The first mistake is not acknowledging that because of the Nanny State the “live it up off of our tax dollars argument” has more force than we might wish. The government spends far more money on even illegal immigrates today then it did on the Italians, Irish, Germans, and Chinese, that came to this country 100 years ago. As is usual with government programs this money is not spent very wisely and thus raise the net cost of immigrants to this country considerably.

I happen to think that the evidence supports the view that immigrants are a net plus, but a fair minded person must confess that the data is ambiguous. This is especially true in regards to the poorly educated immigrants. The effect of the nanny state is to cause only the highly educated immigrants to appear fiscally beneficial when you look at only the hard data. See this for an example.

I still would argue that even with the added cost imposed by the Nanny State net immigrations is still economically beneficial to America. But I would have to use soft data to support that argument as the hard data tends to supports the anti immigration position.

But no matter what data you use or how you spin the soft data, I don’t think it is fair to blame immigrants for problems that are inherent in the Nanny State.

The word “fair” brings us to what I consider the biggest mistake of the pro immigration camp. For I belive that immigration is fundamentally a moral issue. That is why I don’t consider the word xenophobia to be appropriate. It is more of an issue of ethics than it is an issue of reason…..

But I think that my comment is longer then your post already so I will stop now.