?
The Times
further explained that Trump’s figure “did not take into account the economic
benefits of undocumented immigrants” — for example, the surprisingly affordable
maids of some reporters.
Randy Capps of
the Migration Policy Institute told the Times that studies of the cost of
illegal immigration count only the costs or only the benefits. “They tend to
talk past each other, unfortunately,” he said.
BLOG: THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN
ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY ALONE IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION
YEARLY. THIS SAME COUNTY HANDS ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS MORE THAN $1 BILLION YEARLY
IN WELFARE.
Well, the FAIR
study counted both. For every dollar illegal immigrants pay in taxes —
fees, Social Security withholding taxes, fuel surcharges, sales and property
taxes — they collect $7 in government benefits: schooling, English as a second
language classes, hospital costs, school lunch programs, Medicaid births,
police resources and so on.
A few years ago,
the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector looked at the winners and losers under
our government redistribution system and found that in 2010, households headed
by illegal immigrants received $14,387 more in government
services than they paid in taxes.
Legal immigrant
households also were big winners, receiving $4,344 more in government services
than they paid in taxes. (Our government does a fantastic job
deciding who can immigrate here.)
Only with
nonimmigrant households does the government almost break even, doling out a
mere $310 more in benefits than those households pay in taxes. (Surprise!
The deficit is on track to hit $1 trillion next year.)
Like FAIR
estimates, Rector’s study accepted the U.S. Census Bureau’s allegation that
we’ve had the same number of illegal aliens in this country since the beginning
of the Bush administration. Also like the FAIR study, Rector’s examination
counted only the obvious costs imposed on us by illegal immigrants —
things such as health care, education, fire and police protection, parks,
roads, and bridges.
But there are all sorts of costs that no one ever
counts. What about Americans’ lost wages to
illegal immigrants who are willing to work for
$7 an hour? Even if they don’t apply for
unemployment insurance, how do we count the
cost of suicide, opioid addiction or other anti-
social behavior?
Why not count
the lost wages themselves? We want to know the cost-benefit ratio to those
already here, not to the new total that includes the illegal immigrants.
If it's a net negative to those already here — well, that's the point.
And what was the
tab of illegal immigration to the family of Kate Steinle, the young woman shot
dead by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco in 2015? There were obvious,
tragic costs, of course — but there also are hidden costs, such as the lost
productivity of the people close to Kate for years to come, the additional
police presence around the San Francisco pier where she was killed and the
reduction in tourist dollars.
We hear about
the great largesse bestowed upon us by illegal immigrants all day
long. The only hidden benefits are the warm feelings of self-righteousness
that the CASA spokesman gets when bleating about illegals and the happiness
that cheap servants bring to the top 10 percent.
In Maine,
overdose deaths from opioids, mostly Mexican heroin, have skyrocketed in the last
decade, up from an already catastrophic 100 to 200 deaths per year to more than
double that — 418 in 2018. What is the cost of the state legislature
spending weeks debating a bill to provide heroin addicts with Narcan? The cost
of more crime and more police?
This isn’t to
gratuitously mention the fact that completely unvetted,
self-chosen illegal immigrants can, in fact, be rapists, drug dealers and
cop-killers. It is to say that no analysis of illegal immigration’s cost
can ever capture the full price.
Ann Coulter is a lawyer, a syndicated columnist and
conservative commentator, and the author of 13 New York Times bestsellers. The
most recent, “Resistance Is Futile! How the
Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind,” was published in 2018.
BLOG: JUDICIAL WATCH ESTIMATES THAT THE INVASION COST US $135 BILLION JUST IN WELFARE. THIS DOES NOT INCLUDE THE MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE OR $50 BILLION IN REMITTANCES.
BLOG: NOW DO THE MATH!
BLOG: THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY ALONE IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION YEARLY. THIS SAME COUNTY HANDS ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS MORE THAN $1 BILLION YEARLY IN WELFARE.
counts. What about Americans’ lost wages to
illegal immigrants who are willing to work for
$7 an hour? Even if they don’t apply for
unemployment insurance, how do we count the
cost of suicide, opioid addiction or other anti-
social behavior?
International Labour Organization report documents growing assault on wages
5 July 2019
A report issued by the International Labour Organization (ILO) yesterday shows that workers’ share of global income has fallen “substantially” over the past two decades, with a systematic redistribution of wealth to both capital and the top income earners.
Globally, the share of national income going to workers is declining, having fallen from 53.7 percent in 2004 to 51.4 percent in 2017, while the share going to capital rose from 46.3 percent to 48.6 percent. This is part of an ongoing trend, only temporarily interrupted by the 2008–09 global financial crisis.
However, the overall redistribution of wealth from labour to capital is only part of the picture.
One of the most significant findings in the report documents how social inequality is widening. Income is being siphoned up to the highest levels at the expense of middle-income earners, defined as the middle 60 percent of workers. Their share of total wages fell from 44.8 percent in 2004 to 43 percent in 2017.
In what it described as a key finding, the report states: “The data show that in relative terms, increases in top labour incomes are associated with losses for everyone else, with both middle class and lower-income workers seeing their share of income decline.”
This is particularly the case in the major economies. “In several high-income countries,” the report states, “the evolution of the labour income distribution between 2004 and 2017 follows a ‘hockey stick’ pattern: substantial losses for the middle and lower-middle class, and large gains for the top. This pattern can be found, among others, in Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom.”
This pattern of large gains for the upper income earners, coupled with losses for much of the rest of the income distribution, was particularly marked in Britain, where the report found that the largest losses were for the percentiles ranging from 7 to 50 percent. It also found that the increases for the top income earners were “more pronounced” than in the US and Germany.
On a global scale, the report found that the top 10 percent received 48.9 percent of total wages, the next decile received 20.1 percent, and the remaining 80 percent received 31.0 percent. The lowest 20 percent received only 1 percent of total labour income.
Commenting on the report, Roger Gomis, an ILO economist, said: “The majority of the global workforce endures strikingly low pay and for many having a job does not mean having enough to live on. The average pay of the bottom half of the world’s workers is just 198 dollars per month and the poorest 10 percent would need to work more than three centuries to earn the same as the richest 10 percent do in one year.”
A number of factors have worked to create this situation. First, the ILO data is yet another confirmation of the analysis of Karl Marx, denounced by bourgeois economists down through the decades, that the essential objective logic of the capitalist mode of production is the accumulation of massive wealth at one pole and poverty and misery at the other.
This logic has been reinforced by the policies carried out by governments and financial institutions around the world, particularly since the eruption of the global financial crisis in 2008.
The injection of trillions of dollars into the financial system in order to boost the value of share prices and other financial assets has been one of the key mechanisms for the transfer of wealth up the income scale. Much of what constitutes the increase in wages for the upper 10 percent is derived from the escalating incomes of those involved in the top-level speculative operations of the financial system.
At the same time, governments are working to enhance this redistribution of income through tax cuts benefiting top income earners—the latest example being the passage of major tax cuts for the wealthy by the Australian parliament yesterday, with bipartisan support, following the lead of the Trump administration.
However, the key factor in facilitating this process has been the role of the labour and trade union bureaucracies, together with the social democratic parties, in suppressing the opposition of the working class. All over the world, the cuts in real wages, documented by the ILO report, have been accompanied by the actions of the trade unions in doing whatever they can to prevent and shut down opposition.
This is not merely the product of the total subservience and treachery of individual union leaderships—though that abounds—but flows from the nature of the trade unions themselves, rooted in their national-based structures and orientation.
Their response to the globalisation of production and finance over the past three decades has been to make their “own” capitalist class more “internationally competitive” through cuts in real wages and the imposition of changes in working conditions to facilitate greater exploitation. Consequently, they have undergone a transformation: from organisations that once carried out a limited defence of workers’ wages and conditions within the framework of the profit system, to the chief enforcers of the dictates and demands of capital.
In this role they have been aided and abetted by all the pseudo-left organisations, which have worked to promote the deadly illusion that workers’ struggles must be directed through the unions and that social change can come only through the Democratic Party in the US or via social democratic parties in other countries.
However, a new factor has now entered the scene. The ongoing and intensifying offensive by the ruling elites is provoking an upsurge of the class struggle—seen in the strikes by teachers and educators in the US and elsewhere, the “yellow vest” movement in France, the wildcat strikes in Mexico, strikes against wage freezes in Europe and the mass protests in North Africa.
The crucial issue confronting this growing movement, as yet only in its initial stages, is the development of a program and perspective. It must be based, first of all, on the understanding that all the great social issues confronting the working class, reflected most clearly in the escalation of social inequality, arise from a systemic crisis of the global capitalist order.
This means they can be resolved only with a program that is equally systemic, aimed at their root cause. That is, the growing struggles of workers around the world must be armed with an internationalist socialist program directed to the overthrow of the profit system, the taking political power by the working class and the building of the world party of socialist revolution to lead this struggle.
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