Illegal immigrants' taxes not enough

This is in response to a letter in the Herald titled "Illegal immigrants do indeed pay taxes." The writer and many others are misguided about illegal immigrants paying taxes.

Let's say an illegal immigrant family living here does pay taxes, even though most do not because they get paid in cash. Let's say it's a Hispanic family since a lot of illegals are; most Hispanic families are very large so let's say our family has four children. With four kids, the wife will probably stay at home and the husband will work, usually making minimum wage.

On that salary the family will receive government assistance like food stamps. The kids will go to our public schools for free and get into the free lunch program, which means they also get free breakfast and books and transportation.

They will not pay for expensive health care, so they will use our hospitals for free health care and medicines. Because he does not make enough money, at the end of the year he will receive an automatic refund check from the government for, I believe $3,000. That money will probably be sent back home instead of being spent here.

Add up all the costs of this one family and they are using up many times more in public aid than they will ever pay in taxes. Not to mention they will not buy car insurance and have no license and are probably sharing a house or apartment with another family. He probably lied about his citizenship when getting a job, so by now they have broken about four or five of our laws.

Do they work hard? Of course, they are very hard workers, but so are a lot of Americans. Is there a lot of poverty in Mexico and other countries? Way too much.

America also had a lot of poverty over the last 234 years. Remember the Great Depression?

However, instead of running to another country, we stayed and fought to make ours better. We created unions for better wages and benefits. We fought through the poverty many times to become a great country. It wasn't easy and many died.

So maybe they should stay in their own countries and do the same instead of coming here with their hands open and a list of demands.

Are illegal immigrants hard-working? Yes, very! Are most good people, good Christians? Absolutely.

Fix the immigration problem, but please, don't ignore the facts about it.

Mike West

Mundelein