HOW I SEE IT: Fuzzy math by FAIR on illegal immigration

Tuesday’s front-page story “Illegal immigration costs Va. $625 per household” doesn’t fully explain the serious flaws in a recent report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform claiming that “Virginia’s illegal immigrant population costs the state’s taxpayers nearly $1.7 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration.”

FAIR dramatically exaggerates the fiscal “costs” of unauthorized immigrants by including the schooling of their native-born, U.S.-citizen children in its estimate, and completely discounts the economic role that unauthorized workers play as consumers who support Virginia businesses.

More than 90 percent of FAIR’s cost estimate consists of K-12 education costs for the children of unauthorized immigrants — and nearly three-quarters of these children are U.S.-born U.S. citizens who have at least one unauthorized parent. These are children who will go on to become taxpaying “natives” when they are adult workers.

Indeed, the adult U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants are no doubt counted among the native-born taxpayers who FAIR says are being forced to pay for the education of minor U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants.

The fact is that everyone is “costly” as a child. The National Research Council pointed out in an authoritative 1997 report that “children who consume services and pay no taxes today become contributing taxpayers tomorrow.” Why? Because, “at the state and local level, an individual or a household typically first receives costly services and transfers, particularly for education, and then in a sense pays for them later in life through taxes.”

This applies to all of us, regardless of whether our families came to the United States on the Mayflower, through Ellis Island or across the Rio Grande.

The FAIR report acknowledges that accounting for the taxes paid by unauthorized immigrants shaves a couple hundred million dollars off its inflated cost estimate. But the report neglects to account for the consumer purchasing power of unauthorized immigrants —what they spend on goods, services and housing — which not only creates new jobs, but provides federal, state and local governments with additional tax revenue.

The Commonwealth Institute found that unauthorized immigrants in Virginia not only paid between $260 million and $311 million in sales, excise, income, property, Social Security and Medicare taxes in 2007, but that employers contributed an additional $119 million to $142 million in taxes on their behalf-for a total of between $379 million and $453 million.

The Commonwealth Institute also estimates that unauthorized workers earn between $2.6 billion and $3.1 billion (even after subtracting remittances sent back to their home countries), which are “used to purchase goods and services in the commonwealth.”

FAIR ignores the fact that unauthorized workers are also consumers, and that their U.S.-born children are not immigrants. Once these inconvenient truths are taken into account, FAIR’s “cost” evaporates.