It’s getting to be a little difficult to engage in a calm, reasoned discussion of costs and benefits of immigration.
Take the recent Wall Street Journal editorial critiquing the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector.
- Rector’s recent study claims that households headed by low-income immigrants cost the government annually $89 billion more than they pay in taxes. So a big net loss for the U.S. taxpayer.
- The Journal, by contrast, criticizes the Heritage study saying that, “Most studies also agree that the fiscal impact of the overall immigration population—roughly 30 million people—is also positive.” It then cites a “comprehensive” 1997 study from the National Academy of Sciences which concluded, “that over their lifetimes immigrants and their children pay an estimated $80,000 more in taxes to all levels of government than they receive in benefits.” But the Journal also dismisses the cost of public education—$8,462 per immigrant family, according to Rector, which makes up 43 percent of Rector’s cost estimate.
- The Texas comptroller’s office may have produced a more balanced analysis, which just focused on illegals. It recently found the state’s 1.4 million illegal immigrants paid nearly $1.6 billion in state taxes (in 2005), and used just over a billion dollars in services, including health care, education and incarceration. So a plus for the state. However, at the local level they used about $1.3 billion in services, but only paid about $500 million in taxes, leaving cities and counties financially strapped.
Maybe this debate should serve as a reminder of just how generous government handouts have become. Prior to the New Deal the cost-benefit analysis would have been clear because government-sponsored welfare and many other benefits didn't exist. Immigrants often joined their communities, which assimilated the newcomers without much more than neighbors and churches, or the immigrants moved on to find their piece of the American Dream elsewhere.
If the government didn’t feel it was its responsibility to provide so many goods and services to so many people, the debate would largely be confined to whether immigrants are good workers who want a job.