See
Don’t Believe What You’ve Heard About Immigrants and Welfare: How immigrants expand the economy and benefit all Americans by Shikha Dalmia of Reason. Excerpt:
"For the most part, foreigners who want a green card need a
company or blood relative to sponsor them and accept responsibility
for them. Of course, green-card holders could lose their jobs or
relatives and end up on welfare.
The dearth of proof for the view that people flock to the U.S. for
welfare is long-standing. In fact, according to the Agriculture
Department, which administers food stamps, Latinos in recent years
have increasingly flocked to states such as Tennessee, Arkansas,
Alabama, Texas and the Carolinas, which have stingy benefits and
plentiful jobs, instead of to traditional gateways, such as New
York and California, which have relatively generous programs.
The 10 states that experienced the largest percentage increase
in their foreign-born population from 2000 to 2009 spent far less
on public assistance per capita compared with the 10 states with
the slowest-growing foreign-born populations.
Of course, even if immigrants don’t come to the U.S. to live off
the welfare state doesn’t mean they don’t end up doing so. The best
evidence for this claim came in the 2007 Heritage Foundation study,
which found that even though immigrants have been barred since 1996
from receiving federal means-tested benefits, their households
still obtain about $20,000 more in benefits and services (such as
schools and emergency medical care) than they pay in taxes. The
study estimated that these costs imposed in 2004 a net burden of
about $90 billion annually and a whopping $1 trillion over a
decade.
This would be cause for concern -- if those numbers were the
whole story. The study was criticized for counting government
spending on the (American-born) children of immigrants but then
ignoring the taxes these offspring paid when they grew up. By that
standard, most middle-income families in the U.S. with three or
more children in public schools would be a net burden.
There were even bigger questions about the study. By its own
admission, it considered only the tax contributions of low-skilled
immigrants, not what they contribute to the economy as a whole.
Heritage has said it will release new cost estimates, but these
numbers should be met with skepticism.
Everyone Benefits
State-level studies that have taken both into account
consistently find that the economic contributions of these
immigrants dwarf their fiscal costs. A 2006 analysis by the Texas
comptroller estimated that low-skilled unauthorized workers cost
the state treasury $504 million more than they paid in taxes in
2005. Without them, however, the state’s economy would have shrunk
by 2.1 percent, or $17.7 billion, as the competitive edge of Texas
businesses diminished.
Likewise, a 2006 study by the Kenan Institute at the University
of North Carolina found that although Hispanic immigrants imposed a
net $61 million cost on the state budget, they contributed $9
billion to the gross state product.
The Heritage Foundation study also implied that a homegrown
working class would be cheaper for the country because households
headed by low-skilled immigrants consumed $10,000 more in
government services than those headed by Americans. The trouble is
that the study compared the welfare use of low- skilled immigrant
households with average American households, rather than with
low-skilled American households.
In comparing welfare use by immigrants with that of Americans in
the same socioeconomic stratum, a different picture emerges, as a
study by Leighton Ku and Brian Bruen of George Washington
University for the Cato Institute found recently.
Low-skilled foreigners, including adults and their U.S.- born
children, were generally less likely than Americans to receive
public benefits, such as from Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program and Supplemental Security Income. This is partly
because many adults are in the U.S. illegally or on temporary visas
or haven’t held a green card long enough to qualify for most
means-tested benefits besides emergency health care. But the value
of benefits they receive is usually lower, too.
“The combination of lower average utilization and smaller
average benefits indicates that the overall cost of public benefits
is substantially less for low-income non-citizen immigrants than
for comparable native-born adults and children,” the Cato study
concluded."
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