Organization says illegal immigrants hurt state's economy

So says Michael Bloomberg’s Partnership for a New American Economy, whose 2016 study — “The Contributions of New Americans in Oregon” — was lauded by Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek in her recent call to legalize many so-called “undocumented” workers.

PNAE’s study, however, is riddled with omissions and misrepresentations that mask illegal immigrants’ harm to Oregonians. Here, let’s take a fuller, fairer look at the subject.

One of PNAE’s flimsiest assertions is that Oregon’s illegal immigrants “are not displacing the U.S.-born, but rather taking jobs few Americans are interested in pursuing.” (PNAE puts the state’s illegal-immigrant population at 114,000; the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for immigration reductions, recently set it at closer to 170,000).

And, no doubt, industries like food preparation, custodial services and construction, which rely heavily on lower-skilled manual labor, teem with workers here illegally.

This is not, however, because Americans “won’t do” physically arduous jobs. Rather, in great part, it’s because a huge influx of low-skilled illegal immigrants — almost three-fifths of whom, labor economist Vernon M. Briggs Jr. has estimated, possess less than a high-school education — has so depressed wages for those jobs that U.S. citizens can’t afford to take them.

As per Americans and manual work, “the only catch is that they want to make enough money to actually be able to support their families,” writes David Seminara of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). “When companies offer attractive wages and benefits, they generally have little trouble finding American workers to do jobs in...fields like garbage collection, custodial work and dishwashing.”

But when illegal immigrants overinflate the labor supply, take jobs, and drive down wages and benefits, they contribute to environments like Oregon’s — where, the state Employment Department reports, some 200,000 people, the great majority of them American, are officially unemployed, “marginally attached to the labor force” or part-time workers wanting full-time work.

Also consider: Many illegal immigrants’ wages are paid “under the table” in cash, are not reported to government authorities — and, so, go untaxed.

In Arizona in one recent year, CIS’ Steven Camarota has estimated, fully 45 percent of illegal immigrants were under-the-table workers. Nationwide, Dennis Sebayan has reported on SmartAsset.com, this illegal immigrant-fueled “underground economy” may recently have cost American governments, including those in Oregon, $450 billion to $500 billion a year in lost revenue — revenue that could have been used to fix roads, fund schools, and balance budgets. All this, however, goes unmentioned in PNAE’s study.

So too does the fact that illegal-immigrant workers remit much of their U.S. income to relatives abroad. In one recent year, the World Bank has reported, foreign-born U.S. residents sent some $32 billion to Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador — the home countries, estimates the Migration Policy Institute, of two-thirds of the United States’ illegal immigrants.

If the money sent abroad by Oregon’s illegal immigrants was earned instead by the state’s U.S. citizens, it would remain here to help support our own people and fuel our own economy.

And last: “We are currently unable to calculate the amount spent on any public benefits or services used by [Oregon’s] undocumented immigrant families,” laments the PNAE study.

Well, its authors must not have tried too hard. In a detailed report published in December 2012 — the most recent to examine the subject in depth — the Federation for American Immigration Reform determined that Oregon’s illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born children used $1 billion-plus a year in state- and local-government services but that illegal immigrants paid only $77 million a year in state and local taxes. In the four years since, their cost to Oregon’s taxpayers almost certainly has increased.

The facts are clear: Illegal immigrants take jobs from Oregonians and siphon money from the state’s private economy and government coffers. In response, Oregon’s state government operates under a self-imposed “sanctuary” law that impedes illegal immigrants’ removal.

In the 2017 legislative session, lawmakers should repeal that law and pass a new one mandating that the state’s employers use the federal E-Verify system to vet new hires for proof of legal U.S. presence. This would help shrink Oregon’s illegal-immigrant population — and reduce its drain on our unemployed and underemployed, our overall economy, and our taxpayer-funded government services.