blockmarker
Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
On the other hand, we have the "propaganda" which has existed for thousands if not millions of years, needed no technological, scientific or economic advances to exist, and the societies that followed it grew and made all the advances required for the other.
Of the two, I know which seems to be truer and more natural.
And that immigrants do not get most entitlements because the system doesn't work that way seems flawed. The official numbers say that there are 14 million illegal immigrants in the US, and the trustworthiness of those numbers is questionable. It is clear the system is not working properly.
And if Cato wants to talk in public Twitter they should expect questions and answers. And I'm not talking about trolls and haters, but when they respond to intelligent, respectful, high-quality comments from people who know about the subject, with snark and arrogance, with emotional arguments, and sleazy and disingenuous replies, pretending to not understand simple concepts, I don't believe that they are acting in good faith or care about the truth.
I understand that the US has Jus Solis and as such the children of immigrants are legally equivalent to the children of citizens, but that doesn't mean that the economic effect of the children of immigrants should be attributed to all citizens. There is an implicit question and answer of whether immigration is economically beneficial, and the effects of immigration include the children. If the child of every immigrant raised the deficit by a hundred million one would be crazy to support immigration, even if the parents reduced the deficit by a million. Not so in Cato's analysis. It would in fact make increasing immigration look better. For this reason separating between the children of immigrants and non-immigrants would be the correct thing to do, even if legally they are the same. It would be more difficult to do but not impossible at all. If Congress does not collect the data, Cato could do it themselves, or convince Congress to collect it. It is not impossible, they just refuse because it would harm their favored proposal.
Changing the methodology would lead to greater clarity. If in reality it's the opposite of what I believe and the second generation is better than non-immigrants, it wouldn't show with this methodology. If the second generation is better than even the first, we wouldn't know. If the second gen is equal to non-immigrants we don't know. More knowledge is always better. Data may support infinite hypothesis, but more data will lead to more correct ones.
As for my belief that the second generation is a drain, I know it's not very scientific, but it's based on a few things: I believe at least 30% of people are net taxtakers, though I've seen claimed up to 80%(probably due to pensions and elderly healthcare). Stereotipically latino immigrants, who would be farm workers, meat packers and construction workers would have children with similarly low socioeconomic status, and they are more than let's say, software developers with H1B. And Cato's behaviour: If the whole truth benefitted them they would use it. It's very reasonable to suspect they are a net drain, enough that any studies should not assume without looking that they aren't.