Immigrant Costs Defy Analysis : Finances: Lack of data thwarts effort by Rep. Elton Gallegly to pin down illegal residents’ taxpayer burden.

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) has long had a mishmash of conflicting studies cross his desk, each of them trying to pin down the cost of illegal immigration.

One suggests $1.9 billion. Another $19.3 billion.

Tired of the haziness, he and other lawmakers asked the General Accounting Office to study the studies and come up with an independent view on how much illegal immigrants are costing the nation.

The 64-page report from Congress’ investigative arm arrived earlier this month. Its conclusion: There is not enough data available to nail down a reliable figure.

Of 13 national immigration studies issued between 1984 and 1994 by a variety of think tanks and academics, the GAO said all but one concluded that illegal immigrants generated more in public costs than they contributed in revenues to the government. But the GAO avoided endorsing any of the specific cost estimates.

“Because little data are available on illegal aliens’ use of public services and tax payments, the various indirect approaches used to estimate costs and revenues were often based on assumptions whose reasonableness is unknown,” said the report, prepared by GAO staffer Jane L. Ross.

The report’s title summarized its inexactitude: “National Net Cost Estimates Vary Widely.”

So Gallegly, a hard-liner on illegal immigration who chaired an immigration task force set up by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, was no further along than he was before.

After receiving the results, Gallegly called on officials--from Ventura County to Washington, D.C.--to begin tracking the costs of illegal immigrants more closely.

“The bottom line is that there is no question by anybody who is being intellectually honest that illegal immigration is costing taxpayers tremendous amounts of money,” he said. “The problem is, we still don’t know how much.”

Gallegly sometimes touts the higher published estimates.

At a congressional hearing several years ago, for instance, he testified that undocumented immigrants cost taxpayers almost $12 billion a year--that was before a later study boosted the number even higher to $19 billion--and he put the population of illegal immigrants in Southern California at more than 3 million, which almost equals the estimate for the entire nation given by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The difficulty in determining just how much of a drain illegal immigration is on the country--or even whether it is a drain at all--hinges on the widely divergent estimates of how many undocumented people there are in the country, immigration analysts say.

“The limited availability of data on illegal aliens is likely to remain a persistent problem because persons residing in the country illegally have an incentive to keep their status hidden from government officials,” the GAO report said.

As it is now, neither the Census Bureau nor any independent demographic survey scrutinizes residents’ legal status. The census is explicitly forbidden from making such inquiries, opening the door to the wide range of population estimates.

Various studies put the number of illegal immigrants at anywhere from 3.5 million to more than 8 million. The INS estimates there are between 3.5 million and 4 million undocumented immigrants in the country. Gallegly has used a 6 million figure on occasion.

Just how much in cost and benefits illegal immigrants represent remains a huge question mark. Many illegal immigrants pay federal and state income tax, Social Security tax and levies on sales, gasoline and property, studies say. However, there are also costs for providing schooling and health care for illegal immigrants and jailing them if they break the law.

There is consensus on this point: Local and state governments bear a disproportionate share of the burden of illegal immigration by providing most of the services, while most of the taxes go to the federal government.

Both Gallegly and Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) have backed a measure that will reimburse the state of California hundreds of millions of dollars this year for the cost of incarcerating illegal immigrants. That is just one of numerous efforts on the part of officials in states and local communities to recover more money from Washington.

Besides the push for federal payouts, there is also an effort under way to clear up the statistical muddle.

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, a bipartisan panel created in 1990 and headed by former Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, has convened a panel of independent experts organized by the National Academy of Sciences to review the methodologies and assumptions of immigration studies.

“The most important part of solving any problem is recognizing how large the problem is,” Gallegly said. “There is a realization that this problem is significant. But I want better numbers.”

For now, the best conclusion the GAO has come up with is this: “A great deal of uncertainty remains about the national fiscal impact of illegal aliens.”