Illigeal Immigration costs workers $$

[Delicia 1]

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[Ban Hammer 13,336]

to save having to open another window, here it is:

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Ronald J. Hansen

The Arizona Republic

Jan. 9, 2008 05:36 PM

Illegal immigrants cost Arizonans at least $1.4 billion in lower wages in 2005, a prominent Harvard labor economist estimates in a report released this week.

The report by George Borjas is the latest academic attempt to quantify the impact of illegal immigrants on the Arizona economy. It offered not-so-subtle criticism of a University of Arizona report last summer that found illegal workers overall made a slight positive economic contribution to the state.

Borjas' analysis did not attempt to examine any possible economic benefits illegal immigrants may make to the state's economy, such as lower prices for goods and services.

Judith Gans of the University of Arizona tried to quantify the net effect of illegal immigrants on the state's 2004 finances in her report, which immediately touched off a firestorm of complaints that it was not sufficiently thorough.

The Borjas report was prepared for Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas as part of a lawsuit challenging the state's employer-sanctions law, which threatens to pull business licenses from companies that knowingly employ illegal immigrants.

Borjas charged Thomas his customary $625 per hour for the report, which he said he prepared over "a couple of weeks." Thomas declined to disclose the report's cost.

"Dr. Borjas is one of the nation's leading authorities on the effects of illegal immigration on the American economy," Thomas said on Monday. "His analysis demonstrates that enforcement of the employer-sanctions law will help to protect and potentially increase wages in Arizona, especially among lower-wage workers."

Borjas, a Cuban immigrant described by the New York Times as "the pre-eminent scholar in his field," declined to comment Wednesday on his report, saying only that he would let it speak for itself. Gans, who manages an immigration-focused public-policy center at UA, could not be reached for comment.

In different ways, both reports try to quantify the economic impact illegal immigration has on Arizona, a factor often in dispute and at the heart of the issue.

In her report, Gans wrote that sales-tax revenues from illegal immigrants slightly outpaced the costs they incurred to local and state governments. She did not examine the effect of illegal immigrants on wages.

Another report, by Marc Rosenblum, a political-science professor at the University of New Orleans, predicts Arizona employers will react to the sanctions law with "defensive" hiring and firing practices and by increasingly paying low-skill workers in a black-market cash system that will cut wages for others.

Rosenblum, who was paid $225 an hour by business groups suing to overturn the sanctions law, did not estimate the financial impact on the state.

One of the key assumptions Borjas makes is that immigrants - both legal and illegal - expand the labor pool and inevitably lower wages for American-born workers in the same job field.

Some economists, like David Card at the University of California at Berkeley, reject that assumption. If true, workers in Bakersfield, Calif., could expect to make more than those in Los Angeles, Card said.

Borjas, however, said the effects on labor pools ripple across cities and states.

Borjas wrote that the drop in Arizona's wages was greatest for those who make the least, high-school dropouts and inexperienced workers.

For dropouts, wages for legal workers were 4.7 percent lower than they would be without illegal immigrants, Borjas found. Dropouts earned $20,300 in 2005, about $950 less than they otherwise would have been, he calculated.

By comparison, college-educated workers lost 0.9 percent, dropping their average income $590, to $65,100, Borjas found.

All the numbers are estimates and are probably worse than he projected, Borjas said in his report.

That's because federal officials likely undercounted the number of illegal immigrants, which Borjas estimates as 49 percent of the foreign-born residents in Arizona based on figures from the Department of Homeland Security.

Also, illegal workers likely are more concentrated in lower-wage jobs than government estimates show, he said.

In the long term, Borjas said, Arizona's overall wages would likely have no net harm from illegal workers because of adjustments made by those who compete with them and because businesses would find higher investment and profitability. But it is unclear how long it takes to reach that point, Borjas said.

"It is not known if these long-run adjustments take place in five years or 10 years or 20 years (or . . . after we are all dead)," he wrote. Also, low-skill workers would still face lower pay in the long run, he said.

His report focuses on wages only and does not estimate what, if anything, Arizonans saved in the lower costs of goods and services because of illegal immigrants. Also, Borjas did not estimate the impact of illegal immigrants on government, from the extra taxes they pay or the additional services they consume.

That was the approach Gans used, but Borjas said he could not assess her work because she didn't fully explain the methods she used to arrive at her conclusions.

Also, Gans' work was not peer-reviewed, and she does not hold a doctorate in economics, as he does, Borjas wrote.

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[Nessa 23]

dayum illegals

[SMOKE 1,426]

racist!

[natty bumppo 297]

racist!

race card gets played early today ...

[almaty 19]

so does the illegal one

[almaty 19]

so does the illegal one

[Ban Hammer 13,336]

so does the illegal one

topped off with a double post.

[SMOKE 1,426]

racist!

race card gets played early today ...

thought i'd beat'em to it....also first to post...brown people invasion, they just want a better life, cruel, selfish, the economy will be destoyed if we uphold the law, they only take jobs Americans won't do, you're anti immigrant, i should decide what laws we follow not the gov't. oh ya almost forgot.....the fascist fence builder.

[Ban Hammer 13,336]

racist!

race card gets played early today ...

thought i'd beat'em to it....also first to post...brown people invasion, they just want a better life, cruel, selfish, the economy will be destoyed if we uphold the law, they only take jobs Americans won't do, you're anti immigrant, i should decide what laws we follow not the gov't. oh ya almost forgot.....the fascist fence builder.

well you just killed this thread, you've gone and pre-empted the insults!