Handouts? Go Beyond the Usual Scapegoats

Picking up where we left off, I said in my last column that I can’t find anybody who can prove whether the costs of illegal immigration outweigh the benefits. This, of course, was like throwing red meat to a pack of wild dogs.

Aside from the social costs, readers screamed, illegal immigrants drive down wages for everyone. And besides, a study has just been released saying that illegal immigrants are a $10-billion annual drain on the federal budget alone.

Yeah, I know. I had seen the report from the Center for Immigration Studies, but didn’t entirely trust it.

Why?

Same reason I wouldn’t trust a report from the petroleum and coal lobbies saying global warming doesn’t exist.

CIS is on the warpath to stamp out illegal immigration, which is certainly a defensible position given undeniable social and economic costs, as well as the fact that it is illegal, after all.

But even if the claim is completely true, let’s keep in mind that $10 billion is less than one-half of 1% of the federal budget. And considering this outfit’s agenda, only a fool would accept its findings as the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

CIS claims illegal-immigrant households cost the federal government $2,700 more a year in services than they pay in taxes and that legalizing undocumented immigrants would triple the drain from $10 billion to $29 billion. That’s because more immigrants, ostensibly, would take advantage of more government services.

But before the ink on the study was dry, it was being shot full of holes by other organizations.

Yes, poor people pay less in taxes than rich people, said the National Immigration Forum. But that’s an incomplete measure, because illegal immigrants make a huge contribution to the world’s most dynamic economy.

You don’t have to trust the forum, which has its own ax to grind in favor of legalization for some undocumented immigrants. Daniel Griswold, an economist with the libertarian Cato Institute, agrees that the study’s analysis is incomplete.

“It doesn’t take into account the broader economic context, which is the ability of employers to hire workers who are important to broad sections of the economy, from hotels to construction to retail, and agriculture as well,” he said.

At the Urban Institute, researcher Michael Fix also has some problems with the CIS numbers. For one thing, he points out, CIS counted the U.S.-born children of illegal heads of households in its analysis, but not older siblings who have become taxpayers.

“They’re counting people when they’re kids and not adults, or when they’re tax eaters and not taxpayers,” said Fix.

Fix and others challenged the notion that legalization would triple the cost to taxpayers. They argue that a legalization program under President Reagan made immigrants more productive and raised their salaries, making them less of a drain.

This still leaves us with the question of whether illegal immigrants drive down wages for legal residents.

“Not for everybody,” says the Urban Institute’s Fix. “They’ve driven down wages for people without a high school education, and that number is dwindling.”

Ruben Beltran, Mexican consul general in Los Angeles, noted that illegal immigrants often do jobs that others aren’t dying to do. Come to think of it, I don’t know a lot of native-born Californians of European descent who are clamoring for a chance to pick strawberries.

“One thing people don’t think about is the cost of consumer goods if these immigrants weren’t working in certain sectors,” Beltran said. “For the sake of discussion, if you have an iceberg lettuce on the shelf right now for 95 cents, what would the price be” if cheap labor were unavailable?

It might be two bucks. It might be three.

Would we pay that?

Americans love bargains above all else. We crave cheap, which is why Wal-Mart is the Church of State.

Does our lust for the 95-cent head of lettuce make us responsible for illegal immigration?

I wonder if those who complain about illegal immigrants driving down wages are also shopping at the store that exports jobs, chases dirt-cheap labor around the globe, and makes huge profits while being stingy with its U.S. employees.

So with all that, I’m still not sure anyone has proved whether illegal immigration leaves the average taxpayer ahead or behind.

But if you’ve got a problem with questionable handouts, don’t limit yourself to illegal immigrants. American taxpayers shell out billions in farm subsidies, including $34 billion to corn farmers alone between 1995 and 2002.

And the result?

Thousands of Mexican farmers, unable to compete, have been driven off their land.

They climb fences, cross deserts, and head north, where they find no shortage of employers.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.