Illegal immigration has high cost

Opinion by State Rep. John Kavanagh

With their legal challenges to Arizona's new Employer Sanction's Law foundering, opponents of penalizing businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants are shifting to phase two of their attack — a propaganda campaign designed to fool the people into believing that the law will destroy Arizona's economy. It won't.

Illegal immigrants are a drain on Arizona's economy. They burden taxpayers with costs of about $1.3 billion per year, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and that estimate only includes expenditures for education, emergency medical care and incarceration. The $1.3 billion estimate does not include the bill for other benefits, law enforcement costs and the expense of providing benefits to the children of illegals born here who, as citizens, are entitled to full government services, including welfare and costly government-sponsored health insurance.

Illegal immigrants harm Arizona's economy in other ways. By working for lower wages, illegals lower market wages and take good jobs away from legal residents. Because hospitals cannot recoup all of the uncompensated costs of treating illegals, they pass the costs on to legal residents and their insurance companies.

Illegal immigrants also degrade our state in non-economic ways. Our national parks near the Mexican border have been environmentally scarred by the unauthorized roads and trails illegals create and the trash they leave behind, as they illegally enter our country. In some areas of Douglas, residents are so fearful of transient illegals that they do not go out alone at night. In Phoenix, illegal day laborers and their supporters are disrupting a community and attempting to destroy a neighborhood family business that dared speak out against the harm, fear and disorder that loitering and trespassing illegal day laborers cause.

Illegal immigrants also make our communities unsafe. Illegals make up 8 percent of Arizona's population but comprise over 12 percent of the felons incarcerated in our prisons, according to the Arizona Department of Corrections.