Alex Nowrasteh
The Mississippi Office of the State Auditor released a report that purports to show that illegal immigrants impose a cost of over $100 million on state taxpayers and that “actual spending could be higher.” Unfortunately, the report is not a high-quality estimate and is practically worthless because it doesn’t even attempt to include the tax revenue collected from illegal immigrants in the state. The report poorly estimates outlays for illegal immigrants and entirely ignores tax revenue, so a negative answer is the only methodologically possible answer.
The report, which is six pages long, isn’t even useful when it comes to estimating the costs by themselves. It uses back-of-the-envelope estimates for the number of students who are illegal immigrants and emergency room visits by illegal immigrants. Oddly, the auditor didn’t use state administrative data to more accurately identify illegal immigrants who consume taxpayer-funded health care and other services. Instead, the auditor looked at macro data and merely made assumptions—for instance, that half of illegal immigrants go to the emergency room once a year. The Medicaid Budget and Expenditure System FY 2023 report shows that emergency services for illegal immigrants amounted to a total of $0 in Mississippi. The state auditor should have started there, at least.
Upon opening the report, there were two initial signs that the state auditor’s report was not a careful study. The first was its heavy reliance on a state-level fiscal cost estimate by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) that overcounted costs and underestimated tax revenue to such an extent that it’s hopelessly flawed, detailed above.
The second sign is that the opening paragraph unintentionally argues that the illegal immigrant share of the population halved from 2016 to 2022—which did not happen. They wrote:
Illegal Immigration [sic] is a challenge all 50 states face. According to experts from Yale and MIT, 22.1 million illegal immigrants lived in the United States in 2016. Experts acknowledge the number of illegal immigrants in the United States is expected to grow when 2023 and 2024 data becomes available. As of 2022, researchers estimate that illegal immigrants make up 3.3% of the nation’s population.
An illegal immigrant population of 22.1 million in 2016 would have been equal to just over 6.8 percent of the US population at that time. But the auditor then wrote that the population of illegal immigrants was just 3.3 percent of the US population in 2022. What happened? The auditor took two illegal immigrant population estimates from two different sources, one of them a numerical estimate and the other a share of the population, and used them interchangeably. The numerical estimate that comprises 3.3 percent of the population is 11 million. That’s a sloppy mistake.
What about the estimated population of 22.1 million illegal immigrants in 2016? This substantially overstates the illegal immigrant population in that year. Don’t believe me? Perhaps you should read the piece “New Estimate of 22 Million Illegal Immigrants Is Not Plausible” by Steven A. Camarota from the immigration-restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies.
Most troubling, the Mississippi Office of the State Auditor produced a much better state-level illegal immigrant fiscal cost estimate in 2006. There are a few oddities in that report, such as counting the lost tax revenue from remittances as a cost, but it tries to include the tax revenue paid by illegal immigrants, whereas the most recent auditor’s report doesn’t. The state auditor could have dusted off their old paper, updated the data, and published a much more defensible estimate. Instead, they published a report that is even less defensible than the report produced by FAIR. Despite all its flaws, at least FAIR tried to estimate tax revenue paid by illegal immigrants. The Mississippi Auditor didn’t even try. Shockingly, the FAIR report above is more methodologically sound than the Mississippi auditor’s attempt in 2024 to estimate the fiscal costs of illegal immigration in Mississippi.
State auditors should attempt to produce better fiscal cost estimates of illegal immigration if they’re going to go down this path. Mississippi state auditors have tried it before, and they can do it again. Failing to publish fiscal cost estimates is better than publishing unserious reports like Mississippi’s most recent effort. Who audits the auditors? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?