Americans must accept and understand that illegal immigrants are people too—just like them.

By: Matheus Almeida Ogleari

The United States is supposedly a country that believes in equal opportunity. Fair treatment of every individual is fundamental to this concept; thus it is regrettable that the millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S. are frequently characterized as imposters or parasites intentionally undermining the welfare, security, and values of our country. This depiction has been true in the recent health care debate as well, with accusations flying that President Obama’s proposed health care plan will provide services to undocumented immigrants. Obama has made it clear that it will certainly not. However, since human rights and fair treatment of all individuals are core democratic values, perhaps it should, and undocumented immigrants should receive many of the same social services as American citizens.

Those who justify our current system argue that illegal immigrants reap the benefits of living in the U.S. without contributing anything in return. As President Obama would put it, this is “a lie, plain and simple.” The reality is that illegal immigrants contribute greatly to the U.S. but do not receive the same benefits American citizens receive. For example, many illegal immigrants contribute via the sales tax. The fact that they live in the U.S. indicates that they must buy things to survive—basic necessities such as groceries, clothing, and shelter—among other taxed goods and services. In fact, given the regressive nature of the sales tax, low-income Americans, including many illegal immigrants, actually devote a higher percentage of their total income to sales taxes than wealthy Americans.

Some illegal immigrants also contribute by paying income tax. Some of those who work on the record receive paychecks with taxes already deducted from them, so they pay their income tax without filing papers with the Internal Revenue Service. This causes some low-income illegal immigrants to pay more in income taxes than what the government requires of their income bracket. An American citizen in the same situation would file taxes with the IRS and receive deductions or credits, but illegal immigrants do not file tax returns due to their lack of documentation as well as their fear of being discovered.

How significant is the illegal immigrant contribution? “One rough estimate puts the amount of Social Security taxes alone [paid by illegal immigrants] at around $9 billion per year,” Travis Loller reports in USA Today’s “Many Illegal Immigrants Pay Up at Tax Time.” In addition, “the [Social Security] administration factors in both legal and illegal immigration when projecting the trust fund's long-term solvency,” Loller wrote. In other words, the government relies on payments from illegal immigrants to keep social services afloat but does not provide these same services to them.

Illegal immigrants also contribute to the overall economic output of the U.S. IRS Commission Mark Everson has estimated that “illegal immigrants contributed $428 billion dollars to the nation's $13.6 trillion gross domestic product in 2006,” Loller reports.

Other arguments posed against illegal immigrants are that they compete with American workers and drive wages down. This is only partly true. Illegal immigrants do compete in the job market with American citizens in the same way that American citizens compete with each other for jobs. In this case, it does not matter who gets the job because either way the worker, whether it be the illegal immigrant or American citizen, is involved in production and the growth of the U.S. economy. The fact that immigrants live in the U.S. means they spend money here and therefore pump money back into the economy.

Some illegal immigrants do find ways to cheat the system and avoid paying some taxes, but American citizens do this too. The mainstream media and politicians may intentionally depict illegal immigrants as parasitic and unproductive, but in reality, many illegal immigrants are honest people who just want to get by and live in a land of opportunity as American citizens.

This brings up the question of how the U.S. should deal with their legal status. Many immigrants want to be here legally, but the U.S. immigration system makes it difficult for them to obtain citizenship. Suggestions of mass deportation are outlandish. Not only would it be expensive and difficult to implement since many have firmly established lives here, but their removal would create a large hole in the U.S. economy that would be difficult to fill immediately, due to the nature of illegal immigrants’ jobs.

The U.S. must address the problem of illegal immigration by changing certain aspects of its laws in order to progress as a society. Illegal immigrants should have the opportunity to become full citizens and should be allowed to receive social services. After all, social services are designed to promote the general welfare of the public, and it would be foolish to pretend that the 12 million-or-so undocumented immigrants in the U.S. do not exist. Americans must change their mindset to accept the role illegal immigrants have on their lives, similar to when society realized that slaves were not just “three-fifths of a person,” but real people too. We must now understand and accept that illegal immigrants are real people too.