Читать книгу The Politics of Immigration (2nd Edition) - David Wilson - Страница 15

6. Are Immigrants Hurting Our Economy?

CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, a majority of unauthorized immigrants pay taxes. Young families with children in school, whether immigrants or not, tend to use more in services than they pay in taxes until the kids grow up. Immigrants “take” jobs by entering the labor market, but they also buy goods and services, creating jobs. Unauthorized status makes it harder for workers to assert their rights, and that does push wages down, but we could fix that by allowing everyone to work legally. Many immigrants send some of their earnings abroad, but so do we all, every time we buy a product made in China or Honduras.

Studies on immigration’s economic impact generally don’t address important questions like who benefits from economic growth, why so many large corporations don’t pay their fair share, or whether the government spends our tax money in our best interests. People who support immigrant rights often say that immigrants are “good for the economy.” That sounds nice, but what does it mean? Are people supposed to be good for the economy, or should the economy be structured so that it’s good for people? And if so, what would that look like, and who gets to decide?

How much do immigrants cost us?

There have been dozens of efforts to determine the exact cost or benefit of immigration to the U.S. economy.¹ These studies generally focus on how much immigrants increase or reduce economic growth, or else compare how much immigrants pay in taxes to how much they receive in services.

The results have been contradictory, showing how hard it is to measure something so complex, and how much the results depend on what assumptions we start with.

• Research by the generally pro-immigration Fiscal Policy Institute in 2009 found evidence that immigrants had helped the economy grow in twenty-five metropolitan areas. “Immigration and economic growth of metro areas go hand in hand,” the study concluded.

• The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which calls for restricting immigration, claimed that families headed by undocumented immigrants were costing the federal government $10.4 billion a year in 2002, the difference between the taxes they paid and what the government spent on them (although the CIS study inflated the government’s expenses by including some of the cost of enforcing laws that target immigrants).

• A 1997 study by the National Academy of Sciences calculated that immigration boosted economic growth by some $1 billion to $10 billion a year, but that households headed by immigrants were costing households headed by native-born citizens about $166 to $226 annually. However, the study found that the immigrant households made up for the costs later as the children started working and paying taxes.

The one thing that the studies usually agree on is that the overall cost or benefit is relatively small, a few billion dollars either way each year in a country with an annual gross domestic product (GDP) that was about $16.8 trillion in 2014.²

To put those numbers in context, by October 2012 the U.S. government had lent $417 billion to financial firms under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the “bailout” for the 2008 financial crisis. Even after all the loans are paid back, the government projects that U.S. taxpayers will have lost between $24 billion and $63 billion. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2004 has already cost us more than $2 trillion, according to the Costs of War Project sponsored by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, and that total will go up as we pay interest on the loans used to finance the war.³ The estimated costs or benefits of immigration are also smaller than the annual cost of the main U.S. immigration enforcement programs, which totaled more than $17.9 billion in 2013.⁴

Do immigrants pay taxes?

As of 2013 some 74.4 percent of the country’s 44 million immigrants were naturalized citizens or legal residents and were paying the same taxes as U.S.-born citizens. The other 25.6 percent of immigrants, those who lack legal status, were mostly paying the same taxes, too.⁵ Everyone pays local sales taxes and contributes to property taxes when buying or renting a place to live (landlords include property taxes in the rents they charge). Unauthorized immigrant families paid some $10.6 billion in state and local taxes in 2010, according to estimates by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). This comes to about 6.4 percent of their annual income, a rate close to that of other taxpayers with similar incomes, according to the ITEP.⁶

The Social Security Administration estimated in 2013 that about 44 percent of this country’s 8.1 million out-of-status workers were employed in the formal economy, working “on the books,” generally using false Social Security numbers (SSN) or an individual tax identification number (ITIN).⁷ These workers paid federal, state, and local taxes the same way citizens and immigrants with legal status did, and Social Security and Medicare payments were deducted from their paychecks.

The other 56 percent of undocumented workers—about 4.5 million—worked off the books in the informal, or “underground,” economy. Their employers didn’t report their income or pay for unemployment insurance, and their taxes weren’t deducted from their paychecks. But these workers are still expected to pay income tax, and a number of them do, filing with an ITIN instead of a Social Security number.⁸ Why would someone file a tax return if they work off the books? Many unauthorized immigrants hope to resolve their status as soon as the rules allow it, so they want to show that they have been following the law.

How much revenue are the U.S. and state governments losing because of the unauthorized immigrants who aren’t paying income taxes? Workers in the underground economy are mostly paid very low wages; they tend to work irregular hours, if they even have steady work, and their employers often ignore minimum wage laws. Suppose these workers were all working full time in 2013 and were being paid the federal minimum wage; each of them would be making $15,080 a year. Based on the 1040 federal tax form for 2013 and assuming they had no dependents, they would each owe $508 in federal income tax. Even if all 4.5 million undocumented workers in the informal economy were failing to pay their federal income tax, the total loss each year would be about $2.3 billion.⁹