THE CLAIM: IMMIGRANTS
ARE DEPRESSING AMERICAN WAGES.
THE CLAIM: POOR IMMIGRANTS
COST AMERICAN TAXPAYERS A FORTUNE
IN SOCIAL SERVICES.
THE FACTS: Working immigrants contribute
significantly to the Social Security trust fund, providing a projected net benefit of “almost $500 billion
from 1998 to 2022,” according to economist Francine J. Lipman. Lipman estimates that in 2003, the
government collected an estimated $7 billion in Social
Security taxes, or approximately 1 percent of overall
revenue, from 7. 5 million workers with mismatched
Social Security numbers, most of which include
undocumented immigrants. The Manhattan
Institute’s Tamar Jacoby, who studied immigration extensively, told the conservative National
Review that while individuals might receive more
in services than they pay in taxes, “they are growing the [overall economic] pie so significantly that that
cost pales in comparison.” Jacoby cited a recent study
of immigrants in North Carolina, which reported that
over the prior 10 years, Latino immigrants had cost
the state $61 million in services but were responsible
for more than $9 billion in state economic growth.
Fewer than 3 percent of immigrants receive food
stamps. And undocumented people do support local
school districts because, indirectly as renters or directly as homeowners, they pay property taxes.
Sources: “The Taxation of Undocumented Immigrants: Separate,
Unequal, and Without Representation” by Francine J. Lipman;
Manhattan Institute; “The Immigration Equation,” The New York
Times, June 27, 2007
THE FACTS: Despite what
many view as the intuitively obvious
relationship of immigration to wages, most
economists have not found a significant
link between rising immigration and falling wages. The Public Policy Institute of
California study found that immigrants
arriving in that state between 1990 and
2004 increased native-born workers’ wages
by 4 percent. The benefits, attributed to
immigrants generally performing complementary rather than competitive work, extended to native workers at all educational
levels. Giovanni Peri, an economist working at the University of California, Davis,
theorizes that most of the wage losses are sustained
by previous immigrants, because immigrants compete
most directly with one another. The National Academy
of Sciences (NAS) agrees. The NAS reported there was
“only a weak relationship between native wages and
the number of immigrants” in a given place. This was
true for all types of native workers. The one group that
did suffer was “immigrants from earlier waves, for
whom the recent immigrants are close substitutes in
the labor market.”
Sources: Public Policy Institute of California; National
Academy of Sciences; “The Immigration Equation,”
The New York Times, June 27, 2007
THE CLAIM: IMMIGRANTS ARE
INFECTING THE COUNTRY WITH DISEASES
SUCH AS LEPROSY.
THE FACTS: CNN’s Lou Dobbs, in an April
14, 2005, broadcast, said an “invasion of illegal aliens”
was bringing “highly contagious diseases” to America
“decades after those diseases had been eradicated”
here. However, according to the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services, 200 to 250 new cases of
leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, are reported each year.
In a 2006 report, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention said the number of reported cases of
leprosy in the country “peaked at 361 in 1985 and has
declined since 1988.” The claim that malaria is being
spread by immigrants is also wildly exaggerated. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the
disease, which can only be transmitted by mosquitoes,
