The cost of illegal immigration to taxpayers is growing at an unsustainable pace

Sept. 28, 2017

BY SPENCER RALEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR

The total cost of illegal immigration to federal, state and local taxpayers for the nation’s 12.5 million illegal aliens has increased to $116 billion annually, according to a new study released Wednesday by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The study, one of the most comprehensive to date on the issue, investigates the major contributing factors driving the high cost of illegal immigration, and compares that to the revenue state and local governments collect from illegal aliens.

The findings paint a much different picture than what open-border proponents and many in the mainstream media try to portray – that illegal immigration is somehow a net positive to the United States economy.

FAIR found that while illegal immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes every year, they ultimately cost taxpayers more than seven times what they contribute. The study found that illegal immigrants pay almost $19 billion annually in combined federal, state and local taxes. This estimate is actually considerably higher than what many studies before this have suggested. However, the amount of taxes illegal immigrants pay is dwarfed by the considerable costs that they impose on American taxpayers: nearly $135 billion annually, creating a net deficit of $116 billion.

The majority of the costs to taxpayers, $89 billion (66 percent), are borne at the local and state level. This means that American taxpayers are forced to bear the costs of the federal government’s failure to secure our borders every time they pay school taxes, local tolls, sales and excise taxes. It also means that illegal migrants get a lot of benefits that they don’t pay for.

Conversely, by a 5-to-1 ratio, the taxes paid by illegal immigrants wind up in federal coffers. Despite states bearing most of the costs associated with illegal immigration, the federal government receives 15.4 billion of their tax receipts, compared to $3.5 billion received by states and localities.

When states offer financial support to illegal immigrants, and protect them from the federal immigration enforcement efforts, it’s the law-abiding residents who suffer the financial consequences. New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois and Virginia are all far from the southern border, yet they are still popular destinations for illegal immigrants because welfare programs are easily available, even to those unlawfully in the United States. New York, New Jersey, and northern Virginia have all been leaders in the sanctuary movement. Illinois and Maryland have gone so far as to allow illegal immigrants to obtain drivers licenses, and even vote in some local elections…. MORE

AP photo

Washington Examiner

Paul Bedard

Report: Illegal immigration costs $296 billion in lost taxes

Tax credits received by illegal immigrants and wage write-offs U.S companies claim in their illegal employment costs the Treasury $296 billion over 10 years, according to a new report that is urging Congress to crackdown on the loopholes.

Annually, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, the lost taxes bill is about $30 billion, enough to fund the average middle income tax cut the Trump administration is considering, about $300.

That comes on top of wage losses to legal workers of $118 billion when companies illegally hire undocumented aliens, said CIS.

The financial hit to Americans and the Treasury could impact President Trump’s bid to tackle illegal immigration and boost jobs and wages for Americans. In addition, it is part of the administration’s consideration of continuing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that has given legal status to 800,000 young adults, may of whom are employed in the U.S.

The new “backgrounder” from the prominent immigration reform group urges changes in the tax code, a top Trump and GOP congressional agenda item when the House and Senate return to Washington next week.

CIS targets the wages for illegal immigrants that companies write off as operating expenses and the child tax credits illegals can receive through an IRS loophole.

“The economic rewards of unauthorized employment of aliens are not limited to the higher wages of the illegal workers and the lower labor costs of their employers. Unauthorized alien workers and their employers also enjoy multi-billion dollar tax deductions and tax credits that were enacted into law for the benefit of law-abiding workers and businesses,” said the report.

It estimates the wage write-off at $25 billion a year, or $254 billion over 10 years. The tax credit loss is estimated at $4.2 billion a year…. MORE HERE.

GALEO’s Jerry Gonzalez – photo, DIS

“Shorter: The SPLC says the Nation of Islam is a “hate group” and Jerry Gonzalez of GALEO Inc. is partners in the anti-enforcement Cobb United for Change Coalition with the Nation of Islam.

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Brown supremacist Jerry Gonzalez: An ethnic hustler with ties to “hate group”

By his own mindless standards, the Executive Director of GALEO, Jerry Gonzalez, has ties to at least one “hate group.” Which makes his latest race-baiting hissy fit, smear-shot at my pro-enforcement friend Phil Kent all the more obvious and comical.

Under Jerry (Gerado E.) Gonzalez’s leadership, the anti-enforcement immigration corporation GALEO partnered up with several marginal groups in 2008 to form what they called the “Cobb United for Change Coalition” here in Cobb County, Georgia.

The groups and their leaders involved in this coalition included the Nation of Islam (headed nationally by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan), the corporate-funded Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (Jerry Gonzalez), the New Order National Human Rights Organization (Gerald Rose), the Cobb Immigrant Alliance (Rich Pellegrino), the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (Mexican citizen and former Atlanta Mexican Consul General Teodoro Maus), the Cobb Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the Rev. Dwight Graves), the Family Life Restoration Center (Luther Washington Jr.) and according to an Marietta Daily Journal editorial, the National Council of La Raza (Janet Murguía).

For the readers who do not understand Spanish, a translation: The last group mentioned above translates as “The National Council of the Race.” After forty-six years, La Raza has changed it’s name.

When they aren’t smearing Christian groups and caring for its off shore bank accounts, the SPLC hucksters, put out a “hate map” of “hate groups” which has included the Nation of Islam, one of GALEO’s partners in the Cobb United for Change Coalition.

Shorter: The SPLC says the Nation of Islam is a “hate group” and Jerry Gonzalez of GALEO Inc. is partners in the anti-enforcement Cobb United for Change Coalition with the Nation of Islam.

For mainstream Georgians who have the pleasure of not being familiar with “Angry Jerry” Gonzalez, it may help to know that he is one of the ethnic hustler, hard leftists who uses the endless smears from the discredited SPLC to attempt to keep pro-American dialogue out of the immigration debate. But he is also a wanna be tough guy when he doesn’t like what you have to say. Example: A 2011 Rome News-Tribune report (“Immigration discussion gets heated during panel”  recounts Gonzalez’s antics at a mainstream event in that lovely Georgia city.

Apparently, Gonzalez was “uninvited” as a panel member on a scheduled meeting focused on Georgia’s E-Verify law.

According to the Rome news report, Gonzalez showed up anyway, angrily shouted at Rome’s diminutive and well-liked state Representative, Katie Dempsey, from the audience during and after the event and ended up being escorted out of the event, the building and off the property by Rome police officers. Dempsey was a cosigner on the bill that created the E-Verify requirement for private employers, HB 87. Word around Rome is that the meeting organizers learned of Jerry’s involvement in a lawsuit against the governor and the state to overturn stop enforcement/HB 87 and concluded that Gonzalez wasn’t the best choice for a rational, unbiased discussion.

We agree. And we wonder if Angry Jerry will chase and scream at Phil Kent at the coming event. In the spirit of the leftist smear artists, somebody may want to ask Jerry if he still beats his husband. 

Led by Gonzalez, GALEO toxic for federal judge nominee

Angry Jerry is likely still hysterical over the fact that the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee tossed consideration of a GALEO board member, Dax Lopez, after Barack Obama nominated him for a federal judge seat here in Georgia. Georgia Senator David Perdue, a committee member, made it clear that Lopez’s ties to the radical, Jane Fonda-funded GALEO Inc. caused enough concern to reject Dax Lopez.

If Angry Jerry’s years of marching in the streets of Georgia and Washington D.C. demanding an end to voter ID and enforcement of American immigration laws wasn’t what illustrated the anti-American nature of Jerry Gonzalez, GALEO and it’s mission, maybe it was the fact that Gonzalez is a former employee of the radical MALDEF.

To get an idea of the ideology involved in rabid haters like Gonzalez, it helps to know what a MALDEF founder, Mario Obledo, made it quite clear on the radio in 1998: “California is going to become a Hispanic state and if anyone doesn’t like it they should leave. They ought to go back to Europe.” 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Jerry Gonzalez, race-baiting hater.

Amnesty for ‘Dreamers’ won’t solve policy flaw creating DACA dilemma

The Hill

Getty images

Amnesty for ‘Dreamers’ won’t solve policy flaw creating DACA dilemma

Roy Beck

September 12, 2017

Members of Congress who are frantically peddling DACA amnesty ideas — some with a touch of enforcement added — don’t seem interested in what caused these young-adult illegal immigrants to be in the situation the members are trying to fix.

If they explored the cause, they would see that Congress itself has been the culprit.

The dilemma of the so-called Dreamers has its origins in Congress passing the big 1986 amnesty and several smaller amnesties in the 1990s without including a guarantee that U.S. employers would keep jobs out of the hands of illegal workers.

A primary reason most of the hundreds of thousands of young-adult Dreamers have grown from childhood to adulthood while illegally in this country is that outlaw employers have been allowed to hire the Dreamers’ parents throughout their childhood.
Most illegal immigrants come — and stay — for the jobs. Congress has always made sure they can get them.

Congress continues to refuse to mandate the well-tested and widely-used E-Verify system. The outlaw employers in construction, manufacturing, hospitality and other services, of course, don’t use it. Thus, parents worldwide, at this very moment, are enticed to illegally cross borders and overstay their visas while starting their children on the path to the long-term illegal-status life that Dreamers say is untenable.

The federal government has turned the other way as outlaw employers have depressed incomes for Americans and those here legally while they provided illegal-immigrant parents the wages that have fueled the Dreamers’ dilemma.

Now, we hear voices from nearly every quarter hollering for Congress to make the same mistake again. They would allow employers to give jobs to the next set of illegal-alien parents so they can raise the next generation of Dreamers to demand yet another amnesty.

Current law — through its extended-family chain migration categories — offers even more temptation for parents of other nations to create the Dreamer dilemma for their own children if they believe DACA-type amnesties may become available.

As soon as amnestied illegal immigrants become U.S. citizens, current law allows them to petition for their parents to also obtain lifetime work permits and permanent residency. In such a case, the sins of the parents not only won’t be visited upon the children, they won’t fall upon the parents, either.

Chain migration categories for extended family multiply the problems of an amnesty. Because of these categories, it is not just the amnestied illegal immigrants who get added to compete permanently and directly with Americans in the legal labor market.

In considering a DACA amnesty, for example, Congress might think it is deciding about the economic harm to vulnerable American workers of adding several hundred thousand new competitors in the labor market (the children), but that amnesty threatens to eventually add their parents and extended family as competitors as well.

The downstream effects of the chain migration categories are often overlooked by amnesty advocates and are a significant reason why Dreamer amnesties have never gotten through Congress.

Every illegal border crosser and visa overstayer who was given a path to citizenship in the last 30 years has had the opportunity under current law to become a citizen and sponsor parents, brothers, sisters and adult children.

The speed at which these “chain” immigrants are added into the labor force is metered by the five-year wait to become a citizen and by some annual caps, although there is no limit on parents. But in the lifetime of a young Dreamer given an amnesty today, there would likely be time not only to obtain lifetime work permits for the original chain of extended family but for that Dreamer’s grandparents (as parents of the Dreamer’s parents), aunts and uncles (as siblings of the Dreamer’s parents), and cousins (the children of the Dreamer’s aunts and uncles).

The chains don’t stop there. Every one of those adults could immediately bring their minor children and their spouse. Every spouse can start the same chains in his or her families.

All of them could receive lifetime work permits to compete for jobs with working-age Americans who don’t have a job, nearly one-in-four Americans, according to government data.

That’s the reality of DACA amnesty that Congress needs to face. HERE

Roy Beck is president of NumbersUSA, a non-partisan grassroots immigration-reduction organization.

REAL ID Act HERE.

– —–Original Message—–
From: Josh McKoon [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2015 1:02 PM
To: Nealey, Donna
Subject: Document6.docx

This is what I want to know from DDS.

Questions for DDS

1) Is the response from DHS on a SAVE query involving an illegal alien with DACA deferred action status different than other applicants?

a) If the response is different from other applicants, please provide as clear a picture and explanation as possible of the results of SAVE queries to DHS when an illegal alien with deferred action on deportation documents applies for a drivers license or state ID card. What SAVE issued code exactly is returned and what is code noting/describing?

2) Speaking of illegal aliens, DDS has recently told at least one state Senator that: “undocumented and illegal immigrants are not entitled to a Georgia drivers license or ID card.”

The Obama administration has made it clear that “deferred action does not provide legal status” for the illegal aliens who benefit from his executive action. Illegal aliens under deferred action are still illegal aliens. Is DDS aware of that fact and do you have plans to correct and clarify information to the contrary being provided to state Senators regarding who can obtain a Ga. drivers license?

3) In its defense against the lawsuit filed by Texas and 25 other states, including Georgia, the Obama administration is making it clear that individual states are not required to issue drivers license to illegal aliens who benefit from deferred action. Is DDS aware of this fact?

4) According to the Obama DOJ and multiple legal scholars, the REAL ID Act of 2005 provides security guidelines for states on issuing drivers licenses. That law allows states to issue drivers licenses to deferred action illegals, it does not require states to issue drivers licenses to deferred action illegal aliens. Are you making that fact clear in responses to inquiries from elected officials?

5) How many drivers licenses have been issued to DACA recipients since that practice began in 2012? How many state ID cards? What is the estimated added cost, if any, of this process? Has DDS added any staff to accommodate this process?

6) Considering his November 2014 action, does DDS have an estimate or prediction on numbers of future deferred action applicants to guide preparation/plans to issue drivers licenses and state ID cards if the president’s executive actions are not defeated in congress or the courts?

7) What is SOP for DDS when an applicant’s documents prove to be false, unverifiable or do not reflect actual identity of applicant? Does DDS report use of fraudulent documents by applicants for drivers license or state ID cards to any law enforcement agency?

8) Does DDS keep a record of applicants who are declined for a DL or State ID? If so, what is the number of declines and reasons for declination?

9) The federal SAVE program provides verification of immigration status of applicants for public benefits, mostly for non-citizens. Positive responses to queries do not require states to issue a drivers license or any other public benefit. Is this fact being made clear in responses to questions from the public and elected officials?

REPLY does not answer REAL ID Act question. *But…

From: Mitchell, Michael [mailto:mbmitchell@dds.ga.gov] 
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2015 1:17 PM
To: Nealey, Donna
Subject: Re: DDS Questions – SB 6 – Senator Josh McKoon

Donna,

In response to Senator McKoon’s questions, because both a Georgia driver’s license and an identification card are considered to be a public benefit, in accordance with O.C.G.A. § 50-36-1(a), in order to obtain a Georgia driver’s license or an identification card, a non-citizen applicant must provide documented proof of identity and lawful presence in the United States using at least one of the secure and verifiable documents specified in O.C.G.A. § 50-36-2(b)(3).

For non-citizen applicants, the eligibility to receive a driver’s license or identification card is made through the S.A.V.E. program, as required by 50-36-1(h). Any non-citizen whose eligibility cannot be verified through the S.A.V.E. program in accordance with O.C.G.A. § 40-5-21.2 will not receive a Georgia driver’s license or identification card.

Any case in which an applicant’s documents are proven to be false or fictitious is referred to local, state, and/or Federal law enforcement authorities, as well as the Investigative Services Division of the Department of Driver Services.

*The S.A.V.E. response code for a non-citizen who has been granted deferred action status is 188 “INITL RESP. 188 DACA – EMLOY AUTH” (my emphasis – dak).

Since 2012, 13,027 non-citizens have received a Georgia driver’s license, 2,433 non-citizens have received a Georgia identification card, and 38 non-citizens have received both with the S.A.V.E. response code of 188.

Please let me know if I can offer any further assistance.

Thanks,

Mike

Mike Mitchell, Legislative Liaison
Commissioner’s Office

Department of Driver Services

678-413-8413
www.dds.ga.gov