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Illegal immigration costs the US taxpayer $150 billion a year in govt expenditure out/revenue in terms but said report feels free to sideline incarcerations for immigration-related offenses as though that's not 'real' crime...
Besides, 'they're taking our jobs' is undeniable fact, for certain groups of 'our'. Illegal immigrants are a subset of immigrants. Illegal immigrants can get paid cash-in-hand and are more competitive than legal workers with the accompanying tax and regulatory demerits (from the point of view of employers). In a market economy, those who can work more cheaply will take the jobs of those who are more expensive to pay.
Finally, legal immigration automatically depresses wages and employment for domestic workers in that same industry. Just because immigration is not obviously harmful to us white-collar workers generally (though it certainly can be), it does not follow that it's good for everyone:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23153
https://docs.iza.org/dp9107.pdf
And besides the economic aspects of mass immigration, we also have to deal with the social aspects of mass immigration. Allegiance to foreign powers, decline in communal/national feeling...
It seems relevant to note that a large percentage of illegal immigrants work in sectors which can't hire native workers at wages reasonable for the skill level, eg meatpacking plants.
A massive influx of slave labor (from Gaul, if I recall correctly) destroyed the economy of the late Roman Republic as surely as Chinese and illegal immigrant slave labor have the potential to destroy America's (if they haven't already; Canada's and Europe's are well on its way.) It created a massive influx of urban poor, too.
The whole point of going to China (or Mexico, Japan, SEA, Africa, etc.) is that you don't have to pay nearly as much in wages or for materials, the local government handles slave revolts for you, and you don't have to pay for novel solutions to environmental regulations (which are, in part if not in intent, designed to make sure US industry remains minimally competitive). It was always going to result in very specific people getting rich at the expense of everyone else.
Interestingly, that also implies that the unpleasantness of a job will lead to increased prices for the goods that job produces; ironically the solution to "but we want to ban farming because muh whatever" might come from "working in meat-packing plants is awful enough that people are demanding software engineer salaries to work in them" more than anything else.
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Then those businesses should go bankrupt and be replaced by ones willing to pay real wages. I'm perfectly happy to pay a bit more for my steak if it means the immigrants are no longer hanging around depressing wages and inflating property prices.
I won't remark upon you specifically, but the howling from the most anti-immigrant voters in the US about inflation suggests this isn't the case for most people. They like the idea of getting rid of immigrants, but they absolutely do not want to get rid of the benefits of immigrants.
YES THEY DO!
The "benefits" of immigrants are not evenly distributed, and in fact tend to accumulate at the higher levels of society. The people who benefit from illegal immigrants are not the people on wages who now have to compete for their labour, but the people who benefit from keeping the costs of services and manufacturing low - and do you think those people are living in the same kinds of real estate that illegal immigrants drive up the prices for? Talk about the economic benefits of migrants tends to talk about how they benefit "the economy" in abstract as a way to avoid talking about the actual impacts, positive and negative, that they have.
And as for those anti-immigrant voters, I'm extremely confident that a lot of them would be more than happy to pay a bit more for their steak in exchange for losing the negative consequences of illegal immigration, because those negative consequences involve them paying more and getting paid less.
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The fact that people are lamenting inflation in the last few years does not mean that they would be against all policies that would cause inflation. The inflation of the last few years is regarded by people on the right as an unforced error with no significant beneficial trade-offs. Just pure loss. By contrast, substantially reducing immigration - even if it resulted in slightly higher grocery bills - would be a substantial benefit (from their perspective) worth the tradeoff.
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