"Illegal immigrants: a real force in our market" ??

Tweet

The above headline (question marks mine) was on the front page of our newspaper--you can see the complete article at www.sun-sentinel.com--I just want to quote a few 'facts' from the article--I am generally, leery of facts as numbers seem to made up from air--for instance, how do we know there are 15 million illegal immigrants (or whatever the pc term is these days!) and that 12,000 are illegal Irish immigrants? We don't even know how many homeless people there are in the USA so where do the figures come from? I did check a few of the figures and they seem to be pretty close. Anyway--and remember this is the Florida market--though this one is mind boggling IF it is true (sounds like it's for all the States): 1) '$2.9 BILLION estimates that recent immigrants spend on wireless telephone service per year' 2)'$133 is the average amount Hispanic households spend on groceries per week' 3)'In the bustling stores, restaurants and shopping malls, undocumented immigrants buy goods for themselves and their families, boosting the local economy while forking over sales tax'. 4) 'Merchants of all kinds, many of them also immigrants, say their businesses depend on these consumers, whose buying power in immense though hard to measure' 5)'The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisian research arm of Congress, says that implementing such a bill (the Senate bill) would cost Uncle Sam $54 billion over 10 years, much of it to provide food stamps and medicaid coverage HOWEVER these costs would be more than offset by a gain of $66 billion in federal revenue, mostly from income taxes." Those are just a few of the comments in the article. It seems the bottom line is a profit of $12 billion and this doesn't include the additional State revenue. Without getting into a political 'war' what is your reaction to the above?