re: Houston - Owner of Trump Burger restaurant detained by ICE

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that’s about what i figured. run along..

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which doesn’t even remotely come close to offsetting how much they cost taxpayers on a year by year basis.

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Be a big boy. Counter his facts and sources with your ilk’s “facts” and “sources”. Harping on a past comment to deflect from his current post just makes it look like you have nothing.

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a big boy. Counter his facts and sources with your ilk’s “facts” and “sources”.

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Some reports claim to find negative fiscal effects from immigration, but they do not use any of the methods of economists who study the fiscal effects of immigration. One study comes from the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which purports to estimate the fiscal effects of “illegal immigrants.”29 FAIR’s report makes too many methodological errors to list, but here are some of the most egregious:

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FAIR’s study significantly underestimates tax contributions of illegalimmigrants: it underreports their state income tax revenues by 37percent, understates their federal income taxes by at least 88percent, and understates their Medicare and Social Security taxes by62 percent, according to data from the Census Bureau’s CurrentPopulation Survey.30 The discrepancies in FAIR’s estimates arise from erroneousassumptions about the educational attainment of illegal immigrantsas well as inaccurate assumptions about actual tax payments.31 FAIR’s study also miscalculates taxes generated on property andsales taxes.32

FAIR counts expenditures on U.S. citizen children in their households butignores the tax revenues paid by their adult U.S. citizen children.The Census Bureau doesn’t designate someone as a child of anillegal immigrant, but the adult children of Latin Americanimmigrants already pay about as much in taxes as illegal immigrantsdo.33 This ignores well over $100 billion in revenues.

FAIR’s analysis fails to account for tax incidence or taxes that areindirectly the result of the presence of immigrants and theirchildren in the United States. For instance, it incorrectly assumesthat illegal immigrants have zero effect on taxes on corporateincome or capital income. Research has shown that ignoring theeffects of immigrant workers on capital income by itself can lead toa negative result for low-skilled immigrants.34 Similarly, FAIR fails to account for the positive effect ofimmigration on home values, which in turn increases property taxrevenues.35

The likely reason that FAIR does not use the Census Bureau’s data on noncitizen tax payments is that it does not want to use the Census Bureau’s surveys to estimate the illegal immigrant population in the United States. Instead, FAIR invents its own number of illegal immigrants (15.5 million), so it deliberately ignores the best available data on noncitizen tax payments and benefits use. This approach significantly skews its fiscal impact calculations.

The FAIR report also significantly overstates the government benefits utilized by illegal immigrants and their families. It even bizarrely assigns 100 percent of the cost of immigration enforcement to immigrants in the United States. If Congress appropriated $1 trillion to stop all future illegal immigration, FAIR’s model would assign this expenditure to immigrants already living in the United States. This methodology doesn’t make any sense. It also does nothing to inform policymakers of the effects of legalizing the immigration of these people. FAIR’s report is not a serious calculation of illegal immigration’s fiscal effects.

Another report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds similarly negative results for illegal immigrants.36 CIS’s main mistake is that it misallocates most of the cost of pure public goods, such as national defense and interest payments on existing debt, to new immigrants. Excluding public goods is appropriate because accepting an additional immigrant does not require additional spending on them. Correcting its methodology to exclude public goods reverses CIS’s conclusion from a net present value cost to a net present value gain of about $900 billion in today’s dollars.37 Furthermore, CIS’s estimate fails to account for the effect of immigrants on companies’ capital income, which—as noted above—radically reduces the fiscal benefits of immigration.38

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think the below sums up where CATO is coming from. It wants open borders. Its bias is likely just as strong in that direction as anyone else’s differing views and is not any more objective on illegal immigration just because in other views it’s not left wing.

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would support guest workers and even long time resident programs before I would support any pathway allowing illegals to become citizens and vote legally. I don’t think illegals should ever be allowed to become citizens and vote.

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sounds like he was at leat paying taxes

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