It's All A Big Numbers Game

Well, I haven't been adding much over the past few days and I am sorry. The main reason is because I have been collecting my thoughts and doing some heavy surfing on the Internet. Some of the hardest information to find is anything related to illegal immigrants. Reason being, there is no government agency that is keeping records. No records as to an "actual" head count of illegal immigrants. No records on the cost of illegal immigrants to the legal tax payers. All we have are estimates. Every thing I found on this are words like "estimates show"...or "we believe that the estimated number to be"...and on and on. Let me tell you something folks, how ever you would like to word it, we are in some serious trouble! What I am really trying to find out are things like, actual population figures. How many illegal immigrants are in our school districts? How many illegal immigrants are bedded up in our hospitals? How many illegal immigrants are in our city jails and in our state prisons? How many un-registered sex offenders who are illegal immigrants are in our neighborhoods?


I have found that these are some of the hardest numbers and figures to obtain. I have a huge problem with that too. I pay my taxes. Part of my hard earned money goes towards the schools, hospitals, and jails in my city. I should be able to get these figures just by picking up the phone and calling my city hall, mayor, state Representative, my congressman. But what I have found is that is not the case. I have sent email after email to my senators and congressmen, but I all get in return is a basic, computer generated form letters. After several late hours at night, I FINALLY found a report that gave me some sort of idea as to what I was looking for. It wasn't the best, nor the most accurate.


What I found was a report called "The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments". This was a report done in December of 2007. It's a report done by the Congressional Budget Office that was requested by the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee. It's a report that focuses on the estimated costs that certain state and local governments incur for providing various services, especially those related to education, health care, and law enforcement to illegal immigrants. Or as this paper describes them as, unauthorized immigrants. Funny play on words don't you think? You don't hear our government saying things like "unauthorized drugs" do you? No. They say "illegal drugs". Things that make you go, "hummmmmm".


Now, with that in mind, I want to share with you some of the things that I found interesting in this report. Most of what I am about to write comes from this same report. So, when you see the term, unauthorized immigrant(s), trust me, that is not coming from me. I call 'em like I see 'em. ILLEGAL immigrants. Or, ILLEGALS for short.


The report states that there are no comprehensive records that document the number of unauthorized immigrants currently residing in the United States; as a result, the size of that population must be estimated by indirect means. The Department of Homeland Security, (which is a joke in itself), estimates that there are 11.6 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. That was as of Jan. 2006. Researchers at the Pew Hispanic Center estimated an unauthorized population of between 11.5 million and 12.0 million as of March of 2006. So, for the sake of this blog, let's just round it to an even 12 million, what do you say? Do you REALLY know what the number 12 million equates to? Let me throw some figures at you to try to give you a little idea. The total population of Dallas County is 2.3 million. The total population for the ENTIRE state of Kentucky for the year 2006 was 4.2 million. The population for the ENTIRE state of Illinois in the year 2006 was 12.8 million. The 2006 population for the COUNTRY of Ireland was 4.1 million. The total population living in the COUNTRY of Cuba in 2006 was 11.2 million. Sorry for all of the numbers there, I just wanted to give you a little bit better of a perspective of what we are dealing with here. Back to the report.


Using a model developed by the former I.N.S., Pew estimated that as much as one-half of the population of unauthorized immigrants (4.5-6.0 million people) were admitted legally, with visas or border crossing cards, but overstayed or otherwise violated the terms of their authorization; and the remainder of that population (an estimated 6-7million individuals) entered the United States illegally. (just one of the very few times this report used the word "illegal") The report goes on to say that state level estimates are subject to even more uncertainty than estimates of the total size of the population. Historically, most foreign born residents, including unauthorized immigrants, have settled in a few states. In 1990, almost 75% of the total foreign born population and almost 90% of unauthorized immigrants lived in six states: California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas. The population is not defined in the same way across reports. Because the estimates looked at different populations of immigrants, few of them are comparable. For example, although most estimates looked only at unauthorized immigrants, others did not differentiate between unauthorized and legal immigrants. Some included all foreign born residents, regardless of their immigration status, and some included children of unauthorized immigrants who were born in the United Sates (even though those children are U.S. citizens). If the U.S. born children of unauthorized immigrants had been included in the estimates, the costs of certain programs, particularly education, would be much higher. Using data from the Census Bureau's March 2005 Current population Survey (CPS), Pew analysts found that of the appproximately 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in 2005, 5.4 million were adult males, 3.9 million were adult females, and 1.8 million were children under the age of 18 years old. An additional 3.1 million children of unauthorized immigrants were U.S. citizens, Pew estimated. (These stats are avaliable at http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf ) Among Pew's other findings: Members of unauthorizaed families were typically much younger and less educated than members of families composed of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens. The unauthorized population included 7.2 million workers, typically employed in lower wage occupations in the agricultural, construction, and service industries. Analysts at the Urban Institute reported that in 2004, unauthorized immigrant men were less likely to be unemployed than native born men (4.6% compared with 6.5%) and unauthorized immigrant women were more likely to be unemployed than native born women (8.2% compared with 5.2%).


Now that I have totally filled your head with large population numbers, let's talk COSTS! Boy, where to start! Let's start with education.


Education is the largest single expenditure in state and local budgets. Because state and local governments bear the primary fiscal and administrative responsibility of providing schooling from kindergarten - grade 12, they incur substantial costs to educate children who are unauthorized immigrants. Most of the estimates that CBO reviewed DID NOT include costs associated with children who were born to unauthorized immigrants in the United States because those children are U.S. citizens. Again, if those children had been included in the estimates, their fiscal impact, particularly on education, would have been higher. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that sates may NOT exclude children from public education because of their immigration status. See Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982) Current estimates indicate that about 2 million school-age children (5-17 years old) in the United States are unauthorized immigrants; an additional 3 million children are U.S. citizens born to unauthorized immigrants. According to the most recent population data released by the Census Bureau, as of July 2006, there were 53.3 million school-age children in the United States. Thus, children who are unauthorized immigrants represent almost 4% of the overall school-age population. Their numbers are growing quickly in some states, adding additional budgetary pressures. For example: as part of a larger study on the impact of unauthorized immigrants in Minnesota, the state's Department of Administration estimated that, during the 2003-2004 school year, the state and local governments in Minnesota spent between $79 million and $118 million to educate and estimated 9,400 to 14,000 children who were unauthorized immigrants. The agency also estimated that an additional $39 million was spent for children who were U.S. citizens but whose parents were unauthorized immigrants. According to census data, Minnesota state and local governments spent about $8 billion for elementary and secondary education during the 2003-2004 school year. The state estimated that its population of immigrant students, both legal and unauthorized, had almost doubled from about 9,000 to more than 16,000 between 2000-2004. (stats on this are available at www.leg.state.mn.us/lrl/issues/immigration ) On the basis of population estimate developed by the Pew Hispanic Center, analysts at the New Mexico Fiscal Policy Project reported that, for the 2003-2004 school year, total spending in New Mexico at the state and local levels for 9,200 unauthorized immigrant schoolchildren was about $67 million. The Census Bureau reports that state and local expenditures for elementary and secondary education during that period in New Mexico totaled almost $3 billion. Of the estimated 40,000 unauthorized immigrants currently living in New Mexico, 95% are believed to be recent arrivals, having lived in that state for fewer than 10 years.


Now let's talk medical expenses. Because unauthorized immigrants are less likely to have health insurance, they are more likely to rely on emergency facilities or public hospitals for treatment of non emergency illnesses and other health related problems. In 2000 and 2001, researchers from the RAND Corporation and the University of California surveyed immigrants in Los Angeles County and found that 65% of those respondents who identified themselves as unauthorized had no health insurance in the two years preceding the survey. (available at http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/24/6/1640 ) In a separate study, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that in 2004, more than 50% of those children who were themselves unauthorized immigrants and almost 60% of adult unauthorized immigrants were uninsured. Moreover, 25% of those children who, by virtue of their birth, were U.S. citizens, but whose parents were unauthorized immigrants, also lacked health insurance. (available at http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/46.pdf ) The federal government requires health facilities that receive federal assistance to provide a certain level of service to residents, regardless of their immigration status. The amount of uncompensated care provided by some state and local governments is growing because an increasing number of unauthorized immigrants are using those services. According to a report commissioned by the United States/Mexico Border Counties Coalition, in 2000,county governments that share a border with Mexico incurred almost $190 million in costs for providing uncompensated care to unauthorized immigrants; that figure represented about 1/4 of all uncompensated health costs incurred by those governments in that year. In 2006, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority estimated that it would spend about $9.7 million on emergency Medicaid services for unauthorized immigrants that year, and that 80% of those costs would be for services associated with childbirth. Recent estimates indicate that annual costs for unauthorized immigrants in Colorado were between $217 million and $225 million for education, Medicaid, and law enforcement. By comparison, taxes collected form unauthorized immigrants at both the state and local levels amounted to an estimated $159 million to $194 million annually.


In addition to differences in the types of services that federal, state, and local governments provide and the extent to which the unauthorized population participates in those programs, the income that unauthorized immigrants earn and the taxes they pay also contribute to their net impact on state and local budgets. Unauthorized immigrants typically earn less than do native born citizens and other immigrant groups and, partly as a result, they also pay a smaller portion of their income in taxes. One study conducted by analysts at the Urban Institute found that in 1998, unauthorized immigrants in New York State paid an average of 15% of their income in federal, state, and local taxes; other immigrant groups paid between 21% and 31%. The average household income for unauthorized families is significantly less than that of both legal immigrants and native born citizens; therefore, that income is taxed at a lower rate than the income of other groups. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that in 2004, the average annual income for unauthorized families was $27,400, compared with $47,800 for legal immigrant families and $47,700 for native born families.


Well, that's it as far as throwing figures and numbers and stats at you. I just wanted to give you some sort of idea of the massive amount of illegal immigrants we are dealing with and the costs that they are creating for us. Even though some illegals do pay a portion in taxes, as you can see, their income is much lower therefore less is being taken out. So it is up to us, the legal citizens of the United States to foot the bill.


I guess what really bothered me about this whole finding was this, there are NO government studies being done as far as numbers and costs. This scares me because this is just an admission that we don't know who is in our country. This should scare you as well. We give BILLIONS of dollars to Homeland Security so I don't think that it is too much to ask, as a tax payer, that we know exactly who is in this country and why they are here. If they are here, then they need to be paying taxes just like the rest of us.


Again, I ask you to write or call your elected officials and ask them why it is that we Americans aren't given accurate information when it comes to illegal immigration. If you still don't think that this is an important election year we have coming up, think again. Three things come to mind: illegal immigration, National security, and taxes. I say taxes because I just wonder how long our government is going to continue to foot the bill for the estimated 12 million illegals that are here?