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If you don't replace your population over time, bad things happen.  I think if it's not growing at a decent rate, bad things happen. 

Yeah, they did away with that policy.

And as you and CD point out, while medina thinks people are a net drain on an economy, failing to replace those people certainly seems to be a... Much worse drain on an economy.

I was being flippant because I wanted to express the opposite position (more workers is a good thing for an economy) but didn't have the time to go into a longer economic argument.

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.

• Fatal flaw #1: Conflating SS/Medicare with "the economy". SS/Medicare are government transfer payment programs that, yes, pay out more than people pay in on average. That doesn't mean that they are "the economy", or even a reasonable proxy for the economy. 
• Fatal flaw #2: This has always been true of SS/Medicare. They are not retirement investment accounts. The design of the program has ALWAYS required a certain ratio of active workers to retired benefit recipients in order to self-fund. 15.3% has never been about "how much do *I* need to put in to fund my retirement?", it's "how much do we need to tax current workers to pay the recipients?" This is why I spun it around on you. If immigrants are bad for the economy because of the structural nature of SS/Medicare, people are bad for the economy. American children are worse because they cost us much more up front to obtain. 
• Fatal flaw #3: Tying this to SS/Medicare makes it very easy for me to turn this around on you again. Let's say we increase the combined SS/Medicare tax to 20.8%. Oh, and we'll make it more spicy by saying that we reduce income taxes to make it revenue-neutral. Now SS/Medicare are self-sustaining and well-funded, and being revenue-neutral, the government total tax revenue is unchanged. Now magically by putting money into a different bucket, immigrants become great for the economy!

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