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  • 2006-05-03 (xsd:date)
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  • Are These the True Costs of Immigrants in Los Angeles? (en)
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  • Since 2006, a list purportedly detailing the taxpayer costs related to the presence of illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County has circulated online, originally under the title The Largest Insane Asylum in the World: California: The statistics were not taken from a 2002 Los Angeles Times article. They appear to have been gleaned from a variety of sources and vary in accuracy as noted below: Over 2/3's of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal whose births were paid for by taxpayers. The California Vital Records Department of the Department of Health Services classified as Hispanic the race/ethnicity of 62.7% of all births occurring in Los Angeles county in 2001. The statistic quoted above therefore erroneously characterizes all parents of Hispanic heritage in Los Angeles County in 2001 as being illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal. The FBI reports half of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegal aliens from south of the border. In April 2005, Heather Mac Donald, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims. On the issue of gang membership among illegal immigrants, she said: Note, however, that this statement referenced a California Department of Justice study (not an FBI report), and that it describes only a single gang in Los Angeles County (the 18th Street Gang), the gang that likely has the highest membership rate of illegal aliens. 95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens. This figure also appeared (unsourced) in Heather Mac Donald's testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims: Even if the statistic were accurate, however, it is subject to a variety of interpretations. For example, illegal aliens might be disproportionately represented by outstanding homicide warrants in Los Angeles because they are more likely to flee the jurisdiction before their cases are adjudicated than legal residents are (not necessarily because they commit a far greater share of the homicides in Los Angeles). This interpretation is supported by a University of California Davis summary of immigration issues that notes: 75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens. The Los Angeles Police Department's Most Wanted list is viewable on-line, but since each entry generally includes only the ethnicity of a suspect (not his or her immigration status or nationality), and many of the entries refer to persons of unknown identity, it's difficult to verify the claim that 75% of the people listed therein are illegal aliens. Nearly 25% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally. Again, this figure appears to correspond with Heather MacDonald's testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims, in which stated that The L.A. County Sheriff reported in 2000 that 23% of inmates in county jails were deportable, according to the New York Times. However, the 23% figure she cited included all deportable aliens, not just Mexican nationals. 21 radio stations in L.A. are Spanish speaking. The number of Spanish-language radio stations in Los Angeles varies a bit from source to source (and according to how one defines Los Angeles), but according to Los Angeles Almanac, if both AM and FM stations are counted, and all programming formats (e.g., music, news, talk, religion, sports) are included, then it's fair to say that there are about 20 Spanish speaking radio stations in Los Angeles. The existence of these radio stations imposes a negligible cost upon taxpayers. Less than 2% of illegal aliens are picking our crops but 29% are on welfare. Although illegal aliens are not generally eligible to collect public welfare benefits, an illegal alien may receive benefits under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Food Stamps programs on behalf of his or her U.S. citizen child. (Any child born in the United States is considered a U.S. citizen, regardless of the parents' immigration status.) A 1997 General Accounting Office (GAO) report determined that in 1995 households headed by illegal aliens received a total of $700 million in AFDC benefits and $430 million in Food Stamps. Over 70% of the United States annual population growth (and over 90% of California, Florida, and New York) results from immigration. As the Sacramento Bee reported, the over 90% figure for population growth in California is essentially accurate if the term immigration is defined to encompass both foreign immigrants and births to immigrant mothers: The cost of illegal immigration to the American taxpayer in 1997 was a NET (after subtracting taxes immigrants pay) $70 BILLION a year, [Professor Donald Huddle, Rice University]. It is true that Rice University economist Donald Huddle has conducted studies and concluded that immigrants (both legal and illegal) in the U.S. receive billions of dollars more in social services from local, state and federal governments than they contribute in revenue. It's also true that others have criticized his studies as flawed and arrived at exactly the opposite conclusion (i.e., that immigrants actually produce a net revenue surplus). For example, a University of California Davis Migration News article on Illegal Immigration: Numbers, Benefits, and Costs in California notes: An article published by the Urban Institute drew similar conclusions: The Largest Insane Asylum in the World/California e-mail forward first appeared in 2006 and as of late 2020, the well-worn item continued to pop up on blogs and in social media posts. (en)
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