The main argument leveled against illegal immigrants is that they receive government benefits and don't pay taxes; in other words, they cost us money. A previous article on the subject puts the tax claim to rest and introduces some of the uncertainty about the net effect of illegal immigration.
Nevertheless, illegal immigrants do receive public services from local and state governments, costing them considerable taxpayer money. What is a little known fact is that illegal immigrants are only eligible for very specific public services: emergency medical care, mandated by law, and (for their kids) public elementary/secondary education, which a 1982 Supreme Court ruling said was not conditional on immigration status.
Emergency Room Healthcare and Public Schools
A study by the RAND Corporation found that $1.1 billion in public money went to providing non-elderly healthcare for illegal immigrants in 2000. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that border states incurred $190 million in emergency healthcare costs for illegal immigrants in 2000. But these figures are paltry compared to the $88 billion the government spent for non-elderly healthcare overall. It should be mentioned that FAIR publicly came out against the RAND findings with estimates of their own that put the costs to California alone at $1.5 billion.
As for the cost of providing a free public education for children of illegal immigrants - those born inside and outside the U.S. - FAIR says it is on the order of $28.6 billion. Numbers vetted by the CBO, which reviewed 27 research studies on the costs of illegal immigration, found that 2 million "unauthorized" children and 3 million U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are served in the nation's public schools. Again, the context is a school system that takes care of 53.3 million children, according to the 2006 Census, and costs more than $500 billion, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That means that, as a share of the population and expenditures, "illegals" are in the single digits.
Local and State Governments Pay
It is important to note that most services provided to illegal immigrants are funded by local and state governments, yet any taxes they pay will likely end up in the federal treasury - the Department of Education estimates that 90% of education costs will come from non-federal sources. For some states that means huge costs offset by very little revenue.
Take, for example, Texas, which spent $1.4 billion on healthcare and education on illegal immigrants and taxed them $424 million, according to the CBO compendium; or Colorado which spent $217-225 million but received only $159-194 million. Other states fared better: Missouri spent some $17.5-$32.6 million on its illegal immigrant population but collected from them $29-$57 million. But for most states, "tax revenues that unauthorized immigrants generate ... do not offset the total cost of services provided to those immigrants," the CBO concluded. It further qualified this by saying that "... the impact is most likely modest."
Border Security, Drug Trade, Prisons
Other cost factors to keep in mind include the many hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in U.S. prisons, the cost of patrolling the border, and costs linked with the drug trade, particularly coming from Mexico. Though links between illegal immigration and drug trafficking are not firm, many "coyotes" – middlemen that illegals sometimes pay thousands of dollars to get them across the border – are thought to have links to drug cartels.
Putting the Numbers into Context
The numbers are in the millions and billions, like the $108 million spent by border counties on anti-immigration law-enforcement. But all these figures need to be contextualized. Almost half of that $108 million law-enforcement sum was spent by San Diego County alone, but still represented barely 9% of their total spending.
Consider that the CBO found that "the amount that state and local governments spend on services for unauthorized immigrants represents a small percentage of the total amount spent by those governments to provide such services to residents.". For some states - Minnesota and New Mexico - only 2% of their government budgets were tied up by illegal immigration.
In other words, illegal immigration may be a "problem" and have costs, but they are not going to sink our national economy, or any individual state for that matter.
Reference:
Congressional Budget Office - "The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on Budgets of State and Local Governments" (December 2007)
