There’s a good joke out there about illegal immigration. Two guys are talking and the first guy says, “My take on immigration is simple. Americans for America.” The second guy turns to him and says, “I completely agree. So which Native American tribe are you from?”

Illegal immigration has become a hot-button issue since March, when protests against the bill H.R. 4437 (which most notably would make it a felony to aid an illegal immigrant) brought to light the enormous number of illegal immigrants currently in America. I want to try to point out some common misconceptions on illegal immigration.

A popular argument discussed is that illegal immigrants unfairly take jobs from Americans. This argument rests upon the assumption that there are a limited number of jobs available to all people. In economics, this is known as the lump of labor fallacy which assumes (incorrectly) that the amount of work available is a constant rather than a variable. For wonderful examples on how this fallacy has backfired simply look at France’s disastrous maximum hours per week labor laws which tried to create more jobs by limiting the number of hours a person could work. This policy has resulted in high unemployment and a number of riots.

The second argument often cited is that illegal immigrants can unfairly avoid taxation since they don’t pay any income tax. There a few problems with this argument. Illegal immigrants don’t earn enough money to become eligible for an income tax. Illegal immigrants also cannot avoid paying consumption taxes like the sales tax or a sin tax. As reported in Time magazine, in 2002, illegal immigrants added a net surplus of $463 billion to Social Security through wages removed from their paycheck, of which they receive almost nothing.

The third argument is that illegal immigrants are a drain on social services like welfare, food stamps, public education, and emergency medical care. This argument is not supported by a 1998 study done in the Sociological Perspectives journal which found that illegal immigrants do not use services at a rate any higher than American citizens. Additionally, many services are not obtained by the illegal immigrants themselves, but through their children who are American citizens. With welfare, the majority of those services are non-cash ones like Food Stamps. And finally, while the most-used service is emergency medical care and school, the first is used sparingly due to fears of being caught and the second is used through their children (who remember are American citizens).

The last argument, that illegal immigrants are draining our education and medical systems, is a claim oft repeated in the anti-illegal immigration crowd. They exclaim that illegal immigrants are a “burden” on the system and by virtue of “leeching” off of it they simply exacerbate the failing condition of both of these services. These statements are not untrue, but replace “illegal immigrants” with “people living in poverty” and they remain just as true. When people complain about the failing nature of education and hospitals and attribute these problems to illegal immigrants, what they fail to see is that they’re describing a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself. The problem isn’t that illegal immigrants and the poor are burdening these systems; the real problem is that these systems in their current setup are completely incapable of dealing with the most basic needs of people. An honest answer would be revamping both schools and hospitals to handle people who possess poor finances, not trying to solve the problem by getting rid of the poor people.

No one doubts that there are a large number of illegal immigrants residing in America. But why are we trying to solve illegal immigration by kicking them out? This fails to get to the root of why illegal immigration occurs. Illegal immigrants don’t come to America for any reason different from Americans: they come to be successful. Our immigration system as it currently stands is a broken one, forcing workers who would immigrate legally to resort to illegal means. Instead of kicking out people who want to be in America, the solution should be fixing our flawed immigration system to allow them to come and work for America.