RALEIGH – Never, never underestimate your adversary.
This could be another column about my new gaming passion, City of Heroes, where following the rule can help your character avoid unscheduled trips to the hospital. But I’d hate for maniacal gamers to google me and start debating the niceties of choosing secondary powers or taunting super-villains. It’s just too much controversy.
That’s why my topic today is immigration. Only slightly less controversial.
On Tuesday, two researchers at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, Jack Kasarda and Jim Johnson, released a long-awaited analysis of the Hispanic population in North Carolina. Using available data and applying some informed speculation, they came up with estimates of population, economic heft, and fiscal impact that were headline-grabbing and, for the most part, plausible.
Much of the media coverage of the report played up the finding that North Carolina’s Hispanics accounted for $9.2 billion in economic transactions in 2004. But the more eye-catching finding within public-policy circles will be that Hispanics cost state and local taxpayers a net of about $102 per Hispanic resident. That is, Hispanics received $817 million in state and local services last year — mostly public education ($467 million) and public health care ($299 million) — while accounting for $756 million in taxed paid, either directly or indirectly.
At first glance, this finding gives both sides in the illegal-immigration dispute a talking point. Restrictionists will emphasize that taxpayers are net victims of the current flow of illegal immigrants, just like they’ve been saying. Open-border advocates will respond that the fiscal hit is much smaller than restrictionist rhetoric would suggest, and that the $61 million taxpayers lose annually is more than offset by the value of goods and services native-born North Carolinians can buy at lower prices (or higher quality, in some cases) due to immigrant labor.
But on second glance, the restrictionists end up with the better talking point, for an important reason: “Hispanics” and “immigrants” are not synonymous terms. Kasarda and Johnson said it was not possible to disaggregate legal and illegal immigrants for the purposes of computing the net fiscal impact. I take them at their word. Unfortunately, it means that the resulting data do not show what pro-immigration folks (I count myself among them, for the most part) might like them to show.
Slightly fewer than half of North Carolina’s Hispanics are here illegally, according to the study, but the overwhelming share of Hispanic immigrants from other countries over the past decade came illegally. That’s likely to continue to be true. It is also reasonable to conclude that illegal immigrants pay far less than the average in taxes, though they do pay some. Their illegal status blocks their eligibility to some services, too, but probably not enough to offset the lower taxes (public school, which illegal immigrants’ children can clearly attend, being the largest spending category, for example). Besides, while illegals may have a harder time accessing some services, their lower incomes make them more motivated to seek them.
Thus, if pro-immigration groups think this study will buttress their position against the restrictionists, they are mistaken. A better approach would be to argue that any net cost to taxpayers from large-scale immigration can be mitigated or eliminated by cutting back on government programs – a policy that I wholeheartedly endorse, naturally, but that many who favor looser immigration policies may find uncomfortable.
Hey, it’s time for them to be heroic.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.