So here it goes (drum roll, please): Immigrants, legal and illegal, put money into the economy and they take money out of the economy.
I know. It's shocking.
A 1998 report on California's economy found that immigrants took jobs from native-born high school dropouts and did contribute to a decline in wages.
Those same immigrants helped grow the economy 15 percentage points faster than the rest of the nation.
In 2005, Georgetown professor Harry Holzer told members of Congress that immigration has had a "modest" negative impact on the wages of less-educated native-born Americans, but that immigrant labor has reduced the price of food, clothing and housing a distinct benefit for low-income consumers who spend much of their disposable income on these items.
Other studies have found immigrants reduce labor shortages in the health care and elder care services, thereby reducing costs of those services overall.
When it comes to education costs, it's unclear how much we're spending on the undocumented. A 2004 U.S. General Accounting Office report said current information "is not sufficient to directly estimate the state-by-state costs of educating illegal alien schoolchildren."
Then there are the remittances.
Some point out, rightly, that workers send billions of dollars to Mexico annually, making remittances the second largest source of foreign income after oil revenue. This, critics argue, is a drain on the U.S. economy.
This logic has two flaws.
First, a person should be free to spend their paycheck any way they choose, be it a remittance to family back home or a deposit into a Swiss bank account.
Second, wage earners in this country, legal or illegal, pay taxes to the tune of about $1.2 trillion, according to data from George J. Borjas, Harvard University professor of public policy and a well-established authority on immigration.
But immigrants also use $20 billion more in welfare benefits than they contribute, he has found.