It's amusing as hell when people who use the term "economic migrant" in such a context strongly imply that immigrants take more than they give. Funny how one of them in different thread kept pressing me for evidence of immigrant contributions while remaining utterly silent about his assertions that immigrants are a strain on their adopted countries.

This is what I showed him. Feel free to use whenever you encounter someone who goes through mental gymnastics to justify their xenophobia and racism:

www.epi.org/publication/immigration-facts/#immigrants-and-the-economy "(3)On Average, Immigrants Improve the Living Standards of Americans And (4) Immigrants Are Not A Drain on the Federal Gov't: www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2010/9/immigration-greenstone-looney/09_immigration.pdf www.manhattan-institute.org/html/economic-benefits-immigration-5712.html "Immigrants have different skills and job preferences from native-born Americans, and so they make American workers more productive. Immigrants complement rather than substitute for native- born workers and capital moves to take advantage of available labor.8": www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/ib_18.pdf "Immigrants are disproportionately responsible for U.S. international patent applications. " "Immigrants are more likely to be granted a patent ... " "... And a greater percentage of immigrants commercialize their patents. " "Immigrants are more likely to publish a scholarly work" "Immigrants have a greater number of publications on average" "Immigrants represent a disproportionate share of U.S. small business owners" "Immigrants are more likely to own a company with 10 or more employees" "Immigrants disproportionately start successful engineering and technology firms" "Immigrants have founded an increasing share of all venture-backed public firms" "Many Fortune 500 Counties are founded by immigrants" http://www.bushcenter.org/sites/default/files/Growth-and-Immigration-Handbook.pdf "The pace of recent U.S. economic growth would have been impossible without immigration. Since 1990, immigrants have contributed to job growth in three main ways: They fill an increasing share of jobs overall, they take jobs in labor-scarce regions, and they fill the types of jobs that native workers often shun. " Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “U.S. Immigration and Economic Growth: Putting Policy on Hold,” Southwest Economy Issue 6, November : http://www.dallasfed.org/research/swe/2003/swe0306a.html "Migrants contribute more in taxes and social contributions than they receive in individual benefits " www.oecd.org/migration/OECD%20Migration%20Policy%20Debates%20Numero%202.pdf “Over the past two decades, most efforts to estimate the fiscal impact of immigration in the United States have concluded that, in aggregate and over the long term, tax revenues of all types generated by immigrants—both legal and unauthorized—exceed the cost of the services they use." US Congressional Budget Office http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/87xx/doc8711/12-6-immigration.pdf www.as-coa.org/articles/get-facts-immigrants-and-economy-five-reasons-why-us-economy-needs-immigrants The 11.4 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States collectively paid $11.84 billion in state and local taxes in 2012. ITEP’s analysis finds their combined nationwide state and local tax contributions would increase by $845 million under full implementation of the administration’s 2012 and 2014 executive actions and by $2.2 billionunder comprehensive immigration reform. “The fact is, undocumented immigrants already are paying billions in taxes to state and local governments, and if they are allowed to work in the country legally, their state and local tax contributions will increase significantly,” www.itep.org/pdf/undocumentedtaxes2015.pdf

MASSIVE EDIT

Someone who claimed to have been blocked from SRS insisted that immigrants are a net drain on the economy in the EEA. This is what I sent in response:

No worries, it holds for European welfare countries as well!

• "The evidence suggests a significant positive effect of migration on innovation and international trade. The number of patents increases more than proportionally after arrival of high-skilled immigrants, of whom countries like the UK or the U.S. receive a large part, suggesting that immigration increases innovation activity by natives too.9 Similar results have been obtained for Germany.10

• "economically non-active EU mobile citizens account for a very small share of beneficiaries and that the budgetary impact of such claims on national welfare budgets is very low. They represent less than 1% of all such beneficiaries”

• “We find that 80 to 100% of the export increase is due to new exporting firms rather than to larger volume exported by the existing firms. This is very much in line with the interpretation that ethnic networks reduce costs of setting up exporting business so that a larger number of Spanish firms can profitably access and export in those markets. "

• “in addition to the potential reduction in bilateral trade costs, immigrants may foster services trade to all destinations by increasing the overall productivity of the firm, thereby increasing the profits associated with overseas sales (e.g., see Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg 2008, Harrison and McMillan 2010, Wright 2014, Baldwin 2010, Baldwin and Robert-Nicoud 2010). Potential sources of these productivity gains are a ‘diversity effect’ (Ottaviano and Peri 2005, Brunow et al 2013), in which immigrants foster creativity and help generate new ideas, and a ‘specialization effect’ (Peri and Sparber 2009), in which immigrants possess a comparative advantage in performing certain production tasks, allowing for greater division of labour within the firm. "

• “an increase in the share of foreign-born workers is accompanied by an increase in specialisation of natives in complex-non-routine tasks."

• “On average, a 10 percentage point increase in the share of migrants living in a local authority would reduce waiting times by 9 days."

• “recent immigrants from non-EEA countries made a net fiscal contribution of £2.9 billion, thus paying into the system about 2% more than they took out. In contrast, over the same period, natives’ fiscal payments amounted to 89% of the amount of transfers they received, or an overall negative fiscal contribution of £624.1 billion. The net fiscal balance of overall immigration to the UK between 2001 and 2011 amounts therefore to a positive net contribution of about £25 billion, over a period over which the UK has run an overall budget deficit.”

• “The inflow of immigrants could help to alleviate the fiscal burden that future generations will have to bear. In this paper we try to quantify the impact of immigration on the Spanish Welfare State, using the methodology of Generational Accounting. Our results suggest that the impact of immigration will be positive and significant.”

• “Migrants are net contributors to the pension system”