A FReeper's Guide To Immigration Reform

The President's Speech on Immigration Reform given on January 7th, 2004 has many far reaching proposals which if enacted into law, will shape the future of America for generations to come.

It is the first such immigration reform initiative by any president since Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to illegal immigrants living in the United States in 1986.

President Bush's immigration reform initiative would provide immediate and significant legal protections and rights for any illegal immigrants now living in the United States providing they inform the government of their presence here by legally registering it with the .

Significant benefits and privileges, including an opportunity for U.S. citizenship, would be granted to these immigrants as a result of their cooperation.

Since at least ten million illegal immigrants already living in the United States are eligible for the president's proposal, and since deporting that large of a population back to their home countries is largely considered physically impractical, this solution is seen as the "best-case" solution to the immigration problem by many Americans.

Also embedded into the president's proposal are far reaching changes that are considered by many Americans to be "giving away the farm." The cost of absorbing millions of illegal immigrants all at once and the impact and precedent it could create for future illegal immigrations are believed by many other Americans to far outweigh the benefits of legitimizing these millions of immigrants.

The political, economic, and social impact of President Bush's initiatives will affect the United States for at least the remainder of the 21st Century.

The crisis of illegal immigration affects each and every American, and the longer the crisis goes unanswered, the worse it will become.

It is for this reason that the nation must now put their differences aside and work together for the combined good of all Americans, from all walks of life, and from all political and economic persuasions.

Current FR link reference on President Bush's Immigration Reform Initiative will be update on a regular basis.

President George W. Bush's speech on immigration delivered on Jan. 7, 2004 follows:

Federation for American Immigration Reform

Costs of Illegal Immigration to Texans

Texans Cost: report header

Executive Summary

Analysis of the latest Census data indicates Texas's illegal immigrant population is costing the state's taxpayers more than $4.7 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration. Even if the estimated tax contributions of illegal immigrant workers are subtracted, net outlays still amount to more than $3.7 billion per year. The annual fiscal burden amounts to about $725 per Texas household headed by a native-born resident.

This analysis looks specifically at the costs to the state for education, health care and incarceration resulting from illegal immigration. These three are the largest cost areas, and they are the same three areas analyzed in a 1994 study conducted by the Urban Institute, which provides a useful baseline for comparison ten years later. Other studies have been conducted in the interim, showing trends that support the conclusions of this report.

Other significant costs associated with illegal immigration exist, and these too should be taken into account by federal and state officials. Even without accounting for all of the numerous areas in which costs associated with illegal immigration are being incurred by Texas taxpayers, the program areas analyzed in this study indicate that the burden is substantial and that the costs are rapidly increasing.

The more than $4.7 billion in costs incurred by Texas taxpayers annually result from outlays in the following areas:

Education. Based on estimates of the illegal immigrant population in Texas and documented costs of K-12 schooling, Texans spend more than $4 billion annually on education for illegal immigrant children and for their U.S.-born siblings. About 11.9 percent of the K-12 public school students in Texas are children of illegal aliens.
Health Care. Taxpayer-funded medical outlays for health care provided to the state's illegal alien population amount to about $520 million a year.
Incarceration. The uncompensated cost of incarcerating illegal aliens in Texas's state and county prisons amounts to about $150 million a year (not including local jail detention costs or related law enforcement and judicial expenditures or the monetary costs of the crimes that led to their incarceration).

State and local taxes paid by the unauthorized immigrant population go toward offsetting these costs, but they do not come near to matching the expenses. The total of such payments can generously be estimated at slightly less than $1 billion per year.

The fiscal costs of illegal immigration do not end with these three major cost areas. The total costs of illegal immigration to the state's taxpayers would be considerably higher if other cost areas such as special English instruction, welfare programs used by the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, or welfare benefits for American workers displaced by illegal alien workers were also calculated.

While the primary responsibility for combating illegal immigration rests with the federal government, there are many measures that state and local governments can take to combat the problem. Texans should not be expected to assume this already large and growing burden from illegal immigration simply because local businesses or other special interests benefit from being able to employ lower cost workers. The state could adopt measures to systematically collect information on illegal alien use of taxpayer-funded services and on where they are employed. Policies could then be pursued to hold employers financially accountable.

The state could also enter into a cooperative agreement with the federal government for training local law enforcement personnel in immigration law so illegal immigrants apprehended for breaking the law can be expeditiously turned over to the immigration authorities for removal from the country. Similarly, local officials who have adopted "sanctuary" measures that shield illegal aliens from being reported to the immigration authorities should be urged to repeal them.

Texas has also voluntarily adopted policies that add to the cost burdens of illegal immigration. While all states are compelled under a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision to provide a free K-12 education to all children, irrespective of their immigration status, they are under no obligation to subsidize education beyond that point. Nevertheless, the Texas legislature and Governor Perry have decided to grant in-state tuition benefits at public colleges and universities to illegal aliens.

It is unreasonable for a state to expect federal assistance to compensate for the fiscal burden of illegal immigration if it is pursuing policies that encourage illegal aliens to come and remain in the state.

Background Information

Texas had the fourth highest proportion in the country of illegal immigrants in its population in 2000. According to a federal estimate, there were 1,041,000 aliens residing illegally in the state, which was about one-eighth of the country's total illegal alien population. That number of illegal aliens represented about 5 percent of the state's population.¹ As recently as 1992, the INS estimated that the resident illegal alien population in the state was 357,000 persons—so the estimated illegal alien population increased by nearly three-fold in just eight years. These estimates do not include more than 445,000 persons (308,517 long-term illegal residents and 136,535 illegal agricultural workers) who were also part of Texas's illegal alien population until they were given legal residence as a result of the 1986 amnesty.² Texans Cost: Chart

Not only has Texas's illegal alien population grown rapidly, the overall foreign-born population has shot up since the 1965 change in U.S. immigration law. Similarly, the size of the immigrant stock (which includes the progeny of immigrants as well as the foreign-born immigrants themselves) has surged. Both of these groups contribute to the costs of illegal immigration. The progeny of immigrants has more than doubled (136 percent) since 1970, while the foreign-born population has increased more than eight-fold (see chart).

This study looks at the fiscal costs and tax payments to the state associated with illegal immigration. It does not look at the goods and services produced by illegal alien workers, i.e., their economic contribution, as it may be assumed that if the work is essential, and illegal immigrants were unavailable, the work would be done by legal workers. Similarly, this study does not include the displacement costs incurred by legal workers who are laid off or fail to get a job as a result of being undercut by illegal workers willing to work for lower wages. Those costs, which would include unemployment compensation, welfare outlays, lost taxes, etc., are real, but difficult to quantify.

Studies of the cost of illegal immigration to Texans have been done previously. The 1994 Urban Institute study of the costs of illegal immigration—which included Texas—will be described in detail in the following section. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Justice in order to allow the federal government to respond to the lawsuits against it by Texas and other states seeking redress for their increasing fiscal burden.

Another study of the costs of immigration in Texas by Rice University economist Donald Huddle estimated the net fiscal costs from illegal immigration in 1996 to the state at about $1.38 billion. In addition, the study identified displacement costs—associated with unemployed American workers because of the illegal foreign workers—as representing an additional cost to the state's taxpayers of $511 million annually. The Huddle study estimated tax payments by illegal immigrants at slightly over $358 million.³

A study by a research firm, MGT of America, was done for the United States-Mexico Border Counties Coalition in 2002.⁴ The General Accounting Office released two studies in 2004, one on the process of estimating the uncompensated medical expenditures resulting from illegal immigration,⁵ and one on estimating the costs of illegal immigrants in public schools.⁶ All of these studies have been taken into consideration in the process of preparing this estimate of the current costs of illegal immigration to Texans.

National recognition of the fact that illegal immigration represents a fiscal burden, especially on states that border Mexico, may be seen in the fact that the Congress has authorized and appropriated funds in the past to assist Texas and other states for uncompensated medical expenses and for the incarceration of illegal immigrants. Federal recognition of the fiscal costs to state governments from illegal immigrants also may be seen in the State Legalization Impact Assistance Grants (SLIAG) program, which provided $3.5 billion to states in the aftermath of the 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens to ease the burden of the additional expenses the states were required to assume.

In Texas, SLIAG funding was largest in 1990, when state agencies received $64 million, half of which went to the Texas Education Agency for distribution to local public school districts. The Texas Department of Health also received a major part of SLIAG funds.⁷ Over the course of the program, Texas state agencies received $338 million in SLIAG funds, almost 10 percent of the U.S. total.⁸ Those grants phased out in 1994, and the states since then have been bearing an unreimbursed burden associated with this amnestied illegal immigrant population.⁹

What Are the Costs of Illegal Immigration?

The costs of illegal immigration are both quantifiable and non-quantifiable. Because data on illegal immigration generally are not collected, even quantifiable costs must be educated estimates.

The absence of recorded data on illegal alien enrollment in school, use of taxpayer-supported medical care, and other public services is not accidental. It is due to the efforts of civil libertarians, business interests and immigrant support groups that have thwarted data collection efforts in order to keep these costs hidden from the taxpayers who must pay for them. The most recent example of these efforts to obscure the costs of services to illegal aliens may be seen in the campaign against a requirement that emergency health care providers collect information on illegal alien patients in order to receive compensation from a federal appropriation. The health care providers, civil libertarians and illegal immigrant advocacy groups vociferously opposed the data collection requirement, and HHS dropped it.¹⁰

Some of the quantifiable costs are:

Law enforcement costs resulting from investigating property loss due to theft and damage caused by illegal border crossers;
Medical costs that are incurred when an alien's health is affected while illegally entering the country, or from accidents while trying to get to interior locations, or when aliens illegally residing in the country turn to emergency medical facilities for their treatment;
Well-baby maternity care, delivery expenses, and long-term care that are incurred for children born to illegal aliens;
Educational outlays made by public schools for enrolled illegal alien children, which are funded largely from state and local budgets;
Expenses from educating the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens;
Outlays that accrue from Limited English Proficiency (LEP) programs, e.g., staff salaries and foreign language teaching materials;
Subsidized tuition in the state's higher education institutions borne by the taxpayer under a policy that allows illegal aliens to enroll as state residents;¹¹
Low-income housing subsidies;¹²
State welfare assistance. A study of welfare payments to illegal immigrants nationwide by the Center for Immigration Studies concluded that average non-medical welfare outlays to illegal-immigrant headed households averaged $151 per year;¹³
Incarcerated illegal aliens, if tried on state charges, cost the state's taxpayers for the investigation, prosecution, translation and interpreter services, judicial management, incarceration and possible parole costs. The federal government provides partial compensation of those costs only if it accepts responsibility for removing the aliens from the country upon release;¹⁴
American workers who are displaced by illegal foreign workers willing to accept lower wages may qualify for a number of programs paid for by the taxpayer. In Texas, those indirect costs from illegal immigration would be about $937 million;¹⁵
Tax losses to the state resulting from lowered earnings by workers where wage levels have been depressed by the availability of illegal aliens workers, plus taxes lost by the proliferation of illegal aliens working in the underground economy lead to the need for the state to levy a higher tax burden on American taxpayers.

Some of the non-quantifiable costs include:

Law enforcement costs associated with illegal immigration, in addition to felony incarceration, include those associated with general prevention and enforcement expenses, misdemeanor offenses, prosecution, indigent defense, adult probation, juvenile probation, etc.;
The growing burden of providing illegal immigrants an array of services such as foreign language interpretation and translation, especially in the health care, law enforcement and judicial systems;
Parental liaison, translation at PTA meetings and other school meetings, and newsletters prepared in foreign languages for the school-age children of illegal aliens;
Increased insurance rates that are associated with crimes perpetrated by illegal immigrants, especially property loss and auto theft;
Autopsies (if death is suspicious) and burials of indigents;
Remittances sent abroad do not remain in the state and contribute to the local economy. If U.S. citizens or legal residents earned the wages now earned by illegal immigrants, the money would usually be spent locally with beneficial multiplier effects;¹⁶
Congestion, inconvenience and property value loss often occur in areas where illegal aliens seek day jobs.

There are also non-economic costs, such as a degraded learning environment that may result from students being unable to keep up with the class because of language difficulty. Other examples include inconvenience resulting from waiting to receive medical attention when there is congestion in the emergency admissions offices of public hospitals, and the closure of emergency rooms due to the overwhelming uncompensated costs.

There is also the unquantifiable cost of erosion of respect for the law when an increasing share of the population lives illegally in the country; when law enforcement officers are required to ignore this law breaking; when employers illegally hire unauthorized workers; and many of those workers are in the underground economy. Social cohesion may be strained by having to cope with increasingly pervasive language barriers, and rising income inequality associated with immigration.

Updating the Urban Institute Cost Estimates

In 1993, the annual cost to Texas and local governments for public education, emergency health care, social services, and incarceration for undocumented immigrants was estimated by the state to be $1.3 billion. At the time, Texas joined Arizona, California, Florida, New York, and New Jersey in unsuccessfully suing the federal government to recover some of these costs.¹⁷ In that legal initiative, Texas sought compensation from the federal government for emergency medical services provided to illegal immigrants, and for incarceration of illegal aliens. The lawsuits ultimately were dismissed as a political matter for which redress should be sought in Congress, not the courts.

However, in preparation for arguing the case in court, the Department of Justice contracted with the Urban Institute to study the claimed expenditures and provide estimates of the burden borne by the states. The Urban Institute released its report, Fiscal Impacts of Undocumented Aliens: Selected Estimates for Seven States, in September 1994. The study's methodology compared tax payments at all levels within the state with expenditures on only three programs, Texans Cost: Table 1 albeit the major cost areas of education, health care, and incarceration. The study estimated the amount of state and local taxes paid by the illegal immigrants in Texas and used that amount to offset part of the estimated costs and arrive at a net uncompensated fiscal cost of about $250 million annually.

Size of the Illegal Immigrant Population

The Urban Institute based its cost calculation on an estimate of 389,000 illegal immigrant residents in Texas in 1993, while the state at that time estimated the illegal immigrant population at 550,000 persons. The Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated the 1992 illegal alien population in Texas at 320,000, and the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the 1993 illegal alien population at 520,000. These estimates were lower than estimates by demographers at the University of Texas.

The most recent estimate of the resident illegal immigrant population in Texas by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—before it merged into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—was 1,041,000 persons, reflecting the findings of the 2000 Census. This estimate, however, excludes certain categories of illegal immigrants such as those who have been in the country for less than one year and those granted Temporary Protected Status. The Migration Policy Institute released an estimate in May 2002 that Texas's illegal alien population in 2000 was 1.2 million.

The Urban Institute estimated that the illegal alien population nationwide in 2002 was 9.3 million persons and that 1.1 million, i.e., 11.8 percent of the national total, lived in Texas.¹⁸ The federal immigration authorities,¹⁹ who estimated that 14 percent of all illegal aliens in the United States resided in Texas in 1996, revised that estimated share upwards to nearly 15 percent after the 2000 Census. Currently they also estimate that nationally the illegal alien population is increasing by about half a million persons per year.

Based on our estimate that in 2004 the illegal alien population in the country is between 10 and 12 million persons, we estimate the illegal alien population in Texas in 2004 is between 1.5 and 1.8 million persons, i.e., 13-18 percent of the national total²⁰ For this study we use a conservative estimate of 1.5 million illegal alien residents in the state, which is nearly four times the population used in calculations by the Urban Institute ten years ago. That would put the illegal alien share of the state's population at about 6.7 percent compared to the 5 percent share based on official estimates in 2000.

Size of the Illegal Alien K-12 Student Population

The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) recently released a report on difficulties in estimating state costs of illegal alien schoolchildren. It noted that data are not collected by most school systems, and that providing a precise estimate of the illegal alien population in public schools is currently not possible.²¹ The study's conclusion did not mean that ballpark estimates of the costs were inappropriate or invalid. It should be kept in mind the cost estimates in this study are not precise and are simply ballpark estimates done for the purpose of increasing awareness of the general magnitude of the burden borne by Texas's taxpayers.

The Urban Institute's 1994 study estimated K-12 illegal alien enrollment in Texas's public schools ten years ago at 93,907 students, about 30 percent higher than the state's estimate at that time of 72,101 illegal alien students.

A 1997 survey in El Paso and Houston found in El Paso about two-thirds (67 percent) of illegal immigrants had children in the public schools. In Houston, the comparable share was 40 percent.²² The study did not indicate how many children in a family were in the public schools.

FAIR, in its August 2003 research report "Breaking the Piggy Bank: How Illegal Immigration Is Sending Schools Into the Red"²³ used an Urban Institute estimate of the student share of the resident illegal population and calculated that a proportionate share in Texas in 2000 would be about 164,000 students. By 2004, the total illegal immigrant public school population would have risen to about 257,000 students, constituting a 64 percent increase in just four years. However, as noted in the GAO report, not all of the school age illegal immigrant children may be in school, and some may be attending other than public schools. But, because school attendance is mandatory, and the low incomes of most illegal alien families would limit private schooling options, the share of these students in public education is likely to be at least 80 to 90 percent of school-age illegal immigrant youth. This implies a range of 206,000 to 231,000 illegal immigrant students in the state's public schools.

As Texas is likely to have a larger than proportionate share of illegal immigrants compared to other states, given its proximity to the border and already sizable legal and illegal immigrant population, an estimate for 2004 of the illegal immigrant public school population in Texas of 225,000 is reasonable. That suggests that the public school-age illegal immigrant population has more than doubled since 1994 when the Urban Institute did its calculation.²⁴

The estimate above of the illegal immigrant student population does not include those students who are the children of illegal immigrants but were born in this country. They too, however, would not be in the Texas public school system were it not for the illegal immigration of their parents, and the cost of educating them is an additional fiscal burden resulting from illegal immigration.²⁵

Jeffery Passel, one of the Urban Institute researchers who participated in the 1994 and subsequent studies of the school-age population, recently estimated that there are nearly twice as many children born here to illegal immigrant parents as children illegally in the United States (3 million compared to 1.6 million).²⁶ As many as three-quarters of them may be receiving educational benefits from pre-school through secondary school. Moreover, most of the children of illegal aliens who are not currently in the school system are below school age and will enter the system within a few years.

Applying the same proportion to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens yields an estimated additional 315,000 children of illegal immigrants in Texas's schools whose educational costs are included in this study.²⁷ The combined 530,000 children of illegal aliens in public schools represent more than 11.9 percent of the state's total K-12 public school enrollment.²⁸

Cost of Educating the Illegal Immigrant K-12 Population

The Urban Institute's 1994 calculation of the cost of K-12 education in Texas was based on a per-student cost to state taxpayers of about $4,461. This was slightly higher than the state's comparable cost estimate of about $4,146 per pupil per year. If costs remained constant, the Urban Institute's estimate of outlays on the education of the 2004 population of illegal alien students would have risen from about $419 million to a present cost of about $1 billion and the costs of educating the children of illegal aliens born in the United States would be about $1.9 billion. However, educational outlays have not remained constant.

The FAIR research report on educational outlays for illegal immigrant education used the $6,288 average per pupil cost in Texas reported by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for the 1999-2000 school year and calculated the cost of educating illegal immigrant students in Texas in 2000 to be about $1.03 billion based on the illegal alien population in 2000.²⁹

Public educational expenses since 2000 have continued to rise. NCES data indicate that between the 1999-2000 school year and the 2002-2003 school year the per pupil expenses in Texas rose by about 7.7 percent to $6,771. Extending this trend through the 2003-2004 school year would make public education outlays at least 10 percent higher than they were in 2000. Thus, outlays in 2004 would be about $7,450 per pupil.

Using an average cost factor probably underestimates the costs associated with the illegal resident population. As the authors of the 1994 Urban Institute study explained, "We believe that undocumented aliens are more likely than other students to live in urban areas where per student expenses are relatively high."³⁰

The state's admission of illegal aliens into the state's public universities and community colleges is an additional expense, but it is not included in the scope of this study. One estimate of that current cost in Texas is that it could cost the taxpayers $12 million per year.

Using the estimate of the illegal K-12 immigrant population—updated to 2004—and the estimated per pupil expenditure results in a current cost to Texas's taxpayers of at least $1.68 billion per year.

Using the same per pupil cost estimate for the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens suggests that the additional expense of educating these children through the 12th grade is at least an additional $2.35 billion per year—or a total annual public educational cost from illegal immigration of more than $4 billion per year.

Emergency Medical Outlays Updated Estimate

"Over the past 10 years, the [Harris county hospital] district has provided $510 million in unreimbursed care to illegal immigrants, the district says."

The Houston Chronicle,
March 1, 2005

Estimates of the costs of uncompensated medical outlays are necessarily imprecise. As the GAO noted in a May 2004 report, "Hospitals generally do not collect information on their patients' immigration status, and as a result, an accurate assessment of undocumented aliens' impact on hospitals' uncompensated care costs—those not paid by patients or by insurance—remains elusive."³¹

However, there is no doubt that illegal immigrant usage of emergency medical care is a burden on local taxpayers, and this was recognized by the U.S. Congress in the Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997, which provided $25 million in annual compensation to heavily impacted states. Congress renewed and upped the level of assistance tenfold in 2003 with an appropriation of $1 billion to be apportioned among all states over the 2005-08 fiscal years, i.e., $250 million each year.

Along with that proposed financial support, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed that as a condition for receiving the money, the hospitals would have to collect information on to whom the services were provided. But this was dropped after a deluge of protests from immigrant advocates, health care providers and others.

The Urban Institute's 1994 calculation of the annual unreimbursed expense to the state for emergency medical services in Texas was a range of $9-11.8 million. That range was about 50-60 percent of the state's estimate of $19.4 million for emergency medical services outlays for illegal aliens. A similar calculation today yields a much higher estimate.

The Urban Institute based its estimate of uncompensated medical outlays by Texas taxpayers on data collected by the federal government in the State Legalization Impact Assistance Grants (SLIAG) program. That program, authorized and funded by Congress, helped states cope with the additional services they were required to provide as a result of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act amnesty for nearly 3 million illegal alien residents. The Urban Institute researchers thought that the SLIAG model might overstate the use of uncompensated medical outlays for the non-legalized population because the aliens might be reluctant to seek publicly funded emergency medical care. Nevertheless, their calculation of the cost was based on their estimate of the size of the illegal immigrant population and the cost of emergency medical services at that time.

As we showed above, the estimated illegal alien population in 2004 in Texas is nearly four times larger today than it was ten years ago in the Urban Institute estimate. This implies, conservatively, that the Urban Institute's estimated emergency medical outlays would be between $35-$46 million today if costs were constant, which, of course, they are not. If those medical expenses were adjusted for inflation, they would be about $43-$56.4 million today.

Other Studies: A study of the use of health care services by illegal immigrants and family members residing in El Paso and Houston in the 1994-96 period found 36.4 percent of those in El Paso and 35 percent in Houston had visited a physician.³² In addition, 11.4 percent of illegal aliens or a family member had been hospitalized in El Paso, and 12.8 percent in Houston. The study revealed that among illegal aliens 6.4 percent had a birth in El Paso and 5 percent had used all other medical services, compared to 4.8 percent childbirth in Houston and 8.3 percent all other service usage. This same study found that in El Paso 2.5 percent of illegal immigrants reported using Medicaid, and in Houston the share was about 2.2 percent.

A 2001 study for the US/Mexico Border Counties Coalition, "Illegal Immigrants in U.S.-Mexico Border Counties: Costs of Law Enforcement, Criminal Justice and Emergency Medical Services," calculated the cost of unreimbursed medical services to illegal aliens in 12 border counties. The reported expenses totaled $1.8 million in 1999.³³ If the costs in the rest of the state were proportionate to the level of expenses in those border counties, the statewide unreimbursed costs in 1999 would have been about $20 million. If that level of expenditure were adjusted for the much larger illegal alien population in 2004 and for the rising costs of medical services, the comparable cost on a statewide basis would be about $32.3 million in uncompensated medical outlays for illegal aliens.

However, the uncompensated medical expenses are likely to be higher in the border counties than elsewhere in the state. The 28 percent foreign-born population share in the border counties is about double the share for the rest of the state. If the estimated expenditures for the non-border counties are reduced by half for the rest of the state, the resulting estimate of outlays would be about $20 million.

The results were very different in 2002 when a consulting company, MGT of America, did a follow-up study for the Border Counties Coalition.³⁴ The estimated uncompensated cost due to illegal immigrants in nine Texas border counties was $73.7 million. If costs throughout the state were proportionate, the total costs would have been $802 million, and if those costs were adjusted for the illegal alien population increase in the past two years and for inflation, the total would sum to $1.18 billion in 2004.

After accounting for the lower costs in the non-border counties, the resulting estimated annual cost of uncompensated medical coverage to Texas taxpayers would be about $570 million. This calculation does not take into account the expenditures on the children of illegal aliens who were born in this country, as their use of emergency medical services is compensated through Medicaid and is, therefore a burden at the national level rather than at the state level.

Thus, sources of estimated annual uncompensated medical outlays for illegal aliens vary widely from $43-$56 million in the Urban Institute methodology, or even lower in the 2001 Border Counties study, to $570 million (derived from the MGT study). The MGT study, unlike the Urban Institute study, relied on information supplied by hospitals and other health care providers. Although there would be a natural tendency for the health care providers to over-estimate out-of-pocket expenses, they are the only keepers of the data, and until such time as the federal government requires the submission of data on the number of illegal aliens provided emergency medical care and the amounts of expenditure involved, it will be difficult to second-guess their claims.

It seems likely that the out-of-pocket expenditures for medical care for illegal immigrants in Texas in 2004 amount to as much as $570 million. Compensation of about $51 million could be received by the state under the 2003 legislation. This fraction of the outlay would still leave the amount of the annual uncompensated outlays borne by the state's taxpayers at about to $520 million.

Size of the Illegal Alien Prisoner Population

In 1994, the Urban Institute estimated the illegal alien prisoner population to be 1,594 persons— about 61 percent of the state's calculation of 2,620 incarcerated illegal aliens. The discrepancy between the Urban Institute estimate and that of the state, according to the Urban Institute, is that the state included aliens subject to deportation by the immigration service, but who were not illegal aliens. This distinction presumably meant that the aliens had gained legal resident status but were still deportable as a result of the commission of a felony crime. It seems unreasonable to us to exclude aliens who are eligible for deportation from a calculation of the costs of the illegal alien population.

In FY 1999, the state documented 7,854 illegal alien detention years, i.e., the number of days that illegal aliens were held in state and county prisons divided by 365. In FY 2004, the state calculated about 8,235 prisoner years in the state penitentiary.³⁵ Data collected for the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) in FY 2003 and FY 2004 indicate that the Texas state prison system accounts for about 70 percent of the total illegal alien detentions in the state, with the remainder accounted for by county prisons.

Increasing the illegal alien prisoner population estimate to adjust for the county prisons suggests that the state's total illegal alien prison population in 2004 was about 11,800 prisoner years of incarceration. That is more than seven times the size of the illegal alien prisoner population used in the 1994 Urban Institute study.

This estimate does not include all costs of incarceration of illegal aliens. Additional expenses could be attributed to the locally jailed population of illegal aliens who are not covered by the SCAAP reporting and reimbursement.

Uncompensated Incarceration Cost Updated Estimated

The Urban Institute calculated in 1994 the annual cost of incarcerating an illegal alien was about $14,620. This was 13 percent lower than the state's cost estimate of $16,681 per prisoner year. Since that study, the state's illegal alien prisoner population has been steadily increasing, as noted above.

SCAAP data indicate that Texas has received partial compensation for the incarceration costs since 1995. For 1999, the state received about $59 million in compensation, which was 38.6 percent of the expenditures. This meant Texas's taxpayers absorbed more than $152 million in expenses. The average per prisoner cost was calculated by the state at about $14,419 a figure slightly less than in the 1994 study.

Congress cut the amount of funds available for SCAAP reimbursement since 1999 resulting in the share of federal reimbursement being similarly decreased. In fiscal year 2001, Texas received SCAAP compensation of $45.3 million, i.e., only 19.3 percent of the itemized illegal alien expenditures. Texas received a SCAAP award of about $21 million in 2003 and about $24.7 million in 2004 ($17.1 million by the state, and the balance by the counties). The estimated average cost per prisoner year in the state penitentiary system in 2004 is $14,622 and the total cost to the state's taxpayers was slightly more than $120 million.³⁶ If the same estimated cost per illegal alien inmate is used for calculating the cost in county prisons, their costs for 3,530 inmate years would represent a cost of about $51.6 million.

On the basis of an illegal alien inmate population in Texas of 11,800 prisoner years, the total incarceration cost will be about $172 million per year. Offsetting reimbursements under SCAAP reduce that to a net amount of out-of pocket expenditures of about $150 million to be absorbed by the Texas taxpayers.

This estimate, based on state data reporting, seems likely to be too low as it implies that the incarcerated illegal alien population has not increased proportionate to the overall rise in the illegal alien population and per prisoner costs have held steady.

Other Studies: A 2001 study by the U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition estimated the annual cost of law enforcement and criminal justice associated with illegal immigration in 12 Texas border counties in 1999 at more than $20 million.³⁷ If those costs were expanded for all of the state's population, adjusted for the increase in the illegal alien population since 1999 and increased to reflect higher costs, that cost today would be about $275 million per year. These expenses include more than just illegal alien detention.

Offsetting Taxes Paid By Illegal Immigrants

The Urban Institute study provided only the researchers' (but not the state's) estimate of state and local income tax payments plus sales and property taxes paid by illegal immigrants. These amounted to a total of $202 million. Included in that total were state sales taxes (60 percent) and state and local property taxes (40 percent). Because there is no state income tax, that was not part of the calculation for Texas. Sales taxes and property taxes will have risen with inflation, and the size of the illegal immigrant population also has risen since the 1994 study.

Estimates of tax contributions are inherently difficult because many illegal workers are working in the underground economy, e.g., as day laborers or in sweatshops, and pay no income tax.³⁸ In addition, some taxes are being collected from illegal workers even if they work in the "informal sector," because they pay sales taxes and they indirectly pay property taxes even if they only contribute to the rent on an apartment.

If the Urban Institute's estimate of state and local tax collections rose in proportion to the rise in the illegal immigrant population, it would have reached about $779 million in 2004. However, as sales tax and property tax payments have probably kept up with inflation, this estimate must be further increased to allow for that.

Updating for both the increased illegal immigrant population and for inflation suggests that current annual tax payments would be about $579 million in sales taxes and $386 million in property taxes—for a total of about $965 million. That represents more than a fourfold increase from the amount estimated by the Urban Institute ten years ago.

Balancing the Outlays for and Receipts from Illegal Immigrants

Texans Cost: Table 2

The analysis of fiscal outlays and receipts associated with illegal immigration suggest a total cost to Texas taxpayers of $4.7 billion per year and a net cost of about $3.7 billion per year. This includes outlays for only education, medical care and incarceration of illegal immigrants but not numerous other expenses borne by the Texas taxpayer as a result of the extremely large presence of illegal immigrants in the state. If other expenditures, such as local law enforcement and jail costs, special language instruction, and other state and local government programs were included in the estimate, it is clear that the costs attributable to Texas taxpayers as a result of illegal immigration would be much higher. A 1997 national level comprehensive study on the fiscal costs of illegal immigration found the expenditures for the three cost areas included in this study amounted to only about one-fourth of total expenditures without including an estimate for costs associated with displacement of American workers.³⁹

In 2004 there were about 6.5 million households in Texas headed by native-born residents. So the average cost to those households to support the estimated 1.5 million illegal aliens and another 290,000 children of illegal immigration is at least $725 per native household per year. This cost does not include their share of the costs that are paid at the federal level that result from this same population of illegal aliens.

This per household estimate is higher than the national average, but less than the estimated costs per native household in California in 1997 reported by a panel of experts for the National Academies of Science (NAS) i.e., $1,178 per year.⁴⁰ This NAS calculation for California included costs from both legal and illegal immigrants. The principal author of the NAS report, economist James P. Smith, noted that, "The undocumented tend to be less skilled, less educated,"⁴¹ thereby implying that the costs associated with illegal immigrants would be higher because of their lower earnings and tax payments.

Reccommendations

The significant fiscal costs to Texans associated with illegal immigration are not inevitable. While the federal government has the primary responsibility for enforcing immigration laws, state and local governments have a role to play that can either discourage or encourage illegal immigrants settling in their area. For example, state and local policies can either facilitate or hinder federal immigration law enforcement efforts.

While the border states should not be expected to bear an unfair burden resulting from the federal government's failure to exclude unauthorized entries and overstays by aliens, it would be similarly unfair that those states have their expenses underwritten by taxpayers across the country if they have adopted laws or policies that encourage the settlement of illegal immigrants in their state.

Examples of state and local policies that undermine federal immigration law enforcement efforts and encourage illegal immigrant settlement include the following:

Issuing state driver's licenses and voter registration cards to illegal aliens;
Extending public assistance program eligibility to illegal aliens;
Offering in-state tuition to illegal alien students;
Adopting sanctuary or don't-ask-don't tell policies that shield illegal aliens from immigration authorities;
Providing governmental support for or tolerance of formal or informal hiring centers where illegal aliens seek day-labor jobs;
Accepting foreign government-issued identity cards as establishing residence.

Examples of state and local government practices that would discourage illegal alien settlement and facilitate federal enforcement of the immigration law include the following:

Establishing systematic data collection for illegal alien use of public services and adopting methods to identify employers of the illegal aliens in order to put an end to their ability to exploit low cost illegal alien labor by passing costs to the public.
Require the collection and verification of Social Security numbers for the issuance of unrestricted driver's licenses and identity cards;
Issue restricted driver's licenses to aliens legally present in the state so that the license expires when the authorized stay in the United States expires;
Refuse to accept the validity of driver's licenses from states that allow illegal aliens to obtain licenses without supporting documents that prove an applicant's residency status.
Enter a cooperative agreement with federal immigration authorities for training local law enforcement personnel in immigration law enforcement so that law breakers who are identified as illegal immigrants can be turned over to the immigration authorities for removal from the country rather than being released back into society;
Require government contractors to participate in the Basic Pilot document verification system for all of their new employees working on government contracts.

Texas allows illegal immigrants to enroll in state universities as if they were legal residents. Driver's licenses in Texas issued to foreigners are not limited to the visitors permitted stay. This means that a person who stays illegally in the country is free to continue to use a valid state driver's license as an identity document for employment and other purposes. Numerous county and municipal governments in the state support day laborer hiring centers that facilitate the employment of illegal immigrants and recognize the Mexican matricula consular ID cards.

National Policies that Have Local Impact
Texans have a right to expect their national and local elected representatives to work to alleviate the fiscal burden of illegal immigration. To simply convert illegal alien students or workers from illegal alien status to legal resident status with an amnesty is not a valid way to deal with the problem. Rather, experience with the 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens indicates that rewarding today's illegal aliens only encourages others to come tomorrow. A policy that conveys the message that the country or any state or local government will tolerate and reward foreigners who ignore our immigration law invites the world to see illegal immigration as an accepted route to seeking a better life in our country and perpetuates the problem.

As Barbara Jordan, a former congresswoman from Texas, a University of Texas law school professor, and chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform summed up her view on immigration;

"The credibility of immigration policy can be measured by a simple yardstick: people who should get in, do get in; people who should not get in are kept out; and people who are judged deportable are required to leave." (U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility, USCIR 1994)

Most Texans agree with Dr. Jordan's view. A Texas Poll conducted by the Scripps Howard Data Center in August 2001 found that a vast majority of Texans—including two-thirds of Hispanics—consider illegal immigration from Mexico a problem, and more than half (51 percent) consider it a "very serious problem."⁴²

Texas's elected representatives should be expected to recognize that they owe it to the state's citizens and legal residents to take actions that demonstrate that the United States is founded on respect for the rule of law, and that we will no longer accommodate those who disrespect our immigration law.

Endnotes

2002 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, DHS Office of Immigration Statistics, Oct. 2003.
"Immigration Reform and Control Act: Report on the Legalized Alien Population," Immigration and Naturalization Service, M-375, March 1992.
Huddle, Donald, "The Net Costs of Immigration to Texas: The Facts, the Trends, and the Critics," Carrying Capacity Network, Washington, DC, 1996. See also, Huddle, Donald, "Immigration and Jobs: The Process of Displacement," May 1995.
"Medical Emergency: Cost of Uncompensated Care in Southwest Border Counties." MGT of America. Prepared for The United States/Mexican Border Counties Coalition. (The Coalition, Washington, DC), September 2002.
"Undocumented Aliens: Questions Persist about Their Impact on Hospitals' Uncompensated Care Costs," General Accounting Office, GAO-04-472, May 2004.
"Illegal Alien Schoolchildren: Issues in Estimating State-by-State Costs," U.S. General Accounting Office, GAO-04-733, June 2004.
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, Annual Financial Reports and Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports for the State of Texas, 1987 to 1996.
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, "IMMIGRATION: Crossing the Line," website accessed 10/29/04 see: http://www.window.state.tx.us/border/ch11/ch11.html. U.S. Department of Commerce, "Total Outlays for Grants to State and Local Governments by Function, Agency and Program: 1940-2002.
David Simcox, "Measuring the Fallout: The Cost of the IRCA Amnesty After 10 Years," Center for Immigration Studies, May 1997.
Department of Health & Human Services letter of October 1, 2004 from Dr. Mark B. McClellan, Administrator to National Alliance for Hispanic Health stating, "Our intention is to accept the public comments that suggested the use of indirect, non-burdensome eligibility methods to target the funds using methods that do not require providers to obtain direct evidence of a patient's immigration status."
The number of students benefiting from the reduced tuition in 2004, according to a 3/23/2004 story in The Daily Texan, was 3,246 illegal aliens. The difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition in 2004 was $3,692 for a full-time student, so the subsidy paid by Texan taxpayers for those students would have been about $12 million.
Berk, Marc L. ibid, The researchers found the rate of use of subsidized housing in El Paso by undocumented immigrants was 8.6 percent, and in Houston, the rate was two percent. At the time of the study, federal funds were not legally available for subsidized housing for illegal immigrants.
Camarota, Steven, "Back Where We Started: An Examination of Trends in Immigrant Welfare Use Since Welfare Reform," Center for Immigration Studies, March 2003.
According to a January 1998 University of Arizona study, in Texas, the border counties of Cameron, Dimmit, El Paso, Hidalgo, Kinney, Val Verde, and Webb bore the unreimbursed costs of apprehension, prosecution, indigent defense, and other related services for criminal aliens who served more than 142,000 days in county jails. Non-border counties bore similar unreimbursed costs for apprehension, prosecution, indigent defense, and other related services for criminal aliens who served more than 1,000,000 days in county jails.
Huddle, op.cit. The study calculated probable costs based on one American out of work for every four illegal residents. Factoring in unemployment compensation, uncompensated medical outlays, food stamps and other assistance, Huddle calculated that the costs would be about $2,500 per year per displaced worker.
The amount of remittances currently being sent abroad may be estimated to be about $200 per month per illegal resident. That would suggest that the amount of remittances sent abroad by Texas's adult illegal alien population would be in the neighborhood of about $3.6 billion per year. Mexico claims that it is receiving about $12 billion annually in remittances. The source of these remittances is largely from an illegal resident population of roughly 5 million Mexicans in the United States.
"Texas Sues US Over Illegal Immigrant Costs," Reuters, August 3, 1994. "Texas is Latest to Sue US for Cost of Illegals," San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 1994. "Poll Tracks Sentiment On Aliens," Dallas Morning News, February 19, 1995.
Passel, Jeffery S., et al., "Undocumented Immigrants: Facts and Figures, Jan. 2004.
Robert Warren, INS Statistical Yearbooks, Immigration and Naturalization Service (now in the Department of Homeland Security).
The Pew Hispanic Center report "Estimates of the Size and Characteristics of the Undocumented Population," issued March 21, 2005 estimated the illegal alien population in Texas in 2004 at 1.4 million persons.
GAO-04-733, June 2004 op.cit.
Berk, Marc L. op.cit.
The report is available in its entirety at www.fairus.org.
The proportionately smaller increase in illegal alien enrollment compared to the increase in the overall illegal alien population—when compared to the Urban Institute estimates—results because the Urban Institute estimated that there was one illegal alien student for every 1.7 non-student-aged illegal aliens.
FAIR believes that children born to illegal aliens should not be considered U.S. citizens. We believe that the prevailing interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment that confers this citizenship is incorrect because it ignores the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause of the Amendment.
"By including children, proposal may increase strain on schools, health care," Jerry Kammer, Copley News Service, San Diego Union Tribune, February 9, 2004.
A survey of the illegal immigrant population legalized in the 1986 IRCA amnesty found that 74 percent of males and 72 percent of females were between the ages of 20-39. Report on the Legalized Alien Population, Immigration and Naturalization Service, March 1992.
National Center for Education Statistics. "Enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools, by level and state." The estimated enrollment for 2002 was 4,259,823, and the rate of increase suggests a 2004 enrollment of about 4,460,000 students.
"Breaking the Piggy Bank: How Illegal Immigration Is Sending Schools into the Red," Federation for American Immigration Reform, August, 2003 (available at www.fairus.org).
"Fiscal Impacts of Undocumented Aliens: Selected Estimates for Seven States," The Urban Institute, September 1994.
GAO-04-472, May 2004, op.cit.
Berk, Marc L. op.cit.
US/Mexico Border Counties Coalition, "Illegal Immigrants in U.S.-Mexico Border Counties: Costs of Law Enforcement, Criminal Justice and Emergency Medical Services, February 2001. The counties reporting costs were Cameron Hidalgo, Zapata, Webb, Val Verde, Terrell, Brewster, Presidio, Jeff Davis, Culberson, Hudspeth, and El Paso. Three of the counties reported no health care expenditures for illegal aliens.
Medical Emergency: Cost of Uncompensated Care in Southwest Border Counties. MGT of America. Prepared for The United States/Mexican Border Counties Coalition. (The Coalition, Washington, DC), September 2002. In its results, the study included data from the counties of El Paso, Culbertson, Brewster, Val Verde, Maverick, Webb, Starr, Hidalgo and Cameron.
Telephone conversation on March 18, 2004 with Mr. Jeff Baldwin, Senior Executive Assistant in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
ibid.
Tanis J. Salant, Christine Brenner, Nadia Rubaii-Barrett, and John R. Weeks, Illegal Immigrants in U.S./Mexico Border Counties: The Costs of Law Enforcement, Criminal Justice, and Emergency Medical Services (Executive Summary). U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition, Feb. 2001, p. 42.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies ("The High Cost of Cheap Labor," August 2004), "…we estimate that more than half of illegals work ‘on the books'."
Donald Huddle, "The Net National Costs of Immigration: Fiscal Effects of Welfare Restorations to Legal Immigrants," Carrying Capacity Network, Washington, DC, 1997.
"The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration," National Academies of Science, May 1997, Washington, DC. California has a significantly higher proportion of its population comprised of illegal aliens, i.e., 6.5 percent in California compared to 5 percent in Texas.
"Economic impact hotly debated", The Arizona Republic, Aug. 26, 2001.
"Poll discerns anti-amnesty sentiment," Houston Chronicle, September 10, 2001

This report was prepared by Jack Martin and Ira Mehlman.

April 2005

SOURCE

THE ILLEGAL ALIEN CRIME WAVE

* * * *

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.

The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.

Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.

But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.

It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.

I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”

Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and stay in the business.

Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang “Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer (known on the street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.

The ordinarily tough-as-nails former LAPD chief Daryl Gates enacted Special Order 40 in 1979—showing that even the most unapologetic law-and-order cop is no match for immigration advocates. The order prohibits officers from “initiating police action where the objective is to discover the alien status of a person”—in other words, the police may not even ask someone they have arrested about his immigration status until after they have filed criminal charges, nor may they arrest someone for immigration violations. They may not notify immigration authorities about an illegal alien picked up for minor violations. Only if they have already booked an illegal alien for a felony or for multiple misdemeanors may they inquire into his status or report him. The bottom line: a cordon sanitaire between local law enforcement and immigration authorities that creates a safe haven for illegal criminals.

L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the immigration felony.

Though such a policy puts the community at risk, the department’s top brass brush off such concerns. No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say. Just put them under surveillance for “real” crimes and arrest them for those. But surveillance is very manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for getting a violent felon off the street and for questioning him further, it is absurd to demand that the woefully understaffed LAPD ignore it.

The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims. But in any case, this official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators: deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status police already know.

The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned the council: “This is going to open a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.

But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes, but such anxiety can never equal a politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department to work closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang members off the streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness’s life at risk.

But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a federal law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan Lewis told the L.A. Police Commission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to look at Special Order 40.”

Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After their brief moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown more adamant in defense of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the scandal-plagued Rampart Division had cooperated with the INS to try to uproot murderous gang members from the community, local politicians threw a fit, criticizing district commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station houses. In turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now, big-city police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary policies as the politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring.

Immigration politics have similarly harmed New York. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize people.” Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government. Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most devastating attack on the city and the country in history.

New York conveniently forgot the 1996 federal ban on sanctuary laws until a gang of five Mexicans—four of them illegal—abducted and brutally raped a 42-year-old mother of two near some railroad tracks in Queens. The NYPD had already arrested three of the illegal aliens numerous times for such crimes as assault, attempted robbery, criminal trespass, illegal gun possession, and drug offenses. The department had never notified the INS.

Citizen outrage forced Mayor Michael Bloomberg to revisit the city’s sanctuary decree yet again. In May 2003, Bloomberg tweaked the policy minimally to allow city staffers to inquire into immigration status only if it is relevant to the awarding of a government benefit. Though Bloomberg’s new rule said nothing about reporting immigration violations to federal officials, advocates immediately claimed that it did allow such reporting, and the ethnic lobbies went ballistic. “What we’re seeing is the erosion of people’s rights,” thundered Angelo Falcon of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. After three months of intense agitation by immigrant groups, Bloomberg replaced this innocuous “don’t ask” policy with a “don’t tell” rule even broader than Gotham’s original sanctuary policy. The new rule prohibits city employees from giving other government officials information not just about immigration status but about tax payments, sexual orientation, welfare status, and other matters.

But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming additional workload.

The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house, aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation) has forced immigration officials to practice a constant triage. Long ago, the feds stopped trying to find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the country illegally through stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who have been deported following conviction for an aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with 20 years in jail).

That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS investigator Mike Cutler, who worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s, explains. “If you arrested someone you wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss and start a bidding war,” Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks, threw a couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.' The boss would turn to another agent: 'Next! Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed over an old lady, and had a gun.' ” But such one-upmanship was usually fruitless. “Without the jail space,” explains Cutler, “it was like the Fish and Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear and let them go.”

But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and take him across the border. Second alternative: detain him pending removal. Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to final orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a notice asking the deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him. Results: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run letters disappeared, a number that was even higher—94 percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring countries.

To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks like complete indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to Congress about the Queens rape by illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator defended the city’s failure to notify the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the ground that the agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time again been unable to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said last February. “When we reach them on the phone, they require that we write a letter. When we write a letter, they require that it be by a superior.”

Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John Mullaly a former NYPD homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent of the drug dealers and other criminals in Manhattan’s Washington Heights were illegal. Were Mullaly to threaten an illegal-alien thug in custody that his next stop would be El Salvador unless he cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing that the INS would never show up. The message could not be clearer: this is a culture that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. If policing’s broken-windows theory is correct, the failure to enforce one set of rules breeds overall contempt for the law.

The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that would allow immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release he could be immediately ejected without taking up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988, immediately bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent such an army of criminal aliens (who have extensive due-process rights in contesting deportation) and so would have to request delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available. In 1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of their deportability. They included 1,198 aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.

Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The INS was a creature of immigration politics, and INS district directors came under great pressure from local politicians to divert scarce resources into distribution of such “benefits” as permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away from criminal or other investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the INS refused to join an FBI task force against Haitian drug trafficking in Miami, fearing criticism for “Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after Hispanic activists protested a much-publicized raid that netted nearly two dozen illegals, the Border Patrol said that it would no longer join Simi Valley, California, probation officers on home searches of illegal-alien-dominated gangs.

The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early 1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship in record numbers to preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton administration, seeing a political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in 1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed robbery, were naturalized.

Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can keep them in the country indefinitely. Federal probation officers in Brooklyn are supervising two illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi citizenship—who look “ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a probation official, but the officers can’t get rid of them. The Jordanian had been caught fencing stolen Social Security and tax-refund checks; now he sells phone cards, which he uses himself to make untraceable calls. The Saudi’s offense: using a fraudulent Social Security number to get employment—a puzzlingly unnecessary scam, since he receives large sums from the Middle East, including from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism, so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Currently, he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a minor offense would not be prosecuted, but the government, fearing that he had terrorist intentions, used whatever it had to put him in prison.

Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the country, but the two ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly fighting their deportation. “Due process allows you to stay for years without an adjudication,” says a probation officer in frustration. “A regular immigration attorney can keep you in the country for three years, a high-priced one for ten.” In the meantime, Brooklyn probation officials are watching the bridges.

Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens, the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come back. They can’t make it in Mexico.” The tens of thousands of illegal farmworkers and dishwashers who overpower U.S. border controls every year carry in their wake thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists who use the same smuggling industry and who benefit from the same irresistible odds: there are so many more of them than the Border Patrol.

For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part and parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period. For decades, the INS had as much effect on the migration of millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the immigrants themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens living fearfully in the shadows, seemed to regard immigration authorities with all the concern of an elephant for a flea.

Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the hundreds of illegal day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York, in front of money wire services, travel agencies, immigration-attorney offices, and phone arcades, all catering to the local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists). “There is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like the dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping that an SUV seeking carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t worry, because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I need the papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers.”

Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor inconvenience to the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter, crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them, but with six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught. In illegal border crossings, you get what you pay for, Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the coyotes will abandon you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into New York from Los Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her across the border. “Because I pay, I don’t worry,” he says complacently.

The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an impregnably militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as migrants know they can easily get work, they will find ways to evade border controls. But enforcing laws against illegal labor is among government’s lowest priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.

Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite investigations, not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak. That’s no accident: though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the fraud-proof form of work authorization necessary to enforce that ban. Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free number to the Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers verify work eligibility would result in discrimination against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work illegally.

The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker is actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will nearly always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find an employer guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration authorities seized nearly 2 million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.

For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the employment charade. If immigration officials ever do try to conduct an industry-wide investigation—which will at least net the illegal employees, if not the employers—local congressmen will almost certainly head it off. An INS inquiry into the Vidalia-onion industry in Georgia was not only aborted by Georgia’s congressional delegation; it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the spirit of the employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups are ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers understandably fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.

Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry. Everywhere, illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at taxpayer expense; 13 states offer them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been pushed to grant illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state tuition. One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to credentialize illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its blessing to this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make it a boon to money launderers, immigrant smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.

Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican government, that feature signs calling for “no más racismo.” Immigrant advocates use the language of “human rights” to appeal to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They attack the term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed, grouses Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you need to be forgiven.”

Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S. owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive their kids to school,” said California assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that people he stops “get in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce the law emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, Joaquín Avila, a UCLA Chicano studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of apartheid.

Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders. Quite the reverse. By a huge majority—at least 60 percent—they want to rein in immigration, and they endorse an observation that Senator Alan Simpson made 20 years ago: Americans “are fed up with efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of any people—to decide who will join them and help form the future country in which they and their posterity will live.” But if the elites’ and the advocates’ idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.

However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and incoherent immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a minimum, authorities should expel illegal-alien criminals swiftly. Even on the grounds of protecting non-criminal illegal immigrants, we should start by junking sanctuary policies. By stripping cops of what may be their only immediate tool to remove felons from the community, these policies leave law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.

But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning to flash gang signals and hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City, “every high school has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to 14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 18-year-old Mexican. Such pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn about U.S. law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it. “Institutionalizing illegal immigration creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.,” observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.

For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide what our immigration policy is—and enforce it.

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