Why are we debating this because the facts are we are losing money on illegal immigrants.
Introduction
A continually growing population of illegal aliens, along with the federal government’s ineffective efforts to secure our borders, present significant national security and public safety threats to the United States. They also have a severely negative impact on the nation’s taxpayers at the local, state, and national levels. Illegal immigration costs Americans billions of dollars each year. Illegal aliens are net consumers of taxpayer-funded services and the limited taxes paid by some segments of the illegal alien population are, in no way, significant enough to offset the growing financial burdens imposed on U.S. taxpayers by massive numbers of uninvited guests. This study examines the fiscal impact of illegal aliens as reflected in both federal and state budgets.
The Number of Illegal Immigrants in the US
Estimating the fiscal burden of illegal immigration on the U.S. taxpayer depends on the size and characteristics of the illegal alien population. FAIR defines “illegal alien” as anyone who entered the United States without authorization and anyone who unlawfully remains once his/her authorization has expired. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has no central database containing information on the citizenship status of everyone lawfully present in the United States. The overall problem of estimating the illegal alien population is further complicated by the fact that the majority of available sources on immigration status rely on self-reported data. Given that illegal aliens have a motive to lie about their immigration status, in order to avoid discovery, the accuracy of these statistics is dubious, at best. All of the foregoing issues make it very difficult to assess the current illegal alien population of the United States.
However, FAIR now estimates that there are approximately 12.5 million illegal alien residents. This number uses FAIR’s previous estimates but adjusts for suspected changes in levels of unlawful migration, based on information available from the Department of Homeland Security, data available from other federal and state government agencies, and other research studies completed by reliable think tanks, universities, and other research organizations.
The Cost of Illegal Immigration to the United States
At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens. That amounts to a tax burden of approximately $8,075 per illegal alien family member and a total of $115,894,597,664. The total cost of illegal immigration to U.S. taxpayers is both staggering and crippling. In 2013, FAIR estimated the total cost to be approximately $113 billion. So, in under four years, the cost has risen nearly $3 billion. This is a disturbing and unsustainable trend. The sections below will break down and further explain these numbers at the federal, state, and local levels.
Total Governmental Expenditures on Illegal Aliens
Total Tax Contributions by Illegal Aliens
Total Economic Impact of Illegal Immigration
Federal
The Federal government spends a net amount of $45.8 billion on illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children. This amount includes expenditures for public education, medical care, justice enforcement initiatives, welfare programs and other miscellaneous costs. It also factors in the meager amount illegal aliens pay to the federal government in income, social security, Medicare and excise taxes.
FEDERAL SPENDING
The approximately $46 billion in federal expenditures attributable to illegal aliens is staggering. Assuming an illegal alien population of approximately 12.5 million illegal aliens and 4.2 million U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, that amounts to roughly $2,746 per illegal alien, per year. For the sake of comparison, the average American college student receives only $4,800 in federal student loans each year.
FAIR maintains that every concerned American citizen should be asking our government why, in a time of increasing costs and shrinking resources, is it spending such large amounts of money on individuals who have no right, nor authorization, to be in the United States? This is an especially important question in view of the fact that the illegal alien beneficiaries of American taxpayer largess offset very little of the enormous costs of their presence by the payment of taxes. Meanwhile, average Americans pay approximately 30% of their income in taxes.
Taxes collected from illegal aliens offset fiscal outlays and, therefore must be included in any examination of the cost of illegal immigration. However, illegal alien apologists frequently cite the allegedly large tax payments made by illegal aliens as a justification for their unlawful presence, and as a basis for offering them permanent legal status through a new amnesty, similar to the one enacted in 1986. That argument is nothing more than a red herring.
FAIR believes that most studies grossly overestimate both the taxes actually collected from illegal aliens and, more importantly, the amount of taxes actually paid by illegal aliens (i.e., the amount of money collected from illegal aliens and actually kept by the federal government). This belief is based on a number of factors: Since the 1990’s, the United States has focused on apprehending and removing criminal aliens. The majority of illegal aliens seeking employment in the United States have lived in an environment where they have little fear of deportation, even if discovered. This has created an environment where most illegal aliens are both able and willing to file tax returns. Because the vast majority of illegal aliens hold low-paying jobs, those who are subject to wage deductions actually wind up receiving a complete refund of all taxes paid, plus net payments made on the basis of tax credits.
As a result, illegal aliens actually profit from filing a tax return and, therefore, have a strong interest in doing so.
Hundreds of patients have been languishing for months or even years in New York City hospitals, despite being well enough to be sent home or to nursing centers for less-expensive care, because they are illegal immigrants or lack sufficient insurance or appropriate housing.
Yu Kang Fu was moved to a care center in Brooklyn last spring after spending over four years at New York Downtown Hospital.
As a result, hospitals are absorbing the bill for millions of dollars in unreimbursed expenses annually while the patients, trapped in bureaucratic limbo, are sometimes deprived of services that could be provided elsewhere at a small fraction of the cost.
“Many of those individuals no longer need that care, but because they have no resources and many have no family here, we, unfortunately, are caring for them in a much more expensive setting than necessary based on their clinical need,” said LaRay Brown, a senior vice president for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation. Under state law, public hospitals are not allowed to discharge patients to shelters or to the street.
Medicaid often pays for emergency care for illegal immigrants, but not for continuing care, and many hospitals in places with large concentrations of illegal immigrants, like Texas, California and Florida, face the quandary of where to send patients well enough to leave. Officials in New York City say they have many such patients who are draining money from the health system as the cost of keeping people in acute-care hospitals continues to escalate.
But even if Medicaid pays for some care, taxpayer dollars are ultimately being consumed by patients who could be cared for in nursing homes or other health facilities, and even at home if supportive services were available. Care for a patient languishing in a hospital can cost more than $100,000 a year, while care in a nursing home can cost $20,000 or less.
Patients fit to be discharged from hospitals but having no place to go typically remain more than five years, Ms. Brown said. She estimated that there were about 300 patients in such a predicament throughout the city, most in public hospitals or higher-priced skilled public nursing homes, though a smattering were in private hospitals.
One patient, a former hospital technician from Queens, has lived at the city’s Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility on Roosevelt Island for 13 years because the hospital has no place to send him, Ms. Brown said. The patient, who is in his mid-60s, has been there since an arterial disease cost him part of one leg below the knee and left him in a wheelchair. The city’s public health system declined to provide the names of any long-term patients or make them available for interviews, citing confidentiality laws.
Five years ago, Yu Kang Fu, 58, who lived in Flushing, Queens, and was a cook at a Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, was dropped off by his boss at New York Downtown Hospital, a private institution in Manhattan, complaining of a severe headache. Mr. Yu was admitted to the intensive-care unit with a stroke.
Within days, he was well enough for hospital personnel to begin planning for his release, but as an illegal immigrant (he had overstayed a work visa a decade ago), he was ineligible for health benefits. And no nursing home or rehabilitation center would take him. Neither would his son in China nor the Chinese government, although the hospital volunteered to fly him there at its expense.
Mr. Yu’s protracted hospital stay was first chronicled in an article in The New York Times in 2008 about the treatment of uninsured immigrants.
Mr. Yu remained in the hospital for over four years until he was transferred last spring to the Atlantis Rehabilitation and Residential Health Care Facility, a private center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, after the federal government certified him as a “permanent resident under color of law,” essentially acknowledging that he could not be returned to China and qualifying him for medical benefits.
“This gentleman cost us millions of dollars,” said Jeffrey Menkes, the president of New York Downtown. “We try to provide physical, occupational therapy, but this is an acute-care hospital. This patient shouldn’t be here.”
Mr. Yu said that the hospital had treated him well, but that he had made enormous progress in regaining his ability to walk through his rehabilitation regimen at Atlantis. He hopes to return to China when he is well enough to be discharged.
“Here, I am very happy,” he said. “This is very nice — No. 1.”
New York Downtown serves a largely immigrant population, and many patients have no insurance or proof that they are in the United States legally, which is necessary for discharge purposes and eventual reimbursements, said Chui Man Lai, assistant vice president of patient services at the hospital.
These patients often arrive in the emergency room acutely ill and unaccompanied, and we have to treat them until they can be discharged safely,” Ms. Lai said. “The hospital is required, by law and its mission, to care for these patients.”
Health professionals refer to them as “permanent patients,” trussed in red tape and essentially living in hospitals already operating on thin margins. In some cases, health care professionals say, grown children leave ailing parents at the hospitals and go on vacation. Officials call that practice a “pop drop.”
Though the problem is particularly severe in the municipal hospital system, longtime patients place a financial burden wherever they end up.
New York Downtown spends about $2 million annually for such patients out of an operating budget of about $200 million. An acute-care patient can cost the hospital more than $1,500 a day.
Hospitals are reluctant to complain publicly about such patients for fear of being perceived as callously seeking to dump nonpaying patients. Elected officials are generally loath to be seen as encouraging illegal immigrants by changing reimbursement formulas. The issue was never addressed during the debate over national health care legislation.
Longtime patients, meanwhile, risk getting sicker because they are exposed to diseases that fester in hospitals.
“At times there is a fine line regarding who meets the criteria to be admitted to a hospital, but if there’s no way to immediately contact a family member and the patient needs nonmedical help or is homeless, you’re obligated to provide shelter,” said Dr. Warren B. Licht, who recently retired as New York Downtown’s chief medical officer after seven years to return to full-time clinical practice in the wellness and prevention center that he founded there. “You can’t kick a patient out of the hospital.”
New York Downtown, Dr. Licht said, has offered to pay for nursing home care for patents who are uninsured and are illegal immigrants, but care facilities are reluctant to risk taking patients for fear that they would be saddled with unexpected and unreimbursed expenses.
“If the patient does not have or cannot obtain health insurance to pay for the next level of care, other non-acute-care health facilities won’t routinely accept a patient,” Dr. Licht said.
New York Downtown has four or five patients out of a total of 180 who have no place to go, he said, adding, “It cost us several million dollars a year in a hospital struggling to keep its head above water.”
MONTGOMERY, Alabama (AP) — Police arrested 13 protesters in Alabama’s capital Tuesday as they demonstrated against the state’s strict new law clamping down on illegal immigrants.
About 100 people, most of them Hispanic and college-aged, chanted slogans as they marched in light rain around the state Capitol and to the adjacent Statehouse where the legislature works.
“Undocumented, unafraid,” ”No papers, no fear, immigrants are marching here,” and “Ain’t no power like the power of the people,” were among the slogans the protesters chanted as they marched. Later, some were hauled off to jail in a yellow bus normally used by the city parks and recreation department.
Some sat down on Union Street between the Statehouse and the Capitol when police approached and warned them in English and Spanish that they would be arrested if they didn’t move.
None did and police arrested 11 demonstrators, tying their hand with yellow straps and loading them into the bus.
Federal courts have blocked parts of the Republican-backed law from taking effect, but both supporters and critics still call it the nation’s toughest state law against illegal immigration. The Obama administration opposes the law, which is calls an overreach by the state.
Looking like a typical American teenager with her long dark hair in a ponytail, Rios said she knew there was a possibility she might be deported as she sat in the street waiting to be arrested.
“I know that I live in fear every single day of that, so this is no different,” Rios said. “I’m doing this for all the immigrant students who struggle every day.”
A Montgomery attorney who volunteered to represent those arrested, Mike Winter, said he understood they were mostly being charged with disturbing the peace, but also could be held for immigration officials.
After walking all the way around the Capitol one time, about 20 protesters entered the Statehouse and went up to the seventh-floor office of state Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, a key proponent of the law.
Once downstairs, two of the demonstrators — college students Ernesto Zumaya, 24, of Los Angeles and Caesar Marroquin, 21, of Philadelphia — linked arms and sat down on the floor of the main lobby. They vowed not to leave until Beason responded to their concerns. Beason did not respond to the protest and Zumaya and Marroquin were arrested peacefully when the building closed for the day.
Both said they are immigrants from Mexico without papers who have lived in the U.S. most of their lives. Marroquin said he always wanted to be a U.S. Marine.
Beason said later that he was not in his office Tuesday afternoon and did not immediately get the message except being told there were people at the Statehouse to see him.
Beason defended the law when asked about the protest.
“My intention is to enforce what’s already in place in federal law,” Beason said. “I make no apologies. I’m trying to do what I feel is best for the people of Alabama.”
