Illegal residents cost state $175M

12/10/2005

Study comes as Pawlenty prepares to propose changes

BY PATRICK SWEENEY
Pioneer Press

About 80,000 illegal immigrants live in Minnesota, and the state services they and their children use cost taxpayers more than $175 million a year, a new study concludes.

The study was ordered by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who plans to propose law changes affecting illegal immigrants during the coming legislative session, said Brian McClung, a spokesman for the governor.

“We need to remember that we are a nation of immigrants, and we should support immigration that is legal and orderly,” Pawlenty said in a statement announcing the release of the report Thursday. “Unfortunately, the current system is neither and needs to be reformed.”

The report, which was written by the Office of Strategic Planning & Results Management in the state Department of Administration, focused only on the cost to the state of illegal immigrants. Some studies have concluded that the benefit to the national economy of work by noncitizens exceeds the cost of public services they consume.

“Obviously, there is a school of thought that there is an economic advantage to having these folks in our workforce,” said Administration Commissioner Dana Badgerow. “We just didn’t look at that side of it.”

Badgerow said Pawlenty did not request analysis of the economic benefit contributed by illegal immigrants.

State Sen. Sandy Pappas, a St. Paul Democrat who clashed with Pawlenty this summer over her proposal to offer in-state tuition rates to foreign-born children of illegal immigrants who graduate from Minnesota high schools, said she welcomed a public debate on national immigration policy and the contributions and costs of immigrants in Minnesota.

“People come to this country seeking a better life and a better future for their children, and we need to get that out in the open,” said Pappas, who had not yet read the report. “It’s why my Finnish grandparents came, and why my Greek grandparents came.”

McClung refused to speculate about what law changes Pawlenty will propose. On Nov. 29 and on Wednesday, Pawlenty conducted closed-door “listening sessions” with small groups of community leaders in Worthington and Rochester.

Rep. Doug Magnus, R-Slayton, who attended the Worthington session last week, said he believes Pawlenty wants to make it easier for law enforcement officers to crack down on the widespread use of false identity papers by some noncitizens.

Magnus said he also believes Pawlenty supports some form of President Bush’s so-called “guest worker” program that would allow nonresidents to enter the United States to work for a specified period and then require them to return home.

McClung said he did not know Pawlenty’s position on the guest-worker proposal.

During his 2002 campaign for governor, Pawlenty promised to require that state driver’s licenses issued to foreign visitors to Minnesota include their visa expiration dates. When lawmakers did not pass that legislation, Pawlenty imposed the mandate administratively. This year, he threatened to veto a higher education funding bill if it included the provision for in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants, Pappas said.

The new report by the Administration Department is a compilation of other research about the size and scope of the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. and in Minnesota. It estimates the costs — for public education, for state-subsidized health care programs and for incarceration — the state incurs for illegal immigrants.

The report makes no policy recommendations. Key elements of the report include:

• The illegal immigrant population in the state was estimated at between 80,000 and 85,000 people in 2004, giving Minnesota a higher number of illegal immigrants than 20 other states.

• Minnesota’s public schools serve about 7,000 illegal immigrants between the ages of 5 and 18, and more than 10,000 U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. Children born here are citizens. The cost of schooling both sets of children was estimated at between $146 million and $158 million a year.

• Illegal immigrants cost Minnesota health care assistance programs about $35 million a year, with the federal government paying about half that figure.

• The state pays about $14 million a year to imprison illegal immigrants convicted of crimes in Minnesota.

The study said it was difficult to estimate the taxes paid by illegal immigrants. It noted that about 8,000 people pay state income taxes using special filing numbers, and it said “there is also information indicating that illegal immigrants do pay a significant amount of taxes through employer withholdings.”

Four years ago, a study commissioned by Hispanic Advocacy and Community Empowerment through Research, a Hispanic advocacy group at the University of Minnesota, looked at the benefit side of illegal immigrants in Minnesota.

That study, prepared by James Kielkopf, a Democratic-Farmer-Labor activist and economic forecasting consultant who has worked for several Twin Cities financial institutions, assumed there were then between 18,000 and 48,000 undocumented workers — the term he used instead of illegal immigrants — working in Minnesota.

The study, conducted during a period of very high employment, also assumed that all the jobs held by those undocumented workers would go unfilled if they were not available. Kielkopf concluded the total value of that labor — “It’s their spending, plus their employers’ spending, plus the employers’ suppliers’ spending’’ — to the Minnesota economy was $1.6 billion to $3.8 billion a year depending on the number of workers.

Kielkopf estimated that economic activity contributed about $300 million to state and local taxes in Minnesota.

McClung, Pawlenty’s spokesman, said Pawlenty believes current immigration laws and practices have produced a chaotic situation that “can’t be justified by simply saying that it provides cheap labor to the state.”

by the numbers

$175 million: The annual cost of state services to illegal immigrants and their children, according to new state study.

$300 million: Annual contribution to state and local tax rolls from the economic activity generated by illegal immigrants, according to another analysis.