Kansas' audit on illegal immigration hits snag

Kansas lawmakers struggled this year to come to grips with illegal immigration. Some wanted to penalize businesses that repeatedly hire them. Others wanted to do more to stop illegal immigrants from staying here, or from drawing on state services.

Thanks to pushback from powerful industry lobbyists, those ideas went nowhere.

And now it's looking like the one success - calls for a study of the impact of illegal immigration on Kansas - is also in trouble.

For Kansas policy watchers, it's like hearing the latest Harry Potter movie has been kicked back to next summer.

A little background: both sides of this often contentious debate have complained about the lack of any good statistics on the issue.

So last year, in the absence of any other progress, lawmakers called for a 20-week study by state auditors to determine how many illegal immigrants there are in Kansas, and what impact they have on government and the economy.

The Legislature tasked its auditors, the Legislative Post Audit Division, with conducting a 20-week investigation to answer just those questions.

The problem? There aren't enough statistics out there to compile and analyze. Auditors told lawmakers this week that any study they do may suffer from a lack of accuracy, and might not be worth the time.

Why can't we just go out and do a headcount? Not that easy. Census numbers tend to underreport. Some state and federal agencies, for instance, are prohibited from asking the citizenship status of people they see. And others simply don't ask. Tax data often doesn't catch them at all.

So even though we know illegal immigrants are with us, it's not easy to know how many there are. Their impact on society as a whole - forget about it.

"We're taking a best-guess estimate from a best-guess estimate from suspect information," summarized Rep. Tom Burroughs, a Kansas City, Kan. Democrat who sits on the Legislature's Post Audit Committee.

So lawmakers on the committee decided they had a few options: 1) cancel the audit, let the auditors get started on something else and and risk the wrath of their colleagues (they didn't like that idea). 2) drastically revise the scope of the audit to make it more general and less specific. Or 3) wait and see if they come up with any better ideas before their next meeting.

Oh, and another factor to remember: the Legislature called for the audit in a budget proviso, which has the effect of law. If lawmakers on the audit committee nixed the idea, they'd effectively be breaking their own law. (How's this for irony - they'd be breaking a law by cancelling an audit to find out how many residents are breaking a law).

So guess what they decided? Yep. No. 3. They'll decide what to do at next month's meeting.

"Auditors bore into data, and when there's no data, it's impossible for them to do what we ask," said Senate Majority Leader Derek Schmidt, an Independence Republican who chairs the post-audit committee. "This is one of those issues that's difficult - or impossible - to get good data."

Lawmakers predicted the audit, in some form, will go forward. But they said they may not get the comprehensive, detailed look they were hoping for.

"We need to do something because this issue isn't going to go away anytime soon," Burroughs said.
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