Not only do immigrants pay more taxes, but they contribute more to the overall economy. Adding the value of one’s labor to the whole is a positive.
Meanwhile, extracting the value of others’ labor and using your ill-gotten wealth to fund systemic corruption diminishes and destabilizes the system as a whole.
Deport billionaires, not workers.
This article claims they pay a higher effective tax rate, not more in taxes. A citizen working the same position would pay even more in taxes since they would also have to pay income tax.
Maybe the headline should be that sales + other flat taxes are becoming an increasing burden for low income workers. This is the problem for the illegal immigrants in the study, and even more of a problem for citizens who earn the same amount.
So does everyone else.
I would be quite surprised if that were true. The illegal immigrants pay a higher tax rate because as some of the poorest people in the country, they are the most affected by regressive taxation (primarily sales taxes, according to this study). As income increases, the distortion from these regressive taxes should decline so the effect of the higher tax brackets that the wealthy are in will become dominant.
Edit: I don’t have time to find data for every state, but here’s federal data from Pew. Federal taxation is progressive and the share of income paid by the highest earners is many times larger than the share paid by the lowest earners.
Note that this does not apply to federal taxes.
At the state and local levels, slightly less than half (46 percent, or $15.1 billion) of the tax payments made by undocumented immigrants are through sales and excise taxes levied on their purchases. Most other payments are made through property taxes, such as those levied on homeowners and renters (31 percent, or $10.4 billion), or through personal and business income taxes (21 percent, or $7.0 billion).
This isn’t really showing much except that sales taxes are extremely regressive, which is already a well-known fact that people don’t pay nearly enough attention to.
Sales taxes fucking suck. I grew up in a state where it was nearly 10% on everything, but I could hop in my car and drive 30 minutes across states lines to where it was just 6.1%. Still, when I had to shop local, it was terrible having an entire 1/10th added to the cost of whatever I was buying
You are completely correct; what it’s doing is not presenting new ideas so much as pushing back against the narrative of the freeloading immigrant, which is only supported by cherry-picking what taxes “count” as taxes and ignoring the regressive taxes that you, appropriately, note that most people don’t think of when they say “taxes”.
Someone’s gotta pay for the disabled conservatives that litter the Interstate 10 from Florida to California dag nabbit!
