From executive orders to building walls, immigration is on everyone’s mind. Trump ran on immigration in 2016, and he won the election. We cannot ignore the fact that this president was elected to fix immigration. The left and the libertarians, go about promoting open borders and keep citing studies to support them. However, this is just a obfuscation in the pursuit of personal policy, not an attempt to do what’s best for America and her people.
A recent study of immigration, done by the National Academy of the Sciences (NAS) Immigration, has become a popular source of data in proving that immigration is good for the US. It concludes that while immigration takes away from our economy in welfare, they put more money into the country. This accounts for a net positive to the American economy.
This seems like great news for those advocating for open borders, but it’s not. While, prima facie, the study indicates such an interpretation, that interpretation doesn’t hold up under further investigation. This is because we’re applying the study to illegal immigration, which is not the set addressed by the study. When we are trying to find the amount of snowfall precipitation in Mexico, we cannot count all rain just because its precipitation. These numbers are not indicative illegal immigration, but all immigration.
Their data shows the problem. It includes not only the illegal immigrants coming across the southern border, but it also includes legal immigrants from countries like Germany, England, Japan, and China. Legal immigrants aren’t relevant when talking about the effects of illegal immigrants.
The study isn’t all that important to the current political discussion, as the segment doesn’t represent the segment in question.
The problems we face in applying the study don’t end there. The study is plagued by a lack of scope. It’s economic lens is too focused, focusing only on information based on the negatives of social welfare programs. It doesn’t take into account other very real costs. Amongst the other burdens to the economy are primary schooling, healthcare, roads, and public transit.
According to the census bureau it costs $10,625 on average per student/per year to school a student in the US. When this number is multiplied with the 1 million illegal immigrants under the age of 18, the cost per year comes to more than $10.6 billion. While not a huge portion of the GDP, the number is not negligible.
Emergency medical costs is another place where the costs are completely passed by. The study addresses direct numbers from Medicaid enrollment. Those numbers are large, but they are anything but all-inclusive. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) has made, according to Dr. Wesley Fields, “access to emergency care… a right in this country.” The Center for Immigration estimates that the uncovered medical costs of Illegal Immigrants in the United States totals roughly $4.6 billion each year.
Together the overlooked burden from these two categories is over $15 billion per year.
When infrastructure payments based on wear and tear on roads, and the public transit burden the number goes even higher. Even the fact that immigration is a big enough issue to finance this study by the NAS.
If we’re going to use the NAS study to inform our decisions concerning illegal immigration, the study must first be focused on the relevant data. We cannot include legal immigration from Germany, Japan, England, China, and others. This only skews the data.
We cannot purport to have addressed the entire economic weight of illegal immigration, while ignoring the fiscal consequences beyond those tied to social welfare programs. Roads, trains, and buses all have a shelf life. When its time to replace them, it comes at a price.
As some in the media, and even at the CATO institute push open borders, they use this study as evidence, but the study is irrelevant. If we are going to have a worthwhile discussion on illegal immigration, it starts with the relevant data. The NAS study doesn’t offer that, and should be left out of the discussion.