One of the reasons immigration is so controversial in the United States today is the economic impacts. Do illegal immigrants help or hurt our economy? Really, the answer is both. Both sides of the argument were examined in the New York Times article "Do Illegal Immigrants Actually Hurt the U.S. Economy?"
Let's look at the negative effects first. When illegal immigrants come to the United States, they often take low-paying jobs requiring little skill. These jobs, if they weren't being given to illegal immigrants, would go to American citizens with a low level of education. According to the article, there are 25 million adults in the U.S. who did not graduate from high school. These people must now compete for unskilled jobs against a large number of illegal immigrants. The competition for these jobs lowers the pay and it makes it more difficult for American citizens to find work. Pay for the 25 million adults who did not graduate high school has been lowered between .4 and 7.4 percent due to illegal immigrants.
Additionally, the illegal immigrants who are here use our social services. Since many illegal families are poor, a large portion of our aid services go to them when they could be helping American citizens. Therefore, U.S. tax dollars go to funding those who are not citizens of our country.
As pointed out by the article, one of the largest problems with illegal immigration, economically at least, is the fact that the immigrants are largely concentrated in certain areas. Texas, Arizona and California all have significantly higher rates of unauthorized immigrants due to their proximity to the Mexican border. As a result, competition for low-paying jobs is very high in these areas. If immigrants were to spread out more, resulting in fewer immigrants in each area, it could benefit the economy, not hurt it.
This leads us to the benefits of illegal immigration (economically, anyway). Unauthorized immigrants take low-paying jobs that can benefit those working higher-paying jobs. When these immigrants do the dirty work for low pay, skilled workers do not need to extend their work to more unskilled tasks, which saves the employers money. Also, according to the article, from 1990 to 2007 illegal immigrants caused the wages of skilled workers in complementary fields to rise up to ten percent.
The little money illegal immigrants do make at their low-paying jobs usually goes straight back into the U.S. economy, since immigrants need to pay for housing, transportation, food, and other necessities.
Also, undocumented immigrants help support the United States social security system. Most illegal immigrants may not receive benefits, as they are not legal citizens. However, they do contribute to the Social Security Trust Fund through payroll taxes. According to Stephen Goss of the Social Security Administration, who was interviewed for the article, illegal immigrants contribute 15 billion dollars to Social Security and only take out one billion.
Reyna's father is an example of a low-payed immigrant working in Mexican-heavy Southern California. As an illegal immigrant, her father didn't have many choices when it came to employment, so he provided for the family as best he could by doing maintenance at a retirement home. "He hoped that soon that green card he so desired would help him become more than just a maintenance worker" (Grande 236). The family could not afford much, but they made do and contributed to the economy by buying food, cars and other goods and services.
So do the economic benefits of illegal immigration outweigh the negatives? It's hard to tell because the two are not directly comparable. Illegal immigrants do jobs that complement higher-paying jobs, so they support the middle class. However, they compete for jobs against lower-class, uneducated Americans, especially in areas near the border where immigrants are concentrated. It is difficult to weigh pros and cons because the economic impact of undocumented immigrants is so complicated. They do help, but they hurt as well.
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