The One Thing You Can Count On: the Cost of Illegal Immigration
Getting a handle on the mounting costs of illegal immigration in the states – at least the red ones – seems to be a growing trend. Oklahoma’s Superintendent of the State Department of Education, recently asked school districts to determine the number of illegal aliens occupying classrooms statewide, while Texas Governor Greg Abbott just signed an executive order requiring the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to gauge the medical costs for treating illegal aliens.
Mississippi has now done some bean-counting of its own.
Shad White, Mississippi’s State Auditor has just released a new report, How Illegal Immigration Hurts Mississippi, which estimates that there are at least 22,000 illegal aliens currently living in the state. The report “conservatively” estimated, that the annual cost of providing K-12 education for illegal aliens and their children is $25 million, the annual cost of providing healthcare to illegal aliens and their children is $77 million annually, and the yearly cost to incarcerate illegal aliens is $1.7 million. The report suggests that total annual taxpayer costs are over $100 million.
While it’s good news that Mississippi is trying to track their expenditures on illegal immigration, the bad news is that their costs are higher — a lot higher — than they think. This may be no surprise to them, however, as the State Auditor’s report acknowledges in its concluding disclosure that, “due to the limited amount of reliable data, actual spending could be higher.”
Indeed it is. FAIR’s recent research indicates 45,000 (not 22,000) illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children currently live in Mississippi. The annual cost of K-12 education is $103 million (not $25 million), the annual cost of criminal justice is $52.4 million (not $1.7) while other annual costs, including providing health care, are $31 million.
Thus, the total annual taxpayer cost of illegal immigration in Mississippi is more accurately $187 million, substantially higher than the newly released State Auditor’s report. That said, the state should be applauded for its efforts to measure expenses, even though not all costs and impacts of illegal immigration were tallied. After all, calculating costs has been FAIR’s forte for decades and it’s why congressional committees have sought our research.
While there is variance in the methodology and resulting numbers between the two reports, Mississippians undoubtedly agree on one thing; state resources are being unnecessarily drained to the detriment of taxpayers. As State Auditor White said, “Mississippi’s illegal immigration problem is spiraling out of control and is costing taxpayers millions. Our public schools, hospitals, and prisons will continue to lose massive sums of money that we could have spent on our own citizens if this problem is not solved.”
Mississippians may also agree on another point: with proper enforcement, the cost of illegal immigration should be zero.