(June 24, 2018 at 8:17 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: You could dramatically increase the portion of taxes that illegal immigrants pay if you made them all citizens.
Not necessarily. As many have pointed out illegal immigrants do not receive many benefits because they are not citizens, in fact the immigrants that DO pay taxes, pay out more than they receive, yes. Once they become citizens, it's a different story. We know that about half of the illegal immigrant population have not attained a high school diploma or equivalent, well above the national average. Half the population can also neither speak English, or not speak it well. We also know that on average a household only makes $30,100. Between lack of education and language barriers, this makes lifting yourself out of poverty unlikely. Instead what will more likely happen is the benefits that were not available prior to amnesty will now be used, creating a tax deficit for a large portion of the population given amnesty.
If we are going to entertain amnesty, we also need to think of what rules would be creating to allow this path to citizenship. And there are a lot of questions that need answering to implement those rules. Should they have to pay a fee/fine? Obviously what they did was illegal, we have a system in place to grant citizenship to people wishing to immigrate to the US. How much should that fine be? If the average illegal immigrant family is making $30,100, we can't quite fine them $10,000 and expect them to pay it. Should the fine cover the estimated average cost it will be to provide amnesty, therefore relieving current citizens the tax burden of doing so? Should they have to pay back taxes? Surely they should, I mean we are talking a large portion of the population willfully neglected to pay taxes. Ask Wesley Snipes how that worked out for him. Should we imprison those that didn't pay taxes? Won't they become an even further tax burden at that point? If they agree to pay back taxes, what time frame do we give them and do we imprison them if they fail to pay in full within the allotted time? Will amnesty solve the problem of illegal immigration? How does this affect our infrastructure? Do they get moved to the front of the line or back of the line to be granted citizenship? Do we perform background checks first? Should they need to learn English?
In my opinion, I would be willing to give amnesty to those that have already been paying taxes. What a country should be looking for in it's citizens is those that are willing to contribute to the benefit of everyone. That's what taxes are. We pay taxes so we can all benefit. I still however, think giving amnesty to even the tax paying portion of illegal immigrants to be unfair to immigrants that came here through legal channels and waited patiently. It's a slap in their face, and what they did was still wrong. But it is a compromise I am willing to make.
Also it's worth keeping in mind that we gave amnesty to roughly 3 million undocumented immigrants in 1986, and it got us 11 million just 25 years later. If we provide amnesty, even if only in limited fashion, we need to upgrade our border laws and enforce them to a high degree. We also need to take a look at our immigration policies and see if there are ways that we can improve/update them to make legal immigration easier/faster if it allows. But what we don't want to be doing is providing amnesty to large swathes of illegal immigrants every couple of decades, it defeats the purpose of having an immigration policy in the first place. We need to make sure that employers of illegal immigrants are punished, find ways to disincentivize employers from hiring them, make it more difficult to be hired if you are undocumented, enforce our borders, and enforce immigration policy.
