Summary: The Impact Of Illegal Immigrants

The Homeland Security Department has lost track of more than one million illegal immigrants, which have been known to have entered the United States but cannot be proven to have left. Annually an estimated cost for taxpayers to supply healthcare for uninsured illegal immigrants is $94.3 billion. Due to illegal immigrants California’s overstretched health care system is on the verge of collapse. Dozens of California hospitals and emergency rooms have shut down over the past decade because they could not afford to stay open after being endlessly flooded by illegal immigrants who were not able to pay for the care they were receiving. It is estimated that illegal immigrants make up roughly 30% of the population in federal state and local prisons,

Illegal immigration has had a negative impact on the United States because of its negative financial impact on programs funded by the government, the copious amount of participation of illegal immigrants in criminal activities, and the negative effect that illegal immigrants have on economies of the local communities in which they reside. Illegal immigration has a negative financial impact on programs funded by the government. Illegal immigrants are not permitted to any benefits that are supported by the government, however due to the 14th Amendment to the U.S Constitution American born children of illegal immigrants are. Many illegal immigrants get a hold of these benefits from counterfeit documents. In 2002 the Center for Immigration studies (CIS) studied the financial impact of illegal immigrants to the federal government and concluded that illegal immigrants

Controlling immigration is the responsibility of the federal government, when the government fails to stem the influx of the immigrant’s ends up burdening the states and local communities. This affects the economic cost for services such as emergency health care and education. When local communities spend money on illegal immigrants the federal government is supposed to reimburse the local government, when the federal government fails to do so it fails to stop the immigrants from burdening the state. In the 1982 decision Plyler vs. Doe, the U.S. supreme court declared it unconstitutional to ban illegal immigrants from schools, because of this it requires school districts to educate illegal immigrants in public schools without giving the schools the financial tools to do so. States and localities are also required to treat illegal immigrants in hospitals, again with little to none financial help from the federal government (Barbour 36). In Pennsylvania, based on a study done by FAIR it is costing the state taxpayers $230 million dollars yearly to provide education for the children of illegal immigrants. FAIR expanded that estimate to include emergency health care and incarceration costs and it added up to an estimated cost of $285 million a year. They also estimated what the cost would be by the year 2020 and it could rise to $812 million annually just in the state of