Cost for illegal aliens in California estimated at nearly $9 billion

California's nearly 3 million illegal immigrants cost taxpayers nearly $9 billion each year, according to a new report released last week by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based group that promotes stricter immigration policies.

Educating the children of illegal immigrants is the largest cost, estimated at $7.7 billion each year, according to the report. Medical care for illegal immigrants and incarceration of those who have committed crimes are the next two largest expenses measured in the study, the author said.

Pro-immigrant groups and Latino researchers dispute the federation's findings, calling them biased and incomplete.

Jack Martin, who wrote the report, said Thursday that the $9 billion figure does not include other expenses that are difficult to measure, such as special English instruction, school lunch programs, and welfare benefits for American workers displaced by illegal immigrant workers.

"It's a bottom of the range number," Martin said.

The federation is one of the nation's leading lobbying groups aimed at curbing immigration into the country.

Authors of the report say it culls information from the U.S. Census and other studies addressing the cost of illegal immigration into the country to draw its conclusions.

Gerardo Gonzalez, director of Cal State San Marcos' National Latino Research Center, which compiles data on Latinos, criticized the report. He said it does not measure some of the contributions that immigrants make to the state's economy.

"Beyond taxes, these workers' production and spending contribute to California's economy, especially the agricultural sector," Gonzalez said.

Immigrants, both legal and illegal, are the backbone of the state's nearly $28 billion-a-year agricultural industry, Gonzalez and other researchers say.

More than two-thirds of the estimated 340,000 agriculture workers in California are noncitizens, most of whom are believed to be illegal immigrants, according to a 1998 study on farmworkers prepared for the state Legislature.

Local farmers say migrant farmworkers are critical to their businesses, and without them they would have to close their farms or move their operations overseas.

Martin disagrees. He said illegal immigrants displace American workers by taking low-skilled jobs, keep wages low by creating an overabundance of workers and stifle innovation by reducing the need for mechanized labor.

"The product of the illegal immigrant is not included (in the report) because if that is an essential product it will get done one way or another," Martin said. Employers "would have to pay better wages or invest money on mechanization."

Martin's study looks specifically at the costs of educating illegal immigrants' children, providing medical care to illegal immigrants and jailing those convicted of committing crimes. The report estimates the total cost at $10.5 billion each year, but that is offset by about $1.7 billion in taxes that illegal immigrants pay.

The study assumes that there are about 1 million children of illegal immigrant parents in California, or about 15 percent of the state's K-12 school enrolled population. The estimate is based on a 1994 study by the Urban Institute that concluded there were 307,000 illegal immigrant children enrolled in the state's public schools.

Martin also added an estimate of 597,000 U.S.-born children whose parents are illegal immigrants arriving at a total of 1,022,000 children. Multiplying the number of children by the estimated $7,577 the state spends on average per pupil, the study arrived at the $7.7 billion figure.

Including the number of U.S.-born children in the study is one of the reasons pro-immigrant groups said the study is biased.

"I think FAIR is without doubt an extremist organization that tries to portray itself as a mainstream group," said Christian Ramirez, director of the San Diego office of the American Friends Service Committee, an advocate group for legal and illegal immigrants.

The study's author defended the report, saying that the children were born in the United States as a result of their parents' illegal entry into the country.

"In no way does the report identify them as different kinds of citizens, because they would not have been born in the U.S. had their parents not come into the country illegally," Martin said.

To arrive at the cost of providing health care to illegal immigrants, the federation's study used an earlier 2000 analysis of health expenses paid by border counties that concluded the state spent $908 million on medical care for immigrants.

Martin said he adjusted the 2000 figure for increases in the population and inflation on the cost of providing health care and estimated that the state will spend about $1.4 billion in 2004.

The report also estimated that the state will spend another $1.4 billion to jail the 48,000 illegal immigrants in state prisons. California is compensated by the federal government to offset the cost of housing this population, but the federal payments were a fraction, about $111 million, of the total cost, Martin said.

To figure out the contributions that this immigrant population makes in taxes, the federation's study said it adjusted the Urban Institute's study estimates of $732 million for population increases and concluded that they contribute about $1.7 billion in sales, income and property taxes.

A similar study conducted by the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., and released in August, said that illegal immigrants cost the federal government $10 billion more than they pay in taxes.

The federal government pays about $2.2 billion in medical treatment for uninsured immigrants, according to the report. It pays $1.9 billion in food assistance programs, such as food stamps and school lunches, for low-income families. And it pays $1.4 billion in aid to schools that educate illegal immigrant children.

Martin said states bear most of the cost of illegal immigration.

"State costs are much higher on a per capita basis because of the fact that the largest expenses are medical care and education and those are borne at the local level, not the federal," Martin said.

The federation's full report is at: www.fairus.org.

Source - http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/article_5cedf831-9d5d-5335-af7e-2af6730a577c.html