Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [36]
Welfare use among unskilled immigrants is higher than among natives because those immigrants tend to have lower incomes and more of them are poor. Among those U.S. residents who are eligible to receive welfare, however, immigrants are not heavy users. Analyses of welfare use conducted by researchers at The Urban Institute have found that fewer than 1 percent of illegal immigrant households nationwide receive benefits for the program most commonly associated with welfare—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—versus 5 percent of households headed by U.S. citizens.
A 2007 study of census data released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also pokes holes in the welfare magnet theory. It found that, between 1995 and 2005—again, a period during which illegal immigration grew—the share of low-income, noncitizen immigrant children receiving Medicaid or State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) benefits fell from 36 percent to 30 percent. By comparison, participation in those programs among low-income native children over the same period—whether they lived in households headed by immigrants or native-born citizens—increased from 45 percent to 54 percent.
The public perception is that immigrants receive public benefits at higher rates than natives, but that’s not what the data show. Overall, low-income immigrants have lower TANF, food stamp, and SSI use rates than citizens. That was true before welfare reform’s enactment, and it remains the case today.
STATE AND LOCAL COSTS
It is not the federal government, however, that bears the fiscal brunt of immigration. That falls to states and localities, and some argue that even if the feds come out ahead, states with high immigrant populations are left holding the bag. It’s true that the burden sharing is uneven, and states are right to complain that the feds don’t do more to share their immigrant revenue surplus. In our federalist system, it’s the states who pay most of the up-front costs of providing public services—the biggest items being K-12 schooling and health care—for poor immigrants.
Washington could and should do more to compensate these state and local governments. As Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute has pointed out, there’s nothing stopping the federal government from transferring money to states to offset additional costs for emergency room health-care services and increased public school enrollment. Such a policy would have the virtue of addressing the problem without creating “any new programs or additional spending, ” says Griswold. “[I]t would simply reallocate government revenues in a way that more closely matched related spending.”
Still, the significance of this state and local burden is regularly overstated by immigration skeptics. An oft-cited 1997 report by the National Research Council examined what immigrants were costing the Garden State and the Golden State and found that “the average native household bears an overall fiscal burden of $229 in New Jersey and $1,174 in California,” the difference having mostly to do with the latter’s “relatively more generous welfare programs. ” Nationally, the study found, immigrants were a short-term net drain on the average native household to the tune of $200, or a tiny 0.2 percent of GDP. And those results come from data that predate the 1996 welfare reforms, which means that today the burden is likely even less.
A more recent Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation report, from 2007, on how Latino immigrants impact Arkansas’s state coffers found that they “have a small but positive net fiscal impact on the Arkansas state budget.” Taking into account both education and health care, immigrants “cost