Obama was Dead Wrong,
Illegals Cost California Solvency
A recently revealed lowball study of the state’s budget problems shows that withdrawing services from California’s 2.5 million illegal aliens in the state would save the state roughly $4.5 Billion annually. The breakdown of the savings was: $2.5 Billion from the cost of education; $1 Billion from prison budgets; almost $780 Million from medical expenses; and other cost savings amounting to roughly $300 Million yearly. In short, paying for the illegal aliens who have been welcomed into California (the state has more “Sanctuary Cities” than the rest of the country combined) over a typical period of five years would account for the total California shortfall at its 2009 cited $21 Billion maximum. Later in this blog, you’ll discover why Rajjpuut used the term “lowball” to describe this recent study.
How surprising can this statistic be? A mid-2008 study by FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) showed that 60% of the nation’s illegal aliens were concentrated in six states mostly in the Southwest. California’s almost 3.5 million illegals in that study easily topped the list. That figure you’ll notice is a full one million fewer illegals than found in the more recent lowball study mentioned earlier. Poor methodology? Deliberate undercounting? Probably neither. Every year that the state’s abysmal Sanctuary City situation has existed, it’s become much harder to accurately count the illegals, never an easy proposition in the best of scenarios.
Two years later when FAIR updated and expanded its study in 2010 it found that nationally illegals cost America $113 Billion yearly. The study then was called “extremist” and compared to a study that said that rather than costing us, illegals raise the nation’s GDP by $245 Billion. Certainly if that were true, the answer to our budget woes would be to throw open the borders to everyone. This infamous Perryman Report, rumored to have been funded by “Open Society Initiative” founder George Soros, has been cited by all those seeking further amnesty and even citizenship to all illegals. The Perryman Report is suspected of flawed, perhaps even deliberately flawed, methodology because “it fails to fully account for the cost to individual counties, cities and towns” which absorb a huge percentage of the cost of accommodation for illegal aliens.
Are illegals really such a big problem? Ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger once said that it would be a “big mistake” to blame California’s huge illegal immigration population for the state’s long-enduring budget crisis. Any sane review of the figures seems to cough up only one conclusion: the Guv’s been in deep denial. The average yearly budget deficit in California is slightly less than the average cost of illegal immigration to the state over 365 days according to the recent figures.
California, with the other five big alien states, together face a cost of $36 Billion annually for K-12 education, criminal incarceration and health care costs. Some studies show that the cost to California is NOT the $4.5 Billion recently touted, but rather, almost $12 Billion yearly to accommodate illegal aliens, roughly $3,400 per each man, woman or child LEGLLY residing in the state. Other studies call even this figure into doubt and indicate the cost could be much, much higher. Besides the monetary price, there is also the matter of sociological cost . . . .
A recent Supreme Court decision is forcing the state to release “up to 46,000 inmates” before their prison terms are concluded. California is only expected to release roughly 30,000 “low-risk inmates” from prisons, the biggest release of lawbreakers in American history, as a measure to combat the state’s deficit. Among ALL the California convicts an estimated 20,000 are illegal aliens about one-seventh of the entire prison population. The state has deliberately given no indication how many of the projected “parolees” will be illegal aliens. Nor has the state answered questions about how many illegals might be turned over to immigration officials for deportation or if any will just be allowed to walk freely back into California society.
Schwarzenegger, of course, has infamously guaranteed there was NO connection between the state’s large illegal alien population and its budgetary woes. The ex-governator, it seems, has been in denial for eight long years.
His predecessor, Pete Wilson commissioned two separate studies which each reached the same conclusions: illegals were bankrupting California. The 1994 Philip J. Romero study showed that illegal immigrants and their American-born children received $3.6 Billion more in state services than they paid in state taxes. The vast majority of those taxes are sales taxes, not income taxes which few illegals pay. In 1997 the Jordan Commission’s study conducted under the National Research Council put that figure at a $3.463 Billion cost to California. But Schwarzenegger even willfully ignored far more up-to-date information: Romero’s 2007 update of his earlier study. Because of the state’s Sanctuary City situation, Romero found it far more difficult to pin down the full extent of the problem. His shocking results: illegal aliens were now costing California between $9.6 and $ $38.2 billion more in state services than they generate in state taxes.
Everything about the illegal alien question is debatable. Recent estimates of their population have used the numbers 12-18 million illegals with 13 Million the most commonly cited figures. President Obama has used the numbers 11 million and even 10 million in describing them and suggested, in line with the Perryman Report that they constitute a huge NET POSITIVE to the nation’s economy.
Regardless of which figures are used, the logical conclusion is obvious. California, Texas and other border states are being negatively affected by huge illegal alien populations. California itself has been bankrupted by several huge policy boondoggles. The Sanctuary City program in that state is definitely the most costly in the nation and the state’s welcoming of illegals has contributed mightily to California’s ongoing financial meltdown.
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
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