There are few political ideologies that more routinely and snugly embrace the philosophy the enemy of my enemy is my friend than the American left.
This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than when it comes to America’s illegal alien population: the left has bizarrely partnered up with many libertarians in order to justify illegal immigration, whether on economic or moral grounds.
This unholy alliance is, of course, based on nothing but lies.
Here are 3 of those lies about illegal immigrants, and why they’re false.
Liberal Lie #1: Illegal Aliens Don’t Increase Crime Rates
This lie’s the easiest to debunk, because there’s no factual basis for it, nor can a logical argument be made in its favor.
I. No Aliens, No Alien Crime
Let’s start with the obvious: there should be no crimes committed by illegal aliens, because there should be no illegal aliens in the country—no aliens, no aliens committing crimes.
The moral standard shouldn’t, as the liberals claim, be that “aliens commit fewer crimes than citizens” (they don’t)— the standard should be that “aliens commit no crimes” since they have no right to be here in the first place.
Although this sounds like a truism (it is), liberals still don’t seem to get it: if the illegal alien Henry Sanchez wasn’t in America, then he and his alien buddy wouldn’t have been able to rape a 14 year old girl in the Rockville High School’s bathroom.
End of story.
II. Aliens Increase Overall Crime Rates
This shouldn’t be a controversial topic, but it is. In fact, Ann Coulter wrote an entire book on it, and people still don’t seem to get it.
The fact is that illegal aliens are far more likely to commit crimes than American citizens.
Just look at the LAPD’s most wanted list—they’re probably all illegals.
Aside from that, are some actual statistics on crime and illegal aliens for you:
- According to National Review, in New York State illegal aliens are 350% more likely to be imprisoned for homicide than are legal immigrant citizens. This disparity also holds up in other states they examined, such as Texas and California.
- The ratios are worse for drug crime: 75% of all federal drug possession sentences were given to illegal aliens.
- Overall, 40% of all federal crimes were committed in jurisdictions bordering Mexico.
If there were no illegal aliens in America, the federal crime rate alone would drop by 40%, and that is to say nothing of the beneficial impact on quality of life.
Liberal Lie #2: Illegal Aliens Are Good For The Economy
Democrats never seem to care about the economy unless they’re talking about illegal aliens, at which point they suddenly turn into Milton Friedman clones and spout off everything they’ve heard about economics. Same goes for many libertarians.
But, the facts just aren’t on their side. Let’s take a look.
I. Illegal Aliens Cost America A Net $110.1 Billion Per Year
Here are the facts:
- The federal government spends $28.6 billion per year subsidizing illegal immigrants, according to a report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform. This money goes to services such as education ($2.1 billion), healthcare ($5.9 billion), policing etc.
- State and local governments cough up more, $93.3 billion a year on illegals. This goes to everything from education, healthcare, municipal services, court and policing costs etc. You can get a good sense of what this looks like in my cost analysis on California.
- Illegal immigrants do pay taxes to the tune of $14.9 billion at the federal, state, and local level.
Adjusted for inflation, the US government spends a net $110.1 billion every year on illegal immigrants—that’s the sort of statistic they don’t tell you about.
II. Aliens Send $38 Billion Abroad In Remittances Every Year
Remittances are simply money transfers from someone working in the US, to their family back home.
This is the primary reason many aliens come to the US: to work and support their family abroad. The numbers add up quickly, and you can read about how I calculated them in this article on illegal immigration, which I won’t duplicate here.
I would like to make 2 quick points about remittances before moving on:
- Remittances are bad for the economy because they are a net drain on its wealth: it’s like paying an additional tax, except the money leaves the country entirely—remittances are basically a tax paid to Mexico.
- Remittances undermine one of the liberal’s primary economic arguments: they say that illegals spend their money in America, thereby benefiting our economy. However, since most of their earnings either flow abroad, or were made illegally (yes, drug cartels make more money than all the law-abiding aliens combined), there really is no net benefit here. It’s a wealth-outflow, pure and simple.
III. Illegal Aliens Depress Wages For Citizens
This happens in 2 main ways:
- It’s called supply and demand: when supply goes up, prices fall, when demand goes up, prices rise. This works in the labor market too: more labor, lower wages; less labor, higher wages. Illegal aliens have flooded America’s labor market with low-skilled workers, which has caused wage stagnation and led to unemployment.
- Aliens also undercut wages by working under the table for wages that would be illegal to offer an America. Beyond that, employers like hiring illegals because they have leverage over them: if they misbehave, you can fire them without recourse, they will work in unsafe conditions etc.
IV. The Argument That “Illegal Immigrants Do Jobs Americans Don’t Want To Do” Is Wrong
This isn’t true. Why?
- There are 23 million unemployed Americans right now. There are at least 11 million illegal immigrants—even if you deported every illegal and gave that job to an American, the unemployment rate would still be around 7%.
- Americans are willing to work the jobs illegals do, and they currently work them in states where there aren’t illegal immigrants. If you check out this document published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you’ll see that there are literally millions of Americans, white, black, and Hispanic, who are employed as janitors, laborers, store clerks—everything.
- It’s simply not true that Americans won’t do these jobs—they can’t, because they’re being undercut by illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are unemployed.
Believe it or not, people in states without high levels of illegal immigration (for example, Montana or Ohio) can still afford McDonald’s and Starbucks—they just hire teenagers to do the jobs, or they automate them.
The same goes for entire countries like Canada or the UK.
Remember, we didn’t always have illegal aliens to fill job vacancies: in the old days, we had to use our imaginations.
And as you can see in the below graph, disposable incomes actually rose faster before the age of mass migration. Funny, that.
Liberal Lie #3: Illegal Immigrants Have A Right To Live In America
How do I put this? They don’t.
Foreign citizens do not have the moral or legal right to live in any sovereign nation they so choose: this is why we have borders in the first place. If we didn’t, 1 billion people from the 3rd world would run into the West overnight.
Just look at what happened in Europe: Germany said it would accept Syrian refugees with open arms, and then 3 million non-Syrians jogged into Europe as fast as they could.
Now places like Sweden are paying the iron-price for their generosity.
No. The only moral duty a state must owe is to its own people, its citizen population—without this moral duty, a legitimate state cannot exist.
Another way of looking at it is this: does Mexico have a moral obligation to let Americans live there? Does China have a moral obligation to let Indians live there?
No. This logic is only ever applied to Western countries, which means the logic isn’t universal, and is therefore false. If it were a general moral principle, it would apply regardless of the nations involved.
This really isn’t a question that’s up for debate either: despite its seemingly philosophical nature it really does boil down to biology, and something called group-selection, which I discuss in-depth in this article on foreign aid:
America Gives $190 Billion In Foreign Aid: Meanwhile 49,933 Veterans Live On The Streets
Fundamentally, you can’t have altruism without an in-group preference—they are necessarily tied together in our biological architecture. We can’t escape the fact that national unity has been mankind’s greatest survival weapon, and when it goes, we go.
Its abandonment is why Germany won’t be Germany in 50 years. To abandon prioritizing national-self interest is to abandon national self-preservation. It’s to commit suicide.
If you’re interested in that, check out Robert Trivers’ book The Folly Of Fools. He’s an ass hole, frankly, but I respect his scholarship.
Illegal Aliens Are Hurting America, What Do We Do About It?
There’s no question that illegal aliens are bad for America: they’re causing crime and they’re hurting our economy.
In light of this, the only reasonable solution is to deport them: they don’t have a right to be here, and we have the right to put our interests first.
In our situation, their homelands would do the same.
Of course, once they’re gone, they need to stay out. Tighter border security (this includes making sure people don’t overstay their visas) is the key, and Trump’s wall would help as well.
Either way, we can’t afford to ignore this problem any more—just look at what they’re costing us in Texas and California.
We don’t have a choice.
