Thread: New Jersey’s Costly Immigrant Burden

New Jersey’s Costly Immigrant Burden
Governor Corzine’s plan to hook more immigrants up to public benefits makes no sense.

29 August 2007
Steven Malanga
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-08-29sm.html

It’s hard to imagine a politician with lousier timing than New Jersey governor Jon Corzine. The day before the execution-style killing of three Newark students by several illegal immigrants—at least one sporting a long rap sheet—Corzine formed a commission to study ways of providing immigrants with greater access to public services. In announcing the panel, the governor said nothing about the state’s estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants, and the panel included no experts on law enforcement or national security who might recommend how the state could better protect itself in an era of porous national borders. In the wake of the killings, critics have called for Corzine to rethink his immigration panel with the state’s security in mind. That’s not a bad idea. But while he’s at it, Corzine should keep the state’s budget and economy in mind, too. Immigration is already a costly burden to New Jerseyans, and there’s little reason to make that burden even greater.

The Garden State is in a good position to understand the fiscal impact of immigration on its citizens. Back in the mid-1990s, Congress commissioned a project, under the auspices of the National Academy of Science, to examine immigration’s bottom line. As part of the project, nonpartisan teams of some of the country’s leading economists conducted two groundbreaking studies—one on New Jersey and another on California—that assessed immigrants’ contributions to the public good in terms of the taxes they paid, and their cost in terms of the government services they consumed.

Both studies found that immigrants used government services at a greater rate than native-born residents did. The New Jersey study found, for instance, that the typical immigrant family received about $4,044 annually in government services, about 11 percent higher than the average native-born family. At the same time, immigrant households paid about 8 percent less in taxes. The net result was that “the average native household generated an annual fiscal surplus of $232â€

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