The real costs of immigration

Taken from the comments section of Immigration Chronicles, Posted by: zeezil at August 16, 2008 09:28 PM

http://blogs.chron.com/immigration/archives/2008/08/post_151.html

After careful review, anyone with a even a modicum of logic can come to no other conclusion: illegal immigration must be halted, illegal immigrants here now must be deported and legal immigration needs decreased from the approx. 2 million allowed in per year currently.

Please review the following report on the FISCAL COST OF IMMIGRATION by economist Edwin Rubenstein released in April 2008:
http://www.esrresearch.com/Rubensteinreport.pdf

A partial summary of the report:

The impact on 15 Federal Departments surveyed was: $346 billion in fiscal related costs in FY 2007.

Each immigrant cost taxpayers more than $9,000 per year.

An immigrant household (2 adults, 2 children) cost taxpayers $36,000 per year.

Legal immigrants were not separated out from illegal immigrants for the fiscal impact study, but if they had been, the fiscal cost per ILLEGAL immigrant would be even more shocking than the figures quoted above.

The most extensive and authoritative study, prior to economist Edwin Rubenstein's "The Fiscal Impact of Immigration" (April 2008) , is the National Research Council (NRC)'s The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (1997).

The NRC staff analyzed federal, state, and local government expenditures on programs such as Medicaid, AFDC (now TANF), and SSI, as well as the cost of educating immigrants' foreign- and native-born children.

NRC found that the average immigrant household receives $13,326 in federal annual expenditures and pays $10,664 in federal taxes--that is, they generate a fiscal deficit of $2,682 (1996 dollars)per household.

In 2007 dollars this is a deficit of $3,408 per immigrant household.

With 9 million households currently headed by immigrants, more than $30 billion ($3,408 x 9 million) of the federal deficit represents money transferred from native taxpayers to immigrants.

Our national immigration policies have to work for the United States. While improving the plight of the world's poor is a laudable goal, the finite resources we have available to fulfill that goal would be swamped if there wasn't some orderly and manageable system in place to limit entry into the United States to what this nation can actually support. The more illegal aliens that are permitted to subvert the immigration system, the fewer immigrants we can accommodate who might actually produce a positive benefit for our country.

The more we become a nation of illegal immigrants, the deeper we fall into anarchy.