What immigration costs

What is the cost of immigration in our country? The answers really depend on where you look.
Does it surprise you to know that according to at least one expert, the costs of immigration to the United States are underestimated?
Edwin S. Rubenstein is an economist with the conservative “think-tank,” the Manhattan Institute. Rubenstein’s 70-page study on the price of immigration came out earlier this month in “The Social Contract.” Investor’s Business Daily summarized the published study.
Each immigrant’s cost to taxpayers is more than $9,000, according to Rubenstein. The economist goes on to say government agencies have not been required to do fiscal impact statements and so far, they have not done so.
Rubenstein’s study looked at 17 federal departments and agencies, such as Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration and the State Department, among others.
Looking at Department of Education statistics, 7.9 percent of the kindergarten through high school students take limited English proficient (LEP) classes. The 7.9 percent translates to around 3.8 million children. Rubenstein opined that these LEP classes are more expensive than general education courses.
A large burden also falls upon the prison system.
As reported in Investor’s Business Daily, “of all prisoners in federal prisons, 27 percent are criminal aliens, he found, with a total cost of $1.5 billion.”
The caveat is that 80,000 to 100,000 convicted, undocumented immigrants walk the streets, due to a shortage of available prison capacity.
Remember: Rubenstein is a conservative economist writing for a conservative think-tank.
Another think-tank, this one non-partisan, sees things a little differently.
The Urban Institute’s goal, according to its Web site, is to “promote sound social policy and public debate on national priorities.” The institute gathers and analyzes data, and conducts policy research.
In the institute’s report “Undocumented Immigrants: Myths and Reality,” authors Randolph Capps and Michael E. Fix look at “myths’ in the immigration debate.
Undocumented immigrants come to this country to work, not automatically to get on welfare, according to Capps and Fix. “In 2003, more than 90 percent of undocumented men worked,” which is at a higher rate than legal immigrants or U.S. citizens during the same period.
These undocumented workers are also ineligible for welfare, food stamps and other public benefits.
It is a myth that undocumented immigrants do not pay taxes, say Fix and Capps. Immigrants — documented and otherwise — pay the same real estate taxes, either through owning a home or through the rent that they pay. They also pay for consumptive taxes, such as sales tax.
“The majority of state and local costs of schooling and other services are funded by these taxes,” states the report.
Three quarters of undocumented immigrants pay payroll taxes, according to the Social Security Administration. According to another study (from 2005), these immigrants contribute between $6 and $7 billion that they will never be able to claim, due to their undocumented status.
Another interesting “myth” is the high number of undocumented immigrant children in our schools, according to the Urban Institute study, even though the data is now eight years old.
Only 1.5 percent of elementary-aged children (K through 5th grade) and three percent of secondary (grades 6-12) were undocumented. “Slightly higher shares — 5 percent in elementary and 4 percent in secondary schools — had undocumented parents,” according to the Urban Institute’s report.
So, who is correct? Is illegal immigration a huge burden on our government economy? Are the figures misleading?
It seems to me, it all depends on who is finding the statistics and who is interpreting them.
The real cost of immigration is that many resources are spent looking at the issues from one point of view or the other — and no real solutions seem to be on the horizon.

Jeff Walker is an independent columnist who lives in Culpeper. He appears every other Wednesday in the
Star-Exponent. E-mail