Why Illegal Immigration is Bad for America

One of the worst things about modern politics in America is the enormous number of people that don’t even understand the basics of the issues they’re ranting and tweeting about. Illegal immigration is exactly that sort of issue on the Left. So, let’s start with the basics, so anyone who has been listening to liberals can fully understand the issue. Liberal politicians love illegal immigration because they, quite correctly, view illegal immigrants as future Democratic voters. Currently most illegals are Hispanic, and Hispanic voters tend to go Democrat roughly 2-to-1 and although the numbers vary; first- and second-generation Hispanic voters tend to go Democrat at somewhere around a 4-to-1 clip. On the other hand, Republicans are much softer than they should be on illegal immigrants because businesses that profit from illegal immigration pay them to be. The businesses have good reason to do that.

That’s because despite what you may have heard, there are no professions where illegal immigrants make up a majority of the workers and illegal aliens work cheaper than Americans. In other words, there are no “jobs Americans won’t do,” but there are “jobs Americans won’t do at a certain price.” Additionally, because they are criminals that aren’t here legally, illegals have an ENORMOUS advantage over law-abiding Americans when it comes to the price they can work at. Illegal immigrants don’t have to buy health insurance or car insurance, and they can lie on their income taxes if they pay them at all. How much less do you think you could charge if you didn’t have those expenses? What if you actually fudged your taxes and got an earned income tax credit? Because of all this, not only do illegals take jobs from Americans, but they also drive down what American workers get paid. There is no job in America that couldn’t be filled even without illegal immigrants, but it would mean paying the workers higher wages instead of crooked businesses paying illegal immigrants low wages, making extra profits, and passing the extra costs illegal immigrants impose on them to everyone else.

Incidentally, as pro-illegal immigration liberals never tire of telling us, illegal immigrants do pay some taxes. However, as you’d quite naturally expect, they pay in as much less than they take out. Although solid statistics are extremely difficult to come by with illegal immigrants, the GAO estimates they cost the country somewhere between 2–19 billion dollars more than they bring in. Unfortunately, although the GAO is for the most part non-partisan, the ridiculous rules Congress makes it work under often lead to wildly inaccurate projections. So, best guess? The GAO numbers are low. However, other organizations have done their own reports. In 2013, the Heritage Foundation pegged the cost of illegal immigrants at 54.5 billion dollars per year. In 2017, FAIR estimated those costs to be at 116 billion dollars annually. Given that all of these reports are based on estimates and educated guesses, it’s impossible to say which one is right, but we can feel reasonably certain that illegal immigrants cost the country an awful lot of money every year.

They also undermine the whole point of legal immigration. Legal immigration can take years and sometimes even decades while costing thousands of dollars and forcing the applicant to undergo an invasive screening process to get into the country.  Immigrants who respect America enough to do things the right way wait for years and pay big money, while any dirtbag who’s willing to wander across the border essentially gets a free pass to live here while he waits for the Democrats to make him a citizen. What sort of people do you think are crossing the Rio Grande in the middle of the night to pick strawberries? Wealthy people with graduate degrees or poor, uneducated people that barely speak English? A country has every right to choose the sort of people they allow to become citizens. Do we want the best and brightest or the poorest and least educated? Incidentally, what happens if all these people doing manual labor that Americans supposedly don’t want to do become citizens? Do you think they’re going to be a net gain for the country or a net loss when they never make all that much to begin with and are too busted up to keep working at 50 or 55? America needs to add to our tax base with immigration, not import more poverty for American citizens to float.

Then there’s crime. Liberals always like to tell you that illegal immigrants commit crime at a rate lower than the general population, but that almost certainly isn’t true. Even without a lot of data out there, some of the numbers we do have available are just staggering:

From 1998 to 2007, 816,000 criminal aliens were removed from the United States because of a criminal charge or conviction. This is equal to about one-fifth of the nation’s total jail and prison population. These figures do not include those removed for the lesser offense of living or working in the country illegally. The removal and deportation of large numbers of criminal aliens may reduce immigrant incarceration rates because many will not return and re-offend, as is the case with many native-born criminals.”

* “The number of criminal aliens in federal prisons in fiscal year 2010 was about 55,000, and the number of SCAAP criminal alien incarcerations in state prison systems and local jails was about 296,000 in fiscal year 2009 (the most recent data available), and the majority were from Mexico. The number of criminal aliens in federal prisons increased about 7 percent from about 51,000 in fiscal year 2005 while the number of SCAAP criminal alien incarcerations in state prison systems and local jails increased about 35 percent from about 220,000 in fiscal year 2003. The time period covered by these data vary because they reflect updates since GAO last reported on these issues in 2005. Specifically, in 2005, GAO reported that the percentage of criminal aliens in federal prisons was about 27 percent of the total inmate population from 2001 through 2004.” – The U.S. Government Accountability Office

If a legal immigrant commits a crime, you at least know they went through an extensive screening process designed to weed out criminals. In other words, we just had some bad luck if a legal immigrant becomes a criminal. With illegal immigrants, the government can fairly be blamed for every rape, robbery, and murder committed by them becauseit is willfully choosing to ignore the law to allow criminals to enter our country. Millions of Americans have been victimized by illegal immigrants that committed crimes against them and in a just world, those people should be able to sue government officials like Joe Biden who have made it possible.

We can go on and on with the problems with illegal immigration. It undermines respect for the law. Illegal immigrants also spread diseases. For example, the Biden administration is allowing illegal immigrants that test positive for COVID to be released and are allowing them to go anywhere they want to go in the United States. Illegals are also taking advantage of the system here to get welfare. No, they’re not eligible personally, but if they have a kid here, they can use their child to mooch off US taxpayers. Incidentally, 63% of non-citizen households are doing just that. When liberals trumpet all the DACA kids that are going to school, do people ever ask whose tax dollars are paying for that? In most cases, the answer is “you,” which is exactly why it’s a terrible idea to encourage more children to come here illegally by rewarding the DACA kids instead of sending them home — and no, their “home” isn’t here.

Long story short, the problem isn’t the people that want to enforce the law, it’s the people that are breaking the law to come here. When you allow a criminal class to enter the United States, bad things are practically guaranteed to happen as a result – and they have. A country without a border ceases to be a nation and a nation that treats its citizenship as valueless is destined to be taken advantage of by people up to no good. That’s where we are right now with illegal immigration and we should have put an end to this problem long ago. Illegal immigrants are a burden on America and we owe them nothing. Just about anything we can do to discourage illegals from coming here and get them out of the country is a good idea.

John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. His website is Linkiest and you can follow him on Parler here.

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