Illegal immigrants drain economy

An editorial in Thursday’s Las Vegas Sun, “A failed approach,” concerning employer verification of workers’ legal status, contains the following:

• “E-Verify has shown itself to be costly and far from perfect.”

• “Some estimates have placed the cost to the U.S. Treasury as high as $40 billion over the first decade.”

• “System could be vulnerable to fraud and abuse.”

• “How does creating a costly, error-prone and potentially fraudulent system make sense?”

Well, if savings in education, medical and social services’ costs for illegal immigrants over the same decade were $100 billion, and another $150 billion remained in the United States instead of being wired to various countries of origin, we’d have $40 billion to run the currently imperfect system, $60 billion to improve it, and $150 billion left over.

That would make sense to me.