Can a border wall pay for itself?

by philg

My Facebook friends heaped derision on the calculations in “Cutting welfare to illegal aliens would pay for Trump’s wall” (New York Post):

If a wall stopped just 200,000 of those future crossings, Camarota says, it would pay for itself in fiscal savings from welfare, public education, refundable tax credits and other benefits currently given to low-income, illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Camarota explains that illegal border-crossers from Mexico and Central America — who account for more than 75 percent of the illegal immigrant population in the US — are overwhelmingly poor, uneducated and lack English language and other skills. In fact, the average Latino illegal immigrant has less than a 10th-grade education. That means if they work, they tend to make low wages; and as a result pay relatively little in taxes while using public services. And if they have children while in the US, they more often than not receive welfare benefits on behalf of those US-born children, who have the same welfare eligibility as any other citizen.

“A large share of the welfare used by immigrant households is received on behalf of their US-born children,” Camarota said. “This is especially true of households headed by illegal immigrants.”

Therefore, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of more than $72,000 during their lifetimes, Camarota says. Including costs for their US-born children, the fiscal drain jumps to more than $94,000.

I can’t see how these calculations can be right. There seems to be no allowance for the cost of building infrastructure to accommodate the new Americans that result from immigration. (See “How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?“)

Let’s just look at the school construction cost. Mexican immigrants to the U.S. have an average of 3.5 children per woman (source). So let’s assume that each adult immigrant therefore adds 1.75 children to the U.S. school population. Our town is about to spend $166,667 per student on a new K-8 school (previous posting). Let’s assume that these kids also need a place in high school at $166,667. That’s a maximum of $583,335 in construction costs for every person added to the U.S. school population (this is a maximum figure because the marginal cost of building extra classrooms, per square foot, is presumably lower than the average cost; it doesn’t cost quite 2X to build a school that is 2X larger).

Readers: What do you think? Is there any way that the $94,000 number can be correct for a low-skill immigrant coming across the border with Mexico? That’s about what the City of Cambridge spends, including capital costs, to educate a child for three years in the K-12 schools.

[Of course, one could argue that we will be better off in non-financial ways as a consequence of expanded undocumented overland immigration. Money isn’t everything. This post is really about whether my Facebook friends are right in that the border wall is a stupid idea purely on fiscal grounds.]

49 thoughts on “Can a border wall pay for itself?”

  1. The wall will pay for itself if we simply charge an entry fee for each Mexican entering the USA through border check points. Say $100 per Mexican national.

    Countries charge a fee sometimes over a hundred dollars a person for a Visa to enter their country. If you want to go to China, you need to pay $140 for a Chinese Visa. It is only right that we charge the country which is causing a massive illegal immigration problem for us a fee to pay for our border security. They don’t have to like it, but they have ZERO say in the issue.

    Meanwhile, why is the US Army not on the US-Mexico border with Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and Apache helicopters? I will think that should give coyotes some pause! Besides, is it the job of the US Military to defend the our nation against foreign invaders? Whatever the cost of deploying the Army to the border, it’s going to be less than deploying to Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan.

  2. Lots of Mexicans go live in cities where building schools doesn’t come cost anywhere near $150k

  3. The answer is twofold: first, not everything is about money. What is the qualitative benefit of not living in a crime-ridden city like the ones in Brazil, for example? What is the quality of life when you never have to hear “Press 2 for Spanish” on every phone call to a company that you make?

    Second, absolutely it will pay for itself, in terms of both monetary and psychic benefits to the native population of the USA. Once you find out that illegals drain over $50 Billion per year in the USA (probably double that), it’s easy to justify.

  4. I was under the impression nobody builds or maintains infrastructure in the US of A. You have the occasional moneypits for never to be completed pharaonic projects, but that’s it, right?

  5. Nobody wants to do low skill work in US anymore. If we stop illigal immigration who is going to move our lawns and attend to our farms? Our quality of life will be reduced and cost of living will go up as a result!

    PS I tried to hire American lawn movers, they didn’t show up four times, I hired Mexican – run company and it works out really well for many years now!

  6. Both legal and illegal immigrants are a drain on the public purse.

    In Queens, most stores promote their acceptance of EBT (food stamps) in a foreign language.

    Chinese is the most popular language for brochures and posters promoting “free” government-subsidized healthcare.

    The New York City Department of Education published a detailed demographic report for the 2015-2016 on their English Language Learners (ELL).

    At any given time about 1 in 6 of the million students going to NYC public schools can’t speak English well enough to be instructed in the language. Half were born in this country.

    There’s lots more interesting data in the report. For instance, the Domican Republic is, by far, the top foreign source of ELLs (P.15). Most ELLs eventually learn enough English to function in a regular classroom, or they graduate or drop out. However, more than 10% require 7 years or more of ELL instruction. Of these hard cases, 80% are Spanish speakers. Half a percent of these Long Term ELLs speak Albanian, putting that small country 9th on the list of knuckleheaded students. Fulani comes in at a close 10th (p.39).

    http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/3A4AEC4C-14BD-49C4-B2E6-8EDF5D873BE4/213766/201516DemographicReportv5FINAL.pdf

  7. SK: nobody American-born wants to do low skill work? I would love to do yard work all summer as a way to get fresh air and exercise. I would also enjoy being a bicycle tour guide. So I WANT to do these jobs, but I don’t want to do them at the current market-clearing wage.

  9. SK:

    ‘it’s intellectually dishonest to say […] that immigrants do “jobs that Americans will not do.” The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays — and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.” (The Conscience of a Liberal, aka Paul Krugman).

    If one is unwilling to pay market prices for lawn mowing, one can do it oneself, too. That’s what I do and find it a nice exercise.

  11. Mememe: I think that FAIR analysis suffers from the same flaws as most others that I’ve seen. It assumes that infrastructure is free. They talk about 16.7 million extra people here in the U.S. (roughly the entire population of Chile or the Netherlands; more than Cambodia, Guatemala, Ecuador, or Zimbabwe), but budget $0 for schools, roads, water and sewer, etc. to serve those 16.7 million people. They also budget $0 for the costs of traffic congestion by having 16.7 million additional people using the roads.

    We wouldn’t say that it was free to build all of the infrastructure in Chile, would we?

    The authors disclose that their analysis is incomplete: “The estimate of general expenditure services received by illegal alien households, beyond the specific outlays mentioned in the sections above, excludes capital expenditures and debt servicing.”

    If you exclude capital expenditures and debt servicing, Greece was in awesome financial shape!

  12. Philg: I work in maintaining government infrastructure in a city that is losing population, and our costs are still going up. If we had to service an increased population at that rate in my area, I’m not sure we could do it at any price, but it’d definitely cost 100 million to try.

    On the border wall, I’m not too sure it would be effective considering people could just come through as tourists or go on boats. There’s also the issue of do we really want a Berlin style wall?

  13. If you the US does stop immigration my prediction is as follows:

    1) there will be a lot of low paying/low skills jobs for US citizens
    2) US citizens will not want to do the jobs in (1) because pay is too bad
    3) nobody will want to increase the salary for jobs in (1) and incur the extra burden of having to deal with fellow US citizens anyway
    4) we will finally get the development of many more robots doing boring/unskilled/no_reason_to_pay_a_lot jobs

    Point (4) guarantees that US citizens that are unwilling to do jobs that are low paying/low skills today will stay unemployed and a burden forevermore. You will have to finally embrace Swift.

    You read it here first.

  14. Tony: Yes, I think that the future of the U.S. is that we will have to abandon a lot of infrastructure because we can’t afford to maintain it (the trend is maintenance costs that are substantially higher than original construction costs), especially in areas that have shrinking populations (e.g., Detroit). Also the population is tending to shift and cluster. So even without population growth we would have more people per bridge or mile of road.

  15. Federico: If the welfare expansion of 2009 resulted in millions of Americans leaving the workforce, why does your dramatic scenario have to transpire? The government can simply cut back on welfare eligibility and people will take jobs rather than sleep on relatives’ sofas, no?

    A rational Massachusetts resident in 2013 (latest year for which data are available) wouldn’t take a job paying less than $50,540 per year because that was the value of the standard welfare package at the time (see https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/the_work_versus_welfare_trade-off_2013_wp.pdf ). If the value of welfare is reduced then low-wage jobs get more attractive, no?

    Most of the world’s stagnant economies have fizzled rather than imploded, I think. Why wouldn’t the U.S. also trend downward gradually under the weight of our various burdens such as tens of millions of new low-skill residents? All of the Federal entitlements can be cut by Congress when the money runs out. The states are sovereign and they can default on their bonds and pension obligations. We will still have the natural resources that we stole from the Indians!

  16. If the government were allowed to hire employees and contractors in the same manner as Amazon, it would cost like 1% of what it does. The inability to fire people, inflated salaries & benefits, prevailing wages, minority and women owned business laws, certified payroll and purchasing restrictions all add up in calculable and incalculable ways.

  17. The border wall is immigration policy theater. I can’t believe smart people like you fell for it.

  18. Neal: Hillary Clinton suggested that a “barrier” would be helpful in reducing undocumented immigration. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlFi0QUboxs

    Was she wrong to assume that a wall or fence would discourage immigrants? Or is the border wall proposed by the Trumpenfuhrer not the kind of “barrier” to which Ms. Clinton was referring?

    Tony: I’m sure that you’re right, especially given that you have had a front row seat for this, but we can’t plan under the assumption that somehow our government is going to become more efficient, can we? There is no incentive or imperative for government to be efficient, is there? People at Amazon will lose their jobs if everyone shops at Walmart instead. I can’t think of any similar motivation for a government worker.

  19. philg: I haven’t watched the HRC clip but it probably just her saying wishy washy politician things trying to appeal broadly. The reality is that SINCE the days of Saint Reagan (who himself increased spending significantly) we have increased per capita border enforcement spending by a factor of five or six in inflation adjusted dollars. We have reached the limit of that approach. Tactically, border fences, walls, barrier, whatever slow people down and allow a border patrol agent to patrol a somewhat larger area than they could without one. However, we already have them pretty much everywhere they make sense tactically. Spending more on barriers or agents is going to produce low improvements because we’re already getting the low, medium and high hanging enforcement fruit. Conversely, we have clear historical evidence that reducing employer demand for illegal labor works to reduce illegal immigration because illegal immigration ebbs and flows with business cycle related changes in employer demand. I’ve said all this before. In the past when we’ve discussed this topic you side step my points with ad-hominem arguments by you against me. I’m interested in discussing policy, but don’t expect me to go down that rabbit hole with you again.

  20. Neal: You want to speculate on what Hillary says in a 32-second clip rather than watch the 32-second video? Here’s my transcription: In response to the question I was wondering what you think about securing the Mexican border?, Hillary gave the following answer: “I voted numerous times when I was a Senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in and I do think that you have to control your borders.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DckY2dRFtxc is an older and longer video where Hillary describes her hope that Mexico will implement a planned economy to give jobs to all of the folks who would otherwise seek to cross the border into the U.S. Then she talks about “secure our borders with technology, personnel, physical barriers if necessary.”

    So… even a super-intelligent person such as Hillary can mistakenly believe that a high fence will discourage people from crossing. It is apparently a seductive cognitive flaw.

    I don’t think that your idea that the 580 miles of pre-Trump fence/wall (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico%E2%80%93United_States_barrier ) is in the most important places is necessarily inconsistent with Donald Trump’s idea that it would make sense to build additional miles of fence/wall.

    But, when you think about it, it is hard to understand how anyone opposed to additional fencing is intellectually consistent. If an additional mile of fence will make us worse off wouldn’t we expect that subtracting a mile of existing fence would make us better off? The fence has already been built, but our infrastructure usually costs more to maintain than to build. So by leaving the 580 miles in place we are essentially repurchasing it periodically. Why keep buying 580 miles of fence/wall if fence/wall is bad? Instead of simply opposing Trump’s new wall, why not advocate for tearing down the existing wall?

  21. The only hope is that things get so bad politicians are compelled to go against the various interest groups or our philosopher kings(i.e. supreme court) come to the rescue. I don’t know if you could make government workers as industrious as Amazon workers, but I know I could do more with two $12 an hour laborers than I could do with 1 $24 an hour laborer. That’s just one example.

  22. Why not just hire the illegal immigrants, be it Mexican or not to build the wall for us? Even better, import the materials from Mexico and China to reduce the cost?

    This way, the illegals make some money to send back home, Mexico and China will do business with us, and at the end, we have a wall at a fraction of the current cost. We can then say “Mexico paid for the wall”. No!

    Back to reality.

    The fix for illegal or legal immigrant problem is to remove the corrupt government of the countries from which immigrants are coming from. The UN and IMF and all “rich” nations need to stop funding those corrupt governments and let the citizens of those countries make their own revolution rather than outsiders meddling with their affairs. Sure, there will be suffering and destruction until when a country sorts itself out, but aren’t we already indirectly contributing to their current corruption?

  23. Phil, read again point (3): I predict no US citizen will increase his or her need to deal with other US citizens if at all possible, and thus there will be a strong R&D for robots that will leave currently unemployed US citizens still unemployed. You folks hate and despise each other. Their welfare package will be a matter of votes and political expediency.

  24. I agree that wages won’t be raised substantially. But if welfare is cut then the existing wages will be much more attractive. If there were no welfare at all, for example, every working-age person would need to have a job or live off friends and relatives. If welfare yielded a $1 million/year lifestyle then presumably there would be almost nobody working. So the level of welfare available sets the labor force participation rate somewhere in between those two extremes.

  25. philg: If I own an office building it is not inconsistent to conclude that market conditions don’t warrant building another one while also concluding that it doesn’t make sense to tear down my existing building.

  26. Neal: Unless the office building is serving as a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, are you sure that this is a sensible analogy?

    Folks such as yourself are saying that the proposed fence won’t keep undocumented immigrants out. If so, wouldn’t it have to be the case that at least one mile of the existing fence was similarly ineffective at keeping undocumented immigrants out? Thus we should tear down that mile of fence rather than continue to pay for maintenance costs.

    The office building analogy would become more relevant if our brightest non-deplorable minds were saying “It doesn’t make sense to build office buildings because companies never move in and pay rent.”

    If we truly want to be logical we wouldn’t be arguing about a fence. It is well-established among American elites that low-skill immigrants boost the U.S. economy and make everyone already in the U.S. better off. Thus if we want to enjoy a better wealthier life there wouldn’t be anyone trying to walk across the U.S. border. There would be Airbus A380s, paid for with American tax dollars, departing daily from every major city around the world and we would invite anyone who wants to become a low-skill immigrant to the U.S. to hop aboard.

  27. philg: I will concede it is possible there may be a mile of fence it would make sense to tear down rather than pay maintenance costs on. I will even concede there may be a mile of border on which it makes sense to add a fence. I will even concede both may be true. None of this is relevant to evaluating the President’s massive border wall proposal.

    Recognizing that the US economy has come to rely on the labor contributed by illegal immigrants and wanting any policy changes to avoid disrupting those contributions as well as treat those individuals fairly doesn’t even imply approval of the status quo, much less your suggestion about Airbus A380s.

  28. “the US economy has come to rely on the labor contributed by illegal immigrants”

    Out of curiosity, what part of the U.S. economy falls apart without “illegal immigrants” as you put it (since no human being is illegal, I prefer “undocumented immigrants”)?

    Let’s say you are right, though, and the undocumented are huge net contributors to the U.S. economy, making all of the documented immigrants and citizens better off. Why aren’t we trying to boost the flow of undocumented immigrants, e.g., with my Airbus A380 plan? Are you saying that government policies and fencing to date have resulted in exactly the optimum number of undocumented immigrants?

  29. “Out of curiosity, what part of the U.S. economy falls apart without “illegal immigrants” as you put it (since no human being is illegal, I think it is better to say “undocumented immigrants”)?”

    Agriculture for one falls apart without undocumented immigrants.

    “Why aren’t we trying to boost the flow of undocumented immigrants”

    For the same reason that the presence of a profitable office building in a city does not necessarily mean it makes sense to build more office buildings in that city.

    “Are you saying that government policies and fencing to date have resulted in exactly the optimum number of undocumented immigrants?”

    I make no such claim, but because the number of undocumented immigrants seems to be driven by labor demand (they tend to come when demand is high and tend to leave when demand is low), a person who believes in the efficient market hypothesis might think so.

    My original claim was that President’s Trump border wall proposal is immigration policy theater. If you want to move on to another topic I’d prefer that one of us concede on this original topic first.

  30. Agriculture falls apart without the undocumented? This is about 5 percent of GDP, right? Wouldn’t grain production be a core component? Do undocumented immigrants drive combines to harvest wheat and corn? If so, where are the undocumented in http://thefarmerslife.com/farmers-harvest-corn/ ?

    Let’s say that the GDP shrank by 5 percent because we had to shut down agriculture and import all of our food (as they do in some rich countries, e.g., Singapore). Would we be worse off? The environment would be a lot cleaner and more natural, right? Agriculture does a huge amount of damage to the environment. The population would be smaller. Let’s say that the undocumented and their children total about 15 million people. That’s 4.5 percent of the population. So with a GDP that is 5 percent smaller we would have a population that is 4.5 percent smaller and therefore roughly the same per-capita GDP, plus a much more natural and cleaner environment.

  31. Those happy valley students sound really expensive, can’t we just ship them all off to Mexico? Or Finland?

  33. philg: Sorry, I can’t take a counterfactual which involves shutting down US agriculture seriously, but maybe that’s just me.

  34. Richard: Thanks for the link. I will try to listen. Already I am amused by the title. As the American Indians can attest, after a certain number of immigrants show up, it is no longer “our town”. For better or worse, it becomes “their town”!

  35. @Neal:

    > Agriculture for one falls apart without undocumented immigrants.

    Wasn’t that what one of the argument that the South was making about slavery? That if slaves are freed, the economy of the South would collapse?

  36. Uh, agriculture doesn’t fall apart without exploiting low-education foreign workers. We have the technology to keep it going without creating and exploiting a poverty-stricken, itinerant class of foreign workers. And really, is it so bad for Americans to pay the kind of money for food that Europeans pay? Only we’d pay less even without ag-sploitating because America is an innovative country when it wishes to be.

  37. https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=1248 is from 2007 says that higher labor costs motivated farmers to mechanize, e.g., “About 40 percent of the raisin grapes are harvested with some type of mechanization, which has reduced the peak employment in the raisin industry from 50,000 to 25,000.”

    https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=2106 is from 2018: “Many Midwestern towns have manufacturing facilities that are struggling to attract workers. A major reason is the lack of affordable housing. Many of the houses in rural areas were built before 1970, some older residents are staying in them, and there has been little new housing constructed in counties that are losing residents. Hourly wages are often $12 to $15 an hour, which is not sufficient to afford new housing.”

    [In other words, we cannot grow our way to what looks like prosperity because low-skill workers don’t earn enough to afford housing and other infrastructure at current construction costs.]

    Immigrants are not moving to farming areas: “Rural counties attract relatively few immigrants: about four percent of their residents were foreign born in 2017, compared with 22 percent in the center of large metro areas and 13 percent in their suburbs.”

    Americans who live in rural areas are collecting welfare rather than working: “The labor forces of rural counties are becoming less attractive to employers. The male labor force participation rate was 56 percent in 2017, compared to 67 percent in the suburbs of large metro areas. The number of disabled workers aged 15 to 64 was 62 per 1,000 in rural areas, and 35 per 1,000 in the suburbs of large metro areas.”

    So if we believe these UC Davis folks, immigration is mostly a way to expand urban slums, not a way of bringing in crops. It looks as though, just as The Practical Conservative suggests, machines are the key to agricultural productivity.

  38. The Practical Conservative:

    “Agriculture for one falls apart without undocumented immigrants” is one of the dogmas of a certain religion. Faith cannot be discussed rationally, you either believe it or not. Any attempt to question the dogma will be seen, by the believer, as offensive.

  39. 50% – 75% of agricultural workers or some two million people are undocumented. US Agriculture falls apart if you somehow magically remove them from from the workforce. I didn’t mean to say it is impossible to design a US agricultural system which doesn’t rely on undocumented immigrants. My point was that as currently constituted US agriculture, and some other sectors (perhaps to a lesser extent) have come to rely significantly on the labor of undocumented immigrants and it is reasonable to take this existing reality into account when setting immigration policy. I see two major options with respect to illegal immigration:

    The first would be to target low immigration from Mexico. This requires the government to block the market driven flow of low wage labor from Mexico to the US. This in turn requires strong border enforcement (which we already have) AND an effective system for preventing the employment of undocumented workers (which we do not have). This would cause significant disruption in some sectors of the economy, would probably lower the overall growth rate (and possibly per capital growth), and would require significantly more intrusion of the government into US economic life. Of course, there would also be benefits which I will let others enumerate. I don’t favor this option, but I’m willing to consider the possibility that the benefits outweigh the costs providing that those costs are honestly accounted for in the proposal and the proposal treats those undocumented individuals already here fairly.

    The second option would be to legalize the status quo. That is, make it relatively easy for workers from Mexico to get legal authorization to work in the US. We could then reduce our expenditures on border enforcement and what spending remains could be focussed on cross border smuggling and other serious criminal activities. The work authorization system could be much lighter weight than option one because it wouldn’t need to fight against a natural gradient. Economic growth would be less constrained by labor supply issues and lighter regulation of employment should make the economy more dynamic. Of course, there are also costs associated with this option which I will let other enumerate. I’m willing to consider those costs providing the benefits are also honestly accounted for.

    I currently favor the second option (perhaps combined with policies to further spur development in Mexico) because it would be less disruptive in the short term and require less government to implement. In the longer term, as Mexico develops the economic gradient currently driving undocumented immigration will flatten tending to reduce the costs and increase the benefits as time goes on.

    President Trump’s proposed wall doesn’t play a role in either of these scenarios. It is really a continuation of current policy camouflaged by a big increase in spending on something that isn’t needed and won’t do much to change undocumented migration across the border.

  40. philg:

    I posted the link for the FAIR report because I did not want to be a comment hog. As imperfect as that report is, at least it quantifies the problem with exact numbers. Numbers are what are missing in these arguments.

    Infrastructure matters, but it is a relatively small fraction of government spending. Public employee pensions are a much greater strain on the public purse. Health care spending is eating our nation’s wealth like a cancer at ll levels. Education is mostly a local and state concern, and second to health spending.

    I would recommend spending an evening going over the Federal budget, on both the revenue and expenditure side. Then spend an evening going over your state’s budget. To figure out what the state of New York actually spends, it took me a few evenings, and I barely scratched the surface. I had to play with spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows. The City of New York is even more obtuse. Our biggest expenditure category is “miscellaneous”. It turns out most of “miscellaneous” was funding of pension funds. Another problem is that costs cascade — a lot of fed spending is grants to states. A lot of state spending is grants to localities. This disencentivizes savings at the lower levels of government. Comparative studies across states and localities are also illuminating. Then look at debt structure across levels of government. State and local governments are generally required to balance their budgets, but can issue bonds for “*infrastructure*”. This debt load adds another layer of complexity to the calculation.

    I used spreadsheets to make some sense of the data. I wish I knew SQL. Comparing trends over time helps too, but long range digitally available data is hard to get on the state and local levels.

    Revenue and expenditure look vastly different at different levels of goverment. The Feds rely on income and payroll taxes, states depend mostly on the sales taxes, most localities depend on property taxes.

    So the question you asked is needs answers on three levels: How are my income taxes affected by immigration, how are my sales taxes impacted by immigration, and how are my property taxes affected by immigration? And the answer varies by region, income level, source of income, and home ownership.

    Finally, what prompted me to just post the FAIR report was that after looking over figures for New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston, I though I would look over the Cambridge school figures to make fun of you for being an out-of-touch effete millionaire who sends his kids to a coddled lily-white public school. It turns out Cambridge public schools are such an overfunded mess serving mostly dysfunctional households. Cambridge make Queens look like a country club.

    So I have barely scratched the surface, and I have gone on too long for a comment.

    But if you have not already, look over what the various levels of government actually spend their money on, and where they get it from.

    Then maybe you can figure out an algorithmic way for your neighbors to enter in their property lot numbers, and for a number to be given them as to how much their property taxes could be reduced if we deported the illegals, or at least stopped new ones from coming in. Or at least speculate on how such a policy tool might be built, in broad strokes.

    Now I “post comment”. That translates into “shut up, already”.

  41. “50% – 75% of agricultural workers or some two million people are undocumented. US Agriculture falls apart if you somehow magically remove them from from the workforce”

    According to the Pew Research, 17% of agro workers in 2014 was undocumented ( http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/11/03/industries-of-unauthorized-immigrant-workers/ ). Iowa somehow manages to get by with 5% and New Hampshire with 2% and not “fall apart”.

    Not sure where the 50-75% number came from. The Izvestia aka WaPo, perhaps ?

  42. Mememe: What you may be missing is that many of those non-infrastructure costs are actually infrastructure costs. Us public employees get lavish benefits packages and all private sector companies that do business with the government on infrastructure have to follow the same rules. Then of course, other government goods like social services are heavily used by immigrants as well.

  43. Ivan: My numbers came from a spokesman for a major grower trade association, but I’m having trouble re-finding the link.

  44. Neal: Let’s suppose that you’re right. Agriculture is a low-skill, low-wage job done 75% of the time by undocumented immigrants who cannot find any alternatives. There is no way to automate this work or, due to competition in world markets, raise wages to the point where legal American workers would want the job.

    Why would we want the industry that you’ve described in the U.S.?

    If we told you about a country where the entire economy was agriculture and the skills and wages of the workers were low would you say “That’s an economic powerhouse” or “I really want to move there”?

  45. philg: I didn’t say

    “There is no way to automate this work or, due to competition in world markets, raise wages to the point where legal American workers would want the job.”

    I said this isn’t how the system is currently set up and if you want me to take proposed policy changes which make it so seriously I am looking for an honest acknowledgement and accounting of the transition and ongoing costs of that policy on the economy and a commitment to treat the people currently working in the system fairly during a transition.

    “Why would we want the industry that you’ve described in the U.S.?”

    I’ve already said I don’t take the idea of shutting down US agriculture seriously. I’m not interested in debating it; maybe others are.

    “If we told you about a country where the entire economy was agriculture and the skills and wages of the workers were low would you say “That’s an economic powerhouse” or “I really want to move there”?”

    No, and No. What does this question have to do with the United States economy?

    Really, this is what you’ve got? Hope that nobody notices you are ignoring the bulk of my argument and come back with “Hillary said she supports border enforcement spending so that means we should build President Trump’s proposed wall” and “If US agriculture relies on the labor of undocumented workers then we should shut down US agriculture”.

  46. I’m really perplexed at Neal’s insistence that we need immigrants to exploit for agriculture. Having undocumented immigrants leaves them susceptible to all sorts of abuse and exploitation. If we really want to be a humane society, why do we let this continue? Wouldn’t it be better to pay more for our food? And so what if California agriculture collapse? Just because we want cheap strawberries?

    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/rape-in-the-fields/

  47. GermanL: I didn’t mean to insist we need undocumented immigrants to exploit for agriculture. Please quote back the words I used in this thread which gave you that impression so that I can clarify my meaning and avoid using similar ambiguous language in the future.

  48. “And so what if California agriculture collapse?”

    If you don’t care about the well being of communities in my state why should I take anything you say seriously?

  49. @Neal:

    There are regulations and laws to ensure your safety and loved ones safety. The current system for undocumented immigrants is so broken to the point that it cannot be sustained.

    In the short term, undocumented immigrants DO contribute to the economy but in the long run, they are a liability and cost to EVERYONE — including immigrants themselves — no matter how you slice it.

    If you think about it, undocumented immigrants is just like slavery was for the South. Having slaves to work in the field was a liability for the WHOLE nation. And after eliminating them, the articulate of the South did not collapse, they adopted.

    > If you don’t care about the well being of communities in my state why should I take anything you say seriously?

    I do care about the well being of your community and all of the USA. But if we leave this issue unchecked, the wild fires in CA will spread over to other states.

    If you still not convinced, let me put it to you this way: you, as a documented legal US citizen (I’m assuming you are) why do you have to put up with laws and regulation that are all around you? Shouldn’t the government take care of you without you having to pay taxes out of your wages? Or visit a hospital to look after you without giving them your insurance card or personal information? What about flying over some distance relatives, from a different county and have them stay in the USA at taxes payers cost?

    My solution to this issue is what I said in comment #22. We cannot rely on feelings and emotions to address this issue.

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