My grandparents legally immigrated to the US from Germany after WWI. With an identified sponsor and a trade, the path to legal immigration was open to them. Today this is not the case, so what is different today? The answer is robust social welfare programs paid for by citizens, who often make more than new immigrants. There is a difference between immigration for jobs and immigration for welfare.
Open immigration today would cause the wealthy and middle class to pay more into the welfare system and ultimately get less out, since the money they paid in would proportionally go to more people at the lower end of the income scale. I contend that illegal immigration is good for the US, while legal immigration is not so good. Illegal Mexicans that work in the US are here for jobs. These same workers, because they are illegal, are not entitled to any of the welfare programs paid for by legal citizens.
The US gets the benefit of illegal immigrants’ often low-cost labor, as well as their corresponding consumption in the form of food, rent, etc. However, by making them legal immigrants, the net cost to the US would no longer be good, since these immigrants would now be entitled to all the welfare programs available to citizens.
So I ask this question: is illegal immigration good for the US?
