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Study says Napa Valley immigrants pay their way
A worker hand-picks cabernet sauvignon wine grapes at the Stags' Leap Winery in Napa, Calif. A new study finds immigrants in Napa County contribute $1 billion to the economy and also pay their share of taxes.
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Kai Ryssdal: It's not likely immigration policy's going to be a big national issue in November. Congress and the White House agreed to disagree on that a couple of years ago. Locally, though, it's much more of a concern, depending on where you are.
We took you up to Napa Valley last fall to examine the growing gap between rich and poor in California's wine growing region. Latinos will soon be the majority there. And while locals debate the costs of immigration, a new report (PDF) offers some food for thought.
Marketplace's Jeff Tyler explains.
Jeff Tyler: Immigrants contribute about a billion dollars to Napa County’s $7 billion economy. That’s one figure from a report on the fiscal impact of immigration in the area.
Terence Mulligan with the Napa Valley Community Foundation commissioned the study.
Terence Mulligan: We wanted to bring some facts to the table and disprove some misconceptions.
Mulligan hears people say things like: ‘Immigrants work hard, but send their money out of the country’ or ‘Immigrants are a burden on social services.’ But the economic evidence suggests otherwise.
Mulligan: What we spend in Napa County on services for immigrants and their children is proportional to their share of population in public health, in public benefits, in corrections and general government.
Another complaint: Immigrants don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
That’s false, says Randy Capps, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. He conducted the study.
Randy Capps: They pay state and local taxes roughly in proportion to their population.
The fiscal impact of immigration is lower, the report found, because local employers often pay for health insurance, even for agricultural workers.
Capps: Having private health insurance coverage lowers the public health care costs quite a bit.
There is one area where the report found that the children of Hispanic immigrants use a disproportionate amount of services -- public education. But Capps says it’s important to invest in those students, since they represent the area’s future workforce.
I’m Jeff Tyler for Marketplace.
Marketplace should have had a counterpoint to this study, conducted by the Migration Policy Institute, a pro-open borders group.
The study apparently said that immigrants pay taxes, but given that we're talking mostly about low=skilled, no-skilled immigrants, they can't be paying very much tax; yet they are giving a huge boost to the cost of educating local children, and as per this program, they are using more healthcare services than American children.
A 1997 study by the US National Academy of Sciences found that the average Californian family paid an extra $1,100 in taxes to provide transfers of more than $3,000 to the average immigrant family, and so obviously, they aren't paying their way.
Although it apparently wasn't addressed in this study, there is the issue of what all the extra children are doing to the quality of education. One of my high school mates is one of the top hard scientists in the US. When he was teaching at UC Santa Barbara (he's now at a major university in Boston), his 3rd grade daughter attended the local public school, which was 80% immigrant. He was appalled to find out that she was only in the 35th percentile in math. So he went in for a teacher conference. "Not to worry," he was told, "your daughter is the star of the class."
If she's the star of the class in the 35th percentile, that means the education is very poor.
I find it upsetting that American Public Media would run such an ill-reported, or perhaps biased piece. I expect that sort of thing of Fox, but not APM.
More whitewashing of the fiscal and economic impacts of illegal immigrants and their families. Sorry, Randy, but Paul Krugman begs to differ:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=2
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North of the Border
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 27, 2006
I'm instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration. But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration, and immigration from Mexico in particular. If people like me are going to respond effectively to anti-immigrant demagogues, we have to acknowledge those facts.
First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small. Realistic estimates suggest that immigration since 1980 has raised the total income of native-born Americans by no more than a fraction of 1 percent.
Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.
That's why it's intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do "jobs that Americans will not do." The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays — and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.
Finally, modern America is a welfare state, even if our social safety net has more holes in it than it should — and low-skill immigrants threaten to unravel that safety net.
Unfortunately, low-skill immigrants don't pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the benefits they receive.
Worse yet, immigration penalizes governments that act humanely. Immigrants are a much more serious fiscal problem in California than in Texas, which treats the poor and unlucky harshly, regardless of where they were born.
We shouldn't exaggerate these problems. Mexican immigration, says the Borjas-Katz study, has played only a "modest role" in growing U.S. inequality. And the political threat that low-skill immigration poses to the welfare state is more serious than the fiscal threat: the disastrous Medicare drug bill alone does far more to undermine the finances of our social insurance system than the whole burden of dealing with illegal immigrants.
But modest problems are still real problems, and immigration is becoming a major political issue. What are we going to do about it?
Realistically, we'll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants. Mainly that means better controls on illegal immigration. But the harsh anti-immigration legislation passed by the House, which has led to huge protests — legislation that would, among other things, make it a criminal act to provide an illegal immigrant with medical care — is simply immoral.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's plan for a "guest worker" program is clearly designed by and for corporate interests, who'd love to have a low-wage work force that couldn't vote. Not only is it deeply un-American; it does nothing to reduce the adverse effect of immigration on wages. And because guest workers would face the prospect of deportation after a few years, they would have no incentive to become integrated into our society.
What about a guest-worker program that includes a clearer route to citizenship? I'd still be careful. Whatever the bill's intentions, it could all too easily end up having the same effect as the Bush plan in practice — that is, it could create a permanent underclass of disenfranchised workers.
We need to do something about immigration, and soon. But I'd rather see Congress fail to agree on anything this year than have it rush into ill-considered legislation that betrays our moral and democratic principles.
