Political Quotes

“The bulk of this article addresses my bill, H.R. 176, the New IDEA Act, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. They go through the calculations here, and I will just touch on some of them. This is data from a Harvard economist, George Borjas. It is his empirical research. He shows that the workers in America, because wages have been suppressed by an oversupply of unskilled and illegal laborers, that American workers are suffering somewhere between a $99 billion and $118 billion loss in annual wages because they haven't gotten a raise in a long time. Nobody gets a raise as long as there is cheaper labor there that keeps that down--no effective raise. So between $99 billion and $118 billion. That is the Harvard economist, George Borjas. That is the annual wages loss because of illegal immigration. If we go to the next page on this, it lays out the conditions, and we are seeing this. This is a number from the Pew Hispanic Center in 2009. It says that there are 8.3 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. labor force. They recently estimated that number is actually ratcheted down to about 8 million. It doesn't say why. But if they estimated the median household income of unauthorized worker families to be approximately $36,000 at 1-\3/4\ average workers per household, that is roughly--let's see. It says, ``implying median per-worker earnings of $20,571,'' they estimated that the earnings-per-worker estimate yields $165 billion a year.…”