It is a fact that immigrants make us poorer! I am tired of hearing that immigrants pay their share of taxes. How about you? In this blog I will share a few facts.
Federal tax data from 2014 show that the top 10% paid 70.88% of all income tax. In 2014, to be in the top 10%, you needed to have a taxable income of $133,445. What percentage of immigrants earned that much? It is less than 1% and of what they earned, most sent more back home than they spent here. Now, do you really think that immigrants make us wealthier? Not me!
To judge wealth, you don't just look at the total economic figures. You have to look at it on an individual basis. You have to ask if the median person is wealthier? Do we have more oil in the ground per person with more immigration? The answer is "no"!..Do we have more farm land per person? Again, the answer is "no"! How can the median person be wealthier when immigration causes individuals to have less?
Do we have less garbage to deal with when we have more immigrants? Again, the answer is no! How about less traffic on our roads? Same answer. Do we have more green open spaces with more immigrants? No! Do we generate "more" green house gases with more immigrants and now the answer is "yes". Do we have to spend more to deal with global warming with more immigrants? The answer is yes! Is the quality of our education going up or down due to more immigration? It is clearly going down!
Are you starting to understand the problem that we have? If you look around the world, most of the countries who have strict limits on immigration are doing better economically than we are. Don't claim that our population is aging and so we need more immigrants. The average age of the USA population is about 37.5 while Canada's is about 40. Is Canada a bad place and are they in trouble due to their older population? No! They have a higher median income and quality of life than we do.
I can think of no benefit of more immigration that is not more than off set by the cost to our quality of life. Immigration might work if we could get "just the right" people, but no one knows how to do that so it is not on the alternative list. We can't hold out for "magic" can we?
The USA could be a lot better place is if more people had some skin in the game rather than leaching off taxpayers. If we would concentrate on that rather than more immigration, I feel that we would be making more progress for ourselves and our children. The bottom line is that there is no free lunch. If you think that more immigration is a good thing, then let them live in your basement and you feed them. Don't expect your neighbor to pay for what makes you feel good.
