Society: Illegal Immigration: What's the Real Cost to Taxpayers?

The most insightful study remains one done by the National Research Council in 1997. It gauged federal, state and local fiscal costs and contributions over the lifetime of an immigrant in 1996 dollars. Citizen children were included.

The study found that an immigrant high school dropout -- which characterizes nearly half of today's unauthorized people -- received $89,000 more in services than he paid in taxes in his life. But an immigrant with at least some college -- a quarter of today's unauthorized -- gave $105,000 more than he got. For the high school graduates left, those who arrived during their teens or earlier were slightly profitable for the government, while the children of those who arrived later paid off the small deficit of their parents.

The orders of magnitude are more important than the precise numbers. A tough federal law passed in 1996 has since cut almost all benefits to unauthorized immigrants. Even the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates forcing out immigrants here illegally, acknowledged that the average undocumented household in 2002 received fully 46 percent less in federal benefits than an American one. But this likely would go up with legalization.

For more, see Illegal Immigration: What's the Real Cost to Taxpayers? by Edward Schumacher-Matos, September 9, 2010, at The Washington Post.