well named
poorly undertitled
- Oct 2, 2018
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Because you are PURPOSELY conflating legal and illegal immigration
You should attempt to substantiate this claim, and also to show where it matters to the claims I'm making. So for example I cited Peri (2007) in relation to worker complementarity. That research does not distinguish directly between legal and illegal immigrants, but I cited it in response to your assertion about poor illegal immigrants being bad for the economy. The operative word there is really poor, not illegal, and Peri does research labor market impacts across different educational and income levels, thus you can see the data for poorer immigrants specifically, who in California are going to be mostly illegal. I've already pointed out that Allen et al. (2018) explicitly deals with illegal immigration specifically.
Beyond that, one of the points I have made repeatedly is that these cost estimates you've cited depend on estimating costs associated with providing services to the children of illegal immigrants, without estimating the economic benefits of having those children grow up in the US. But those children are also very often US citizens. That does not make their economic contributions less valid, and it's still misleading to exclude them from the analysis, because the economic consequences are directly related to illegal immigration. On this particular question it doesn't really make a lot of sense to consider exclusively their illegal parents in a vacuum, if you want to understand the economic impact.
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