"Illegal" Immigrants Saving Our Collective Economic Ass

Anyone with eyes to see who's doing the hard, dirty, ugly, essential work in this country shouldn't need any more proof that without paperless immigrants we'd collapse into Burmese levels of chaos.

But if you do need more, Kevin Drum points us to the facts:

Matt Yglesias recommends a recent FactCheck.org piece that looks at the economic impact of immigration and concludes that "study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs." This is true. Most research shows that increased immigration — legal or illegal — has at most a small negative effect on low-skill workers who lack a high school education and has a positive effect overall. Matt comments:

But of course when you look at the politics of this issue, none of this is reflected. The people clamoring to “control the border” aren’t recent low-skill immigrants from Mexico. It’s very rarely native born high-school dropouts either. Rather, the people upset about immigration tend to be white high school graduates, a group that has a lot of conservative opinions about many issues but generally benefits from high levels of immigration.

This suggests, of course, that opposition to immigration is rooted less in economic concerns and more in cultural resentment and language angst.

Read the rest for an explanation of the lizard-brain anti-immigrant campaign.

Kevin concludes:

And part of that emotional appeal? Beyond language and culture, it's the fear that Hispanic immigrants are responsible for an "illegal alien crime wave." But that, it turns out, probably isn't true either.