Local Fiscal Effects of Illegal Immigration Report of a Workshop (1996) / Chapter Skim
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FISCAL EFFECTS
FISCAL EFFECTS
Pages 13-21
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From page 13... ...
The workshop included extensive discussion about the use and costs of selected public services, including education, health care, and incarceration and criminal justice. Limited workshop discussion centered on the problem of ascertaining and measuring what revenues illegal immigrants actually contribute and the amount of their contributions.
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From page 14... ...
All of the studies used per pupil expenditures to estimate the cost of educating the additional immigrant children entering the school system. Workshop participants identified six unresolved issues affecting the reliability of cost estimates for kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12)
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From page 15... ...
Capital Costs Most of the case studies examined the costs for operating budgets for education. As with other cost estimates in the case studies, it is unclear if per pupil costs or average program costs take into account capital costs, such as providing new infrastructure, a pressing concern in many school districts with an aging capital stock.
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From page 16... ...
Cost estimation is especially difficult when the demand creates the need for substantial additional capital expenditures for new schools. HEALTH CARE Estimates of the cost of providing health care to undocumented immigrants differed among the case studies based primarily on what services were included in the cost estimates.
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From page 17... ...
When studies attempt to attribute health care costs to undocumented immigrants, the estimates may lack overall credibility. The San Diego study, for example, attributed about 5 percent of in-patient admissions to undocumented immigrants, based on an estimate that the illegal immigrant population comprises approximately 5 percent of the total resident population (Parker and Rea, 1993:107)
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From page 18... ...
studies included the same elements in their cost estimates, yet the estimated cost for San Diego, the much smaller and less populated county, was 36 percent higher than that for Los Angeles County. More broadly, the Urban Institute estimates of incarceration costs for seven states (Clark et al., 1994)
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From page 19... ...
2,620c 16,681 43.7b Incarceration in state prisons Notes: The amounts cited from the Urban Institute study are the states' estimates, not the estimates generated by the Urban Institute analysts. aNot available bOur calculations, based on data supplied in original study 19
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From page 20... ...
When taxes are a function of income, it is clear that improved estimates of total income, including earnings not reported for state or federal tax purposes, are needed.1 Estimates of remittances to one's home country are important for estimating the amount of money undocumented immigrants spend in the United States, which is useful for estimating sales taxes paid. Beyond these empirical issues, workshop participants were also concerned that cross-sectional estimates for illegal immigrants tended to understate revenues and overstate costs.
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From page 21... ...
Too few studies, participants noted in general, develop an overall analysis taking into account the statistical uncertainty in the underlying estimates. Workshop participants noted that there may be indirect economic benefits of illegal immigration, such as cheaper labor costs, but that there are few available empirical studies on this topic.
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