MORE ON ILLEGALS & TUCSON

I keep reading claims that the illegals don't pay taxes and thus are a drain on the economy but this tidbit from part 2 of the 4-part series casts doubt on that claim:

Six in 10 illegal immigrants in the United States pay income taxes and contribute to Social Security, says Douglas Massey, a Princeton University sociologist who has studied international migration for nearly three decades.

That keeps them, and their bosses, from running afoul of the Internal Revenue Service, which most fear more than Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Massey says.

"Their chances of getting in trouble for hiring illegal aliens has been about zero, but if you break federal tax law, you can get into big trouble," Massey explained.


Most of the illegals ignore the notices from the Social Security Administration:

Each year, Quintanilla gets a letter from the Social Security Administration telling him the number he uses doesn't match his work alias. Five years, five notices — and nothing more has ever happened.

Social Security sends such letters to give workers the opportunity to get credit for earnings that fall into the earnings-suspense file, which tracks cases in which numbers don't match names. Construction is one of the top two industries — along with eating and drinking establishments — that contribute to the file, the office says.

An employer gets a copy of the letter only if it has a large percentage of mismatches among its W-2 submissions, says Barbara Bovbjerg, director of education, work force and income security issues with the Government Accountability Office.


These excerpts are from part 3 of the 4-part series:


Like any business owner, George Simon needs dependable labor.
So when the excavation contractor finds workers who show up on time and work hard, he keeps them — even if he later discovers they're in this country illegally.

"They got here illegally, yeah. But they're here and have family here, and they abide by all the laws and work hard and pay their taxes, so what do you do?" asks Simon, 61. "Do you kick them out of here and ruin their lives because they don't have real papers, or do you hang on to them?"

It's a common dilemma in Tucson's $2 billion-a-year home-building industry. At least 34 percent of Arizona's construction workers are here illegally, based on estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group. Two dozen local legal and illegal workers told the Star that in their experience, the percentage is more than half.

And the CATO Institute explains it all for us:

Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute, a libertarian public policy research foundation.

"The Arizona economy, the Tucson economy, the national economy continues to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs each year for low-skilled workers in construction, landscaping, food preparation and cleaning at a time when there just aren't enough Americans around to fill all the jobs," Griswold says. "We're getting older, we're getting better educated, and so you've got this huge jobs magnet and an immigration law that doesn't reflect the real needs of the U.S. economy."


Although on a national scale, the evidence for illegals holding down wages is mixed, locally there is little doubt:

At least in part, illegal labor has pushed down wages here, economists say.

Tucson construction workers earned an average of $14.42 an hour in March, compared with the national average of $19.53, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. Local wages have not kept pace with inflation since 2001, despite a housing boom that has seen median new-home prices nearly double from about $140,000 to $267,000 over the same period.

That indicates employers, knowingly or unknowingly, are tapping into a supply of low-cost illegal labor that holds wages flat, University of Arizona economist Marshall Vest says.

"It has everything to do with supply and demand," Vest says. "If you have workers that are willing to work for a low wage, there is no way wages are going to move up."