1. Impact of illegal aliens on the U.S. economy
There have been a lot of arguments about the impact of illegal aliens on the U.S economy. The protesters said that they are the burden while the opposite team thought that undocumented aliens contribute to the country’s economy. Therefore, it can be said that unauthorized immigrants have both positive and negative impacts on different parts of the U.S economy.
1.1. Pros
1.1.1. Illegal aliens pay taxes
With the idea of earning legalization, many undocumented citizens in the U.S pay taxes to gain legal status. As IRCA (1986) imposed strict penalties on business hiring illegal aliens, many of them have to get individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) to file and get job. ITIN acts as an alternative
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They come to the U.S in order to flee from destruction and upheaval in their countries or just to work to support family back home. As they are willing to work for less than under minimum wage in the U.S as it is still higher than wage they received at home. As Hanson wrote in his report “The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration” in 2007, the influx of illegal workers resulted in increasing the supply of labor with low-wage, raising the productivity of resources that need a large number of laborers to be exploited more efficiently. For example, the employers who rent illegal aliens to work for them are able to cut costs, produce products at a cheaper rate so that they can provide their services or products in greater number to a wider market at more affordable prices. One more example is about perishable agriculture where most of the landlords in Arizona, Florida or California need to hire field hands to plan, harvest and process. Low-wage labor allowed them to expand or make use of their land more efficiently. As the result, each acre of land under cultivation generates more …show more content…
There is a group of Americans affected by illegal immigration: high-school dropouts. Davidson (2006) wrote in his article “Q&A: Illegal Immigrants and the U.S. Economy”: the wages of low-skilled high-school dropouts are claimed to decrease between 3 percent and 8 percent because of competition from immigrants, both legal and illegal. Economists speculate that for the average high-school dropout, that would mean about a $25 a week raise if there were no job competition from immigrants. Borgas (2004, cited in Davidson, 2006) adds that group received an extremely impact as the wages reduced by 7.4