re: How hard is it to actually secure the border?

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Impossible. Policing an area that size is too expensive and would require too much manpower.

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Don't know but stationing the border patrol forty miles from the border doesn't work.

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This is 4 days old. The White House ordered the border patrol to reposition 40 miles inland from the border to make it easier for illegals to get in.

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ou will see them living in Section 8 housing,

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They often manage to even get SNAP benefits and Welfare with phony SSI cards

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Prior to mid-2006, TANF benefit levels fell while unauthorized immigration rose. During the housing construction boom, unauthorized immigrants were attracted by jobs and not declining TANF benefits. After mid-2006, when housing starts began falling dramatically, real TANF benefit levels and unauthorized immigration both fell at the same time. If unauthorized immigration was primarily incentivized by the real value of welfare benefits, it would have fallen continuously since 2003.

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get driver's licenses, and vote in elections

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while not paying property, income, or payroll taxes.

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In the public debates over federal immigration reform, much has been made of the argument that undocumented immigrants would be a drain on federal, state and local government resources if granted legal status under reform. But it is also true that the 11.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States are already taxpayers, and that their local, state and federal tax contributions would increase under reform.

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So Rick Perry is lying?

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However, worries that new immigrants will increase the size of our bloated welfare state and further decrease America’s economic freedom shouldn’t be among them.

In a new paper from the Cato Institute, we show that, historically, immigrants and their descendants have not increased the size of individual welfare benefits or welfare budgets and are unlikely to do so going forward. The amount of welfare benefits is unaffected by the foreign origin or diversity of the population.

Since 1970, no pattern can be seen between the size of benefits a family of three gets under welfare programs like Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF) and the level of immigration or ethnic and racial diversity.

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There is no relationship between the relative size of the immigrant population, diversity and the amount of economic freedom in the United States. The percent of the national population that is immigrant, Hispanic, Asian or any combination is also not associated with more or fewer burdensome government regulations and higher or lower tax rates.

Demographics do not determine a country’s degree of economic freedom. But a country’s attractiveness for immigrants tends to be correlated with free markets, which bring greater economic prosperity.

The success of states like Texas and the decline of those like California cannot be explained by immigration or immigrant-driven increases in diversity. Political institutions, like those in Texas, that constrain the growth of government compared to those that drive it, such as in California, better explain their different levels of welfare spending and relative economic freedom than demographics.

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