Study missed costs of illegal immigration

The Statesman Journal’s June 23 PolitiFact, “What do ‘illegal aliens’ cost Ore.?” is very misleading.

It claims that fiscal costs incurred for the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens should not be counted a cost of illegal immigration, and on that basis wrongly tags the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s estimate “Mostly False.”

PolitiFact’s position is illogical. If the illegal immigrant couple had not entered the U.S., any children born to them would not be in the U.S. either. The presence of children born to illegal aliens in the U.S. is costly to taxpayers and should be included in any estimate of the fiscal cost of illegal immigration.

In addition, the education of U.S.-born children of illegal aliens is a service to the illegal-alien parents and thus a cost of illegal immigration.

FAIR’s study, “The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Aliens on Oregonians,” is actually conservative in its estimates.

Note that the study deals only with the fiscal costs of illegal immigration. There are also social costs: Toleration of illegality threatens the rule of law and downgrades the value of citizenship. There are numerous other ill effects of illegal immigration on this country, too many to list here.