10-30-2016, 01:15 AM
(10-28-2016, 12:48 PM)wildcats forever Wrote: This caused me to wonder about the total cost of illegal immigration, which according to this: http://www.fairus.org/publications/the-fiscal-burden-of-illegal-immigration-on-united-states-taxpayers is $113 billion total,
This is a perfct example of what I said earlier about it being hard to find an unbiased study on the costs of immigration and deportation. FAIR is an extremely biased source and there has been a lot of criticism of the methodolgy used in this report
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/statistical-hot-air-fair%E2%80%99s-usa-report-lacks-credibility
- FAIR assumes, without any empirical backing, that all children of unauthorized immigrants are low-income, and that they all attend low-income schools—and therefore that they are responsible for nearly 10 percent of the $13.8 billion in Title I funding aimed at assisting schools to improve the academic performance of children from poor families. In addition to being baseless, this assumption is inconsistent with other sections of FAIR’s report, where higher income levels are acknowledged or even used as a basis for computing costs. In other words, FAIR changes its assumptions about the income of unauthorized immigrants in order to maximize the costs which are attributed to them.
- FAIR acknowledges that “only anecdotal information is available” about Medicaid fraud by unauthorized immigrants, yet inexplicably assumes that the number of unauthorized immigrants who fraudulently use Medicaid is equal to the number who seek emergency medical treatment. No explanation is provided as to why these two numbers would bear any resemblance to one another, but this assumption helps FAIR to produce $2.5 billion in alleged costs.
- FAIR assumes that nearly three-fourths of Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students in public schools are the children of unauthorized immigrants—and therefore utilize most of the $730 million in taxpayer-funded Title III programs for LEP students. Yet FAIR also states that the majority of the children of unauthorized immigrants are U.S. citizens, born and raised in the United States. It stands to reason that native-born children are less likely to be LEP students than are foreign-born children.
- FAIR counts the entire $2.5-billion budget of the Department of Homeland Security’s Detention and Removal Office as a cost associated with unauthorized immigration. However, 10 percent of the people deported each year are Legal Permanent Residents, not unauthorized immigrants.
But it works both ways. People who claim it will costs too much to deport all the illegal immigrants will often inflate those numbers also.
