Questing for Atlantis

Over at monoblogue Michael posted a press release from Delegate McDonough citing a study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform that purports to show just how much illegal immigration is costing Marylanders.

Now a new study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (F.A.I.R.) has exposed the fact that illegals are costing Maryland citizens more than 1.4 billion dollars annually.

I’ve gone and read over the study and the fact is its claim is nowhere near as sound as one would believe.

The primary flaw of the study is a heavily slanted accounting of the costs of illegal immigration. Any honest accounting of the costs of immigration must necessarily be balanced against the benefits of immigration, both legal and illegal.

FAIR’s study doesn’t do this. While they at least took the time to acknowledge there is a receipt of taxes from illegal immigrants, they gloss over the point, suggesting that any contributions made by illegal workers would be balanced out by new contributions by legal workers.

This point is demonstrably false. As a Cato Institute study released this summer notes, increasing security to limit illegal immigration would in fact have a deleterious net impact on the economy:

Our simulations show that the difference between the long-run welfare effects for U.S. households of the worst and best policies that we considered is about $260 billion a year in current dollars. This is the welfare gap between the tighter-border-enforcement policy in Simulation 1 (a welfare loss of 0.55 percent) and the liberalized policy with an optimal visa charge in Simulation 7 (a welfare gain of 1.27 percent).

These economic impacts come in part through tax receipts, but also manifest in the form of increased wages to remaining illegal immigrants, reductions to average wages as a result of changing occupation-mix of employment of U.S. workers, tightening capital, decreased employment, all of which outpace the relatively meager reductions in public expenditure on illegal immigrants.

The effect of this problem becomes bigger when one considers the relative inputs and outputs of illegal immigrant economic activity. The only welfare programs they have access to are emergency medical care and K-12 education (with some additional public expenditure coming in the form of law enforcement and incarceration costs). When you consider that the first two will logically have an inverse correlation to the third, any cost savings from reducing illegal immigration will likely be lower than what FAIR sells them as.

With economic impacts like these it is careless at best, and downright deceptive at worst to willfully leave out the economic benefits of immigration when doing an accounting of its costs, particularly when Cato has already done such a thorough study on the topic.

Understanding just who FAIR is makes me lean towards downright deceptive. Looking at the About page on their website, it is quite clear that the organization’s interest isn’t public expenditures, nor is it remittances to families in immigrants’ native countries, concern for rule of law, or any of the other items noted in the study.

The motivation for the Federation for American Immigration Reform is simple. It is crass xenophobia. They’re honest about it. In their stated purpose they advocate for a moratorium on all immigration and in their principles they state that immigration should be:

at the lowest feasible levels consistent with the national security, economic, demographic, environmental and socio-cultural interests of the present and future.

When a group is this open about their bigotry there’s little reason to wonder about the worthlessness of its study. FAIR is a perfect example of what Shikha Dalmia was talking about when she noted “The cost of undocumented aliens is an issue that immigrant bashers have created to whip up indignation against people they don’t want here in the first place.”

Delegate McDonough and Michael are both good people. They’re both honestly concerned about the amount of taxpayer money the state is spending. But they, and others in the GOP, need to think carefully about their stances on immigration. Republicans need to reject the bigotry espoused by the likes of FAIR, acknowledge how broken our immigration system is, and embrace substantive reform that makes the path to legal residency simple, quick, and inexpensive.

UPDATE: Frequent monoblogue commenter Marc posted several more links taking issue with FAIR’s study. I’m re-posting them here as well,

As far as the study, here’s a partial rebuttal: http://immigrationimpact.com/2009/12/04/fair-blames-immigrants-and-children-for-maryland%E2%80%99s-budget-deficit/.

The problem with many of these studies is that they are ideologically-driven. FAIR isn’t going to put out anything that is in any way fair to illegal immigrants. If it produces a study, it’s going to show illegal immigrants hurt the US. Finding good, unbiased data on this subject is difficult. Here’s something from 1994: http://migration.ucdavis.edu/MN/more.php?id=298_0_2_0.

A CBO report from 2007 looked at the impact of illegal immigrants on state and local expenditures and finds that they do cost state local governments money and that their taxes don’t offset their costs, but that they only impose a small burden: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/87xx/doc8711/12-6-Immigration.pdf. This study doesn’t include taxes paid to the federal government.