by Thomas Elias

About the author: Thomas Elias is a columnist with Southern California Focus.

No one questions whether immigrants—both legal and illegal—cost money in the short term.

Many of them draw survival-level stipends from the federal government, their children must be educated in public schools, some get publicly funded health services and the criminals among them must be prosecuted and kept in prison.

But the emphasis these short-term costs get from politicians like California Gov. Pete Wilson and from popular initiatives like California’s Proposition 1871 can make it easy to overlook the long-term benefits of immigration.

Immigrants Are Profitable

What are those benefits? Hundreds of new businesses joining the tax base, cheap labor for use by many contractors and homeowners, and hundreds of millions of tax dollars raised...