[1] Michael Hoefer, Nancy Rytina, and Bryan Baker, “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2011,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, Population Estimates, March 2012, http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois_ill_pe_2011.pdf (accessed April 18, 2013). The population of unlawful immigrants was relatively stable in this period; DHS estimates that the number of such immigrants in 2010 was 11.6 million.
[2] Ibid. Table 2 and its accompanying text state that in January 2011, the foreign-born population in the U.S. that entered after 1980 was 33.6 million. Of these, 1.65 million were not reported in the Census American Community Survey, leaving 31.95 million foreign-born persons appearing in the survey. The 31.95 million foreign-born persons in the ACS survey minus the 21.6 legal foreign born in the survey left 10.35 million unlawful foreign-born persons in the ACS survey.
[3] Table 2 shows that there were an estimated 11.5 million unlawful immigrants in the U.S. in January 2011. Of these, 1,150,000 were an undercount, meaning that they did not appear in the Census American Community Survey; the remaining 10.35 million unlawful immigrants were recorded in the ACS.
[4] The primary analysis in this paper uses the March 2011 Current Population Survey. The data in this survey cover the prior 12 months; thus, they mainly represent conditions in 2010. Throughout the report, the March 2011 CPS data are referred to as 2010 data.
[5] For a comparison of the DHS and Heritage estimates of the unlawful immigrant populations, see Appendix Table 1. Because of slight differences in the CPS and ACS and because both are weighted surveys, it was impossible to match DHS data exactly on every characteristic.
[6] Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Unauthorized Immigrant Population: Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State Trends, 2010,” Pew Research Hispanic Center, February 1, 2011, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2011/02/01/iii-births-and-children/ (accessed April 18, 2013).
[7] Some 1.1 million adult U.S. citizens and adult lawful immigrants resided in households headed by unlawful immigrants in 2010. These individuals have been excluded from the figures in Table 2. The benefits they received and taxes they paid were excluded from the analysis in this paper. Inclusion or exclusion of these individuals has very little impact on the fiscal balance of unlawful immigrant households.
[8] Compared to other households, unlawful immigrant households are more likely to be clustered households. They are more likely to contain unrelated individuals and sub-families in addition to the primary family within the household.
[9] George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 27.
[10] Ibid., p. 8.
[11] See Appendix Tables 1, 2A, 2B, and 2C.
[12] This figure includes persons in nursing homes. See Appendix A.
[13] In measuring the distribution of benefits and services, this paper will count the value of each benefit and service as equal to the cost borne by the taxpayer to deliver it. The cost of any benefit to the taxpayer does not necessarily equal the subjective value the beneficiary may place on the benefit. For example, if the food stamp program provides a family with $400 per month in food stamp benefits, the family itself may value the food stamps at more or less than $400. Similarly, if a child receives public education costing $10,000 per pupil per year, the child’s family may subjectively value those education services as worth more or less than $10,000. While the question of recipient valuation of government benefits is an interesting one, this paper is concerned with the basic question of the distribution of benefits valued according to their costs to taxpayers.
[14] This figure includes property income earned by the government such as sale of assets or interest earned on assets.
[15] For example, the Census Bureau assigns Medicare costs in this manner in the Current Population Survey.
[16] Congressional Research Service, “Cash and Noncash Benefits for Persons with Limited Income: Eligibility Rules, Recipient and Expenditure Data, FY2002–FY2004,” CRS Report for Congress, March 27, 2006.
[17] This spending figure excludes means-tested veterans programs and most means-tested education programs. See Robert Rector, “Examining the Means-tested Welfare State: 79 Programs and $927 Billion in Annual Spending,” testimony before the Committee on the Budget, U.S. House of Representatives, May 3, 2012, http://www.heritage.org/research/testimony/2012/05/examining-the-means-tested-welfare-state (accessed April 8, 2013).
[18] National Research Council, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997), p. 303.
[19] Of this total, an estimated $67 billion represents the costs of financial obligations resulting from past public goods expenditures. These costs are entered in the public goods category in Table 1.
[20] National Research Council, The New Americans, pp. 302, 303.
[21] Paul A. Samuelson, “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (November 1954), pp. 387–389.
[22] National Research Council, The New Americans, pp. 302, 303.
[23] Chapter 6 of The New Americans provides a single-year analysis of the fiscal costs of immigration that employs much of the same methodology used in the present Heritage Foundation analysis.
[24] For example, in its analysis of immigration costs in California, the National Research Council study asserts that public services provided at the state level in California “include Medi-Cal health care coverage and AFDC and SSI income transfers, state aid for K–12 education, state support for higher education, state police, corrections, and recreation and state assistance to local governments. Services provided by local governments include local spending on K–12 education, community colleges, police and fire protection, transportation, libraries, public health, public works, general low-income assistance, and general government administration.” The study “assumes each of these services is a private good requiring a proportional increase in spending to protect services for native residents.” National Research Council, The New Americans, p. 278. Accordingly, the study assigns the cost of these services to immigrant households either according to their direct use of the benefit (based, like the Heritage study, on reported receipt in CPS data) or according to their share in the population.
[25] The exception to this principle is that Census imputes certain values into the CPS data based on the family’s reported income; these include the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Additional Child Tax Credit, federal and state income tax payments, FICA taxes, and school lunch subsidies. Census also imputes the value of Medicare and Medicaid benefits to households that report enrollment in those programs.
[26] The Consumer Expenditure Survey provided information on consumption of specific items relative to income for different age and education groups. These consumption-to-income ratios were applied to the CPS income data to estimate consumption levels for various families. For additional information, see Appendix D.
[27] No unlawful immigrant adults would be enrolled in government medical programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.
[28] 2010 was also a recession year; in a non-recession year, the average household would probably not have a fiscal deficit.
[29] In this paper, the term “non-immigrant household” refers to households of persons born legally in the U.S. The term does not refer to foreigners with temporary or “non-immigrant” visas.
[30] This figure includes state spending on Medicaid but excludes expanded Medicaid and other benefits generated by the Affordable Care Act. See U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2012: Analytical Perspectives, Table 32-1, “Policy Budget Authority and Outlays by Function, Category, and Program (in Millions of Dollars),” http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/32_1.pdf (accessed May 2, 2013).