Gordon Hanson Quoted in Voice of San Diego Article on Discussion of Costs of Illegal Immigrants

Fellow Academics Question Validity of Illegal Immigration Study

Oct 04, 2007
By Rob Davis, Voice of San Diego

CPE Director Gordon Hanson discusses a recent SDSU report on the costs of illegal immigrants.

Despite several caveats and estimates, a San Diego State University report about the costs of illegal immigrants on San Diego County's government pegged the annual tab at $101 million.

But when SDSU demographics professor John Weeks presented his calculation to the county's Board of Supervisors Tuesday, the number got twisted. Supervisor Bill Horn, who has campaigned on an anti-illegal immigration platform, said the money was being stolen out of taxpayers' pockets.

Supervisor Pam Slater-Price said the number was the result of a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis that weighed both the positives and negatives that undocumented immigrants bring to the region. She blamed "a couple of news accounts" for saying the $40,000 study had ignored immigrants' positive contributions to the economy.

Horn and Slater-Price were both wrong, even by the professor's own admission.

"Whether or not there is a net cost or gain is the subject of debate," the report states. "... It is probably impossible to ever know the exact impact of undocumented immigrants."

Weeks' study had a specific target: Figuring out how much illegal immigrants cost the county in 2006. The county performed 42 autopsies on immigrants who died while crossing the border. It provided health care to pregnant women in the country without papers. It immunized preschoolers for influenza.

The study estimated how much those services cost, but ignored the benefits that illegal immigrants bring, such as inexpensive labor, payroll taxes and sales tax revenue. And the study ignored those benefits because supervisors didn't ask for them to be analyzed. The report provided a limited view of illegal immigration's local effects.

While county taxpayers may see some of their property taxes diverted to paying for illegal immigrants, those same taxpayers reap benefits elsewhere. Many immigrants pay into Social Security but do not receive it; they spend money in local businesses; they have payroll taxes withheld.

"It's misleading," said Gordon Hanson, director of the Center on Pacific Economies at University of California, San Diego. "No economist wants to know just what the impact on the revenue side is. You want to know what the net impact is." More....