expenditures. Garvey and Espenshade report that in general immigrant households were more costly than native households. On both the expenditure and the tax side, however, this discrepancy was small compared with the differences that existed among immigrants. European households received relatively fewer state expenditures, whereas Asian and especially Latin-American immigrant households received state benefits well in excess of the foreign-born average.

Michael Clune examines the federal, state, and local fiscal impacts of immigrant households in California for FY 1995. Household-level data were obtained from the 1995 Current Population Survey (CPS) so that receipt and amount of government services can be divided into 25 categories and taxes into 13 separate categories. Supplemental data sources are used for services (police, fire, prisons, etc.) not included in the CPS files, and expenditure totals are scaled to match administrative records. Households were classified by their nativity, age, and ethnicity. As was true for Garvey and Espenshade, explicit incidence assumptions were made for all taxes.

One of the more difficult issues facing fiscal impact studies comes from recognizing that resident households are not the only sector either paying taxes or receiving benefits. The two most important examples are tourists (who pay sales taxes) and the corporate sector (business taxes). During their stay, tourists gain by their use of roads, police, and fire. The corporate sector also gains through these provisions. There is little hard evidence on the relation of these benefits to taxes so that some simplifying assumption must be made. Clune assumes that on net they are a wash, so that the household sector also obtains benefits equal to the taxes they pay.

Immigrant and native-born households in California differ on both the tax and government expenditure side. Across all sectors of government, however, total costs of the benefits obtained by immigrant and native-born households were actually quite similar. For example, in California, native-born households received $22,021, whereas immigrant-headed households were given $25,943 in all government benefits in FY 1995. This similarity in total government benefits hides considerable diversity in individual categories. As a general rule, those programs in which immigrants receive fewer benefits than native-born households are predominately at the federal level (e.g., Social Security and Medicare), whereas programs in which immigrants receive proportionately more benefits are at the state and local level (e.g., education). The same diversity exists for within-immigrant comparisons. Although Hispanic immigrants are heavy users of public education, Asian immigrants have much higher take-up rates for Supplemental Security Income. These program-by-program differences in take-up rates among immigrants and between immigrants and the native born is a strong argument that government benefits must be measured in a comprehensive way.

The differences between immigrant and native-born households are much larger on the tax side. Clune reports that immigrant-headed households pay 69 percent as much in taxes as do native-born households. The net result is that