Undocumented workers are entitled to benefits

Undocumented workers are certainly very productive. They pay taxes, are civic-minded and are an integral part of our economic community. In my view, an immigrant worker who happens to be undocumented is as entitled to worker benefits as the next person earning an honest living.

Although active immigration reformists, like Mike Sizer, chairman of Utahns for Immigration Reform and Enforcement, would like everyone to know that "illegal" immigrants are only "urged on by the promise of better jobs" (My View, Deseret Morning News, July 31), it is more important to understand that it is in response to the loud "sucking sound" from American employers for cheap, docile and even disposable labor.

By virtue of having paid taxes, anyone earning that honest wage is entitled to the vested benefits from paycheck deductions. And in my book this is the universal practice of civilized nations, so let's not characterize these earned benefits as simple enticements and "unwarranted benefits" of free education and health care.

The primary concern of anti-immigration groups seems to be grounded on the cost issue. So let me submit to you that no one has yet produced factual and convincing evidence of the alleged net cost to the state from the "unauthorized" worker. And I especially challenge UFIRE and other bunker-minded immigration reformists to come up with a serious source for this claim.

Even the Center for Immigration Studies — an advocate for forced attrition and the creation of "virtual choke points" to stimulate "self-deportation" — publicly acknowledged that the cost associated with undocumented workers cannot be determined in isolation from their households, and therefore, cannot be eliminated without the removal of all their dependents and extended families as well ("The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget," the Center for Immigration Studies, Washington, D.C., August 2004).

Most by now will agree that Latinos have the largest number of household dependents in the nation, and many of them are now U.S.-born citizens. Unless one insists on the deportation of millions of U.S.-born children, the ongoing cost of these entitlement programs is not only certain but also necessary. Dependent children and other vulnerable members in the undocumented worker's household generate the lion's share of this "illegal" cost.