Absurd or obscured?

Bordering on Absurdity is an article which rants on how Americans are too caught up in their own self-interests to care for the self-interests of others, and in this case especially immigrants. He presents a somewhat powerful argument from an economic standpoint and tries to convince his audience to have an open view on immigration because they will in reality benefit our economy. In so doing, he leaves out some important information, perhaps obscuring the truth.

The writer makes his first point by saying "Immigration policy should facilitate the movement of people, just as trade policy facilitates the movement of goods.

From an economic perspective, this is a no-brainer. Right now, there are massive differences across countries in the rewards that skills garner. According to a new paper from Mark Rosenzweig, an economist at Yale, immigrants to the U.S. who are high school graduates earn far more than they did in their home countries. The same is true for college grads. An immigrant from Mexico with a college degree can earn almost 10 times more in the U.S. compared with what he or she would receive in Mexico."(Par. 3-4)

Now that would be a fine statement to make if it wasn't for the fact that the writer is trying to use it to prove immigrants will benefit our country. His fallacy is that he uses a hasty generalization. He tries to prove from this quote that immigrants will benefit our economy because they make more money here than in the country that they left, but he doesn't take into account what they will do with the money, or the fact that if they didn't come to the U.S. that an
American would have that job and would be making that money. Instead he just generalizes and obscures the information by not specifying how them making more money here would benefit our economy.

Another fallacy which I found a little more comical came out in the latter part of his article. He says this:

"Another objection is that a higher number of immigrants will add to the country's fiscal burden, through higher future medical and education costs. There's more validity to this argument. It costs local governments a lot to educate immigrant children, and future Medicare and Medicaid expenses could effectively bankrupt the government(italics added), according to current projections.

But these problems are not as big as they seem. As the children of immigrants grow up, their contributions to the overall economy should exceed the costs of their education(italics added), even though that may not help the finances of the towns or cities where they grew up. And the long-term state of Medicare and Medicaid is an issue that is going to have to be dealt with regardless of whether or not there are immigrants here."(Par. 8-9)

Here I just have to pause and grin because it seems that the writer tries to slip in unawares that simple line that immigrants could effectively bankrupt the government. I mean maybe I'm just overreacting, and it's a common occurrence that our government goes bankrupt, but something tells me that that could be a very big deal. Later the writer tries to justify his words by saying that their contributions should exceed the costs of their education, but once again I feel as if I have been robbed of some key point, and I was; he never explained whether or not their use of health care would cause us to go bankrupt. That's a very interesting fallacy because he is appearing to stack the issue, but at the same time he wants to show that he is not being partial to one side or the other. The ensuing result is confusion on the side of the readers, or just humor from his obscure hypothesis.