I wish our government was. Both parties are intent on reducing legal immigration and making us all poorer as a result
I don't blame you because the money on BOTH sides of the aisle tell you this all the time. They even buy studies that purport to "prove" it, but this is wildly untrue.
The welfare state and benefits like Social Security and Medicare make nearly any additions to the pool of recipients a net negative for us all economically.
Social Security and Medicare are substantially underwater. Ignore immigrants for a moment and just consider the economics of those programs for people born here:
- Social Security charges 6.2% of your wages.
- Medicare charges 1.45% of your wages.
- If you are self-employed you pay double that.
- If you work for someone else they pay the other half.
Thus, the total collected by the systems is 12.4% of earnings for Social Security and 2.9% of earnings for Medicare.
The two programs are theoretically separate but in practice they function together so, in total the Federal Government collects 15.3% of earned income for Social Security and Medicare.
As already mentioned both programs are massively underwater so that 15.3% is nowhere close to sufficient. This is despite the fact that each American pays it from their very first day flipping burgers at McDonald's in their teens until their very last day passing out carts at Wal-Mart in their old age (McDonald's and Wal-Mart are merely examples, the point is that Americans pay $1.53 of every $10 they earn from cradle to grave into SS/Medicare).
Since both systems are drowning in red ink we know that the average American isn't paying enough into the systems to cover their own costs.
Now back to immigrants:
Since we already know that the average American is a net drain in SS/Medicare, we also know that adding additional average Americans can only make those problems worse. You can't lose money on each person and make it up on volume, math doesn't work that way.
In theory we could benefit from high earning immigrants so long as their earnings are sufficient but there are additional problems spawned by immigration. The first is age. Even if SS/Medicare had some combination of higher rates or lower benefits such that the average American did pay for themselves, the numbers would still only work for immigrants who came here right at the start of their working lives. Anybody older than that couldn't possibly catch up without earnings way above average.
A prospective immigrant in their early 20's who has a job lined up with a six figure salary *MIGHT* pay for themselves but all other immigrants both legal AND illegal are a net drain on the economy. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either ignorant, lying, or a shill working for the Koch brothers or some similar person or entity.
