Expert: Bipartisan immigration reform plan will cost trillions
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, expects the bipartisan immigration reform proposal, which includes a path to citizenship, will end up costing taxpayers more overtime than the trillion-dollar calculations he testified to during debate over the 2007 immigration reform bill.
“[The proposal] seems to be virtually identical to the 2007 bill and would be extremely costly to the U.S. taxpayers,” Rector told The Daily Caller in a Wednesday interview. “Granting amnesty or legal status to illegals will generate costs in Medicare and Social Security alone of $2.5 trillion above any taxes paid in.”
According to Rector, the majority of the undocumented immigrants [illegal aliens] who would eventually be legalized by the legislation are largely uneducated, and therefore more likely to be dependent on government assistance. Fifty to 60 percent of the new immigrants are high school dropouts, and 75-80 percent have no more than a high school degree.
“It’s not like they pay in a lot when they are young, and they take it out when they’re old. They are in fiscal deficit every year of their lives,” Rector explained. “For example, the typical household headed by someone who does not have a high school degree, as I said in that paper in 2007, got back then $30,000 in benefits and paid $10,000 [in income and consumption taxes]. It’s a net cost of $20,000. That would be significantly higher now.”
Rector’s numbers, he noted, were from 2007, which means that now the cost will higher due to the increase in benefits programs and number of undocumented [illegal aliens].
“We don’t know how many there are,” Rector said of the 11 million undocumented [illegal] immigrant figure. ..
“Basically, the figures from 2007 are just under counts now,” he said. “Everything now has gotten more expensive. Obamacare increases the costs considerably. One of the tricks is they will do things like say, ‘They will contribute to the Social Security Trust Fund.’ Well, you can’t compartmentalize these costs that way, because it doesn’t do the taxpayer any good if they contribute to the Social Security tax fund $2,000, but they take $20,000 out of general revenue. Right?”
“They will put a little money into the Social Security Trust Fund in the long term, but also in the short term, they’re taking $30,000 annually per household in government benefits and services, most which they don’t pay for,” he added.
Rector warned that people should remember the lack of border and employer enforcement that followed the 1986 amnesty.
“They almost all came here after the last amnesty, and almost all have been employed here because we did not enforce the law we put on the books in 1986,” Rector said. “There is no actual effort to prevent employers from hiring illegals. Ostensibly, we’re going to do that, but they didn’t do it last time. All administrations have basically turned a blind eye to the hiring of illegals, and we’re to somehow pretend that won’t happen in the future.”..
CAIRCO Research
The Fiscal Cost of Low-Skill Immigrants to State and Local Taxpayers
by Robert Rector, May 21, 2007
At the state and local level, the average low skill immigrant household received $14,145 in benefits and services and paid only $5,309 in taxes. The average low skill immigrant households imposed a net fiscal burden on state and local government of $8,836 per year...
The fiscal burden imposed by low skill immigrant households is slightly greater at the state and local level than at the federal level. The annual fiscal deficit for all 4.54 million low skill immigrant households at the state and local level in 2004 was $49.1 billion. Over the next ten years the state and local fiscal deficit caused by low skill immigrants on state and local governments will approach a half trillion dollars.Recent proposed immigration legislation in the Senate and House will raise costs on the taxpayers at all levels of government. By granting amnesty to illegal immigrants (who are overwhelmingly low skilled) and creating massive new "guest worker" programs which would bring millions of additional low skill families into the nation, such legislation, if enacted, would impose massive costs on the U.S. taxpayer.