This is topic Connection between Illegal Immigrant population and State budget shortfalls? in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.
Purpose of this thread was to get some thoughts on some numbers I pulled together from some of the wise minds here at hatrack.
Before I get to the thread title, a little background.
Myself and some coworkers were discussing the illegal immigration issues and Arizona's new law. The general consensus that we came to was the the primary issue is the fact that we have 11.5 million (estimate I read in one of the stories) illegal immigrants in this county who do not pay income taxes, yet they use our roads, hospitals and schools. I am sure there are other public services as well.
Lesser but real concerns are national security and local crime. National security I see as more of a border protection issue. The vast number of illegal immigrants crossing the border are looking for better lives for themselves and I don't think you can really blame any on an individual level.
Crime is certainly an issue, since you can bet if you are here illegally you won't be reporting crimes to the police or testifying in court.
So I got to thinking if you could find a connection between state budget shortfalls and illegal immigrant population by state.
My methods were amateur to say the least, but for a cursory inspection, I think there is a connection.
I took percent budget shortfall by state and correlated that to the percent of state population that is estimated to be illegal immigrants. I used relative instead of absolute numbers since states vary so dramatically in population and budget.
So if a state budgets 1 million dollars, and spends 1.1 million, thats a 10% shortfall. If a state has 10 million population, and 1 million illegal immigrants, thats a 10% illegal immigrant ratio. (I might have done 1/11)
In the end I had data on 44 states. Some I removed for missing data. And the correlation was a positive .69 .
What that means is that we can say with over 99% certainty that there was a relationship between my two datasets. Obviously its not too hard to poke holes in my methodology, but I would imagine if a similar study was conducted professionally, you would still find a relationship.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
Too bad about 96% of them do jobs that would not require the to PAY income taxes at all. In fact, illegal immigrants pay significant taxes to the states, in the form of sales taxes on everything they consume and purchase.
Check out the tax rates for those same states, and factor in the average earnings of illegals and it is a far less clear picture. There is a factor when it comes to hospital bills, to be sure, but there are just as many citizens as illegal contributing to that. It's more a healthcare issue than an immigrant one in most places.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
OP: Show us the data.
Posted by TrapperKeeper (Member # 7680) on :
I'll link the source data. I'd rather not mess with the actual spreadsheet or trying to make a google docs document public.
Keep in mind though, I'm not claiming this methodology is deserving of publication or anything. It was just good faith data pull from the internet and a correlation.
Feel free to pull the data, but if you are looking to poke holes, I don't claim it to be perfect. I do think its in the ballpark though.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Of course you'd find a relationship. Pick any two variables in similar social datasets and you will, with absolute certainty, find relationships between them (and frequently strong relationships -- a .69 relationship is, however, a very weak relationship for unadjusted data with so few points). Demonstrating a relationship demonstrates nothing.
What's more, this has been studied extensively by people with a heck of a lot more mathematical and modeling power, and the general conclusion is that illegal immigrants are somewhere between break-even and a good-sized benefit to the economy. They tend to use much less in the way of services than other populations (especially similar populations that are here legally), they commit less crime, they're often entrepeneurial, many of them use fake social security numbers and do pay withheld income tax, in addition to all the sales tax and other taxes they pay, only they don't get the refunds they're potentially eligible for at the end of the year, et cetera.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
TrapperKeeper: on a google doc, just go to the 'Share' dropdown in the upper right. If you don't want to make the doc itself public, you can publish it as a webpage (and only republish when you choose). The whole process takes just a few clicks, and it gives you a URL you can give to people.