Someone, a liberal who shall remain nameless, was recently complaining that a wall on our southern border could cost as much as 25 million per mile. So, let's crunch some numbers. A 2,000 mile wall, at 25 million per mile, would cost 50 billion dollars. Sounds like a lot of money, right? Well, compare that to the 100 billion a year that illegal aliens are costing us. That wall would be a bargain at twice the price. Tell me I'm wrong. I dare you.
compare that to the 100 billion a year that illegal aliens are costing us.
Any responsible analysis must look at costs and gains. It's convenient to say that illegal immigration costs some $100B. Saying that, however, ignores what is returned in exchange for that cost.
According to George Borjas' analysis:
- Illegal immigrants increased GDP by $395 to $472 billion. As before, this “contribution” to the economy does not measure the net benefit to natives.
- The immigration surplus or benefit to natives created by illegal immigrants is estimated at around $9 billion a year or 0.06 percent of GDP — six one-hundredths of 1 percent.
- Although the net benefits to natives from illegal immigrants are small, there is a sizable redistribution effect. Illegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 to $128 billion.
Economists have long known that immigration redistributes income in the receiving society. Although immigration makes the aggregate economy larger, the actual net benefit accruing to natives is small, equal to an estimated two-tenths of 1 percent of GDP. There is little evidence indicating that immigration (legal and/or illegal) creates large net gains for native-born Americans.
Even though the overall net impact on natives is small, this does not mean that the wage losses suffered by some natives or the income gains accruing to other natives are not substantial. Some groups of workers face a great deal of competition from immigrants. These workers are primarily, but by no means exclusively, at the bottom end of the skill distribution, doing low wage jobs that require modest levels of education. Such workers make up a significant share of the nation’s working poor. The biggest winners from immigration are owners of businesses that employ a lot of immigrant labor and other users of immigrant labor. The other big winners are the immigrants themselves. Illegal immigration continues to vex the public and policymakers.
Illegal immigrants have clearly benefited by living and working in the United States. Many business owners and users of immigrant labor have also benefited by having access to their labor. But some native-born Americans have also lost, and these losers likely include a disproportionate number of the poorest Americans.
Who is George Borjas?
George J. Borjas has been described by both Business Week and the Wall Street Journal as “America’s leading immigration economist”. He is the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the recipient of the 2011
IZA Prize in Labor Economics. Professor Borjas is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at IZA. Professor Borjas is the author of several books, including
Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton University Press, 1999), and the widely used textbook
Labor Economics (McGraw-Hill, 2012), now in its sixth edition. He has published
over 125 articles in books and scholarly journals. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1975.
It may be politically inauspicious to tell the whole story of both costs and benefits of illegal immigration, but that one tells only half of it -- the negative half -- does not make the other side of the story fail to exist for responsible voters and policy makers who want to be fully informed before arriving at conclusion. Now you can have fun parsing the matter any way you want, but there is no way the numbers make a net increase to GDP become a cost; it is a gain.
