[calbear81]

I generally agree that the visible benefits are not available to undocumented immigrants but you're forgetting about the unseen things that taxes support. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr once remarked "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society..".

Taxes pay for civil infrastructure, a somewhat-functioning democratic government, our National Parks, and of course our armed forces. We don't often think about these things since they're not as visible but our ability to sit here in the relative safety of our homes/workplaces exercising our 1st Amendment rights is in a large part supported by the taxes we pay.

[mikeyouse]

Say you're an illegal immigrant working for a factory in Texas. Here's a list of your state tax burden:

http://www.itepnet.org/wp2009/tx_whopays_factsheet.pdf

Illegal immigrants are surely in the lowest 20% bucket. What taxes don't they pay? They rent homes, so they pay property taxes. Their money is spent on clothes and food, so they pay sales taxes. The income taxes that they might not pay are an absolutely minuscule portion of their burden -- literally $11/year on average.

Ever since the I-9's existence, most employers use fake social security numbers for their illegal immigrants. So FICA taxes are removed from their paychecks -- and they'll never get them back in the form of Medicare or Social Security. (Don't take my word for it, here's NYT reporting on SSA's "Earnings Suspense File": http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.htm...)

Smarter people than myself have looked at this, here's a good example: http://www.itep.org/pdf/undocumentedtaxes.pdf -- Tl;Dr: Illegal immigrants pay a lot of taxes, probably pretty close to the amount they would pay if they were legalized. However, they get far less benefit from their taxes since they don't qualify for most programs.