Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration | Hacker News Reader

Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

theamericanconservative.com

56 pointsluu33 comments

Thank you, HN peeps. Nice to see the loyal opposition appear on HN once in a while. I accept the site's left-of-center leanings, but it's heartwarming to see a different perspective hit the front page every so often. Speaks well of the mods and audience here.

Meanwhile the recent article on scaling back the house ethics committee is flagged/dead..

Well, that's "just politics". While immigration policy somehow is not.

But I bet if you suggested ruthlessly deporting anyone who overstays a student visa or cheats on their visa to do a startup, you'd get a different response, even though those things are just as illegal as the person working at Wal-Mart without legal presence/permission to work.

>the site's left-of-center leanings

I find HN to be one of the more moderate, centrist, pro-business places I get my news. There are vocal left-of-center members, but I'd hardly call it a left-of-center place. We clearly want to create an environment where entrepreneurialism and technology work to make the world a better place, and admire successful people and companies that make that a reality.

Should not have thanked them. The article quickly went flagged.

It seems like an obvious result of the law of supply & demand that immigration will drive the price of labor down for jobs which those immigrants do: more (un-unionized) labor = lower wages.

Followed by the cost of the government paying for their children (who will be citizens), because they certainly won't be able to afford to take care of several children on those low wage jobs. School, and welfare programs will add up, even if the parents themselves don't get much. The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone With Utah being on the low end with $6,000 per year.

What's the cost to deport 11.1 million people? And is it more expensive to deport them then to assimilate them into the workforce on a permanent basis?

Remember, the fertility rate drops when women are educated and their children don't die; this would suggest state funded education and the continuation of low income healthcare for children is the financially superior option to mass deportations.

According to https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/... it's 285bn USD over 5 years to deport them, and GDP would decrease by 1.45% over 10 years without undocumented/illegal immigrant participation (i.e. 0.145% drag every year---assuming this includes the relevant GDP multipliers).

You don't need to deport people; make it tough to earn a living and they'll move somewhere else — that's what brought them here in the first place. Arizona cracked down on illegal aliens a while back and their intensive-English courses enrollment dropped by 80,000 students. While intensive-English course enrollment is an imperfect proxy for "illegal" (some illegals don't need it anymore and some born here still do), this saved the state $350 million a year. Annual ER spending on noncitizens dropped from $167M to $106M. And between '00 and '04, the annual cost to state prisons from incarcerating noncitizen felons dropped 11% from $202M to $180M.

At least $416M saved, per year on average, and Arizona didn't deport anybody.

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/arizonas-e... (numbers quoted from the WSJ article quoted near the end: ctrl-F for "Remember education?"

> The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone

That number surprises me. If you think that the loaded labour rate of a teacher is probably $100K, that gives you a teacher to student ratio of 1:10. Since the ratio is more like 1:30 or 1:40, that means that 65-75% of the cost of education is something other than teachers' salaries.

I've got to think that's an indication that something is very, very wrong. Even accounting for the depreciation of the building and its contents, I wonder if quite a lot of money is being spent on something other than education...

Average class size is way less than 30 to 40: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s...

Hmm... Very interesting. Much different than the class sizes I remember from my one and only year of education in the US. Also, very nice if true.

I can't quite understand the data, though. In the description for self-contained and departmentalised the percentages don't even come close to adding up to 100%. Are there other styles of teaching whose data is not represented on this chart?

Easy solution: stop social services for everybody.

Are you sure that is cheaper?

Always good to cite your sources. (=

* Education Spending Per Student by State || http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...

I find this really interesting -- I wasn't able to figure out how to subtract transportation costs from the spend per pupil, probably good to also normalize school building maintenance costs where labor is more expensive. So this is certainly from the hip...

If we assume the folks at US News did an OK job of ranking education performance...

* How States Compare in the 2016 Best High Schools Rankings | Best High Schools | US News || http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/h...

Then we see that the states that were able to get the most bang for their buck were:

1) Utah

2) Florida

3) California

4) Nevada

5) Colorado

6) Arizona

7) Oklahoma

8) Georgia

9) Texas

10) Kentucky

It'd be curious to look for similarities between these states. I suspect America is too diverse of a place that we won't find a one-size-fits-all answer to education. Vouchers may help some states, hurt others. Religious participation and divorce rates may help some states but not matter at all in others. Raw spend may matter (seems to help CT and DC), or not at all (seems to not matter much in AK or WY -- this is where factoring out transportation and school maintenance seems like it'd be important).

Utah spends less than any state and still has exceptional performance... wonder if it scales... can you add more money to improve or does money not even matter?

Making sure the next generation doesn't grow up destitute and uneducated is hardly even an altruistic goal.

These children should be left out of this discussion. They didn't even have the opportunity to choose not to inconvenience you by their existence. They are US citizens just like you are. If there is a net transfer of tax dollars to children growing up in poverty - and there is preciously little of that - then all to the better.

Except immigrants also increase demand.

They increase demand for products (certain products that are local only to the destination country, not things they would buy anyways like a cellphone), but not jobs. Increased workforce will increase supply of labor much more than it will increase demand for that labor (which I can't think of a direct route which would cause that, except for general economic boom leading to more businesses, but that's pretty indirect)

That is a bunch of completely unproven assumptions. Of course immigrants increase the demand for labor. Even the illegal ones.

You can't think of a direct route? Try the obvious ones: Who cuts their hair? Who fixes their car? Sells them groceries? It's even more obvious for legal immigrants.

What's wrong with a general economic boom?

Great for haircut salons: you get cheaper labor with an increased labor pool and you get more customers!

Not great for the previous employees of the haircut salon.

I'm not convinced that the increased demand for haircuts will outpace the wage loss that came with increased competition for that job.

This simplified notion of "Supply and demand" does not work with immigration and labor.

The obvious solution to your problem of lower wages would be to legalize illegal immigrants to give them equal rights and empower them to seek higher wages.

This wouldn't work either, because the majority of immigrants will still be unskilled, not speaking the language well etc, starting as dirt poor and having to work hand to mouth, and thus unable to "seek higher wages" for other reasons too aside from their illegal status.

In that case they'd have to go back to their home countries to find work.

Yes, but the average commenter on the site (or anybody middle class and above) will rarely be impacted negatively by this, and if anything they'll have some benefits from the cheaper low-skill labor available to them (e.g. for their companies, construction, services, etc).

As for the low-skill working class people affected, the general sentiment is screw them. Or BS jokes like "if an immigrant that doesn't even speak the language can take your job, you didn't deserve it in the first place" (as if all jobs are dependent on verbal skills, e.g. mining, cleaning, gardening, construction work, etc).

In the same vein, if visas for developers counted in the millions, there would be riots all over Silicon Valley, and angry letters to politicians...

Sure, let's add up the cost.

What is the cost of a human life? What is the cost of the welfare of children whose only crime is following their parents across a border?

I don't pose these questions to signal virtue, but to point out the absurdity of assigning something like a cost function to something as natural as wanting a better life for oneself or one's children.

It might very well be true that "uncontrolled" immigration has an impact on the livelihoods of poorer Americans. Does this really imply that we should hurt the former in favor of the latter instead of helping both?

Depending on how and where you spend it, its about $7500 or more to save a life.

http://www.givewell.org/giving101/Your-dollar-goes-further-o...

But is that life worth $7500? More seriously, is a life that costs more to save more valuable?

I think the answer to both of these is an unqualified 'no.'

A life is a life. If one life costs 7500 to save and another costs 15000 they are both still lives if you ask me. Should you spend 15000 to save one life or 7500*2 to save 2? If the one that costs 15000 is your child? Thats complicated of course. But the numbers arent really. Again, 7500 or more. As long as you have resources to share you can choose which life to save (or if you want to spend it on a computer and time on HN and let them all perish).

Depends if the economics are zero sum or not, it could be that helping one group necessarily harms the other. Evidence in the article would imply that to be true, at least how we do things today. I'm not convinced there isn't a non-zero-sum solution though.

The article tries to paint both sides as adversarial and politically entrenched when clearly the researchers themselves (when quoted) want to focus on the data and the realities on the ground. I'm glad that it touches upon the fact that immigration policy is more complicated and nuanced then it first seems, with emergent behaviors that are reflected in more then just falling wages.

>Borjas suggests requiring employers to use the E-Verify system to ensure their workers aren’t in the country illegally, and otherwise supports a period of “benign neglect” toward those already here: no deportation, but no amnesty either, at least until the enforcement-first strategy proves successful.

I think a huge gap in the article is the write-off of labor rights under this kind of "benign neglect" system. A policy that creates a second-tier system naturally depresses wages for both immigrant and citizen laborers. If "benign neglect" means that basic standards for workplace safety and the right to assemble are not recognized and protected by the government, employers can use this to perform wage arbitrage.

Employment of illegal immigrants is not illegal in the US?

It's roundly ignored, because dark foreignors are easier for politicians to scape goat.

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