Mass immigration costs govt. $296 billion a year: National Academy of Sciences
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Immigration is a massive drain on the government, with immigrants taking as much as $296 billion more in benefits than they pay in taxes, according to a new authoritative study by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which found the record level of newcomers is straining the country.
The report suggests that migrants depress wages for Americans, at least in the beginning, and particularly hit workers who have to compete for jobs.
And the new arrivals aren’t assimilating as well as past waves of immigrants, struggling to learn English and to raise their wages as quickly as previous migrants, the academy said in a final draft of the report, which The Washington Times obtained.
The reasons for the slowdown in assimilation aren’t clear, but one possibility — particularly when it comes to difficulties learning English — is the heavy presence of Mexican immigrants during the previous two decades, the academy said.
The report, due to be released Thursday afternoon, challenges many of the assumptions concerning how well the U.S. can handle the current levels of immigration, which run about 1 million a year, including both legal and illegal arrivals.
Defenders of immigration, including the White House, argue that legalizing illegal immigrants and increasing legal immigration will earn billions of dollars in new revenue.
But the academy report runs eight different scenarios and in every one of them, immigrants end up being a burden to government when both federal and state costs are calculated. One scenario shows those costs were as high as $296 billion in 2013, while in the best-case scenario it was still a $43 billion loss that year.
In some of those models, the federal government does in fact make more in taxes than it spends in benefits, but states and localities always suffer, and it’s always more than enough to outweigh the federal benefits.
One model showed states and localities pay out an average of $1,600 a year for immigrants and their children.
“Fiscal impacts vary strongly by level of government,” the report concludes. “States and localities bear the burden of funding educational benefits enjoyed by immigrant and native children. The federal government transfers relatively little to individuals at young and working ages but collects much tax revenue from working-age immigrant and native-born workers.”
Over the longer run, immigrants and their families, particularly by the third generation, can boost government finances, depending on the assumptions.
The report, coming in at about 500 pages, is written in heavy academic language and peppered with equations and charts attempting to show the impacts of immigration. The academics weighed a number of different models, with assumptions about what kinds of immigrants will come — high-skilled or low-skilled — and how markets will react.
The findings appear to bolster the claims of GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump and to undercut the arguments of Mr. Obama and congressional leaders of both parties, who have argued massive immigration will help, not hurt, American workers.
“Although the extra labor causes the aggregate amount of output to rise, per-capita output — output divided by the new, higher number of people in the economy — initially declines,” the academy panel concluded after looking at one model.
Underlying the report is the large increase in immigration.
During the 1980s, the country took in about 600,000 migrants a year. In the early 1990s it was 800,000 a year. But since the dawn of the new century the country averages more than 1 million legal immigrants a year. They accounted for 42.3 million people in 2014, which was about 13 percent of the population.
As many as 400,000 new illegal immigrants also arrive each year, though they are balanced by about the same number of illegal immigrants either returning home, dying or gaining some form of legal status, so their number remains static at slightly more than 11.1 million this decade.
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