Hollow Blog

Contrary to popular myth, immigrants — illegal or legal — impose less costs on the U.S. health-care system than U.S. citizens.

Indeed a Feb. 2008 RAND Corporation study concluded:

Overall, immigrants to the United States use relatively few health services, primarily because they are generally healthier than their American-born counterparts, according to a November edition of the journal Health Affairs –- estimates that in the United States about $1.1 billion in federal, state and local government funds are spent annually on health care for undocumented immigrants aged 18 to 64. That amounts to an average of $11 in taxes for each U.S. household. In contrast, a total of $88 billion in government funds were spent on health care for all non-elderly adults in 2000.

And:

“Our findings show a relatively small amount of tax money is spent on health services provided to undocumented immigrants,” said James P. Smith, the RAND chair in Labor Market and Demographic Studies and an author of the report.

 Other noteworthy items:

“This suggests that the act of immigrating to the United States favors those who are generally healthier and may discourage those who have chronic health problems,” said study co-author Sood.

“But the largest factor [of significantly lower healthcare costs of immigrants -- legal or illegal] appears to be due to their being generally healthier than the native-born population.”

Bottom line:

The foreign-born (especially the undocumented) use disproportionately fewer medical services and contribute less to health care costs in relation to their population share (this means U.S. citizens), likely because of their better relative health and lack of health insurance.

No wonder the demand for illegal (undocumented) immigrants is high! They are healthier than citizens and the employer does not have to pay for health insurance. Even if undocumented workers did have health insurance, their healthier-than-US-citizens diet and lifestyles would still make them a better employment choice.

A timely and poignant article, “The Great Immigration Panic”, appeared in the June 03, 2008The
New York Times editorial section.

Some highlights:

An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate
terror among millions of people who pose no threat.

Immigrants in detention languish without lawyers and decent medical care even
when they are mortally ill. Lawmakers are struggling to impose standards and
oversight on a system deficient in both. Counties and towns with spare jail
cells are lining up for federal contracts as prosecutions fill the system to
bursting. Unbothered by the sight of blameless children in prison scrubs, the
government plans to build up to three new family detention centers. Police
all over are checking papers, empowered by politicians itching to enlist in
the federal crusade.

Perhaps even more noteworthy are the over-400 online Readers’ Comments for
this article. Here are some highlights:

The pious tone of the descendents of these immigrants [all Americans being
immigrants] is hypocritical. I live in Canada but [I] am an American Citizen.
Mostly proud of our nation except when xenophobia sets in.

My wife and I had a nightmare trying to go through the legal route of trying
to get her a [ U.S.] green card. They put us through hell even when she was
pregnant with our first baby, including sending her home, trying to ban her
for three years. We are a young couple, college educated, and with jobs.
The whole process left us with such a bad taste we decided to move to New
Zealand. […] The US has become so fearful that all common sense has been thrown
out the window. Life is just easier here [in New Zealand] and it could be in
the US. It’s not to late to turn things around [in the U.S.] … I almost cried
after going through the immigration system in the U.S. with my “wife”.
I love the US, but please let’s get our common sense back. Become the country
that once had amazing ideals.

Venal politicians use illegal immigration as they’ve used same sex marriage,
‘Willie Horton’s’, abortion, et al to divide and conquer. The whole conversation
with respect to illegal immigrants is phony to the point of nausea. If my family,
my children are starving in Mexico, I’ll gut chickens in the US if it’s the
last thing I do to try and keep them alive. Hypocracy, it’s what’s for dinner.

[Another Reader commented:] “Those who violate the law, who ignore the
rules and who have no grasp of the underlying precepts are NOT a benefit to
the nation.” [And here is another Reader's reply:] I guess that would
include former New York Gov. George Pataki’s mother. As he reports, she came
to this country completely illegally, using her sister’s passport (something
quite common, actually). She didn’t overstay a visa because she fell in love,
or fell ill, or was misadvised by a storefront immigration advice office in
her neighborhood. No. She deliberately violated the law from the get-go. [… Corrupt
governments and even citizens] are merely looking for scapegoats for economic
problems, rather than solutions?

If you want to understand why immigration is a problem, look to why businesses
who hire foreign workers without papers can do so without any risk of prosecution
and why the foreign citizens cannot find work and decent living conditions
in their own countries.

My wife had a Mexican passport, a bank account and a letter affirming that
she had no criminal record. We had her birth certificate, baptismal records
and, even, her school records back to grade school. To say the least we felt
ready and able to tackle the INS. It took us seven and a half years to obtain
her citizenship. We were treated brusquely and often rudely [by INS] ….

Stop blaming “big business” [for hiring illegal immigrants]; they
are only trying to keep prices low because YOU don’t want to pay more for
goods and services. YOU are the end user of immigrant labor. YOU are a hypocrite
and a moron. You are benefiting every day from the hard work and sacrifice
of immigrants. If you think that you, me, and our entire economy would not
be hugely affected if we forced them all to leave, you can’t even follow
your own logic to its obvious conclusion. The level of hypocrisy and ignorance
coming from the anti-immigrant movement is disgusting.

Immigration is necessary for the USA as it is for Europe and for any other
country with aging populations and the necessity to continue growing and modernizing.

“Every country has to secure its borders” — oft stated and accepted
without critical examination. Human experience suggests it just aint so.
The rush to secure the borders subsumes the assertion that the borders are
not secure. If true, and I suspect it is, it proves that securing the borders
is unnecessary. It proves that our country has grown from its humble origins
to its present position as economic and military collosus of the known world
with insecure borders. In fact, it may be those insecure borders which have
landed us at the top of the heap. Messing with them risks finding out the
answer.

Looking back through the lens of history, we will be remembered not just
for what we did — treating immigrants more harshly than we treat citizens
– as for what we didn’t do — finding a solution to the immigration problem.
[...] Rome fell because large groups of immigrant populations invaded and
established their own states within Roman territory. The longstanding practice
of assimilating immigrants was not enforced on these groups, and the Roman
state ran out of money and armies to deal with the new arrivals. [Good point
about money. ICE is spending huge amounts of taxpayer dollars on jails and
detention centers as well as transportation … and let’s not
forget the top-dollar Government wages of officers, agents, judges, and administrators.]

Will your local county Sheriff keep real criminals out of jails — just to make room for non-criminal or petty-criminal illegals — because they want the big money from ICE?

With help from U.S. hard-earned tax dollars, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is filling jails across the country with mostly non-criminal immigrants who have been torn away from their families, jobs and homes.

Tens of thousands of arrested immigrants are being held in county jails while they await court dates and eventual deportation.

The county governments are eager to receive immigrants into their jails because ICE (U.S. government) pays well. This is a double whammy for tax-payers who already pay local (city/state) tax as well as Federal income tax.

In conclusion, Americas Policy Program of the Center for International Policy notes…

Clearly the federal government has failed to create a sustainable immigration system. But involving local governments and police in immigration law enforcement and detention is not a solution. It just extends this failure to new levels of government.

The June 2, 2008 Washington Post article “Immigration Prosecutions Hit New High: Increased Use of Criminal Charges Strains System” further strengthens the argument that the U.S. Immigration service is dysfunctional and many of its new “policies” and practices are based on Administration politics, xenophobia, and other other undesirable characteristics.

As we noted earlier, these type of “policies” and practices hurt the U.S. in many different ways, including:

• deterring legal resources away from much-more-needed cases (see below)
• prison/jail overcrowding

Some highlights of the Washington Post article include:

 [Some] federal officials are more critical, warning that the focus on immigration is distorting the functions of law enforcement and the courts. Several Arizona officials noted that U.S. prosecutors there last year were so short on resources, they chose not to prosecute a number of marijuana seizures of less than 500 pounds, although they later revised the guideline to 20 pounds.

And…

“We’re concerned about the misdirection of resources,” said Heather Williams, first assistant to the federal public defender of Arizona. Each day her office’s lawyers spend on misdemeanor border-crossing cases, she said, “they’re not talking about a drug case, a sex crime, a murder, assault or any number of white-collar cases — and the same is obviously true of the prosecutors….This is taking on a life of its own,” she said.

And, finally, on the topic of civil liberties…

Williams also warned that the program tests the U.S. legal system’s promise of fairness to the accused. “If we as a U.S. citizen were placed in any other country on the planet, and had to resolve a case in a day that could result in being deported and having a criminal record, we would be outraged, and so would our government,” she said.