As California struggles to wrestle its budget back into balance, an ever-louder chorus of critics suggests there is an easy answer to the state's troubles: End all services to illegal immigrants.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger waved away these concerns June 5 when he told the Bee editorial board that it is a "myth" that illegal immigrants are to blame for the state's budget problems.
"Our budget is out of whack because we have self-inflicted wounds that the Legislature and this state has never really sat down and had the will to go and make the necessary changes that have to be made," he said.
But the governor's answer did not satisfy the critics, if The Bee's comment boards, letters and phone calls are any indication. Why not end those services, these people ask, before shutting down state parks, laying off public employees or cutting the safety net for U.S. citizens?
It's a legitimate question, and its answer is more complicated than the governor's easy brush-off. People who disagree with him deserve to know more about which services illegal immigrants receive, how much those services cost, and what, if anything, can be done about it.
According to the best information I could find, state government spends about $5 billion from its $91 billion general fund each year on services to illegal immigrants.
The biggest share of that, about $1.2 billion, is in the public schools. The schools don't track immigration status, but reliable estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the state and the number of children they have suggests that about 3.6 percent of California school children are in this country illegally.
But even if the state wanted to bar these children from the public schools, it could not do so. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that states cannot deny education to children based on their immigration status. As long as that ruling stands, all children in California, regardless of where they were born, will be entitled to a public education, and the taxpayers will have to pay for it.
Illegal immigrants also have children after they arrive here, and these kids probably account for two to three times as many slots in the public schools as do children who were born elsewhere and came here without proper immigration papers. But these children are U.S. citizens, with all the rights enjoyed by every other citizen. Quantifying what it costs to educate them (probably about $3 billion) is helpful in making the argument for more-secure borders, but it is not really relevant to the state's efforts to balance the budget in the near-term.
The state spends almost $1 billion annually keeping an estimated 19,000 illegal immigrant felons behind bars until the end of their prison terms. But it is difficult to imagine how this cost could be avoided. Handing these convicts over to the federal government for deportation before they do their time would amount to a Get Out of Jail Free card, because there is no guarantee they would be jailed after they returned to their home countries. This would create a separate and more lenient criminal justice system for illegal immigrants than the one we have for citizens and legal residents. Is that something we want to do?
The next biggest cost is health care. The state reports that it will spend about $730 million from the general fund next year on health care for illegal immigrants. More than half of that – $486 million – will be for emergency care, which hospitals by law and by medical ethics must provide to anyone who arrives at their doors.
The spending also includes birth control and prenatal care. These could be eliminated, but contraception helps prevent the birth of new citizen children, and prenatal care ensures that those children who are born to illegal immigrants are healthy, not only because it is humane to do so but because sick babies are extremely costly to care for, and in most cases the taxpayers would be picking up that cost, too.
The last major cost of illegal immigration is welfare. Public assistance to the families of illegal immigrants amounts to about $612 million a year. But all of this aid goes to citizen children of illegal immigrants. The immigrants themselves are not eligible for welfare. And again, the state cannot deny assistance to a child who is a U.S. citizen because of the immigration status of his or her parents. If you want to reduce this cost, you have to either reduce illegal immigration or change the U.S. Constitution so that the children born here to illegal immigrants do not become U.S. citizens.
In my totals I have also attributed to illegal immigration a portion of all of the state's other spending equivalent to the percentage of the population that is believed to be here illegally – about 7 percent. But while this makes for sound accounting, it is not something the Legislature can act upon. Lawmakers cannot very well reduce spending on highways or environmental protection or law enforcement simply because illegal immigrants benefit from those services in proportion to their numbers in the greater population.
Any analysis of the cost of illegal immigration should also consider the fiscal benefits. Illegal immigrants in California probably pay $1 billion to $1.5 billion in direct sales and income taxes to the state. Their cheap labor, meanwhile, makes the economy more productive, and that also generates revenue, though it would be difficult to quantify.
All told, then, it looks as if the state spends a net of about $4 billion on illegal immigrants, plus another $3 billion to $4 billion on their children who are U.S. citizens.
But except for cutting contraceptive services and prenatal care for pregnant mothers, which amounts to about $200 million a year, very little of that spending can be eliminated or even reduced.
The bottom line: If you think illegal immigration costs too much, your problem is really in Washington, D.C., not the state Capitol. The federal government is responsible for controlling the borders, and the U.S. Constitution defines citizenship and equal protection, two principles that lead to much of the spending about which so many people are concerned.
