Refugees do NOT bring in more tax dollars than they
consume in social services, by
Ann Corcoran, 6/15/17
This news was all over my alerts
yesterday morning (one version of the story at Business Insider): Study finds refugees actually pay the US government thousands more than
they get from it
The glowing (and deceptive) report
was clearly released now as a run-up to World Refugee Day next Tuesday and has
probably been widely distributed on Capital Hill by the legion of lobbyists for
the refugee industry.
My reaction was that the conclusions
fly in the face of all common sense. And, LOL!, I wondered right away
whether they included the costs to the criminal justice system. Imagine
how much those life prison terms of some refugee murderers and
terrorists cost the American taxpayer!
Esar Met, a Burmese refugee raped
and murdered a little girl in his apartment complex shortly after arriving in
the US (he had surely not paid in any taxes yet!) and is doing life in prison.
Someone with some economic training and the interest should figure out what it
costs taxpayers for these expensive trials and life sentences. One of my many
posts on Met is
So, I wondered if there was a
rebuttal and sure enough there is! If you see the deceptive news published in
your newspaper, you must respond with a ‘letter to the editor’ using key points
of Jason Richwine’s rebuttal. You can’t let their propaganda go unanswered.
The Center
for Immigration Studies responded here this morning (emphasis is mine):
Refugees do not pay their
own way A working paper released this week by Notre Dame economists
William Evans and Daniel Fitzgerald makes the head-scratching claim that
refugees, despite below-average incomes and high rates of welfare use, pay
$21,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits during their first 20 years
in the United States. Immigration-boosting wonks such as Matt Yglesias and
Dylan Matthews immediately trumpeted the findings, and the Washington Post and
FiveThirtyEight added favorable write-ups.
They should have been more
skeptical. The claim that refugees contribute more in taxes than they receive in
benefits is simply implausible.
So how does the Evans-Fitzgerald
paper come to such an implausible result? First, the authors count all (or nearly
all) taxes paid by refugees but reduce the services they receive to six social
programs cash welfare, SSI, Social Security, food stamps, Medicare, and
Medicaid. All
other costs that governments might incur from immigration, housing,
infrastructure, education, law enforcement, and so on, do not count.
Second, they fail to adjust for the
underreporting of those social programs…
Third, the paper excludes refugees’ minor
children. When refugees cannot afford to provide food, housing, or medical care
to their children, taxpayers foot the bill. Most of those costs are omitted.
Fourth, the authors restrict the refugee
age range to 18-65, cutting off the analysis just before the age where most
people stop working and begin participating in the nation’s costly retirement
programs.
By the way, we bring in a
significant number of refugees to the US over the age of 65 who
immediately draw on SSI.
Don’t miss CIS’s previous detailed
study of the cost of refugees to taxpayers, here. Middle Easterners are especially expensive!
This is posted in my ‘What you can do’ category (created because new readers are
asking). If you see the deceptive report mentioned in your local
newspaper do not let it go unanswered! Send
a letter to your member of Congress too
and tell him or her (in advance) to watch for the propaganda (Big Lie!) campaign
about refugees supposedly adding to the US economy. (The cheap labor supply
might add to the bottom line at Tyson Foods, but not to the overall economy!).
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