04/20/2006
An American Indian Reader Says the Immigration Problem Is Multiculturalism
Re: Edwin S. Rubenstein’s Column: Justice Now! But not for native-born taxpayers
From: Stan Fogel
I read Rubenstein’s recent column with interest. Using my Federation for American Immigration Reform demographic projections and applying them to FAIR’s cost of illegal alien estimates for California, Texas, Arizona and Florida, I estimated current and projected state and local costs for every state and the U.S. aggregate. These were recently shown on the FAIR website.
FAIR’s current cost estimate is $36 billion; these are gross costs, we assume that taxes collected from illegal aliens are negligible.
The difference between our bottom line and Rubenstein’s $61 billion may be because FAIR’s estimates were only for education, health care and incarceration while his cover all expenditures. In addition, Rubenstein’s projections may be for the entire immigrant population.
Given the above considerations, our estimates appear to confirm each other quite nicely. In addition I suspect that if all the infrastructure and environmental expenditures could be quantified, the total might be considerably greater.
I appreciate Rubenstein’s estimates of immigration’s total economic costs. Playing devil’s advocate, one might contend that the so-called stimulating effect of immigration produces substantial economic benefits.
However, in my judgment, any such benefits accrue almost entirely to the immigrant stock itself and to our elite; middle class and blue collar workers — both white and black — are seriously undermined.
I project the state and local costs out to 2010 and 2020 using the projected populations for those times for the FAIR amnesty scenario as well as for the McCain proposal and the FAIR Zero Net scenario which approximates the Sensenbrenner proposal.
These costs are for future populations of illegal aliens, amnestied aliens, immigrants under the guest worker proposal and their offspring; in other words for the entire illegal alien "substitute" population as envisioned by Washington’s governing elite.
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Stan Fogel is a New York City economist and a consultant to FAIR on its demographic studies.
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