State and local taxes paid by the unauthorized immigrant population go toward offsetting these costs, but they do not come near to matching the expenses. The total of such payments can generously be estimated at about $910 million per year.

The fiscal costs of illegal immigration do not end with these three major cost areas. The total costs of illegal immigration to the state's taxpayers would be considerably higher if other cost areas such as special English instruction, welfare programs used by the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, or welfare benefits for American workers displaced by illegal alien workers were also calculated.

Introduction

While the primary responsibility for combating illegal immigration rests with the federal government, there are many measures that state and local governments can take to combat the problem. Floridians should not be expected to assume this already large and growing burden from illegal immigration simply because local businesses or other special interests benefit from being able to employ lower cost workers. The state could adopt measures to systematically collect information on illegal alien use of taxpayer-funded services and on where they are employed. Policies could then be pursued to hold employers financially accountable.

The state could also broaden its cooperative agreement with the federal government for training local law enforcement personnel in immigration law to be able to increase the numbers of illegal immigrants apprehended for breaking the law that are turned over to the immigration authorities for removal from the country.

Florida has also voluntarily adopted policies that add to the cost burdens of illegal immigration. The state and some local jurisdictions have adopted policies that recognize an identity card issued by the Mexican government to Mexicans residing illegally in the United States as valid identity documents for state and local governmental purposes. ¹ This clearly is an accommodation to illegal alien residents. Florida Governor Jeb Bush has repeatedly endorsed a proposal to issue state driver's licenses to illegal aliens.²

Florida unsuccessfully sued the federal government in the early 1990s seeking compensation for the costs of illegal immigration.³ It is unreasonable for a state to expect federal assistance to compensate for the fiscal burden of illegal immigration if it is pursuing policies that encourage illegal aliens to come and remain in the state.

Background Information

Florida had the nation's fifth highest number of illegal immigrants in its population in 2000 according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The official estimate is that there were 337,000 aliens residing illegally in the state, which was slightly less than five percent of the country's total illegal alien population. ⁴ The federal government's estimate of illegal aliens represented about 2.1 percent of the state's population. Previously, as recently as 1992, the INS estimated that the resident illegal alien population in the state was 270,000 persons — so the estimated illegal alien population increased by nearly one-fourth in eight years.

By contrast, an estimate by demographer Jeffrey Passel for the Migration Population Institute in 2002 put the illegal alien population of the state at more than double that number — 700,000. This estimate ascribes to Florida the nation's third largest number of illegal alien residents. FAIR's estimate of the current illegal alien population nationwide (10-12 million) is similar to the estimate by Passel, but FAIR's estimate for Florida's illegal alien population is lower, i.e., about 630,000 persons. However, that level of illegal alien residence is also the third largest in the country.

These estimates do not include about 152,300 persons (50,100 long-term illegal residents and 102,200 illegal agricultural workers) who were also part of Florida's illegal alien population until they were given legal residence as a result of the 1986 amnesty. ⁵ Nor do they include the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who have entered illegally and would have been subject to return to Cuba if it were not for the 'wet foot/dry foot' policy that paroles into the country the illegal entrants and the Cuban Adjustment Act that allows Cubans to adjust to legal residence one year after their illegal arrival in the United States.

Not only has Florida's illegal alien population grown rapidly, the overall foreign-born population has shot up since the 1965 change in U.S. immigration law. Similarly, the size of the immigrant stock (which includes the progeny of immigrants as well as the foreign-born immigrants themselves) has surged. Both of these groups include illegal immigrants and their children. The progeny of immigrants has increased over these three decades nearly 4.7-fold, while the foreign-born population has increased nearly five-fold (see chart).

This rate of increase in the foreign-stock population has been much more rapid than the rise in the overall population of the state. As a result, the foreign-stock share of the population has surged from 18.2 percent in 1970 to 37 percent in 2000.

This study looks at the fiscal costs and tax payments to the state associated with illegal immigration. It does not look at the goods and services produced by illegal alien workers, i.e., their economic contribution, as it may be assumed that if the work is essential, and illegal immigrants were unavailable, the work would be done by legal workers. Similarly, this study does not include the displacement costs incurred by legal workers who are laid off or fail to get a job as a result of being replaced by illegal workers willing to work for lower wages. Those costs, which would include unemployment compensation, welfare outlays, lost taxes, etc., are real, but difficult to quantify.

Studies of the cost of illegal immigration to Floridians have been done previously. The 1994 Urban Institute study of the costs of illegal immigration in seven states — including Florida — will be described in detail in the following section. That study was funded by the U.S. Department of Justice in order to allow the federal government to respond to the lawsuits against it by Florida and other states seeking redress for their increasing fiscal burden.

Another study of the costs of immigration in Florida by Rice University economist Donald Huddle estimated the fiscal costs from illegal immigration in 1996 to the state at about $2.1 billion. He estimated taxes collected from illegal aliens at $779 million, so the estimated net cost to Florida taxpayers was more than $1.3 billion annually. In addition, the study identified displacement costs — associated with unemployed American workers because of the illegal foreign workers — amounting to an additional cost to the state's taxpayers of $320 million annually. ⁶

National recognition of the fact that illegal immigration represents a fiscal burden may be seen in the fact that the Congress has authorized and appropriated funds to assist Florida and other states for uncompensated medical expenses and for the incarceration of illegal immigrants. Federal recognition of the fiscal costs to state governments from illegal immigrants also may be seen in the State Legalization Impact Assistance Grants (SLIAG) program, which provided $3.5 billion to states in the aftermath of the 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens to ease the burden of the additional expenses the states were required to assume. Those grants phased out in 1994, and the states since then have been bearing an unreimbursed burden associated with this amnestied illegal immigrant population. ⁷

What Are the Costs of Illegal Immigration?

The costs of illegal immigration are both quantifiable and non-quantifiable. Because data on illegal immigration generally are not collected, even quantifiable costs must be educated estimates.

The absence of recorded data on illegal alien enrollment in school, use of taxpayer-supported medical care, and other public services is not accidental. It is due in large part to the efforts of service providers, civil libertarians, business interests and immigrant support groups that have thwarted data collection efforts in order to keep these costs hidden from the taxpayers who must pay for them. The most recent example of these efforts to obscure the costs of services to illegal aliens may be seen in the campaign against a requirement that emergency health care providers collect and provide to immigration authorities information on illegal alien patients in order to receive compensation from a federal appropriation. The health care providers, civil libertarians and illegal immigrant advocacy groups vociferously opposed the data collection requirement, and HHS dropped its proposed regulation.⁸

Some of the costs of illegal immigration that could be quantified if data were collected are:

• Medical costs that are incurred when an alien's health is affected while illegally entering the country, or from accidents while trying to get to interior locations, or when aliens illegally residing in the country turn to emergency medical facilities for their treatment. Well-baby maternity care, delivery expenses, and long-term care that are incurred for children born to illegal immigrants.
• Educational outlays made by public schools for enrolled illegal alien children, which are funded largely from state and local budgets. Expenses from educating the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens. Outlays for Limited English Proficiency (LEP) programs, e.g., staff salaries and foreign language teaching materials. According to statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Education, LEP enrollment in Florida in 2002 was nearly 300,000 students.
• Subsidized tuition in the state's higher education institutions borne by the taxpayer under a policy that allows illegal aliens to enroll as state residents.⁹
• Low-income housing subsidies.
• State welfare assistance. A study of welfare payments to illegal immigrants nationwide by the Center for Immigration Studies concluded that average non-medical welfare outlays to illegal-immigrant headed households averaged $151 per year.¹⁰
• Incarcerated illegal aliens, if tried on state charges, cost the state's taxpayers for the investigation, prosecution, translation and interpreter services, judicial management, incarceration and possible parole costs. The federal government provides partial compensation of those costs only if it accepts responsibility for removing the aliens from the country upon release.
• American workers who are displaced by illegal foreign workers willing to accept lower wages may qualify for a number of programs paid for by the taxpayer.¹¹
• Tax losses to the state resulting from lowered earnings by workers where wage levels have been depressed by the availability of illegal alien workers, plus taxes lost by the proliferation of illegal aliens working in the underground economy lead to the need for the state to levy a higher tax burden on American taxpayers.

Some of other cost areas where data are not currently available to allow quantification of the costs to the state's taxpayers include:

• Law enforcement costs associated with illegal immigration, in addition to felony incarceration, include those associated with general prevention and enforcement expenses, misdemeanor offenses, prosecution, indigent defense, adult probation, juvenile probation, etc. In Miami-Dade, youth gangs that include illegal aliens involved in criminal activities are a growing problem.¹² According to crime statistics compiled by the FBI, only two states and the District of Columbia have higher rates of violent crime per capita than Florida. Only three states have a higher rate of burglary per capita. The crime rates in the Miami-Miami Beach metro area are considerably higher than for the state as a whole. This metro area, with 14 percent of the state population, accounted for 20.6 percent of the state's violent crimes and 18.9 percent of the state's property crimes in 2003.¹³
• The growing burden of providing illegal immigrants an array of services such as foreign language interpretation and translation, especially in the health care, law enforcement and judicial systems.
• Parental liaison, translation at PTA meetings and other school meetings, and newsletters prepared in foreign languages for the school-age children of illegal aliens.
• Increased insurance rates that are associated with crimes perpetrated by illegal immigrants, especially property loss and auto theft.
• Autopsies (if death is suspicious) and burials of indigents.
• Remittances sent abroad do not remain in the state and contribute to the local economy. If U.S. citizens or legal residents earned the wages now earned by illegal immigrants, the money would usually be spent locally with beneficial multiplier effects.
• Congestion, inconvenience and property value loss often occur in areas where illegal aliens seek day jobs.

There are also non-economic costs, such as a degraded learning environment that may result from students being unable to keep up with the class because of language difficulty. Other examples include inconvenience resulting from waiting to receive medical attention when there is congestion in the emergency admissions offices of public hospitals, and the closure of emergency rooms due to the overwhelming uncompensated costs.

There is also the unquantifiable cost of erosion of respect for the law when an increasing share of the population lives illegally in the country; when law enforcement officers are required to ignore this law breaking; when employers illegally hire unauthorized workers; and many of those workers are in the underground economy. Social cohesion may be strained by having to cope with increasingly pervasive language barriers, and rising income inequality associated with immigration.

Updating the Urban Institute Cost Estimates

In 1993, the annual cost to Florida and local governments for public education, emergency health care, social services, and incarceration for undocumented immigrants was estimated by the state to be about $200 million. At the time, Florida joined Arizona, California, Illinois, Florida, New York, and New Jersey in unsuccessfully suing the federal government to recover some of these costs. In that legal initiative, Florida sought compensation from the federal government for educational outlays, emergency medical services, and for incarceration of illegal aliens. The lawsuits ultimately were dismissed as a political matter for which redress should be sought in Congress, not the courts. The state's case for compensation was made in a March 1994 publication from the Executive Office of the Governor and the Florida Advisory Council on Intergovernmental Relations entitled "The Unfair Burden: Immigration's Impact on Florida."

However, in preparation for arguing the case in court, the Department of Justice contracted with the Urban Institute to study the claimed expenditures and provide estimates of the burden borne by the states. The Urban Institute released its report, Fiscal Impacts of Undocumented Aliens: Selected Estimates for Seven States, in September 1994. The study's methodology compared tax payments at all levels within the state with expenditures on only three programs, albeit the major cost areas of education, health care, and incarceration. The study estimated the amount of state and local taxes paid by the illegal immigrants in Florida and used that amount to offset part of the estimated costs and arrive at a net uncompensated fiscal cost of about $185 million annually.

Size of the Illegal Immigrant Population

The Urban Institute based its cost calculation on an estimate of 356,000 illegal immigrant residents in Florida in 1994. The state estimated the illegal alien population in 1992 at 345,000 and the Census Bureau estimated it at between 223,000 and 414,000 persons while the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) provided an estimate of 322,000 persons.

The most recent estimate of the resident illegal immigrant population in Florida by the INS — before it merged into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — was 337,000 persons, reflecting the findings of the 2000 Census. This estimate, however, excludes certain categories of illegal immigrants such as those who have been in the country for less than one year and those granted Temporary Protected Status. The Migration Policy Institute released an estimate in May 2002 that Florida's illegal alien population in 2000 was 700 thousand persons, i.e., more than double the government's estimate. The Urban Institute estimated that the illegal alien population nationwide in 2002 was 9.3 million persons and that 900 thousand, i.e., about 9.6 percent of the national total, lived in Florida.¹⁴ Demographer, Jeffrey Passel, who did the earlier estimates of the illegal alien population for the Urban Institute made a new estimate for the The Pew Hispanic Center in 2005 that put the illegal alien population in Florida in 2004 at 850,000 persons.¹⁵ In part, the reason for the discrepancy may be due to the high level of adjustments to legal status by formerly illegal residents.

FAIR's estimate of the illegal alien population in Florida in 2005 is 630,000 persons. This represents 5.9 percent of the estimated national total illegal alien population, and it is the nation's third largest concentration of illegal aliens after California and Texas. It is also about 3.6 percent of Florida's overall population, and it is the 10th highest concentration of illegal immigrants per capita in the country.

The high influx of illegal entrants to Florida from Cuba complicates an estimate of the illegal alien population. Cubans who have entered the country illegally by boat are paroled into the country in an on-going process, and they are granted legal residence after one year under the provisions of the Cuban Adjustment Act. In effect, they are treated as if they were refugees fleeing political persecution but, unlike other illegal aliens, they are not required to apply for political asylum in order to be protected against removal. As a result, Florida has a larger foreign-born population that owes its presence in the country to illegal entry than estimates of the illegal alien population would indicate. There were about 156,000 illegal aliens residing in Florida who gained legal residence under the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act amnesty.

Adjustments of Cubans under the Cuban Adjustment Act currently amount to about 20,000 persons per year, although there was a drop in adjustments in fiscal year 2003 because of adjudicators being diverted to do security clearance work, and overall adjustments to legal permanent residence by aliens already in Florida have averaged more than 56,000 per year over the last three years for which official data are available. In part, the reason for the large discrepancy between official estimates of the illegal alien population and that by other researchers may relate to this large population of illegal immigrants in transition to legal residence.

Size of the Illegal Alien K-12 Population

The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report in 2004 on difficulties in estimating state costs of illegal alien schoolchildren. It noted that data are not collected by most school systems, and that makes providing a precise estimate of the illegal alien population in public schools currently not possible. ¹⁶ The study's conclusion did not mean, however, that ballpark estimates of the costs were inappropriate or invalid. It should be kept in mind the cost estimates in this study are necessarily simply ballpark estimates done for the purpose of increasing awareness of the general magnitude of the burden borne by Florida's taxpayers as a result of illegal immigration.

The Urban Institute's study estimated K-12 illegal alien enrollment in Florida's public schools ten years ago at 97,160 students, slightly more than double the state's estimate at that time of 45,970 illegal alien students.

FAIR, in its June 2005 research report "Breaking the Piggy Bank: How Illegal Immigration Is Sending Schools Into the Red" ¹⁷ used an Urban Institute estimate of the student share of the resident illegal population and the federal governments estimate of the size of the illegal alien population in Florida. The result was a calculation that the illegal alien student population in Florida in 2000 would be about 52,955 students. However, as noted above, the federal government's estimate of the illegal alien population in Florida is lower than that of other researchers including the estimate by FAIR.

Using FAIR's estimate of Florida's illegal alien population in 2005, the total illegal immigrant public school population would be about 97,725 students. That is only slightly more than the estimate by the Urban Institute ten years ago, but more than double the state's estimate at that time.

The estimate above of the illegal immigrant student population does not include those students who are the children of illegal immigrants but were born in this country. They too, however, would not be in the Florida public school system were it not for the illegal immigration of their parents, and the cost of educating them is an additional fiscal burden resulting from illegal immigration.¹⁸

Jeffrey Passel, one of the Urban Institute researchers who participated in the 1994 and subsequent studies of the school-age population, recently estimated that there are nearly twice as many children born here to illegal immigrant parents as children illegally in the United States (3 million compared to 1.6 million).¹⁹ As many as three-quarters of them may be receiving educational benefits from pre-school through secondary school. Moreover, most of the children of illegal aliens who are not currently in the school system are below school age and will enter the system within a few years.

Applying this same proportion of the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens to their illegal alien siblings yields an estimated additional 122,800 children of illegal immigrants in Florida's schools whose educational costs are included in this study. The combined 220,500 children of illegal aliens in public schools represent about 8.7 percent of the state's total K-12 public school enrollment.¹⁰

Cost of Educating the Illegal Immigrant K-12 Population

The Urban Institute's 1994 calculation of the cost of K-12 education in Florida was based on a per-student cost to state taxpayers of about $4,363. This was higher than the state's comparable cost estimate of about $3,932 per pupil per year. If costs remained constant, the Urban Institute's estimate of outlays on the education of the 2004 population of illegal alien students would have risen because of the increase in illegal alien students from about $419 million to a present cost of about $426 million and the costs of educating the children of illegal aliens born in the United States would be about $962 million. However, educational outlays have risen considerably.

The FAIR research report on educational outlays for illegal immigrant education used the $5,831 average per pupil cost in Florida reported by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for the 1999-2000 school year and calculated the cost of educating illegal immigrant students in Florida in 2000 to be about $378 million based on the U.S. government's estimated illegal alien population in 2000.

NCES data indicate that educational costs per pupil have risen to a current level of about $6,848. Using an average cost factor may underestimate the costs associated with the illegal resident population. As the authors of the 1994 Urban Institute study explained, "We believe that undocumented aliens are more likely than other students to live in urban areas where per student expenses are relatively high."²¹

Using the estimate of the illegal K-12 immigrant population — updated to 2005 — and the estimated per pupil current cost results in a current cost to Florida's taxpayers of at least $.67 billion per year. Using the same per pupil cost estimate for the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens suggests that the additional expense of educating these children through the 12th grade is at least an additional $.84 billion per year — or a total annual public educational cost from illegal immigration of more than $1.5 billion per year.

The state's admission of illegal aliens into the state's public universities and community colleges at taxpayer subsidized in-state tuition rates is an additional expense not included in the above calculation. Our estimate of that outlay in Florida is that it could be costing the taxpayers $38-49 million per year.

Emergency Medical Outlays Updated Estimate

Estimates of the costs of uncompensated medical outlays are necessarily imprecise. As the GAO noted in a May 2004 report, "Hospitals generally do not collect information on their patients' immigration status, and as a result, an accurate assessment of undocumented aliens' impact on hospitals' uncompensated care costs — those not paid by patients or by insurance — remains elusive." ²²

However, there is no doubt that illegal immigrant usage of emergency medical care is a burden on local taxpayers, and this was recognized by the U.S. Congress in the Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997, which provided $250 million in annual compensation to heavily impacted states. Congress renewed and upped the level of assistance ten-fold in 2003 with an appropriation of $1 billion to be apportioned among all states over the 2005-08 fiscal years, i.e., $250 million each year.

The Urban Institute's 1994 calculation of the annual unreimbursed expense to the state for emergency medical services in Florida was a range of $22.4 to $29.1 million. That range was three to four times the state's estimate of $7.5 million for uncompensated emergency medical services outlays for illegal aliens. A similar calculation today yields a much higher estimate.

The Urban Institute based its estimate of uncompensated medical outlays by Florida taxpayers on data collected by the federal government in the State Legalization Impact Assistance Grants (SLIAG) program. That program, authorized and funded by Congress, helped states cope with the additional services they were required to provide as a result of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act amnesty for nearly 3 million illegal alien residents. The Urban Institute researchers thought that the SLIAG model might overstate the use of uncompensated medical outlays for the non-legalized population because the aliens might be reluctant to seek publicly funded emergency medical care. Nevertheless, their calculation of the cost was based on their estimate of the size of the illegal immigrant population and the cost of emergency medical services at that time.

As we showed above, the estimated illegal alien population in 2004 in Florida is 77 percent larger today than it was ten years ago in the Urban Institute estimate. This implies, conservatively, that the Urban Institute's estimated emergency medical outlays would be between $40 to $51 million today if costs were constant -- which, of course, they are not. If those medical expenses were adjusted for inflation, they would be about $51 to $66 million today.

Other Studies: The Florida Hospital Association (FHA) conducted a member survey in 2002 and found that unreimbursed emergency medical care for "undocumented" aliens amounted to $40.2 million.²³ This estimate was based on reports from 56 hospitals in the state, i.e., 26 percent of the acute care hospitals. If information from all of the hospitals in the state had contributed to the report, it is reasonable to assume that the estimate would have been proportionately larger, i.e., $155 million. The report also notes that, "...Florida hospitals have seen the number of uninsured non-citizens almost double since 1977, increasing from 3,901 in 1997 to 7,670²⁴ in 2001. However, this number could be significantly understating the volume as patients often provide false information to avoid being reported to INS." The methodology used in compiling the report was to include "...patients without Social Security numbers over the age of two and with a payer source of 'charity care' or 'uninsured'." The 2002 data are also likely to have increased due to the increasing number of illegal aliens in the state as well as the growing medical costs.

Because the FHA survey provides a case-related estimate of emergency medical expenditures on illegal aliens, we judge it to be a better indicator of the magnitude of the burden borne by Florida taxpayers for the medical care of illegal immigrants than the proxy method used in the Urban Institute evaluation.

The annual out-of-pocket expenditures for medical care for illegal immigrants in Florida in 2005 amount are likely as much as $175 million. The state has been allocated compensation of $8.7 million by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services under a four-year program enacted in 2003. This fraction of the outlay would still leave the amount of the annual uncompensated outlays borne by the state's taxpayers at more than $165 million.

Size of the Illegal Alien Prisoner Population

In 1994, the Urban Institute estimated the illegal alien prisoner population to be 951 persons. This estimate was arrived at by comparing state records on foreign-born prisoners with the records of the INS to confirm that the aliens were subject to deportation upon removal. Missed in this process would be any alien prisoner who was not in the INS records.

In FY 1999, the state documented 3,054 illegal alien detention years, i.e., the number of days that illegal aliens were held in state and county prisons divided by 365. In FY 2003 the state filing under the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) listed 4,712 prisoner years of illegal alien detention. In FY 2004, the state calculated about 4,920 illegal alien prisoner years in the state's detention facilities. More than 95 percent of the aliens on whom there is an immigration hold (to allow expeditious deportation upon release) are in the state prisons system. However, the share of persons with immigration holds is much smaller in the county detention system, which accounts for about 18 percent of the state's total of illegal alien prisoners.

Given the rising trend in illegal alien detention, it is safe to assume that the number of prisoner years in 2005 was at least 5,000. That is more than five times the size of the illegal alien prisoner population used in the 1994 Urban Institute study.

This estimate does not include all criminal costs generated by illegal aliens. Additional expenses could be attributed to the locally jailed population of illegal aliens who are not covered by the SCAAP reporting and reimbursement. In addition there are many other administration of justice expenses related to crime costs, insurance, law enforcement, and prosecution that have not been included in this calculation.

Uncompensated Incarcreation Cost Updated Estimate

The Urban Institute calculated in 1994 the annual cost of incarcerating an illegal alien was $15,508, although its total estimated cost indicates that study used a cost factor of $12,408 per prisoner year. The state estimated the annual per prisoner cost at $15,534 in 1993. Total unreimbursed costs claimed by the state ($13 million) were about ten percent higher than the Urban Institute estimate, but it was not indicated whether this resulted from a higher cost per prisoner or a larger prisoner population.

SCAAP data indicate that Florida has received partial compensation for the incarceration costs since 1995. For 1999, the state received about $59 million in compensation, which was 38.6 percent of the expenditures. This meant Florida's taxpayers absorbed more than $152 million in expenses. The average per prisoner cost was calculated by the state at about $14,419, an amount less than in the 1994 study.

Congress has cut the amount of funds available for SCAAP reimbursement since 1999 resulting in the share of federal reimbursement being similarly decreased. In fiscal year 2001, Florida received SCAAP compensation of $45.3 million, i.e., only 19.3 percent of the itemized illegal alien expenditures. Florida received a SCAAP award of about $21 million in 2003 and about $24.7 million in 2004 ($17.1 million by the state, and the balance by the counties). The estimated average cost per prisoner year in the state penitentiary system in 2004 is $14,622 and the total cost to the state's taxpayers was slightly more than $120 million.²⁵ If the same estimated cost per illegal alien inmate is used for calculating the cost in county prisons, the costs for 3,530 inmate years would represent a cost of nearly $51.6 million.

On the basis of an illegal alien inmate population in Florida of 5,000 prisoner years, the total incarceration cost will be about $172 million per year. Offsetting reimbursements under SCAAP ($14.3 million in 2004) would reduce that to a net amount of out-of pocket expenditures of about $155 million to be absorbed by the Florida taxpayers.

Offsetting Taxes Paid by Illegal Immigrants

The Urban Institute study provided only the researchers' (but not the state's) estimate of state and local income tax payments plus sales and property taxes paid by illegal immigrants. These amounted to a total of $277 million. Included in that total were state sales taxes (65.3 percent) and state and local property taxes (34.7 percent). Because there is no state income tax, that was not part of the calculation for Florida. Sales taxes and property taxes will have risen with inflation, and the size of the illegal immigrant population also has risen since the 1994 study.

Estimates of tax contributions are inherently difficult because many illegal workers are working in the underground economy, e.g., as day laborers or in sweatshops, and pay no income tax.²⁶ In addition, some taxes are being collected from illegal workers even if they work in the "informal sector," because they pay sales taxes and they indirectly pay property taxes even if they only contribute to the rent on an apartment.

If the Urban Institute's estimate of state and local tax collections rose in proportion to the rise in the illegal immigrant population, it would have reached about $779 million in 2004. However, as sales tax and property tax payments have probably kept up with inflation, this estimate must be further increased to allow for that.

Updating for both the increased illegal immigrant population and for inflation suggests that current annual tax payments would be about $570 million in sales taxes and $350 million in property taxes — for a total of about $920 million. That represents about a fourfold increase from the amount estimated by the Urban Institute ten years ago.

Balancing the Outlays for and Receipts from Illegal Immigrants in Florida

This analysis of fiscal outlays and receipts associated with illegal immigration indicates a total net cost to Florida taxpayers of nearly one billion per year.

If expenditures besides education, medical care and incarceration of illegal immigrants were included in the estimate, it is clear that the total costs attributable to Florida taxpayers as a result of illegal immigration would be much higher. A 1997 national level comprehensive study on the fiscal costs of illegal immigration found the expenditures for those three cost areas amounted to less than one-third of total expenditures without including an estimate for costs associated with displacement of American workers.²⁷

In 2004 there were about 5.8 million households in Florida headed by native-born residents. So the average cost to those households to support the estimated 1.5 million illegal aliens and another 290,000 children of illegal immigration is about $315 per native household per year. This cost does not include their share of the costs that are paid at the federal level that result from this same population of illegal aliens.

This per household estimate is higher than the estimated costs per native household nationwide, although not as high as in California, reported by a panel of experts for the National Academies of Science (NAS) in 1997.²⁸ This NAS calculation included costs from both legal and illegal immigrants. The principal author of the NAS report, economist James P. Smith, noted that, "The undocumented tend to be less skilled, less educated,"²⁹ thereby implying that the higher the share of illegal immigrants in the immigrant population, the higher are likely to be the costs because of their lower earnings and tax payments.

Future Implications

Over the past decade, Florida's taxpayers have been required to assume a growing burden in governmental outlays because of the rapidly rising number of illegal aliens living in the state. Unless measures are taken to stem the flow of illegal immigration, these costs may be expected to continue to rise. The rise in the illegal alien population, if it should continue to increase at the same rate that it has grown over the past decade, could reach more than 1.1 million persons in another ten years. The costs to the taxpayer associated with this larger illegal alien population would likely rise to about $3.2 billion per year — without an additional upward adjustment for inflation.

Whether or not today's illegal residents were to gain legal status — as is now granted to Cuban entrants after one year — an amnesty provision would not significantly change the cost burden on the Florida taxpayer, because the illegal alien population, in general, does not have the educational preparation or work skills that would allow it to move to higher paying jobs and contribute more in tax payments. Rather, the adoption of any amnesty provision may well increase the incentive for illegal immigration, increase access to public services — and, therefore, the costs — and aggravate the problem in the same way that the Cuban Adjustment Act provision currently creates a strong magnet attracting Cubans to pay smugglers to get them to Florida.

Recommendations

The significant fiscal costs to Floridians associated with illegal immigration are not inevitable. While the federal government has the primary responsibility for enforcing immigration laws, state and local governments have a role to play that can either discourage or encourage illegal immigrants settling in their area. For example, state and local policies can either facilitate or hinder federal immigration law enforcement efforts.

While Florida should not be expected to bear an unfair burden resulting from the federal government's policy of encouraging illegal immigration from Cuba or failure to exclude unauthorized entries and overstays by other illegal entrants, it would be similarly unfair that the state have its expenses underwritten by taxpayers across the country if the state has adopted laws or policies that encourage the settlement of illegal immigrants in the state.

Examples of state and local policies that undermine federal immigration law enforcement efforts and encourage illegal immigrant settlement include the following:

• Issuing state driver's licenses and voter registration cards to illegal aliens;
• Extending public assistance program eligibility to illegal aliens;
• Offering in-state tuition to illegal alien students;
• Adopting sanctuary or don't-ask-don't tell policies that shield illegal aliens from immigration authorities;
• Providing governmental support for or tolerance of formal or informal hiring centers where illegal aliens seek day-labor jobs;
• Accepting foreign government-issued identity cards as establishing residence.

Examples of state and local government practices that would discourage illegal alien settlement and facilitate federal enforcement of the immigration law include the following:

• Establishing systematic data collection for illegal alien use of public services and adopting methods to identify employers of the illegal aliens in order to put an end to their ability to exploit low cost illegal alien labor by passing costs to the public.
• Requiring the collection and verification of Social Security numbers for the issuance of unrestricted driver's licenses and identity cards;
• Issuing restricted driver's licenses to aliens legally present in the state so that the license expires when the authorized stay in the United States expires;
• Refusing to accept the validity of driver's licenses from states that allow illegal aliens to obtain licenses without supporting documents that prove an applicant's residency status.
• Building a cooperative arrangement with federal immigration authorities for training local law enforcement personnel in immigration law enforcement so that law breakers who are identified as illegal immigrants can be turned over to the immigration authorities for removal from the country rather than being released back into society;
• Requiring government contractors to participate in the Basic Pilot document verification system for all of their new employees working on government contracts.

At least one local government in the state has committed support for a day laborer hiring center that will facilitate the employment of illegal alien workers. And the state, as well as at least one local jurisdiction, recognizes the Mexican matricula consular ID cards for official purposes.³⁰ The state stopped issuing licenses to foreigners without legal residence following the revelation that several of the 9/11 terrorists held Florida licenses or ID cards. However, driver's licenses in Florida issued to foreigners are not limited to the visitors permitted stay. The absence of an expiration date tied to the expiration date of the entry permit means that a person who stays illegally in the country is free to continue to use a valid state driver's license as an identity document for employment and other purposes

Local Reform Activists Should Also Focus on National Policies

Floridians have a right to expect their national and local elected representatives to work to alleviate the fiscal burden of illegal immigration. To simply convert illegal alien residents from to legal resident status with an amnesty violates a fundamental principle of immigration reform, because that will encourage rather than deter future illegal immigration. A policy that conveys the message that the country or any state or local government will tolerate and reward foreigners who ignore our immigration law invites the world to see illegal immigration as an accepted route to seeking a better life in our country and perpetuates the problem.

As Barbara Jordan, a former member of Congress from Texas and chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform summed up her view on immigration;

The credibility of immigration policy can be measured by a simple yardstick: people who should get in, do get in; people who should not get in are kept out; and people who are judged deportable are required to leave.
—(U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility, USCIR 1994)

Most Floridians agree with Dr. Jordan's view. A Research 2000 poll conducted among likely voters in February 2005 found that, "Two-thirds...would oppose a plan to allow some undocumented immigrants to live and work legally [the Bush plan] in the US." Florida "...voters oppose — by more than a 3-to-1 margin — letting states issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants..." This sentiment is shared by Florida's Hispanic population. "Only two in 10 Hispanics favored a law allowing undocumented immigrants to work legally in the country. Only two in 10 favored issuing driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants. And only 38 percent of Florida's Hispanics...said they thought immigration helped the United States."³¹

Florida's elected representatives owe it to the state's citizens and legal residents to uphold the principle that the United States is founded on respect for the rule of law, and to act in ways that demonstrate the country does not accept those who disrespect our immigration law.

Endnotes

1. Mexicans who are legally in the United States do not need the matricula consular document because they have other, U.S. Government-issued documents, either a 'green card' in the case of residents, or a Mexican passport and U.S. visa in the case of nonresidents. Palm Beach County is an example of a local jurisdiction that has decided to recognize the Mexican consular ID cards per the Sun Sentinel of March 13, 2003.
2. "Governor endorses illegal-alien driving bill," The Miami Herald, April 6, 2004.
3. "Chiles' suit against U.S. tossed out," St. Petersburg Times, December 21, 1994.
4. 2002 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, DHS Office of Immigration Statistics, Oct. 2003.
5. 1991 Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS, M-367, September 1992.
6. Huddle, Donald, "The Net Costs of Immigration to Florida: The Facts, the Trends, and the Critics," Carrying Capacity Network, Washington, DC, 1996. See also, Huddle, Donald, "Immigration and Jobs: The Process of Displacement," May 1995.
7. David Simcox, "Measuring the Fallout: The Cost of the IRCA Amnesty After 10 Years," Center for Immigration Studies, May 1997.
8. Department of Health & Human Services letter of October 1, 2004 from Dr. Mark B. McClellan, Administrator to National Alliance for Hispanic Health stating, "Our intention is to accept the public comments that suggested the use of indirect, non-burdensome eligibility methods to target the funds using methods that do not require providers to obtain direct evidence of a patient's immigration status."
9. FAIR's updated research report "Breaking the Piggy Bank; How Illegal Immigration is Sending Schools into the Red," released June 2005 estimated the cost to the state's taxpayers from providing in-state university tuition to illegal alien students as $37.5 to $48.7 million per year. The report is available in its entirety at www.fairus.org.
10. Camarota, Steven, "Back Where We Started: An Examination of Trends in Immigrant Welfare Use Since Welfare Reform," Center for Immigration Studies, March 2003.
11. Huddle, op.cit The study calculated probable costs based on one American out of work for every four illegal residents. Factoring in unemployment compensation, uncompensated medical outlays, food stamps and other assistance, Huddle calculated that the costs would be about $2,500 per year per displaced worker.
12. "Feared Latin gang touches region," Miami Herald, February 7, 2005.
13. "Crime in the United States — 2003," Table 5, www.fbi.gov (consulted June 5, 2005).
14. Jeffrey S., et al., "Undocumented Immigrants: Facts and Figures, Jan. 2004.
15. The Pew Hispanic Center report "Estimates of the Size and Characteristics of the Undocumented Population," issued March 21, 2005.
16. GAO-04-733, June 2004 op.cit
17. "Breaking the Piggy Bank," op.cit
18. FAIR believes that the practice of conferring U.S. citizenship on children born in the United States to illegal aliens is a misapplication of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment. It disregards the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause of the Amendment.
19. "By including children, proposal may increase strain on schools, health care," Jerry Kammer, Copley News Service, San Diego Union Tribune, February 9, 2004.
20. National Center for Education Statistics. "Enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools, by level and state." The enrollment for 2003 was 2,539,929, and the rate of increase since then suggests a 2005 enrollment of about 2,783,000 students.
21. "Fiscal Impacts of Undocumented Aliens: Selected Estimates for Seven States," The Urban Institute, September 1994.
22. GAO-04-472, May 2004, op.cit.
23. "Care for Uninsured Non-Citizens: A Growing Burden on Florida's Hospitals," Florida Hospital Association, February 2003.
24. About 31 percent of those cases were identified as deliveries.
25. The cost in 2005 is likely slightly higher, i.e., $15,000 per illegal alien prisoner year.
26. According to the Center for Immigration Studies ("The High Cost of Cheap Labor," August 2004), "Éwe estimate that more than half of illegals work 'on the books'."
27. Donald Huddle, "The Net National Costs of Immigration: Fiscal Effects of Welfare Restorations to Legal Immigrants," Carrying Capacity Network, Washington, DC, 1997.
28. "The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration," National Academies of Science, May 1997, Washington, DC. The estimated net cost in California was $1,178 per year, but it .has a significantly higher proportion of its population comprised of illegal aliens according to the government's estimate, i.e., 6.5 percent in California compared to 2.1 percent in Florida in 2000.
29. "Economic impact hotly debated", The Arizona Republic, Aug. 26, 2001.
30. For example the Palm Beach County sheriff's office began accepting Mexican consular IDs in 2003 according to the Sun Sentinel of March 13, 2003. See also "Jupiter sets an example on the day-labor issue," Palm Beach Post, April 14, 2005.
31. South Florida Sun-Sentinel, March 5, 2005.