Immigrant Costs Overstated, Study Finds

A pivotal study of immigration in Los Angeles County inflated the costs and undercounted the contributions of legal and illegal immigrants to local government, according to a report issued Thursday by the Urban Institute.

But although the report said that the drain of immigration on local coffers was overstated by the Los Angeles County study, researchers at the institute, a liberal-leaning think tank here, reached the same general conclusion: The per capita cost to county government of recent immigrants is higher than for the rest of the population.

The Los Angeles County study, released last November, said that the county spent $946 million in 1991-92 providing public services to recent immigrants--described as illegal and legal immigrants who have moved into the county since 1980. The study said that the county collects only $139 million of the $4.3 billion a year in federal, state and local taxes paid by those immigrants.

Those findings have been brandished by California politicians on both sides of the contentious immigration debate.

After reviewing the study, the Urban Institute concluded that the Los Angeles study’s cost estimate is as much as $140 million too high because it attributes to recent immigrants the costs of county health and public social services used by all legal immigrants. Similarly, the county study’s revenue figure for federal, state and local taxes is $848 million too low because it did not take into account additional revenue sources, the Urban Institute said.

Further, the report said, using the Los Angeles study’s accounting scheme, so-called native citizens, defined as people born in the United States, also represent a net cost to the county, although the cost per person is below that of recent immigrants. The county study also made that point, but it has received little attention in the ensuing public debate.

“The implication that you’re left with from some of the discourse on this is that the immigrants cost money and the natives are paying for it,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, co-author of the Urban Institute study. “The natives cost the county money too.”

Authors of the Los Angeles study noted that the Urban Institute’s conclusions generally supported their own and that most of the criticisms were merely quarrels over calculations.

“In essence they are using the same methodology, but different assumptions,” said Manuel Moreno-Evans, the principal author of the Los Angeles County study. “We had different missions.”

The Urban Institute report said that, by focusing on recent immigrants, the Los Angeles study overlooked the contributions of long-term immigrants, those who entered the county before 1980.

Although the Urban Institute authors concluded that recent immigrants represent 17% of the population but pay just 10% of the taxes, they stressed that long-term immigrants, who are 15% of the population, pay a disproportionately high 18% of taxes. Natives, who make up 67% of the population, pay 72% of the taxes.

“Once you’ve let people stay in the country for about 10 years they start paying a lot more in taxes,” said Rebecca L. Clark, Passel’s research partner. “All of the focus in recent studies has been on recent immigrants, which fosters the mistaken impression that problems they face the first few years they come to the country last indefinitely.”

Although the researchers conceded that recent immigrants put more strain on local government services than do long-term immigrants or natives, the authors said that the Los Angeles study made the deficit appear too large. Whereas the Los Angeles study estimated that recent immigrants contribute $1,637 a year each in local taxes, Urban Institute researchers said consideration of other revenue sources, including commercial real estate property taxes, brought the per capita contributions up to at least $3,000.

The comparable figure for all immigrants is $4,264 per capita, compared to $6,902 for natives, the Urban Institute found.