By Porter

Briefly tonight: A new study reveals that illegal migrants in America cost $135 billion in upkeep while paying in a scant $19 billion in taxes. This resulting in a $116 billion dollar net drain. But everyone knows having nice things isn’t cheap. So what nice things are we getting for that $116 billion? Hey, look at the time.

Though it is necessary to make a few points on this topic. And since you won’t see those points made in the media, you’ll have to resign yourself to reading here.

First, because Washington fires mountains of money into the abyss like an ongoing terrestrial gamma burst, $116 net billion may not sound so unwieldy. But it’s a more egregious sum than you may imagine. For context, consider that what we pay illegals to squat here exceeds the annual state budgets of Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming combined.

Second, the above calculation of revenues and outlays related to illegal immigration is so rare to see because it’s so useful to read. In contrast, more duplicitous commenters perpetually alight upon GDP as their metric of choice when appealing for the importation of Pakistan. They do this because gross GDP is worthless in measuring the alleged benefits of immigration.

A slug leaving its mucus trail across the wall can conceivably add a dollar to GDP. But that tells you nothing whatsoever of whether its presence represents an economic boost or burden to the host society. And that absence of actual insight is precisely why liberal economists find GDP so useful.

Third, a first world society requires far more than mere break-even participants. Imagine if illegals were so productive as to be just that–they’d still represent an enormous deficit. Because maintaining the social commons of a modern Western welfare state requires huge numbers of highly positive contributors to make up for the broad cohort who are not. Perhaps this fact hasn’t yet been revealed to left-wing columnists, but migrants will eventually grow old, just like the legacy Americans they come to call racist. If we received only break-even contributors, what surplus wealth would pay for papa Paco’s Da Vinci machine and dialysis? No one ever seems to ask.

Fourth, I am far more concerned about importing swarms of hostile aliens who will attack my traditions, nullify my vote, and crow about taking my children’s national inheritance, than I am how much money they kick into the till. If George Soros were here illegally, would tax contributions alone cause us to feel grateful for his malice? A nation isn’t an economy. And sharing a country isn’t sharing a future.

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ