Quote:
Originally Posted by TheNewT50
It's about $10 billion/year, which is less than 1% of the annual payroll tax take (the undocumented labor force makes up something like 3% of the taxpaying workforce, by contrast). Not necessarily "keeping it afloat", but it's a positive factor nonetheless.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/20-I...20Taxation.pdf
I think it's not necessarily a terrible thing for guest workers to be paying into entitlement programs from which they cannot draw, but this should be a piece of a great compromise on immigration. We should allow many workers to have legal status here in order to help pay for the entitlement programs that are underfunded (mainly medicare). But right now it's just a blip in the system that happens to exist, and I find it hard to argue in favor of maintaining any single thing that screws illegal immigrants over, considering they're among the most screwed-over groups in our society as it is.
If you're actually concerned about entitlement program funding, the higher birthrate of immigrants is of dramatically greater benefit to these programs than payroll taxes among current illegal immigrants. But that's the kind of thing that would only be relevant in a good-faith debate about the subject, which currently does not exist.
I would be more interested on focusing on the companies that are filing fraudulent employment papers to highlight the problem that immigrants solve than worrying about them taking advantage of entitlements they've paid for.
It's an easier conversation to have when it turns out not having immigrants is going to raise the prices of everyday items because labor costs suddenly go up.