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To suggest that immigrants take American jobs that will never be replaced espouses Mercantilistic ideology, a school of thought most thought died centuries ago. Wealth is not finite; to demonize immigrants as thieves who steal American jobs is false. Immigrants necessitate the creation of higher income jobs: accountants, doctors, managers, and other illustrious professions to manage newly legalized workers.

Secondly, when Hispanic immigrants come to the U.S. they often take what we would consider “lower end jobs”, thus putting them in competition with the very lowest skilled and educated Americans. Immigrants, by taking these “low-end jobs” forces Americans to improve their market worth so they are competitive for upper tier jobs. Immigrants effectively push Americans into higher paying jobs that offer a better quality of life. This may seem counterintuitive but is confirmed by the shrinking African-American underclass in three important categories: poverty, income, and educational attainment.

The Cato authors all came to the same conclusion; current immigration law is detrimental to the American economy. Through complicated econometric simulations, Cato authors Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer concluded that legalizing more unskilled workers would result in a $180 billion gain to the American economy.

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The economy of the country's largest city and the entire nation would collapse if illegal immigrants were deported en masse, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a Senate committee hearing Wednesday.

New York City is home to more than 3 million immigrants, and a half-million of them came to this country illegally, Bloomberg testified.

"Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our borders ... our city's economy would be a shell of itself had they not, and it would collapse if they were deported," he said. "The same holds true for the nation."

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