According to conventional wisdom, immigration is an undeniable boon to the United States, with millions of diligent new workers pumping money into our economy. Guess what. It’s a myth. Present immigrants pay far less in taxes than they consume in services, so much so that six states (California, Texas, New Jersey, New York, Florida, Arizona) took the unusual step of suing the federal government to recover their costs for immigrant services. Surprised? You should be, we rarely hear this side of the story.

During the 1990s, the prestigious National Academy of Sciences was performing a detailed examination of the effects of immigration policy. Their study, conducted at the request of President Clinton’s U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, was published by the National Academy Press in 1997 under the title “The New Americans.” The study was detailed and far reaching, examining demographic, economic, labor and fiscal effects of immigration policy. The media chose to emphasize the estimated $1-10 billion dollars that immigration adds to the American economy, but avoided the uncomfortable information regarding the cost of services to immigrants and the adverse impact of immigration on American workers. Two of the study’s authors were sufficiently incensed by this one sided spin to object in a New York Times op-ed titled, “Findings we never found – How a report on immigration was distorted.” (Dec. 17, 1997.) Five years later, the media continue to avoid the subject of costs, and the happy myth continues.

Taking the trouble to delve into the body of the study, a different picture emerges. The researchers focused on data from two high immigration states, California and New Jersey. They found that the disparity between taxes paid and the costs of public services used by immigrant headed households constituted a net drain of $232 per native household in New Jersey and a net drain of $1,178 per native household in California. On a national level the authors report that the net fiscal drain of immigrant headed households is between $14.77 billion and $20.16 billion per year. Both these numbers exceed the $1 to $10 billion that immigration is estimated to pump into the economy. Bottom line: immigration is a net fiscal drain.

How can this be? It’s not for lack of hard work. The researchers cite three factors: immigrant-headed households have more children and consume more educational services, they are poorer and therefore receive more government services, and they have lower incomes and therefore pay less taxes. They go on to say that the lower incomes result in large part from the lower job and language skills of recent immigrants. This flood of low-skilled workers into a shrinking entry level labor market drives down wages for the recently arrived immigrants and the native born workers with similar job skills. Employers of cheap labor thrive, but the result is that native households are subsidizing cheap labor for these businesses through their taxes.

Immigration has been hugely profitable to the employers, and it is the voice of the employers who continually clamor that the American economy cannot survive without immigrants. And so we continue this amazing experiment in mass immigration which is unprecedented in history. And Congress, despite recommendations by the Presidential Commission to reduce legal immigration and stop illegal immigration, continues to avoid any real immigration reform.

According to the academy study, immigrants from Latin America constitute a proportionately greater fiscal drain than immigrants from other regions. This is not because they are poor workers, but because Latin American immigrants are the least educated and have the most children. The nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies recently published a detailed analysis of the effects of Hispanic immigration entitled, “Immigration from Mexico: Assessing the Impact on the United States.” (www.cis.org) This report indicates that since two-thirds of adult Mexican immigrants have not completed high school, they earn significantly less and require more tax payer funded services. Even after welfare reform, 34 percent of households headed by legal Mexican immigrants used at least one major welfare program. Based on estimates developed by the National Academy of Sciences for immigrants by age and education at arrival, the lifetime fiscal impact (taxes paid minus services used) for the average adult Mexican immigrant is a negative $55, 200!

President Bush this week will meet with Mexican President Vicente Fox to promote once again a massive amnesty for three million illegal Mexican immigrants and to “regularize” the flow of Mexican workers into the United States. The American public deserves a fair and balanced discussion of how these open border polices with Mexico, and our government’s deliberate capitulation to illegal immigration, will serve our national interests. We need an honest portrayal of not only the obvious benefit to immigrants and their employers of the Bush-Fox policies, but also the costs of these choices for the American people.

There is tremendous political pressure to perpetuate the myth that more immigration is always good for us and that anyone who brings up the costs of immigration should be dismissed as “anti-immigrant.” Only through an open, fact-based discussion can we arrive at a truly honest conclusion.

Julie Tosswill of Camden is a medical care administrator.