The number made such a good headline: Illegal immigrants cost Colorado a billion dollars a year.
The figure came from Defend Colorado Now. The anti-illegal-immigration group paid a management and financial consultant from Evergreen to produce it. Defend Colorado Now wanted the number to make its case for a constitutional amendment that denies government benefits to undocumented state residents.
Amendment supporters stood with straight faces at the state Capitol and announced that illegal immigrants cost slightly more than $1 billion a year in “Medicaid, K-12 education and incarceration.” It was an astounding number, given that Defend Colorado Now relied on demographers’ studies, not the staffs at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Education.
Especially amazing was the K-12 calculation. Defend Colorado Now said the state spends nearly $839 million a year “educating the children of illegal immigrants in Colorado.” It modestly proposed that in 2006, this state will spend $900 million. As in $900 million!!!
This figure did not come from the Colorado Department of Education. CDE officials told me they do not keep student information that way. They can’t. As in what part of “illegal” don’t you understand?
The Supreme Court decided long ago that children who cross the border without documentation still have the constitutional right to go to public schools. Children born to illegal immigrants after they arrive in this country … well, those kids are American citizens. As in what part of “American citizen” don’t you understand?
If the nativists want this fight, they need to be a bit more ingenuous.
Jeffrey Passel, a senior research associate at Pew Hispanic Center, is one of the people cited as a source for the data Defend Colorado Now trotted out. Passel told me that two of three children born to illegal immigrants now in the U.S. were born in this country. Passel also told me that if every child born to an illegal immigrant inside or outside the U.S. miraculously disappeared from Colorado classrooms, the state’s schools are unlikely to save $900 million next year.
Besides fixed educational expenses, Passel said, the cost of educating children of illegal immigrants is offset by taxes illegal immigrants pay. And yeah, most do pay taxes and Social Security, Passel said, although undocumented workers often don’t file for tax refunds or retirement.
What’s more, there’s no guarantee that the state is even spending $839 million a year right now to educate “children of illegal immigrants.” The entire Defend Colorado Now claim is built on estimates applied to estimates applied to estimates, none provided by state education officials. The “Colorado March 2005 illegal alien population” of 220,000 is an estimate. So is the “number of school-age children in Colorado with immigrant mothers” (161,000). So is the “percentage of foreign born in Colorado whose parents were illegals” (49.66). So is the number “of school-age children in Colorado with illegal immigrant mothers” (79,955).
What the state spends to educate each of these kids is equally murky. Defend Colorado Now uses a current figure of $10,492 per child and projects a cost of $11,247 for 2006. Education department finance director Vody Herrmann says the first figure rolls in the costs of all debt service and school construction. She assumes that the $11,247 comes from a presumed increase. She must assume because nobody from Defend Colorado Now talked to her. Anyhow, using general fund expenditures, the Colorado cost to educate a student is more like $6,600, Herrmann said.
Even if it wasn’t a constitutional right – which it is – all we really know about the “annual cost of educating the children of illegal immigrants in Colorado” is that we don’t know.
In October, opponents of temporary adjustments to the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights tried to play the anti-immigration card. They said the cost of schooling illegal immigrants’ kids was $550 million a year.
We now understand that as nativist hysteria grows, so does the inflation factor.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
