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Do Immigrants Pay ‘Fair
Share’ of Taxes?
Post plays up liberal group’s study, but
a conservative group’s findings on immigrants’ cost to taxpayers
were dismissed two years ago.
By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
June 5, 2006
How much money do illegal immigrants cost taxpayers?
Don’t ask The Washington Post for a balanced answer.
Two think tanks studied the issue. One found illegal
immigrants to be a huge drain on taxpayer-funded services. The other
focused instead on legal immigrants and claimed they pay their “fair
share” of taxes.
The difference? One think tank was conservative; the
other liberal. The Post played up the liberal study but dismissed
the conservative one.
The June 5 Post paid deference to a study by the
liberal Urban Institute showing that legal immigrants pay their
“fair share” in taxes while illegal immigrants underpay. Yet two
years ago a study by the conservative-leaning Center for Immigration
Studies (CIS) – showing that illegal immigrants draw more in
benefits than they pay in taxes – was dismissively covered by the
same paper.
“A report that found that illegal immigrants in the
United States cost the federal government more than $10 billion a
year – a sum it estimated would almost triple if they were given
amnesty – has drawn criticism from immigration advocacy groups,”
staff writer
Mary Fitzgerald opened her Aug. 26, 2004, article on the CIS study. That article was
buried on page A21.
By contrast, staff writer Karin Brulliard’s take on the
Urban Institute (UI) study on immigrants and taxation appeared above
the fold in the June 5, 2006, Business section of the Post.
In the more recent
article, Brulliard wrote that the UI study “provides the most detailed
snapshot yet of tax payments” by Washington, D.C.-area immigrants.
Yet even Brulliard conceded that the study showed illegal immigrants
pay less in taxes than they are supposed to: “less than 2 percent of
the region’s taxes, even though they made up more than 4 percent of
households.” That study failed to consider the immigrants’ drain on
government services, which the CIS study found to be sizeable.
In the 2004 article, Fitzgerald omitted any reference
to the liberal ideology of then-Urban Institute demographer Jeffrey
Passel or the National Immigration Forum’s Frank Sharry, both of
whom cast doubt on the CIS study’s methodology. Passel now works for
the liberal Pew Research Center and co-authored the new recent Urban
Institute report.
Sharry had complained to Fitzgerald that the
“contributions to the economy as workers and taxpayers” was not
accounted for in the CIS study and added “that the report’s
conclusions were not helpful to the debate on immigration reform.”
Fitzgerald did not inform readers that Sharry was
instrumental
in the successful 1994 effort to defeat California’s Proposition
187. That ballot initiative was an attempt to rein in the social
welfare costs the state of California had borne in schooling and
emergency services for illegal aliens.
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