gracchusdixit

Nothing so fires up the so-called Republican “base” as the so-called “problem” of illegal immigration.  To listen to the most rabid of the countless fear-mongers on right, you would imagine that the country was being gobbled up by an invading horde of barbarians bent on rape, rapine, and the ruin of civilization as we know it.

Several days ago, Donald Trump poured kerosene on the flames of this hellish vision with two uniquely incendiary proposals: (1) to overturn the 14th Amendment, which declares any person born in the United States to be a citizen; (2) to deport, en masse, not only illegal immigrants but their U.S.-born children.  The latter, he added without even a wink of irony, would serve to “keep immigrant families together”.

There are, of course, one or two practical difficulties with what Trump has proposed.  He did not say, for example, exactly what it might take, not to mention cost, to identify, process, and deport 11 million people and their children, which is something that no democratic society has ever contemplated.  Nor did he explain how the Constitutional rights of American citizens could suddenly be revoked, since no legal or historical precedent for doing such a thing exists.  Indeed, the inviolable principle of birth-right citizenship goes back centuries, to English common law, well before the Constitution itself was written.

All that aside, Trump’s proposals at least have the virtue of being clear, which is more than can be said for the empty rhetoric and endless equivocating of the other Republican Presidential candidates.

What is far from clear, however, is whether illegal immigration is even a problem to begin with, let alone a problem that needs drastic solutions of the sort Trump suggests.

It is broadly claimed—and widely believed—that illegal immigration is a catastrophic financial drain on the country.  Several years ago, for example, the resolutely right-wing Heritage Foundation (which led a fight to shut down the federal government long after the Republican Party had abandoned the idea as a self-destructive waste of time) published a study asserting that the average illegal household costs the country more than $14,000 a year.  That conclusion, along with the study as a whole, has since been thoroughly debunked.  Nonetheless, the perception that illegal immigration is an economic threat of the first order lives on.

The truth of the matter is that the net cost of illegal immigration has been studied to death by innumerable sources whose bona fides are a tad more reputable than those of the Heritage Foundation.  Those sources include professional economists, academics, non-partisan think tanks, the Congressional Budget Office, the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the revenue and tax agencies of dozens of states, both red and blue.  For every study that points to a net cost, there are far more that point to a net gain.  Indeed, every economic objection to illegal immigration collapses under inspection.

For example, some insist that illegal immigrants must cost the country money, because illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes.  As it happens, they do.  At least six million illegals file and pay income taxes every year—because the IRS cares only about collecting taxes, not about the status of those who pay them.  In addition, all illegals pay the same taxes on merchandise, gasoline, liquor and tobacco as everyone else.

Some claim that illegal immigrants “steal” jobs from American citizens or lower their wages.  There is evidence that illegal immigrants compete for jobs with some American citizens—almost entirely with those who dropped out of high school and have limited skills.  The best way to solve that problem, of course, would be to keep such people in school, fund those schools properly, and equip them with the skills they need, a subject on which anti-immigrant demagogues have little to say.  There is no evidence—repeat: no evidence—that the rest of the job market is affected in any appreciable way.

Some complain that illegal immigrants get free medical care.  It is true that illegal immigrants who show up in emergency rooms will eventually be attended to, because federal law requires that everyone who shows up in an emergency room should be attended to.  But illegals, like everyone else, will  also get a bill—unless they can prove an inability to pay., which is something that most illegals, for all the obvious reasons, are reluctant even to attempt.

Far more importantly, those who so desperately want to vilify and criminalize illegal immigrants either don’t realize or refuse to acknowledge the extent to which illegals subsidize their own prosperity.  Millions of illegals pay both Social Security and Medicare taxes, from which they never receive a penny in benefits, subsidizing those who do.  Their low-wage labor boosts corporate profits, which is why the oh-so-conservative Chamber of Commerce is oh-so-adamantly in favor of what they euphemistically call “immigration reform”.  The labor of illegals also lowers consumer prices, particularly food prices.  If Donald Trump got his way and succeeded in deporting illegal immigrants and their citizen children, Americans would soon be paying as much for fruit and vegetables as the perfidious French.  God forbid!

In the end, the animus against illegal immigrants has little to do with the actual economic cost of their presence in our country.  It has everything to do with the entrenched entitlements, privileges, and prejudices of those who are already here.

When German immigrants poured into this country in the late 18th century, the English who had gotten here first demonized them.  When Irish and Italian Catholics arrived by the millions in the 19th century, the Protestants who then ran the country called them every vile and filthy name they could think of.  When Slavs and Jews came in their wake, the lucky immigrants who had already made their way to our shores greeted the new arrivals with racial slurs, cudgels, and violence.

We are a nation of immigrants, a heritage of which we should be proud.  The saddest aspect of this heritage is that each generation of American immigrants has been so predictably prepared to begrudge the next.  Donald Trump is merely the latest in a long line of demagogues to exploit that shameful impulse.  He, and it, should be rejected by anyone who calls himself an American.