Quote:
Originally Posted by Vendzilla
Saying things will never change is giving up. I have nothing aginst mexicans or any culture. What I have an anger is for people draining our economy and the same people that are allow it are asking for more entitlements. It's a drain on the country, a big one. Want universal healthcare? If we saved 1.6 billion a year in just one county by closing the border and changing a few things, by doing it national, we could afford to fund it.
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"Donald Huddle of Rice University set the benchmark for today's debate with a study that concluded that the legal and illegal immigrants who arrived since 1970 cost the US $42.5 billion in 1992, and $18.1 billion in California. According to Huddle, 7.2 million immigrants arrived legally and illegally in California since 1970, and the state incurred costs of $23 billion to provide them with services--half of the costs were for education and health care, and one-sixth were due to the costs of providing services to US residents displaced by these immigrants.
As with all such studies, Huddle made assumptions about how many illegal aliens there are, their usage of welfare and other public services, the taxes they paid, and their indirect economic impacts. Jeff Passel of the Urban Institute reviewed and revised Huddle's US estimates, and his calculations turned the
$42 billion net cost into a $29 billion net benefit.
Most of the $70 billion difference between these studies arises from their estimates of the taxes paid by immigrants--Huddle assumes that post-1970 immigrants paid $20 billion in taxes to all levels of government, and Passel assumes they paid $70 billion. And the major reason for the difference in tax estimates is that Huddle did not include the 15 percent of each worker's earnings that are paid in Social Security taxes, while Passel did--this accounts for over one-third of the $70 billion difference."