The Fiscal Times: Burdens and Benefits of Obama’s Immigration Amnesty
media mentionActually, reports by pro-immigration groups tend to undermine Biden’s claims, by noting that people in the country illegally already pay significant taxes. A study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) reported that in 2010, undocumented immigrants paid $10.2 billion in state and local taxes. About 77 percent of that total came from sales and excise taxes, with the balance being income and property taxes. The group reports, “Their effective rate [6.4 percent] is close to taxpayers in similar income situations.” In other words, making them legal will not significantly change their tax payments.
This organization agrees that granting these workers legal status would boost revenues – not because they are earning enough to guarantee higher tax collections, but because “legalization would increase immigrant wages both because of their increased bargaining power with employers and because of their increased investment in their own language and skill development, thus increasing the taxes paid by those same immigrants.”