Where the hell is the inclusion of
A. There is no way they are all working.
B. If they are, they are working under the table to not get caught, and by extension, no taxes are taken out and given to the government.
C. And almost all the Money they earn goes back over the border out of the US.
I actually wrote that response right after waking up, and I misread what he was saying. I thought we were still talking about refugees, but he switched to undocumented immigrants.
Either way, most of the undocumented people in the United States have families that live outside of the country, which is why they send money outside of the country. That means that the only reason they have for being here is to work, so I'd guess that a fairly huge majority of undocumented immigrants are working.
Second, the only permanent ways to fix the problem of undocumented immigrants dodging taxes is either to grant them amnesty or to deport them. But if you deport them, you're missing out on 11 million people's worth of human capital, which is a stuffload of productive possibility.
Third, if you think about it, it's impossible that a majority of the money they earn goes over the border back to Mexico. If we assume that all 11 million undocumented immigrants are Mexican, and we assume that they're getting paid half the federal minimum wage for a 40-hour work week, then the total wages earned by all 11 million immigrants is roughly
77.4 billion dollars. The total amount of remittances from the United States to Mexico is around
24-25 billion dollars a year, and plenty of that comes from legitimate tourism, commerce, and business that has nothing to do with illegal immigration. The reason there's a discrepancy of
50 billion dollars is because undocumented immigrants still pay for housing, food, cars, gas, etc in the American economy. It would be literally impossible for them to send all of their wages back to Mexico unless they sleep in a box and drink rainwater while they live in the US.