"I'm coming to America. Land of opportunity."

Net-net, immigration is good for America.

People don't come to America to loaf and collect welfare benefits. They don't get them. 

They come here to work their butts off.

Erich Almasy has been reading the news about the problems of illegal immigration. I wrote here on Tuesday that if Kamala Harris lost the election it would likely be because Biden allowed for too long a surge of undocumented immigrants at the border. It was lawless and disorderly and gave an impression of Democratic incompetence or unwillingness to address real-life problems. There was a problem, and if Democrats won't fix it, maybe Trump will.

Erich Almasy doesn't dispute the fact that a crush entering the country overwhelmed our ability to process them. But amid the claim that immigrants are dangerous, expensive, cat-eating "others," he argues that immigrants -- including undocumented ones -- are a net positive for the U.S. We need them. They don't "cost" us; they enrich us. They are excluded from major federal public benefit programs, including food assistance, non-emergency Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. They pay into Social Security but don't collect it. And they are more law-abiding than native-born Americans. 

In retirement, Erich and his wife Cynthia Blanton, both college classmates, live in the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende.

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

Have you ever met an unauthorized immigrant? Probably not knowingly, but almost certainly. They are all around you - serving your food, pumping your gas, driving your Uber, and doing many low-paid jobs that native Americans won’t perform. Most of these people are of Mexican heritage; however, did you know there are about 725,000 Indian unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. — the third largest population of unauthorized immigrants after Mexico and El Salvador?

 

Republicans claim that there are 25 million unauthorized immigrants, but Pew Research, which has collected this information for decades, shows a much smaller number. As of 2021, their statistics show that the nation’s 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants represented about 3 percent of the U.S. population and 22 percent of the foreign-born population. These shares were among the lowest since the 1990s. Between 2007 and 2021, the unauthorized immigrant population decreased by 1.75 million, or 14 percent. The unauthorized immigrant population in the United States grew to 11.0 million in 2022 but remained below the peak of 12.2 million in 2007. The number of unauthorized immigrants from México dropped to 4 million in 2022 from a high of 6.9 million in 2007.

 

In 2023 and into 2024, there was a massive surge in border encounters involving largely non-Mexican unauthorized immigrants. This surge reached its highest monthly total of 249,741 in December 2023. The previous high was 220,063 in March of 2000. By August 2024, the monthly total had dropped to 58,038 encounters, and the surge appears to have ended. The encounters for the twenty-two months of 2023 and 2024 totaled roughly 3.3 million, bringing the U.S. population of unauthorized immigrants to approximately 14.3 million, a 30 percent increase since 2022.

 

Republicans claim a massive cost of unauthorized immigration: increased Medicaid, increased crime, illegal gun imports, increased housing costs, lost jobs, unlawful voting, excessive use of welfare, and education system overload. The National Review blithely asserted they cost $451 billion annually. A Republican report of January 2024 stated that the lifetime fiscal drain per individual is $68,000. The wording of this report includes “likely,” “caveats,” “data limitations,” or “rough approximation” after every “fact.” Many of these assertions, such as housing shortages and gun imports (they go the other way), have been debunked as patently ridiculous. 

 

According to New American Economy, undocumented immigrants contributed about $13 billion to Social Security funds in 2016 and $3 billion to Medicare with no drawdowns. Unauthorized immigrants are not entitled to Medicaid except for emergency treatment. A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report shows $27 billion in federal and state spending on Emergency Medicaid for noncitizen immigrants for the seven fiscal years (FY) 2017 through 2023. Twenty-seven billion dollars represents less than 1 percent of overall expenditure in Medicaid over the entire period and, in some years, is less than half of a percent. Spending on Emergency Medicaid was $3.8 billion in FY 2023 and was 0.4 percent of total Medicaid spending that year.

 

Unauthorized immigrants are not entitled to welfare, although their USA-born children are. Unauthorized immigrants stay out of the legal system to avoid deportation. A Texas study found that unauthorized immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes. They don’t vote in elections. Our election systems distinguish between U.S. citizens and non-citizens, and fraud is nearly non-existent.

 

Professor Francine Lipman of William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, states that "unauthorized immigrants contribute more to public coffers in taxes than they cost in social services" and "contribute to the U.S. economy through their investments and consumption of goods and services; filling of millions of essential worker positions resulting in subsidiary job creation, increased productivity and lower costs of goods and services; and unrequited contributions to Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance programs." Even the Republican report admits they contributed $321 billion to the U.S. GDP in 2023.

 

So, was the surge of the past 22 months a problem? Absolutely. Is it over? Apparently. Are unauthorized immigrants a drain on public resources? The facts don’t support it. What exactly is the problem?

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