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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mph who wrote (59652)	6/7/2007 11:06:05 AM
From: Bill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

I wish more people would recall the simple of wisdom of Milton Friedman when considering this immigration legislation. ====================================================================== Q & A session with Milton Friedman at the 18th Annual Institute for Liberty and Policy Analysis (ISIL) World Libertarian Conference, August 20-22, 1999, in San Jose, Costa Rica. Co-sponsors: The Mackinac Center for Public Policy; the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Q: Dr. Friedman should the U.S.A. open its borders to all immigrants? What is your opinion on that? A: Unfortunately no. You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state. Q: Do you oppose a unilateral reduction of tariffs and if not how can you oppose open immigration until the welfare state is eliminated? A: I am in favor of the unilateral reduction of tariffs, but the movement of goods is a substitute for the movement of people. As long as you have a welfare state, I do not believe you can have a unilateral open immigration. I would like to see a world in which you could have open immigration, but stop kidding yourselves. On the other hand, the welfare state does not prevent unilateral free trade. I believe that they are in different categories. Q: Instead of a green card [resident alien status], can the USA issue a blue card which does not give welfare? A: If you could do that, that would be fine. But I don't believe you can do that. It's not only that it is not politically feasible, I don't think that it is desirable to have two classes of citizens in a society. We want a free society. We want a society in which every individual is treated as an end in themselves. We don't want a society in which some people are in there under blue conditions, others are in there under red conditions, others are in there under black conditions. We want a free society.

To: mph who wrote (59652)	6/7/2007 11:17:23 AM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

"I'd actually be interested in seeing the studies that show that the net cost of having illegals here is insignificant or even negative. Please do post them. I'm also interested in who funded the studies." I did a quick Google Scholar search last night, but didn't have time to go more than a page or two deep. I don't have time to find the links again right now and the search is easy enough for anyone to do, but there was a late '90s Rand lit-review kind of paper that summarized a variety of other studies, noting that estimates of the net cost to taxpayers of illegal immigrant households (benefits rcvd less taxes paid) ranged from a negative $1400 to positive $1600 per year. The summary is here: rand.org The half-a-legal-household estimate is from a WaPo article about the CIS study. washingtonpost.com