"Immigrants: a Real Force in Our Market"

The above headline was on the front page of our newspaper--you can see the complete article at www.sun-sentinel.com--I just want to quote a few 'facts' from the article--I am' generally, leery of facts as numbers seem to made up from air--for instance, how do we know there are 15 million illegal immigrants (or whatever the pc term is these days!) and that 12,000 are illegal Irish immigrants? We don't even know how many homeless people there are in the USA so where do the figures come from.

Anyway--and remember this is the Florida market--though this one is mind boggling IF it is true (sounds like it's for all the States)--'$2.9 BILLION estimates that recent immigrants spend on wireless telephone service per year'--$133 is the average amount Hispanic households spend on groceries per week--'$89,000 is the average difference between the value of tax-funded services used by immigrant workers without high school di[plomas and what they contribute in taxes, according to the national Research Council."

"In the bustling stores, restaurants and shopping malls, undocumented immigrants buy goods for themselves and their families, boosting the local economy while forking over sales tax'.

It continues, 'Merchants of all kinds, many of them also immigrants, say their businesses depend on these consumers, whose buying power in immense though hard to maesure.

"They are eating, driving and purchasing. They are making our economy go," said Dinah C. Liautaud.

'The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisian research arm of Congress, says that implementing such a bill (the Senate bill) would cost Uncle Sam $54 billion over 10 years, much of it to provide food stamps and medicaid coverage HOWEVER these costs would be more than offset by a gain of $66 billion in federal revenue, mostly from income taxes."

Those are jsu a few of the comments in the article--please read it and let me know your reaction.