The costs of illegal immigration

Governments are infatuated with numbers. Elected officials must see concrete figures to be able to defend their spending priorities.

So government tracks darn near everything. Domestic violence arrests. Home sales. Public school enrollment. Incidents of disease. Tax collections. Tourist traffic. Population growth. Highway accidents. Marriage licenses. And on and on and on. All calculated to the most miniscule unit of measurement, all data available to inquiring members of the taxpaying public.

But as Congress and scores of state and local governments grapple with the most important, divisive domestic policy issue of the day — illegal immigration — little specific information is available.

Want to know how many times local attorneys have asked to have a case assigned to a different judge? You can get an answer that day. Want to know how many millions of dollars worth of free health care is provided to illegal immigrants in Southern Nevada? That information isn’t available.

Want to know how many registered sex offenders live in your neighborhood? Just log onto the Internet. But ask how many schoolchildren are illegal immigrants, or how many are the “anchor babies” of illegal immigrants, and you’ll get a shoulder shrug from Nevada’s education bureaucracy.

On Sunday, the Review-Journal wrapped up a three-part investigative series on the local impact of illegal immigration. Its most powerful finding: the institutions most affected by illegal immigration are not documenting the economic costs and social consequences of illegal immigration, and a few are blatantly ignoring them.

Demographers can offer only broad ranges of figures when asked to nail down exactly how many illegal immigrants are in any one area. Nationally, guesses on the number of illegals range from 10 million to 20 million. In Clark County, the Review-Journal’s best efforts resulted in an estimate of between 120,000 and 200,000 — or between 6 and 10 percent of the county’s total population.

Clark County recently diverted $60 million from parks to bail out University Medical Center, the region’s only public hospital. Everyone in government knows uninsured illegal immigrants contribute to the hospital’s operating deficit. But exactly how much? The best the hospital can do is say that three out of every four patients who did not provide a Social Security number last year were Hispanic.

Hispanic enrollment in the Clark County School District has exploded since 1998. While overall enrollment is up 49 percent since then, the Hispanic student population is up 132 percent. The number of students not proficient in English has grown 136 percent since 1998, and 94 percent of the program’s students are Spanish speakers.

So how many of those students are illegal immigrants, or the children of illegal immigrants? The district doesn’t know and doesn’t intend to find out.

The state’s public university system is similarly indifferent to the issue.

What about Medicaid and welfare benefits? Some social service agencies are strictly prohibited from asking a person’s residency status.

A cynic might conclude that it’s in the best interest of the various government bureaucracies to ignore the situation — after all, the more people need government “services,” the faster government grows. Or perhaps government officials realize that if the public ever got wind of just how much illegal immigration is costing them, taxpayers might stage a revolt.

If Congress, states and local governments want to be taken seriously when addressing illegal immigration, they first must use their significant powers to get their hands on hard numbers. We know public institutions have the means, the procedures and the personnel to figure out how many illegals are here and what they’re costing taxpaying citizens. Accumulating such data should be a priority for Congress and the 2009 Nevada Legislature.

It’s past time for government to finally complete these calculations so the public can know just how serious the situation has become.