Report Uncovers Hidden Cost of Illegal Immigration

by Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum: Are you having a hard time paying your bills, making your mortgage payments, or putting your kids through college? You need to know how much of your hard-earned income the government is skimming off and diverting into handouts to immigrants and illegal immigrants. You can read the depressing details in the new 70-page document called "The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration" by Edwin S. Rubenstein. . . . Big Brother hasn't told you this bad news, perhaps because the government doesn't want you to know why your paychecks are shortchanged . . .

The financial burden immigrants impose on education starts with the 3.8 million K-12 students enrolled in more-expensive classes for the non-English-speaking. . . the total amounts to an estimated $1,030 per pupil, or $3.9 billion. Of the 48.4 million public-school children, pre-K through 12th grade, 9.2 million or 19% are immigrants or the children of immigrants. In the next few years, immigration will account for virtually all the increase in public school spending.

. . . $1.5 billion cost of incarcerating 267,000 criminal aliens in federal prisons. That's not the worst of it; prison capacity is limited, so 80,000 to 100,000 other criminal aliens have been prematurely released to prowl our streets. Criminals also impose heavy private costs on their victims. . . . the losses of income and property, hospital bills and emotional suffering at $1.6 million per assault- or property-crime offender.

. . . Earned Income Tax Credit . . . gives an average cash payment of $1,700 per year to 25% of immigrant households. The emergency medical treatment given free to illegal immigrants is another enormous cost, causing some hospitals and emergency rooms to close. Emergency means any complaint from hangovers to hangnails, gunshot wounds to AIDS. . . . 24.2% of immigrant households receive Medicaid, . . Hispanics account for 19.2% of Medicaid enrollment, while they are 13.7% of the U.S. population . . .

The Interior Dept spends millions of dollars to clean up the mountains of trash discarded by illegal immigrants crossing [borders] . . . Another cost . . . immigrant workers depress the wages received by native-born Americans, and that causes a $100 billion shortfall in federal tax revenue. Harvard Univ Professor George Borjas found that each 10% increase in the U.S. labor force from immigration reduces wages of native-born Americans by 5.25%.

Some liberals are trying to tell us to fight a recession by bringing in more immigrants, but that would only raid the pockets of U.S. taxpayers to support more millions of non-taxpayers. It's hard to say which is more outrageous: the diversion of Americans' personal income into cash handouts to foreigners, or the federal government's policy of concealing the fiscal impact of immigration. The bottom line, which you need to know for your own bottom line, is that U.S. taxpayers are giving more than $9,000 a year in cash or benefits to each immigrant, a third of whom are in the country illegally. That's $36,000 for each immigrant household of four. Because the U.S. has 37 million immigrants, legal and illegal, the national cost was more than $346 billion last year, which was twice our fiscal deficit. . . [Read More]

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