Immigration and the Texas Legislature

The Houston Chronicle has a story about how with Congress failing to enact comprehensive immigration reform, illegal immigrants are poised to become one of the hottest issues before the Texas Legislature.  The story begins:

They work as maids and busboys. They build homes and highways. They bone chickens on the way to market. They are worth billions of dollars to the Texas economy, but as members of the working poor they also are a drain of hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers. They are the 1.4 million illegal immigrants that the federal government estimates live in Texas.

Click here for the full story.

The intro to the story reveals one of the problems in how many people look at the economic impacts of immigration.  Immigrants work and contribute to the economy.  We as a society benefit economically from those efforts.  Many immigrants, including many undocumented, also pay state and local and federal taxes.  They ARE taxpayers.   We must look to the benefits to the economy and the tax coffers to appreciate the full economic benefits of immigration. 

KJ