My Facebook friends heaped derision on the calculations in “Cutting welfare to illegal aliens would pay for Trump’s wall” (New York Post):
If a wall stopped just 200,000 of those future crossings, Camarota says, it would pay for itself in fiscal savings from welfare, public education, refundable tax credits and other benefits currently given to low-income, illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Camarota explains that illegal border-crossers from Mexico and Central America — who account for more than 75 percent of the illegal immigrant population in the US — are overwhelmingly poor, uneducated and lack English language and other skills. In fact, the average Latino illegal immigrant has less than a 10th-grade education. That means if they work, they tend to make low wages; and as a result pay relatively little in taxes while using public services. And if they have children while in the US, they more often than not receive welfare benefits on behalf of those US-born children, who have the same welfare eligibility as any other citizen.
“A large share of the welfare used by immigrant households is received on behalf of their US-born children,” Camarota said. “This is especially true of households headed by illegal immigrants.”
Therefore, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of more than $72,000 during their lifetimes, Camarota says. Including costs for their US-born children, the fiscal drain jumps to more than $94,000.
I can’t see how these calculations can be right. There seems to be no allowance for the cost of building infrastructure to accommodate the new Americans that result from immigration. (See “How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?“)
Let’s just look at the school construction cost. Mexican immigrants to the U.S. have an average of 3.5 children per woman (source). So let’s assume that each adult immigrant therefore adds 1.75 children to the U.S. school population. Our town is about to spend $166,667 per student on a new K-8 school (previous posting). Let’s assume that these kids also need a place in high school at $166,667. That’s a maximum of $583,335 in construction costs for every person added to the U.S. school population (this is a maximum figure because the marginal cost of building extra classrooms, per square foot, is presumably lower than the average cost; it doesn’t cost quite 2X to build a school that is 2X larger).
Readers: What do you think? Is there any way that the $94,000 number can be correct for a low-skill immigrant coming across the border with Mexico? That’s about what the City of Cambridge spends, including capital costs, to educate a child for three years in the K-12 schools.
[Of course, one could argue that we will be better off in non-financial ways as a consequence of expanded undocumented overland immigration. Money isn’t everything. This post is really about whether my Facebook friends are right in that the border wall is a stupid idea purely on fiscal grounds.]
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