In a competitive market where cheap inputs (labor in the construction industry) are uniformly used the price reductions will be passed on to the consumer. Firms will reduce prices as much as possible to improve market share. Assuming of course that there is no widespread cheating.

Immigration has always been a good thing for this country. They always start off as cheap labor, then become americanized and move up the ranks. Before the Hispanics it was various Europeans and Asians, in waves stretching back for ages. In all these incidences there were outcries against immigrants and laws passed to bar more immigrant entry. Every time immigrants proved a boon to the economy with implications far more long-reaching than the initial wave. Immigrants have kids, who learn English and are no longer immigrants, they are Americans. Life would be much easier if we just allowed and regulated the inevitable flow of immigration, allowing us to work it further to our advantage. Regulating and allowing unskilled immigrant laborers allows us to reduce remittances abroad, capturing more money in the economy, increases the US population (we've got plenty of room) and helps us keep out the bad ones (criminals).

Most illegal immigrants are only illegal because its pretty much impossible to get here legally if you're not super-skilled with advanced education. However, America needs unskilled labor, especially at a time when more people than ever are going to college and pursuing higher education. We have plenty of unemployed people, but unfortunately they generally don't live where the unskilled labor is need (as in there is no agriculture in the city) and don't want to do that work. Labor relocation programs have proved unsuccessful. (There was one in California in particular where inner-city unemployed persons were encourages to work as field hands. Of the 100,000 contacted, 500 applied and 3 showed up to work. Half of CA's peach crop went unpicked. I can't remember the site, but it was proposed by Barbara Boxer, and a lexis-nexis search should bring it up.)

Is there any hard data to back up your assertions? All of society shouldn't be expected to pay for illegal labor that benefits the few. Unless you can the rhetoric and show dollars and cents value over and above the costs to society, why bother arguing their value.

I have never seen any hard data that verifies this as opposed to them simply harvesting additional profit for themselves.

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Barack Obama's Executive Flop

If Obama couldn't lead such a small organization as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to success, how can any one bellieve he can lead this country to it?

Immigration is destroying America?

I believe thats what the American Indians said about 400 years ago

I'm sure the Aborigines are still thanking the British for dumping thousands of their criminals on the continent and breaking up thousands of years of spiritual living to 'better' their society.

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Barack Obama's Executive Flop

If Obama couldn't lead such a small organization as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to success, how can any one bellieve he can lead this country to it?

this is true
I believe its sometimes called invading for the purposes of stealing land to commit murder on a genocidal scale.

Australia is ONE big crime scene

And we are still waiting for the coroners report and autopsy results.

The USA is not different (only more bloodshed)

It must be a massive rug that both nations sweep all this carnage and injustice under.

The spirit never forgets though - it haunts forever, there can be NO ESCAPE

In the U.S. the carnage wasn't all one sided. It was all despicable and a rather shameful history. One thing that is a constant throughout the history on mankind, they do tend to settle their differences by killing each other.

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Barack Obama's Executive Flop

If Obama couldn't lead such a small organization as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to success, how can any one bellieve he can lead this country to it?

I have the file "Illegal Immigration and Resource Allocation" paper in pdf form, which is about 545 kb. I don't know how to post it here, so if you can give me your email address, I can send it to you.

In a competitive market, which has many sellers selling identical product, every firm in the industry is a price-taker not a price-maker.

From that information, we can infer that any reduction in the input costs overall that most firms can get access to (in this case cheap labor source) will lead to the reduction of price.

The reason why someone does not need data to know this is because this is an established principle in microeconomics that has been proven with empirical evidence and has become orthodoxy. I am not to say that someone that is right today will always be right tomorrow, but I am saying that this is a proven fact with our current knowledge - economists are, within the realm of practical possibility of today, pretty certain until new research proves otherwise. It is an implicit assumption. To require data of every case is intellectually paralyzing just like to require the data of the every dimension of the object every time to demonstrate the validity of gravity.

To put it in a different way, showing that why would firm behave that way, we can use the logic Adam Smith succinctly captured:
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages."

For example, if you are a firm in the construction industry; you save $1,600 because you get access to this pool of cheap labor. However, the firms next to you get similar access to the same source of cheap labor, meaning he save roughly $1,600 as well. In order to compete for the same pool of consumers, your competitors will charge a lower price, forcing you to charge a lower price until it reach the market equilibrium where no one can charge a lower price and make a profit.

Livefor, You will simply have to provide empirical data that Illegals benefit more than the billions that they cost society that is available to all from an on-line. I have a long standing policy to NEVER open any attachments in emails. I appreciate the thought, but if that is the only source that claims benefit exceeding the cost, than it must be a dubious application of statistics or there would be far more sources.

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Barack Obama's Executive Flop

If Obama couldn't lead such a small organization as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to success, how can any one bellieve he can lead this country to it?

Actually, we could fit the population of the entire planet in the State of Texas. You can take every single building, every monument, every house everything ever built on the planet, move it all to Texas along with all the people and leave the rest of the world as a natural museum. Fire up Google Earth and look at the U.S. and all the open spaces we have. What most people don't realize is that only 6% of the entire planet's land area has been developed, the vast majority has nothing. Look at China, they have 4 or 5 X the population that we have, yet look at Google Earth over it and see all the wide open spaces there.

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http://www.nosocialism.com
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America is not a Socialist country, this is why the only democrats who ever win, are democrats who SOUND like Republicans (Hello Bill Clinton - Low taxes, Free Trade, Welfare Reform, Era of Big Government Over - Sounds Republican).

The more likely explanation would be it's copy-righted. I'm at American University and using its network, I can open the file readily through JSTOR; maybe other people outside the network can't get access to it.