ShareThisUnder the Obama administration's health care reform, Medicaid eligibility is expanded to allow more Americans onto the program. There has been much written about how requiring the uninsured to become insured and covering everyone will cause the federal budget and deficit to balloon over time.
What is less known is the impact on the budget and on taxpayers of granting a path to citizenship or to immigrants in this country illegally. Apparently, it could be huge.
The Center for Immigration Studies is a nonpartisan think tank that supports lower immigration levels and issues papers on the cost of immigration to federal and state budgets. The Center recently issued a paper on what it would cost to provide health care to immigrants now here illegally, if those persons were granted amnesty.
Immigration reform is no longer on the table for this year. Democrats now control Congress and the White House and many progressives wanted to push immigration reform through before the November elections. While health care reform was tough for Democrats, immigration reform, at least of the type the Obama administration supports, would have been impossible. Many Democrats in swing districts feared that if Democrats did approve a so-called path to citizenship for the 11 million to 12 million or so persons living illegally in the United States that would have turned tough reelection bids into mission impossible.
Polling on immigration reform is tough to decipher, but the recession and drug trafficking across the U.S.-Mexican border have bolstered anti-immigrant sentiment. According to USNews.com, recent polls show that: "60 percent, consider illegal immigration a 'very serious problem'...."
Americans need to be more fully informed about the true costs of granting legal status to millions of immigrants currently here illegally. I will say once more, as I always do when I write about this most touchy of topics, it is not individual immigrants who are the problem. It is mass immigration and our country's ability to absorb and support the millions who enter the U.S. each year both legally and illegally that concerns me.
Just so we're clear on this: current law bars illegal immigrants from receiving welfare benefits such as Medicaid (other than for emergency medical care.) But what happens if, as the Democrats would like, they become legal citizens? Congress places a five-year exclusion from most welfare programs on legal immigrants.
In addition, visa sponsors are required of legal immigrants. Sponsors are supposed to help out new immigrants with financial support for the first few years they are living in the United States. Would lawmakers make immigrants granted legal status through amnesty secure sponsors? The answer is, probably not. That in turn would transform them into a greater financial burden on taxpayers.
Calculating the cost of covering millions of legalized immigrants through Medicaid is a very difficult task. Medicaid is of course a joint federal/state program with benefits varying in some places. And the Center for Immigration Studies also takes into account the fact that not all immigrants here illegally would qualify for Medicaid. Only those with families of four living on $29,000 or less (part of the poverty formula used to qualify low-income Americans for Medicaid) would qualify.
"Nonetheless, we still estimate that covering just 3.1 million uninsured illegal immigrants with the lowest incomes would cost $8.1 billion annually," the CIS report says. "This estimate does not include the extra costs of the illegal immigrants whose incomes would qualify them for the new affordability credits under health reform."
A lot of other things could be done with $8.1 billion each year: job-creation, health care for long-term unemployed Americans, clean energy investment and so on. We should think long and hard before spending it to accommodate persons who begin their lives in the United States by breaking the laws to get and stay here.
(Bonnie Erbe is a TV host and writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail bonnieerbe(at)CompuServe.com.)
COLUMN
What is more to
What is more to say
youtube.com/watch?v=7Lxx1FZNCu0&feature=related
youtube.com/watch?v=DUgaBcUSfAs&feature=player_embedded
youtube.com/watch?v=Yi17AYMESJ0&feature=channel
youtube.com/watch?v=Sdodd2PYkG4&feature=related
youtube.com/watch?v=5eI3kusMRXY&feature=channel
youtube.com/watch?v=j-yQZLMc3ac&feature=channel
youtube.com/watch?v=DUgaBcUSfAs&feature=player_embedded
youtube.com/watch?v=mBYKx6AR2YA&feature=channel
youtube.com/watch?v=zEo2Vhgf4AM&feature=related
youtube.com/watch?v=XpGuMXLW5fg&feature=related
TERRIBLE ARTICLE
I cant tell Bonnie has not researched the facts........LEGALIZING THESE ILLEGALS WILL GIVE THEM A WAY TO PAY TAXES! THIS WILL ACTUALLY BOOST OUR ECONOMY!
"The Center for Immigration
"The Center for Immigration Studies is a nonpartisan think tank". Is this a joke?? this is a racist, anti-immigration group founded by the white supremacist John Tanton...do your homework.
Finally--someone talks about facts!
Funny to see the two instant comments (probably from staff of some of the paid pro-mass-immigration outfits that are funded by employers of cheap labor). How crudely they try to smear people who talk about facts, and use guilt by (fabricated) association--as if that could rebut numerical facts.
Aah but for these shills, it is very dangerous to have people like Bonnie and CIS actually doing the math on what amnesty for illegal immigrants will do to our economy! Quick, try to smack her down and smear everyone she gets her facts from, or else people will wake up and notice that at a time when our economy is in desperate shape, and possibly even teetering on the brink of a full-scale depression, that we cannot possibly afford to legalize millions of poor unskilled people. If we do, they will consume far more in government services than they will ever pay in taxes.
And then they will be entitled to bring in yet more unskilled uneducated relatives to consume ever more of our declining resources.
Thanks, Bonnie, for introducing some factual discussion on this topic, where so much discussion is dominated by economically motivated schemers and their paid flacks.
(Question to the flack: so if 40% of people already pay no federal income taxes, how is it possibly going to be the case that people with no education who do jobs like bus tables and run edger machines, are EVER going to be among the upper earners who pay federal income tax? Obviously, they are not going to be. Even if they are hardworking people, they are coming with their hands outstretched looking for help from the day they arrive. And their children and uncles and aunts are also going to be arriving, also with their hands out. This is obvious to anyone who reads the newspaper, and CIS's math shows it to be true. You flacks are just liars trying to pretend it isn't so.)
This law is a step backwards,
This law is a step backwards, yes, but I honestly don't see any other way of getting illegals out of the country. Simply asking them won't work, so I don't see any other way of getting them to leave short of a holocaust style roundup. And no, I'm not racist, it's just that there's no other semi-civil way to do this. I honestly don't know why they're complaining so much... in WWII my grandpa who lived in Hawaii was thrown in an internment camp and all of his land was confiscated (which he never got back after the war) and he WAS legal. Yea he was bitter, but he didn't complain about it half as much as all these illegals are about the country enforcing a law. If you have so much anxiety about being pulled over and getting deported, you should at least try riding a bike or walking (since you don't even have a license to begin with if you're illegal). I realize that the economy is dependent upon the amazing savings that can be made by hiring illegal workers, but the problem I have with them being here is that they are confined to only the bottom tiers of America's society. And no, I'm not talking about Mexicans in general, because a lot of them are moving up in society - I'm referring to illegals, who will prob never get a soc sec #, and will thus be stuck in their existence of ridiculously underpaid manual labor. By having illegals in this country, we're essentially perpetuating a class of slavery, whereas in Mexico, they would have chances to progress since they are actual citizens there (considering that Mexico undergoes major changes in its, er, "management."