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Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

theamericanconservative.com

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Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#11

Post by dbg31415 »

setra wrote: post #3
chillacy wrote: post #2

It seems like an obvious result of the law of supply & demand that immigration will drive the price of labor down for jobs which those immigrants do: more (un-unionized) labor = lower wages.

Followed by the cost of the government paying for their children (who will be citizens), because they certainly won't be able to afford to take care of several children on those low wage jobs. School, and welfare programs will add up, even if the parents themselves don't get much. The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone With Utah being on the low end with $6,000 per year.

Always good to cite your sources. (=

* Education Spending Per Student by State || http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...

I find this really interesting -- I wasn't able to figure out how to subtract transportation costs from the spend per pupil, probably good to also normalize school building maintenance costs where labor is more expensive. So this is certainly from the hip...

If we assume the folks at US News did an OK job of ranking education performance...

* How States Compare in the 2016 Best High Schools Rankings | Best High Schools | US News || http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/h...

Then we see that the states that were able to get the most bang for their buck were:

1) Utah

2) Florida

3) California

4) Nevada

5) Colorado

6) Arizona

7) Oklahoma

8) Georgia

9) Texas

10) Kentucky

It'd be curious to look for similarities between these states. I suspect America is too diverse of a place that we won't find a one-size-fits-all answer to education. Vouchers may help some states, hurt others. Religious participation and divorce rates may help some states but not matter at all in others. Raw spend may matter (seems to help CT and DC), or not at all (seems to not matter much in AK or WY -- this is where factoring out transportation and school maintenance seems like it'd be important).

Utah spends less than any state and still has exceptional performance... wonder if it scales... can you add more money to improve or does money not even matter?

Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#12

Post by saboot »

tomcam wrote: post #7

Thank you, HN peeps. Nice to see the loyal opposition appear on HN once in a while. I accept the site's left-of-center leanings, but it's heartwarming to see a different perspective hit the front page every so often. Speaks well of the mods and audience here.

Meanwhile the recent article on scaling back the house ethics committee is flagged/dead..

Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#13

Post by ubernostrum »

saboot wrote: post #12
tomcam wrote: post #7

Thank you, HN peeps. Nice to see the loyal opposition appear on HN once in a while. I accept the site's left-of-center leanings, but it's heartwarming to see a different perspective hit the front page every so often. Speaks well of the mods and audience here.

Meanwhile the recent article on scaling back the house ethics committee is flagged/dead..

Well, that's "just politics". While immigration policy somehow is not.

But I bet if you suggested ruthlessly deporting anyone who overstays a student visa or cheats on their visa to do a startup, you'd get a different response, even though those things are just as illegal as the person working at Wal-Mart without legal presence/permission to work.

Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#14

Post by bayesian_horse »

chillacy wrote: post #8
pranjalv123 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except immigrants also increase demand.

They increase demand for products (certain products that are local only to the destination country, not things they would buy anyways like a cellphone), but not jobs. Increased workforce will increase supply of labor much more than it will increase demand for that labor (which I can't think of a direct route which would cause that, except for general economic boom leading to more businesses, but that's pretty indirec…

That is a bunch of completely unproven assumptions. Of course immigrants increase the demand for labor. Even the illegal ones.

You can't think of a direct route? Try the obvious ones: Who cuts their hair? Who fixes their car? Sells them groceries? It's even more obvious for legal immigrants.

What's wrong with a general economic boom?

Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#15

Post by bayesian_horse »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #9
setra wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Followed by the cost of the government paying for their children (who will be citizens), because they certainly won't be able to afford to take care of several children on those low wage jobs. School, and welfare programs will add up, even if the parents themselves don't get much. The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone With Utah being on the low end with $6,000 per year.

Easy solution: stop social services for everybody.

Are you sure that is cheaper?

Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#16

Post by bayesian_horse »

chillacy wrote: post #2

It seems like an obvious result of the law of supply & demand that immigration will drive the price of labor down for jobs which those immigrants do: more (un-unionized) labor = lower wages.

This simplified notion of "Supply and demand" does not work with immigration and labor.

The obvious solution to your problem of lower wages would be to legalize illegal immigrants to give them equal rights and empower them to seek higher wages.

Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#17

Post by ec109685 »

mikekchar wrote: post #5
setra wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Followed by the cost of the government paying for their children (who will be citizens), because they certainly won't be able to afford to take care of several children on those low wage jobs. School, and welfare programs will add up, even if the parents themselves don't get much. The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone With Utah being on the low end with $6,000 per year.

> The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone That number surprises me. If you think that the loaded labour rate of a teacher is probably $100K, that gives you a teacher to student ratio of 1:10. Since the ratio is more like 1:30 or 1:40, that means that 65-75% of the cost of education is something other than teachers' salaries. I've got to think that's an indication that something is very…

Average class size is way less than 30 to 40: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s...

Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#18

Post by bayesian_horse »

setra wrote: post #3
chillacy wrote: post #2

It seems like an obvious result of the law of supply & demand that immigration will drive the price of labor down for jobs which those immigrants do: more (un-unionized) labor = lower wages.

Followed by the cost of the government paying for their children (who will be citizens), because they certainly won't be able to afford to take care of several children on those low wage jobs. School, and welfare programs will add up, even if the parents themselves don't get much. The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone With Utah being on the low end with $6,000 per year.

Making sure the next generation doesn't grow up destitute and uneducated is hardly even an altruistic goal.

These children should be left out of this discussion. They didn't even have the opportunity to choose not to inconvenience you by their existence. They are US citizens just like you are. If there is a net transfer of tax dollars to children growing up in poverty - and there is preciously little of that - then all to the better.

Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#19

Post by woodruffw »

Sure, let's add up the cost.

What is the cost of a human life? What is the cost of the welfare of children whose only crime is following their parents across a border?

I don't pose these questions to signal virtue, but to point out the absurdity of assigning something like a cost function to something as natural as wanting a better life for oneself or one's children.

It might very well be true that "uncontrolled" immigration has an impact on the livelihoods of poorer Americans. Does this really imply that we should hurt the former in favor of the latter instead of helping both?

Re: Adding up the cost of uncontrolled immigration

#20

Post by adiabatty »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
setra wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Followed by the cost of the government paying for their children (who will be citizens), because they certainly won't be able to afford to take care of several children on those low wage jobs. School, and welfare programs will add up, even if the parents themselves don't get much. The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone With Utah being on the low end with $6,000 per year.

What's the cost to deport 11.1 million people? And is it more expensive to deport them then to assimilate them into the workforce on a permanent basis? Remember, the fertility rate drops when women are educated and their children don't die; this would suggest state funded education and the continuation of low income healthcare for children is the financially superior option to mass deportations.

You don't need to deport people; make it tough to earn a living and they'll move somewhere else — that's what brought them here in the first place. Arizona cracked down on illegal aliens a while back and their intensive-English courses enrollment dropped by 80,000 students. While intensive-English course enrollment is an imperfect proxy for "illegal" (some illegals don't need it anymore and some born here still do), this saved the state $350 million a year. Annual ER spending on noncitizens dropped from $167M to $106M. And between '00 and '04, the annual cost to state prisons from incarcerating noncitizen felons dropped 11% from $202M to $180M.

At least $416M saved, per year on average, and Arizona didn't deport anybody.

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/arizonas-e... (numbers quoted from the WSJ article quoted near the end: ctrl-F for "Remember education?"

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