It was no surprise last week that Colorado Gov. Bill Owens refused to follow the lead of governors in New Mexico and Arizona who have recently declared states of emergency in order to deal with the effects of illegal immigration.
Colorado, after all, isn’t quite in the same league as those two border states.
Still, the governor’s response was less than inspiring. His spokesman merely said the Colorado Disaster Emergency Act is designed to cover man-made or natural disasters that produce “severe damage, injury, or loss of life.” He also said that the issue of illegal immigration should have a “full-fledged debate.” He didn’t say when that debate should occur and he certainly didn’t do anything to advance it.
That doesn’t mean that the problems associated with illegal immigration aren’t real or shouldn’t continue to attract public attention.
Thankfully, there are still organizations (mostly private) interested in documenting the effects of illegal immigration, estimating what they cost and what might be done to reduce those expenses.
One such group is the Center for Immigration Studies, which has just released a report on birth rates among immigrants in America. What that study shows is that immigrants (legal and illegal) plus the children born to these groups add some 2.3 million people to the United States each year, “accounting for most of the nation’s population increase.” It also shows that for most immigrant groups, especially Hispanics, the fertility rate is not only much higher than that of the native-born population, it is also higher than the fertility rates in their homelands. For Mexican immigrants, the rate is 3.5 children here compared to a rate of 2.4 children in Mexico. Keep in mind that the fertility rate for native-born women is 2.
Education, or the lack of it, seems to play a very big role in current birth rates. The study shows that immigrants with less than a high school education have 3.3 children on average while those with a college education have just 1.9 children.
One need not be a demographer to see that these trends will have serious social, cultural, economic and political consequences for the nation. The same might be said of a recent study by the Rand Corporation that measures the impact of illegal immigration on the number of medically uninsured people in the U.S.
The Rand report, based on Los Angeles data, has been extrapolated in ways that allow for some surprising national conclusions.
The study quotes estimates showing that the U.S. population will increase by 120 million people over the next 50 years, and two-thirds of that total will be the result of legal and illegal immigration. The study’s authors also estimated that between 1980 and 2000, the ranks of the medically uninsured grew by almost 9 million.
Public officials who have often lamented this increase rarely mention any connection to illegal immigration. The Rand study corrects this lapse.
According to the study, illegal immigrants have accounted for one-third of the increase although they are a much smaller percentage of the overall population. In fact, Rand reports that the uninsured rate among illegal immigrants is about 70 percent. Just one in five illegal immigrants obtain some level of insurance through the work place. Although it can be purchased individually, few do.
The Rand study notes that the cost of providing emergency and non-emergency medical care to the undocumented population is passed on to the general public, but it does not attempt to estimate the amount of those expenses.
Obviously, any discussion of what should be done to reduce the ranks of the uninsured, and the cost to the balance of the population, can’t take place without considering the impacts of illegal immigration.
The same might be said of a number of other areas of public policy, such as automobile insurance, for example.
While it’s certainly true that illegal immigration is primarily a federal concern, as the governor likes to emphasize, it’s also surely true that it is a concern for every state and every citizen.
That’s why the actions of the two neighboring governors were so welcome and why the Colorado governor’s response has been so disappointing.
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His columns appear on Wednesday.
