Big profits from unauthorized immigrants

According to Texas Comptroller, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, her December 7, 2006 report, Undocumented Immigrants in Texas: A Financial Analysis of the Impact to the State Budget and Economy, is the first comprehensive analysis any state has done of the impact of undocumented immigrants on a state's budget and economy. The Comptroller's conclusion:

The Comptroller’s office estimates the absence of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in Texas in fiscal 2005 would have been a loss to our Gross State Product of $17.7 billion. Also, the Comptroller’s office estimates that state revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceed what the state spent on services, with the difference being $424.7 million.

That's Texas-sized impressive: magically whisk away all of the state's unauthorized immigrants and the economy of Texas would be 18 billion big bucks poorer! As it is, with the current unauthorized immigrant population, the Lone Star state last year raked in nearly $425 million in net profit!

In a commentary piece that appeared yesterday in the Austin American-Statesman Strayhorn wrote: "The report estimates that undocumented immigrants in Texas generate more in state taxes and fees than the costs incurred by the state in providing education, health care and emergency medical services, and incarceration." (emphasis mine)

However, the Strayhorn report also concluded:

The Comptroller estimates that undocumented immigrants paid more than $513 million in fiscal 2005 in local taxes, including city, county and special district sales and property taxes. While state revenues exceed state expenditures for undocumented immigrants, local governments and hospitals experience the opposite, with the estimated difference being $928.9 million for 2005. (emphasis in original)

Despite what the anti-immigrant pushers allege, state and federal-funded health benefits for undocumented immigrants are very limited in Texas. As Strayhorn's report stated, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, food stamps, welfare, Supplemental Security Income, public housing, job opportunities for low-income individuals and child care and development. Texas counties do, however, have a fundamental responsibility under state law to provide medically necessary basic health care to their medically indigent, and costs for doing that fall on local governments and non-profit and private health care facilities. ("Medically indigent" is a term used to describe individuals who do not have health insurance and who don’t have the means to pay for the health care they need. Source: Providing Health Care to the Uninsured in Texas, p.12.)

It is critically important to keep in mind in this discussion that it's not just unauthorized immigrants that are not covered by medical insurance in this state. According to research by the U.S. Census Bureau, about 25% of Texans are uninsured, the highest percentage of uninsured than any state in the nation. Yes, local governments and non-profit and private health care facilities are absorbing costs to provide necessary basic health care to uninsured unauthorized immigrants (and not all unauthorized immigrants are uninsured--see my post here), but they're also absorbing costs to provide needed medical services to medically indigent folks born and bred in the U.S. of A.

But, you know something I don't understand in all of this? If the the anti-immigrant pushers (the folks who continuously spread wildly exaggerated figures of how much unauthorized immigration is costing the whoever the "us" is they're always talking about) are really concerned about such costs, than how come they're not agitating to eliminate all medically indigent costs? How come they're not agitating for national health-care reform?

Hey, I'm just asking.