The hidden cost of illegal workers

Low-skilled individuals, legal or illegal, cost the government much more in services than they pay in taxes.

By David R. Francis

from the March 19, 2007 edition

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Possibly the rush of illegal workers across the Mexican border has eased a little. That would please most Americans, since polls find that 3 out of 4 want immigration levels into the United States reduced.

If the flow has decreased, it would indicate some effect from strengthened patrols and a fence rising along the 2,000-mile border, a modest step-up in prosecutions and convictions of immigration-related crimes (many involve people caught in the US again after having been deported), and recent, highly publicized raids on factories employing large numbers of illegal immigrants.

At the border, apprehensions are down, notes Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington-based group that supports more immigration restrictions. But so far, he adds, no solid statistics indicate whether the estimated pool of 11 million to 12 million illegal residents in the US is shrinking or still increasing. (In 1970, one estimate put America's "undocumented" residents at a mere 700,000.)

The cure for illegal immigration is "not difficult," says Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. The government simply has to sternly enforce the laws against hiring illegals. If jobs for these foreign-born workers dry up, he says, so will their flow into the US.

As he and Mr. Krikorian see it, the plant raids are primarily meant to persuade Congress to act on President Bush's proposed law to create a large guest-worker program and a route for illegal immigrants to gain citizenship. "A few cosmetic [enforcement] items," says Mr. Rector, who regards the Bush proposal as an "amnesty" for illegal immigrants. Once the plan was in place, enforcement of immigration law would practically cease, he says, as happened after the last amnesty in 1986. That law wasn't enforced, Rector says, because of a "bizarre coalition" of Democrats, who hoped to "import" future Democratic voters, and business and industrial groups who wanted cheap, flexible employees.

One Democrat in that coalition, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, has been critical of the recent raids, such as one earlier this month at a leather goods factory in New Bedford, Mass.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "turned its efforts to end unauthorized employment and illegal immigration into a spectacle in which the results are separated families, silent transfers in the middle of the night, traumatized children, and hundreds of people stranded without proper legal representation," Senator Kennedy wrote in a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, who oversees ICE.

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