Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [38]
California and Texas are the states with the most people. Serving as immigrant portals, they rank first and third (with New York in between) in the sizes of their foreign-born populations. California has by far the country’s largest illegal alien population at 2.8 million (though the state’s share of the nation’s total has been falling), followed once again by Texas, which has half as many undocumented migrants. The experience of these two states is instructive, or should be, for anyone interested in facts about public benefits and immigrants, rather than emotion or populist rhetoric.
In what its authors describe as “the most detailed analysis to date of immigrants and their use of health services,” a 2006 Rand Corporation study estimates that each year the United States spends “about $1.1 billion in federal, state, and local government funds on heath care for illegal immigrants aged 18-64.” That works out to $11 per household.
Lou Dobbs informs his viewers that thousands of illegal alien lepers are scurrying across the Mexican border, infecting Americans and spiking health-care costs. But the Rand researchers found that nonelderly adult immigrants, both legal and illegal, made fewer visits to the hospital than their native-born counterparts. And the foreign-born—especially the undocumented—reported fewer health problems than natives. In 2000, illegal immigrants were 12 percent of Los Angeles County residents, yet received just 6 percent of total medical spending.
How to explain? “Most of the costs for undocumented immigrants’ health care were covered by private insurance or out-of-pocket payments,” according to the report, “but an estimated $204 million [out of $887 million] was for publicly supported services.” Native residents, the study found, “were more likely to use publicly funded services than foreign-born residents.” Imagine that.
Health-care costs are rising independently of immigration. Scapegoating the latest arrivals will hardly lower our medical bills and is highly misleading besides. Given that immigrants tend to be younger and healthier than natives, they’re actually less likely to rack up large health bills. Recent immigrants from Mexico are also less inclined than most natives to use hospital emergency rooms, though you often hear claims to the contrary. A 2005 University of California at Los Angeles study found that fewer than 10 percent of Mexican aliens—legal and illegal—who’d been in the United States less than a decade reported using an emergency room, compared to 20 percent of white citizens. So much for the myth of freeloading illegals.
And then there’s Texas, home to our second-largest illegal population. In 2006, the Texas comptroller, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, issued a report on how undocumented immigrants affect the state budget and economy. The first of its kind in Texas, according to Strayhorn, the study looked at gross state product, revenues generated, taxes paid, and the cost of state services. Education was the largest cost, while state-paid health care for illegals “was a small percentage of total health care spending.” It found that illegal immigrants in Texas generate more taxes and revenue than the state spends on them.
What’s more, the fiscal impact wasn’t simply not negative; it was remarkably positive. Without immigrants— without illegal immigrants—Texas is worse off. The report found that “the absence of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in Texas in fiscal 2005 would have been a loss to our Gross State Product of $17.7 billion. Also, the Comptroller’s office estimates that state revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceed what the state spent on services, with the difference being $424.7 million” (emphasis in the original).
Texas is a relatively low-levy state, one of only nine with no income tax. The taxes it does impose tend to be consumption