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Old 11-04-2009, 05:22 PM
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Default Immigrant economy

Immigrant economy
Experts debate illegal immigration’s effect on state budget, resources
In the midst of the latest Congressional push for immigration reform, the debate over illegal immigration is becoming more heated than ever before. This is the second of a three-part series on illegal immigration in Arizona and its effects on the state, the economy and the University.::
At the heart of the immigration debate is the dispute over whether illegal immigrants drain resources or are important contributors to society — whether the benefits they provide are worth the cost of educating, medicating and, in some cases, incarcerating them.
The most common argument for increased enforcement is that illegal immigrants — the Pew Hispanic Center estimates there are about 500,000 in Arizona — use social services funded by taxpayer money, resources many say should be reserved for citizens and legal residents.
“Immigration [reform] policy is basically population-increase policy,” said Brian Griffith, who works with Washington-based think tank the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for increased enforcement.
“You’ll have a larger economy with lower wages, more people attending schools, more people using roads [and] more competition for purchasing housing,” he said.
Jose Mendez, an economist at ASU’s W. P. Carey School of Business, said the cost of having illegal immigrants in the country is offset by the economic benefits they contribute, through tax revenue and labor.
“There are no academic studies from respectable [economists] that show that immigrants are a drain on the economy,” he said. “More resources are better than fewer resources.”
Mendez recently conducted a study called “The Impact of Undocumented Aliens on Public Health in Arizona,” examining the fiscal consequences
of providing emergency health care to illegal immigrants in the state.
The study found that most undocumented immigrants were too afraid of being caught to go to the doctor for anything but dire medical emergencies.
“It turned out that the amount of taxes collected far exceeded the use of [public] medical services,” Mendez said.
Economists from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that this balance does not apply to all parts of state and local budgets.
A report from December 2007 determined that the tax revenue collected from illegal immigrants is less than the amount of money spent on social services.
“The tax revenue that unauthorized immigrants generate for state and local governments do not offset the cost of services provided for those immigrants,” according to the report, although the net impact is “most likely modest.”
Wendy Sefsaf, a spokeswoman for the pro-reform American Immigration Council and communications manager for the Immigration Policy Center, said immigrants provide other economic benefits, including purchasing power and low-cost labor.
“The fiscal costs of illegal immigration are far outweighed by the economic benefits,” Sefsaf said. “It’s really a myth [opposing groups] are perpetuating, the idea that the fiscal costs are enormous.”
Griffith said researchers should be examining the way illegal immigration affects overall quality of life, not just fiscal and economic impacts.
“Increasing the labor pool creates a larger economy,” he said. “But the question is, what does that do for the living situation for everyone else?”
Experts from all sides of the spectrum agree that the current system is ineffective. Proposed solutions usually emphasize one of two courses of action: reform, which would work to legalize non-criminal undocumented aliens, and enforcement, which would work to decrease the undocumented population through more strict policy and harsher penalties.
Griffith pointed to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act — which granted amnesty to more than 2 million illegal immigrants — as an example of the ineffectiveness of reform policy.
Many opponents of reform policy say the act was instrumental in boosting the number of people in the country illegally over the next 20 years from 5 million to 20 million, according to a 2000 report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“No amount of amnesty is ever going to end illegal immigration,” Griffith said. “You’re not going to be able to deal with the issue properly without a good enforcement policy.”
Sefsaf criticized the enforcement-focused approach as unrealistic and said even if it was successful, it would have devastating economic effects.
“We have never experienced ripping millions of workers out of the work force,” Sefsaf said. “Any real economist could tell you that would cause an untold amount of damage.”
The state has had some success in tightening the grip on undocumented immigrants by requiring all employers to use E-Verify, the electronic system used to check job applicants’ immigration status, and instituting employer sanctions designed to keep businesses from hiring them.
The sanctions include suspension and revocation of business licenses for employers who “knowingly and intentionally” hire illegal immigrants.
The Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry opposed the measures when they were being considered by the Legislature, but chamber president and CEO Glenn Hamer said the measures have successfully kept employers from hiring illegal immigrants.
“There’s a very strong incentive to comply,” he said, referring to the revocation penalty. “It’s a pretty effective deterrent.”
Hamer was hesitant to take a position on immigration reform, but criticized recent state immigration policies as hurtful to the local economy.
“All the energy in the Arizona Legislature should be on creating jobs,” Hamer said. “[The state] is built on growth. The employer sanctions policy is a contractional policy.”
Reach the reporter at derek.quizon@asu.edu.
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