Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [39]
And so it goes with health care. Health-care costs aren’t what they are because of immigrants but because we have employer-provided health insurance. A third party rather than the patient is paying most of the medical tab. When people are spending other people’s money, they tend to spend more of it, which drives up costs. We then exacerbate the situation by mandating what a health plan must cover and prohibiting employers from providing a bare-bones insurance option with a high deductible at a modest price. These regulations also result in more people without health insurance, since many employers opt not to insure their employees at all rather than offer an expensive plan that would force them to reduce wages.
These are problems, to be sure, but they are heath-care problems, not immigration problems. They are problems that would exist even if every foreign national in the country up and left tomorrow. The free-market solution to rising medical costs and emergency rooms full of uninsured patients isn’t ramparting the Rio Grande. It’s medical savings accounts and other reforms for low-income individuals who’ve been priced out of the market by special-interest regulations masquerading as consumer protections. It’s ending “guaranteed issue” requirements that allow people to wait until they’re sick to buy insurance, and “community rating” requirements that prevent insurers from charging different prices to different people based on age and health status. It’s moving the entire U.S. health-care system more generally in a market-based direction.
The Texas study is a model for other states looking to determine the economic impact of immigration. Not only does it recognize that immigrants are a catalyst for economic growth, but it’s also careful about how it identifies the immigrant population. A similar Colorado report overstated the health-care costs of illegal immigrants by including the health-care costs of many legal immigrants. The same Colorado study also inflated the costs of educating immigrants by assuming that all illegals between the ages of five and seventeen were in public schools, not accounting for the fact that some were enrolled in private schools and others did not attend school at all.
Strayhorn references a report by the nativist Federation for American Immigration Reform that stacks the deck by including as an illegal alien “cost” the education of their American-born children, who are, in fact, U.S. citizens—until a constitutional amendment says otherwise. That’s significant because some two-thirds of the children of illegal immigrants, and 80 percent of the children of legal immigrants, are U.S. born. Such human capital expenditures, properly understood, are a net investment, and the children of immigrants—including Latinos—typically do better than their parents in terms of schooling and income. It’s a strange logic that assumes American children are a fiscal burden to society.
ROBERT RECTOR AND ARITHMETIC
There’s no credible research demonstrating that immigration imposes a large economic cost on the United States. The findings in smaller states like Arkansas and North Carolina, or larger states like California and Texas, are not sui generis. They’re the product of standard economic analyses that incorporate realistic assumptions. There is a cost component to low-skill immigration, to be sure, especially in border communities and states with large public benefits. But immigrants are also catalysts for economic growth. They increase the number of agents in the marketplace— the number of people who earn, spend, and invest—and thus the amount of economic