How serious is the problem of undocumented immigration?

[ksen]

I would argue that since the Right is always telling us the illegals do jobs real 'muricans would never do.

 

[Togo]

Perhaps you can answer my questions, or present an alternative view? Do you "wish to believe" that none of the 5,000,000 legalized immigrants will EVER compete for (and obtain) a job that would otherwise go to an American?

Surely the question is whether the country has more jobs for 'americans' (i.e. non-recent immigrants) than it would without immigration? If immigrants created two jobs and fill one, 'americans' are better off, no?

 

[dismal]

I would argue that since the Right is always telling us the illegals do jobs real 'muricans would never do.

Like vote Democrat.

 

[ksen]

exactly . . . wait

 

[maxparrish]

LOL... amusing.

 

[maxparrish]

Perhaps you can answer my questions, or present an alternative view? Do you "wish to believe" that none of the 5,000,000 legalized immigrants will EVER compete for (and obtain) a job that would otherwise go to an American?

Surely the question is whether the country has more jobs for 'americans' (i.e. non-recent immigrants) than it would without immigration? If immigrants created two jobs and fill one, 'americans' are better off, no?

If they did, true. But as they have little positive effect on the economy, beyond their own profit, that consideration is moot.

 

[laughing dog]

I apologize for assuming you kept track of your arguments.
You wrote
which are all drags on the economy (not to mention unsupported with actual disinterested evidence from non-partisan sources).

You needn't apologize. I generally keep track of the arguments that I make, it's the ones that you imagine I made that requires your assistance.

I did not argue that they were a drag on the economy, I only presented a list of negative effects from immigration, among them that immigrants generally do not pay for themselves in economic surplus. And more recently I noted that their macro economic effect was (in the net) negligible.

I would also agree that ALL these negative impacts could imply even more, that they likely are a substantial net drag. However, when I speak of a negligible effect on the economy I was referring to the effect as measured by typical immigration economists. Their GDP economic impact studies of immigration almost always leave out major externality costs, as well as that of welfare, education, and other government costs.

So while I usually refer to net economic effects as presented in GDP analytic studies as "negligible" in economic impact, that may be far too generous.

That requires the gigantic presumption that your claims are empirically valid.

No, my assumption is valid because it is deductively self-evident, and it is the common assumption in much of immigration economics.

As I said, your assumption is valid because you wish to believe it.

Perhaps you can answer my questions, or present an alternative view? Do you "wish to believe" that none of the 5,000,000 legalized immigrants will EVER compete for (and obtain) a job that would otherwise go to an American?

Until you can substantiate your claim(s) with disinterested evidence from non-partisan sources, there is no reason to offer alternative explanations. Of course, as we have been told, immigrants take the jobs "Americans" don't want.

 

[maxparrish]

For those who live by the river called denial, and insist on the evidence for immigration's impacts, lets start with:

George J. Borjas has been described by both Business Week and the Wall Street Journal as “America’s leading immigration economist”. He is the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the recipient of the 2011 IZA Prize in Labor Economics. Professor Borjas is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at IZA. Professor Borjas is the author of several books, including Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton University Press, 1999), and the widely used textbook Labor Economics (McGraw-Hill, 2012), now in its sixth edition. He has published over125 articles in books and scholarly journals. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1975.

In a recent review of immigration literature, provided to the Center for Immigration Studies, he wrote:

http://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/borjas-economics.pdf

At current levels of around one million immigrants per year, immigration makes the U.S. economy (GDP) significantly larger, with almost all of this increase in GDP accruing to the immigrants themselves as a payment for their labor services.

For American workers, immigration is primarily a redistributive policy. Economic theory predicts that immigration will redistribute income by lowering the wages of competing American workers and increasing the wages of complementary American workers as well as profits for business owners and other “users” of immigrant labor. Although the overall net impact on the native-born is small, the loss or gain for particular groups of the population can be substantial.

The best empirical research that tries to examine what has actually happened in the U.S. labor market aligns well with economy theory: An increase in the number of workers leads to lower wages. This report focuses on the labor market impact of immigration.

Immigration also has a fiscal impact — taxes paid by immigrants minus the costs they create for government. The fiscal impact is a separate question from the labor market impact. This report does not address the size of the fiscal impact.

Some of his bullet points are:

-The standard textbook model of a competitive labor market yields an estimate of the immigration surplus equal to $35 billion a year — or about 0.2 percent of the total GDP in the United States — from both legal and illegal immigration.

-The immigration surplus of $35 billion comes from reducing the wages of natives in competition with immigrants by an estimated $402 billion a year, while increasing profits or the incomes of users of immigrants by an estimated $437 billion.

-Three key results are implied by the standard economic model: (1) if there are no wage losses, then there is no immigration surplus; (2) the redistribution of income is much larger than the surplus; and, (3) the size of the net benefit accruing to natives is small relative to GDP.

-The immigration surplus or benefit to natives created by illegal immigrants is estimated at around $9 billion a year or 0.06 percent of GDP — six one-hundredths of 1 percent.

-Although the net benefits to natives from illegal immigrants are small, there is a sizable redistribution effect. Illegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 to $128 billion.

-The above estimates are generated by the presence of additional workers in the labor market, not by the legal status of those workers.

For the denialists, more to come.

 

[laughing dog]

All of that is generated using a partial equilibrium model that completely ignores the demand effects of the immigrants, the effects on prices of the products they produce, and any dynamic effects over longer periods of time.

 

[maxparrish]

All of that is generated using a partial equilibrium model that completely ignores the demand effects of the immigrants, the effects on prices of the products they produce, and any dynamic effects over longer periods of time.

"Until you can substantiate your claim(s) with disinterested evidence from non-partisan sources" there is no reason to assume your presumptions are valid.

Goose, meet the Gander.

 

[PyramidHead]

You could start here: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myths_and_facts_about_immigration_to_the_United_States

 

[fromderinside]

In a recent review of immigration literature, provided to the Center for Immigration Studies, he (Borjas) wrote:

http://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/borjas-economics.pdf

Also its published in Harvard's Kennedy school as http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/popular/CIS2013.pdf where the math is more evenly integrated, by format, into the text.


As for more to come don't bother. The textbook model is actually a zero sum model approach which doesn't get at what is the most important aspect of immigration effects on economies and income.

More diverse thinking leads to more expansion of products which, in turn, leads to more income and trade in the economy.

The approach used in the review is pretty good at suggesting that people should become competent, get educated, get productive, to become more wealthy.

Thanks for that.

For something a bit more data driven there is this summary which summarizes Peri's research in a 2010 article "The Effect of Immigrants on U.S. Employment and Productivity" http://www.frbsf.org/economic-resea...effect-immigrants-us-employment-productivity/

The effects of immigration on the total output and income of the U.S. economy can be studied by comparing output per worker and employment in states that have had large immigrant inflows with data from states that have few new foreign-born workers. Statistical analysis of state-level data shows that immigrants expand the economy’s productive capacity by stimulating investment and promoting specialization. This produces efficiency gains and boosts income per worker. At the same time, evidence is scant that immigrants diminish the employment opportunities of U.S.-born workers.

and "Do immigrant workers depress the wages of nativeworkers?
Short-term wage effects of immigrants are close to zero—and in the
long term immigrants can boost productivity and wages" http://wol.iza.org/articles/do-immigrant-workers-depress-the-wages-of-native-workers-1.pdf which concludes

Summary and policy advice

Decades of research have provided little support for the claim that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers. Most studies for industrialized countries have found, on average, no effect on the wages of native workers. To understand the impact of immigrant workers on wages, immigration and the response of firms and workers must be analyzed together. Such studies show that native workers’ wages have been insulated by differences in skills between native and immigrant workers, adjustments in local demand and technology, expansion of production, and specialization of native workers in response to rising immigration.
Two policy lessons emerge from these findings.

• First, considering the very small evidence of absolute and relative wage effects of immigration and the evidence that market mechanisms work to absorb immigrants, there is no clear basis for government intervention to reduce losses for native workers or to tax firms that hire immigrants.
• Second, while the wage effects are small, the productivity, complementarity, and dynamic-response effects may have positive impacts in the long term. This implies that more open immigration policies, focused on attracting immigrants with a balanced skill mix or slightly favoring the college educated, would probably not change wages in the short term, but would likely boost productivity (and wages) in the long term.

Taken together with Borjas essentially no change conclusions put the whole effect on US low education employees right into the dumper. Long term effects of immigration are positive.

 

[Harry Bosch]

You could start here: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myths_and_facts_about_immigration_to_the_United_States

That's a great site. Thanks for sharing. I think that republicans are freaking out over nothing. If they don't like this action (Obama didn't create a new law!), then just run in two years of a platform that if elected, a republican president will kick out all undocumented workers. The reps are just pissed because Obama outflanked them!

 

[bilby]

For those who live by the river called denial, and insist on the evidence for immigration's impacts, lets start with:



In a recent review of immigration literature, provided to the Center for Immigration Studies, he wrote:

http://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/borjas-economics.pdf

At current levels of around one million immigrants per year, immigration makes the U.S. economy (GDP) significantly larger, with almost all of this increase in GDP accruing to the immigrants themselves as a payment for their labor services.

For American workers, immigration is primarily a redistributive policy. Economic theory predicts that immigration will redistribute income by lowering the wages of competing American workers and increasing the wages of complementary American workers as well as profits for business owners and other “users” of immigrant labor. Although the overall net impact on the native-born is small, the loss or gain for particular groups of the population can be substantial.

The best empirical research that tries to examine what has actually happened in the U.S. labor market aligns well with economy theory: An increase in the number of workers leads to lower wages. This report focuses on the labor market impact of immigration.

Immigration also has a fiscal impact — taxes paid by immigrants minus the costs they create for government. The fiscal impact is a separate question from the labor market impact. This report does not address the size of the fiscal impact.

Some of his bullet points are:

-The standard textbook model of a competitive labor market yields an estimate of the immigration surplus equal to $35 billion a year — or about 0.2 percent of the total GDP in the United States — from both legal and illegal immigration.

-The immigration surplus of $35 billion comes from reducing the wages of natives in competition with immigrants by an estimated $402 billion a year, while increasing profits or the incomes of users of immigrants by an estimated $437 billion.

-Three key results are implied by the standard economic model: (1) if there are no wage losses, then there is no immigration surplus; (2) the redistribution of income is much larger than the surplus; and, (3) the size of the net benefit accruing to natives is small relative to GDP.

-The immigration surplus or benefit to natives created by illegal immigrants is estimated at around $9 billion a year or 0.06 percent of GDP — six one-hundredths of 1 percent.

-Although the net benefits to natives from illegal immigrants are small, there is a sizable redistribution effect. Illegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 to $128 billion.

-The above estimates are generated by the presence of additional workers in the labor market, not by the legal status of those workers.

For the denialists, more to come.

Talk about denialists. I have redistributed the bold to highlight the stuff you are glossing over.

In summary:

1. The impact is probably too small to worry about
2. It is slightly positive overall
3. There is a net redistributive effect from the poor to the wealthy

1 and 2 need not be fixed, as they are in no way problematic. Small positive effects on the overall economy are the antithesis of a disaster.

3 can be easily fixed by a countervailing redistribution in the opposite direction; simply raising income taxes very slightly, and increasing benefits to the poor would resolve this 'problem' - and given that it is a very small problem, would barely be noticeable to anyone except the poor, for whom the increased benefits would be significant. Of course, while I and many others here do consider redistributive pressures that move money from the poor to the rich to be a bad thing, your posting history suggests that you do not.

There are many redistributive pressures in the economy; one more small pressure is of little import, and is easy to mitigate should it be necessary to do so.

You are posting a lot of words here, but not one of them highlights anything that could genuinely be considered a problem. The closest you get is cryptic hints that there is a "fiscal impact"; but as your source itself points out, "This report does not address the size of the fiscal impact."

So so far, this 'evidence' of a 'problem' presented by you shows no such thing.

 

[Underseer]

For those who live by the river called denial, and insist on the evidence for immigration's impacts, lets start with:



In a recent review of immigration literature, provided to the Center for Immigration Studies, he wrote:

http://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/borjas-economics.pdf


Some of his bullet points are:

-The standard textbook model of a competitive labor market yields an estimate of the immigration surplus equal to $35 billion a year — or about 0.2 percent of the total GDP in the United States — from both legal and illegal immigration.

-The immigration surplus of $35 billion comes from reducing the wages of natives in competition with immigrants by an estimated $402 billion a year, while increasing profits or the incomes of users of immigrants by an estimated $437 billion.

-Three key results are implied by the standard economic model: (1) if there are no wage losses, then there is no immigration surplus; (2) the redistribution of income is much larger than the surplus; and, (3) the size of the net benefit accruing to natives is small relative to GDP.

-The immigration surplus or benefit to natives created by illegal immigrants is estimated at around $9 billion a year or 0.06 percent of GDP — six one-hundredths of 1 percent.

-Although the net benefits to natives from illegal immigrants are small, there is a sizable redistribution effect. Illegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 to $128 billion.

-The above estimates are generated by the presence of additional workers in the labor market, not by the legal status of those workers.

For the denialists, more to come.

Talk about denialists. I have redistributed the bold to highlight the stuff you are glossing over.

In summary:

1. The impact is probably too small to worry about
2. It is slightly positive overall
3. There is a net redistributive effect from the poor to the wealthy

1 and 2 need not be fixed, as they are in no way problematic. Small positive effects on the overall economy are the antithesis of a disaster.

3 can be easily fixed by a countervailing redistribution in the opposite direction; simply raising income taxes very slightly, and increasing benefits to the poor would resolve this 'problem' - and given that it is a very small problem, would barely be noticeable to anyone except the poor, for whom the increased benefits would be significant. Of course, while I and many others here do consider redistributive pressures that move money from the poor to the rich to be a bad thing, your posting history suggests that you do not.

There are many redistributive pressures in the economy; one more small pressure is of little import, and is easy to mitigate should it be necessary to do so.

You are posting a lot of words here, but not one of them highlights anything that could genuinely be considered a problem. The closest you get is cryptic hints that there is a "fiscal impact"; but as your source itself points out, "This report does not address the size of the fiscal impact."

So so far, this 'evidence' of a 'problem' presented by you shows no such thing.

"You must spread some reputation around before giving it to bilby again."

Damn.

Anyway, Bilby, you missed the point. Even if they have a net positive impact, it's still a disaster because most of them are dirty brown people instead of good and noble white people. At least I'm pretty sure that's how the reasoning works.

 

[laughing dog]

All of that is generated using a partial equilibrium model that completely ignores the demand effects of the immigrants, the effects on prices of the products they produce, and any dynamic effects over longer periods of time.

"Until you can substantiate your claim(s) with disinterested evidence from non-partisan sources" there is no reason to assume your presumptions are valid.

Goose, meet the Gander.

I am not making any assumptions. I observed that those effects are absent. There is no mention of any of those effects in your summary. It seems obvious they are omitted. But since you are touting their effects, one would think you would be able to show my claims are false. Instead, you trot an inappropriate "no you". I I will not speculate out loud for such a intellectually pathetic response.

Anyone familiar with economic modelling understands the necessity to make simplifying assumptions. Honest researchers and reporters of those models should be able to admit to the possible effects of the assumptions and how those assumptions might affect their results. Modelling the effects of immigration on labor markets or the public finances is complicated. Leaving out important possible effects may be unavoidable but that does not mean they should be unacknowledged.

Frankly, I don't know what the overall effects of immigration to the US are. But I suspect your arguments are not based on a comprehensive or disinterested survey of the literature. I suspect you got those snippets from the CIS page where the author quotes studies that are almost 20 years old!

 

[Sabine Grant]

What is this bit about "open borders"? Anyone who like me has been a Green Card holder (and I have been since 1983) is quite familiar with the reality that upon returning on US territory from a trip overseas, they will have to go through a check point at the port of arrival and present both their foreign passport and Green Card. Similarly foreign nationals(non legal residents in the US) will need to present their passport with a valid visa allowing for entry in the US for a determined period of time. US citizens only need to present their US passport. Usually (at least in Atlanta and Kennedy Airport), Green Card Holders and US Citizens are directed to the same lane and same check point. Others to a separate one.

Every so often, the immigration agent did far more than just looking at my Green Card but also verified via computer data that my alien registration number is not a fake.

My point is that this nation does not have "open borders".

Gasp, if they let the French in the borders are not "open", they must not EXIST!

As if the number of non US citizens arriving via a port of entry are French citizens only! Open borders would apply in several nations within the European Community where such controls and check points verifying the status of people leaving and entering the territory are non existent. In the early 70's, every car and train passenger was checked at the Ventimiglia border check point between Italy and France. As often as we traveled between Italy and France between 1995 and 2001, there was no checking any longer.

And FYI, no matter which wishful thinking of yours, as long as mandated documentation is presented when entering US territory, immigration agents do not pull holders of such mandated documentation into a separate locale based on their skin pigmentation while undertaking to verify they have a sufficient IQ or/and hold college degrees!

 

[maxparrish]

As for more to come don't bother. The textbook model is actually a zero sum model approach which doesn't get at what is the most important aspect of immigration effects on economies and income. More diverse thinking leads to more expansion of products which, in turn, leads to more income and trade in the economy.

Oh, I think I will bother - after all, the labor economics textbook immigration model is based on factor demand theory, canonical in labor economics. I recognize that like the issue of minimum wage, there are certain researchers employing dubious empiricism as a premature springboard to generalized claims; their appeal to "diverse thinking" 'assumes' that if there actually existed a general equilibrium immigration model, one that took into account all the long range secondary effects (capital, migration, demand effects, etc.), such a model would find a hoped for result - it would make a negative into a substantial short and long-term positive for native workers.

But untill then immigration boosters will need to dial back expectations and first determine if empirical work robustly proves textbook labor economics has it all wrong - something that remains illusory in the sophisticated hand-waving of revisionists.

For something a bit more data driven there is this summary which summarizes Peri's research in a 2010 article "The Effect of Immigrants on U.S. Employment and Productivity" http://www.frbsf.org/economic-resear...-productivity/

No doubt it is 'data driven', but like all emprical research it is dependent on the methods and data sources that Peri uses as a basis of his claims. Borjas (et. al.) has looked at Ottaviano and Peri (Ottaviano is his usual co-author), which I refer to as OP. In 2007a OP reported evidence that immigrant and native workers were strongly imperfect substitutes within narrowly defined skill groups. If they were "imperfect", as they reported, there were complementaries that would raise the wage of many native born workers, rather than decrease short-term wages.

Boras and his co-authors Hanson and Grogger were initially unable to replicate their finding, but in 2008 they resolved it. Turns out the OP claim of imperfect substitution was fragile, and dependent on how the OP sample was constructed (e.g. in OP's lumping of high school students with high school dropouts as a single sample). Once the hetrogenity is adjusted for the "imperfect substitution" disappeared.

OP and Peri tried again, this time on a national scale ( Borjas, in 2003, had introduced the nested CES framework, and the use of national data as a way to avoid the problems of spacial correlation). Apparently OP (2012) agreed; "As a result, the wage effects of immigration are better detected at the national level since one can exploit variation in wages and immigrants across groups of workers with different skills (as captured by education and experience) over time."

OP's paper (2012) attempted to estimate the elasticity of substitution between similiarly skilled native and immigrant groups, finding a modest elasticity estimate which implied immigrants were compliments, rather than substitutes, to native skill groups - as such, the affected native born groups wages would rise rather than fall.

Borjas (et. al.) replicated this study as well. They found that OP did not use modeling assumptions that were widely accepted in the literature. They defined the value of marginal product for a skill group as the log of the mean wage, rather than the standard definition of mean of the log wage. This definitional error had a huge impact on the estimates, changing the results to high elasticities, indicating there was perfect substitution and, therefore, native wage losses. It was not the note the only problem with the paper, but it is sufficiently illustrative.

IMPERFECT SUBSTITUTION BETWEEN IMMIGRANTS AND NATIVES: A REAPPRAISAL
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic803549.files/Week 7-October 20/borjas_imperfect.pdf

The Analytics of the Wage Effect of Immigration
http://www.colorado.edu/Economics/seminars/SeminarArchive/2009-10/borjas.pdf

SUBSTITUTION BETWEEN IMMIGRANTS, NATIVES, AND SKILL GROUPS
http://core.kmi.open.ac.uk/download/pdf/6475579.pdf

COMMENT: ON ESTIMATING ELASTICITIES OF SUBSTITION
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/journal/JEEA2012.pdf

 

[maxparrish]

For those who live by the river called denial, and insist on the evidence for immigration's impacts, lets start with:

In a recent review of immigration literature, provided to the Center for Immigration Studies, he wrote:

http://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/borjas-economics.pdf

...

For the denialists, more to come.

Talk about denialists. I have redistributed the bold to highlight the stuff you are glossing over.

In summary:

1. The impact is probably too small to worry about
2. It is slightly positive overall
3. There is a net redistributive effect from the poor to the wealthy

1 and 2 need not be fixed, as they are in no way problematic. Small positive effects on the overall economy are the antithesis of a disaster.

You missed the point. The argument FOR current immigration demographics often rests on the assumption that it is a substantial net benefit to the native born population - it is not. Assuming one ignores fiscal and social costs (externalities) is largely a wash. HOWEVER, it does redistribute 400 billion a year from the pockets of native born, mainly unskilled or lower skilled, workers to employers and users.

If your purpose is to work in the interests of foreign workers, and against the interest of American workers - its a great idea. Most, however, would feel differently.

3 can be easily fixed by a countervailing redistribution in the opposite direction; simply raising income taxes very slightly, and increasing benefits to the poor would resolve this 'problem' - and given that it is a very small problem, would barely be noticeable to anyone except the poor, for whom the increased benefits would be significant. Of course, while I and many others here do consider redistributive pressures that move money from the poor to the rich to be a bad thing, your posting history suggests that you do not.

Except, of course, some think fixing a problem with more welfare is addressing a symptom, and counter-productive. You can't give welfare increases ONLY to native born workers. AND even if you could, to make up the difference would require 400 billion a year in taxes (twice or more the cost of Obamacare).

Again, why subsidize American workers (and indirectly employers) by "fixing the problem" with welfare? Why not cease the immigration madness and reform it to BENEFIT native born and legal permanent residents, (which include many second and third generation offspring of immigrants)?

There are many redistribution pressures in the economy; one more small pressure is of little import, and is easy to mitigate should it be necessary to do so.

You are posting a lot of words here, but not one of them highlights anything that could genuinely be considered a problem. The closest you get is cryptic hints that there is a "fiscal impact"; but as your source itself points out, "This report does not address the size of the fiscal impact."

So so far, this 'evidence' of a 'problem' presented by you shows no such thing.

Well, as you noted, I promised "more to come". But the first step to recovery is to immigration realism, the dispel the popular myth that current immigration demographics are economically beneficial to Americans in general, or to native born workers in particular.

It's not. And now that Thanksgiving is over, I will give that "more to come".

 

[maxparrish]

Immigrant Gains, Native Losses

Recent trends in the labor market show that, although natives account for the majority of population growth, most of the net gain in employment has gone to immigrants.

In the first quarter of 2013, the number of working-age natives (16 to 65) working was 1.3 million fewer than in the first quarter of 2000, while the number of immigrants working was 5.3 million greater over the same period. Thus, all of the employment growth over the last 13 years went to immigrants even though the native-born accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the working age population.5

The last 13 years have seen very weak employment growth, whether measured by the establishment survey or the household survey. Over the same time period 16 million new immigrants arrived from abroad.6 One can debate the extent to which immigrants displace natives, but the last 13 years make clear that large-scale immigration does not necessarily result in large-scale job growth.
Fiscal Impact

The National Research Council (NRC) estimated in 1996 that immigrant households (legal and illegal) create a net fiscal burden (taxes paid minus services used) on all levels of government of between $11.4 billion and $20.2 billion annually.7

The NRC also found that the fiscal impact of immigration depends heavily on the education level of the immigrant in question.8

At the individual level, excluding any costs for their children, the NRC estimated a net lifetime fiscal drain of -$89,000 (1996 dollars) for an immigrant without a high school diploma, and a net fiscal drain of -$31,000 for an immigrant with only a high school education. However, more educated immigrants create a lifetime net fiscal benefit of +$105,000.9

A just-released study from the Heritage Foundation found that the average household headed by an illegal immigrant used nearly $14,400 more in services than it paid in taxes, for a total fiscal drain of $55 billion.

The Heritage study is absolutely clear that the fiscal costs associated with illegal immigrant households is directly related to their educational attainment. They find that illegal immigrant have on average only 10 years of schooling.

Figure 2 at the end of this testimony illustrates the importance of education. For example, it shows that 59 percent of households headed by an immigrant who has not graduated high school access one or more welfare programs, and 70 percent have no federal income tax liability. In contrast, 16 percent of households headed by an immigrant with bachelor's degree access welfare and only 21 percent had no federal income tax liability.

In a study I authored for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), we found that if illegal immigrants were legalized and began to pay taxes and use services like households headed by legal immigrants with the same education levels, the annual net fiscal deficit would increase to $29 billion, or $7,700 per household at the federal level.10

Illegal immigrants with little education are a significant fiscal drain, but less-educated immigrants who are legal residents are a much larger fiscal problem because they are eligible for many more programs. For this reason amnesty increases costs in the long run. Heritage's just-released study confirms the finding that amnesty would substantially increase costs over time.

http://cis.org/node/4573