This country never has and never will need illegal immigrants to flourish. Legal immigrants however have made great contributions to this country.

easy enough ...

Not only the workers and the products, but I believe it was Alan Greenspan that said that without high levels of immigration, we can kiss Social Security goodbye. Demographically, we have too few young people to meet the demands of our aging population. Immigration is the lifeblood of our nation.

Immigrants are of two types, legal and illegal. When Alan Greenspan and other economists talk about the effect of immigration, they are talking about the effect of both types. I for one wish the U.S. would make every last "illegal immigrant" into a "legal immigrant." This is a democracy and we can do it if we want to. How do you think we made them "illegal immigrants" in the first place?

Greenspan also recently said that American professionals make too much money and that we need to import foreigners to depress the wage scale. It's likely that Greenspan believes that all Americans should have a wage cut, as we haven't been able to compete with cheap labor in China. Greenspan is an economist who is worth millions and likely has little compassion for the worker. Productivity is is his focus, the ability to make widgets or provide services at the lowest possible cost, the standard of living of Americans be damned. Do you think that he'd have made his statement when he was just climbing the latter and not the chairman or the Federal Reserve Bank?

We should kiss SS goodbye. For a long time now realists have recognized that SS is not a viable retirement plan for Americans. Fund outputs will always exceed fund imports in the long run.

Immigrants are not a panacea for SS, as they only prolongue its eventual demise.

Exactly, Horace. By continuing massive population growth through illegal immigration we are just perpetuating the next huge baby boomer generation and a need for more massive population growth to support them in their retirement. It has to stop somewhere so that we can sustain a population in line with our natural resources, etc. We have 300 million people in this country now. Population growth fueling out of contol economic growth is a recipe for disaster. As you said, Greenspan and Bernanke are only concerned with productivity while completely ignoring the long term disaster of too much population growth.