I recently received this e-mail entitled, Joe Legal vs. Jose Illegal. It’s filled with racist undertones and is annoyingly ignorant. According to Snopes.com it started being e-mailed in 2000, 10 years ago. It’s clear that the author started with the goal of making illegal immigrants look like they are getting a everything for free and paying for nothing, and then tried to gather a few bits of evidence, with bogus math, to support the claim. The following is a response that I gave to the entire list of addresses to which the e-mail was forwarded. I welcome better-informed views and evidence on the topic.
I do not profess to know the answer to the specific problems of immigration. I think that this is a complex issue, and I have come to the conclusion that there are rarely quick fixes to problems this complex. So I won’t attempt right now to propose a well-thought solution. But I will address misinformation.
I would propose that a better way to approach this issue is to be humble and just ask questions like, “Are illegal immigrants paying less taxes?” I think that the people in the best position to answer this question are people who are willing to ask questions, do really thorough research, and report the answers that they find, regardless of whether the answers support their prior held views. Economists do this for a living. They, like all of us, have opinions. However, they also have pride, just as most of us do. And most economists that I know do not want to be viewed by their peers as weak or sloppy in their analysis. Therefore, they at least gather the right data and analyze it correctly. This is superior to these e-mails.
So, I’m no expert on this, and I do not have any friends that do this type of work, but this is what I have found from a simple google search using “percent of illegal immigrants paying taxes”. I find several articles, and am not sure which of them are done by a qualified and impartial economist. One rule of thumb is that I avoid blogs and websites that clearly have an agenda. I think: “Are they somehow making money off of this (by more webhits)? Is their self-esteem and identity wrapped up in supporting a view, so much that they could never be persuaded by evidence that they are wrong?”
On the first page of hits, I find an article from the Urban Institute, a non-partisan economic and social policy research group at: http://www.urban.org/publications/900898.html
I attach a summary to this email.
I go back to the google search, and I find another thinktank called Reason Foundation, subtitled: Free minds, free markets (I would think that they have little incentive to support a view of illegal immigrants based on this affiliation). They provide their view:
http://reason.org/news/show/122411.html
Another article from the Tax Foundation from an economist
http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/1424.html
A website called procon.org that gives opinions with some evidence on both sides of the question of whether illegals pay taxes. It is at: http://immigration.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000789
On the next page, I find another paper on SSRN (a site where academics post their research papers, often before they are published, so that any one can access them for free).
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=881584
I find another study in the state of Virginia at the Wilson Center at:
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/news/docs/immtaxcontribution_1.pdf
From these sources, it seems that while the data is not perfect, illegal immigrants do pay various forms of taxes. Most interesting to me, and something that I had never thought of before, is that illegal immigrants are actually helping to pay into social security, but they are not able to receive social security, so they are helping to address the huge problems that we have with social security.
I’m sure that there are more facts that can tip the balance somewhat from the few cursory findings that I find in the last hour. Nevertheless, I think that we should find viable solutions to stopping illegal immigration. I imagine that there are some methods that are more successful than others, but it’s late. If anyone would like to respond with impartial evidence of a system that actually works, I’d be interested.