“New Americans” drain state dry.
Maryland has a fast growing illegal alien population of about a quarter million persons, more than quadrupling since 2000. Between 2000 and 2008, the state’s foreign-born population has grown by 34.6 percent while its native-born population has increased by 3.3 percent. . Public school enrollment of students who require special instruction in English has soared even more, rising by 93.5 percent from 2000 to 2008 while overall enrollment declined slightly.
This illegal alien population represents a major burden on the state budget and is borne by Maryland’s taxpayers. The costs imposed on law-abiding Marylanders are unfair and unwelcome even in the best of times, but are especially burdensome at a time when the state has been cutting jobs and funding for schools and health care. Furthermore, the state is facing what the Maryland Budget and Tax Policy Institute projects will be a $2 billion deficit in the 2010 budget.
In 2008, the foreign-born population in Maryland represented nearly one in every eight residents (12.4%), and illegal aliens constituted more than one-third of that immigrant population. This illegal immigrant population costs the state’s taxpayers more than $1.4 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration. The annual fiscal burden amounts to about $790 per Maryland household headed by a native-born resident.
In addition to the fiscal cost estimates in this study, there are additional burdens caused by illegal aliens, i.e., foreign remittances that they sent abroad constitute a major drain on the state’s economy. The Inter-American Development Bank estimated that remittances from Maryland just to Latin America and the Caribbean amounted to $921 million in 2006. If this amount had been earned by American workers, it would have been spent locally, and it would have generated sales, production and jobs in the state as well as increased tax collection.
The more than $1.4 billion dollars in costs incurred by Maryland taxpayers annually result from outlays in the following areas:
Education
Based on estimates of the illegal immigrant population in Maryland and documented costs of K-12 schooling, Marylanders spend more than $966 million annually on education for an estimated 80,800 children of illegal aliens. An additional amount of nearly $250 million is spent on providing special English instruction to an estimated 35,000 children of illegal aliens. About 9.6 percent of the K-12 public school students in Maryland are children of illegal aliens.
Health Care
Taxpayer-funded, unreimbursed medical outlays for health care provided to the state’s illegal alien population amount to about $167 million a year.
Incarceration
The cost of incarcerating illegal aliens in Maryland’s state and county prisons amounts to about $29 million a year not including related law enforcement and judicial expenses or the monetary costs of the crimes that led to the incarceration.
Some state and local taxes are received from illegal immigrants even from those working off the books. But, those same tax collections, or more likely an increased amount, would occur if the jobs were done by legal workers. So, unless it is illogically assumed that no legal U.S. or immigrant or foreign guestworker would do the jobs now done by illegal workers, it makes little sense to consider this a true offset to the tax burden. The estimated amount of the taxes currently collected from Maryland’s illegal workers is about $204 million per year.
These fiscal costs would be considerably higher if other cost areas such as assistance programs for needy families or welfare benefits for American workers displaced by illegal alien workers or resulting from depressed wages were included in the calculation.
The current proposal to adopt an amnesty for the illegal aliens would not lessen the burden if enacted. Rather, it would increase the access of this population to additional social welfare benefits and allow them to legally apply for the state’s reverse tax benefit known as the Earned Income Tax Credit.
These costs are not inevitable. State and local policymakers have several means at their disposal to discourage settlement of illegal aliens. Maryland and some local jurisdictions, on the other hand, are permissive towards illegal immigration. Marylanders concerned about the impact on their state and local communities should demand an end to those policies.