This article describes the problem but it's from 1999. The cost is alot more now but it's not in the 40B range............perhaps I remembered that number as the total cost of illegals to the state which would include healthcare, foodstamps and many other expenses like bilingual ed, etc.
fairus.org
CRIME
According to a Hollywood Division citizen advisory board member, the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that there are 10,000 illegal alien members of the 18th Street gang in Los Angeles. That information was used to support a request to the Police Commission for more active efforts to identify illegal aliens for deportation. The Commission rejected the proposal on the basis that enough was being done by having 4 INS officers assigned full time to the county jail to screen prisoners.
(Source: LatinoLink News Services June 24, 1997)
California and its regional governments spend more than $500 million a year to arrest and imprison illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Total legal costs of crimes committed in California by people who are not legal U.S. residents is estimated to be between $1 billion to $1.5 billion a year.
(Source: "The Criminal Alien," a report by the California Joint Committee on Prison Construction and Operations)
Deportable aliens comprise 11% of the Los Angeles County jail population costing the county an estimated $75 million a year.
(Source: "Impact of Repeat Arrests on Deportable Criminal Aliens in Los Angeles County")
California sued the federal government in March 1996 to make up the difference between the $252 million it received last year in compensation for the costs of incarcerating criminal aliens and the $400 million it estimates that it spends. The suit was denied by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on June 3, 1997. The court ruled, in effect, that Atty. Gen. Reno could not reimburse more than the amount appropriated for that purpose by Congress. California authorities said that there will be about 20,000 incarcerated criminal aliens who are illegally in the United States in jail in California by mid-summer.
(Source: San Diego Union Tribune, June 4, 1997)
Anaheim was the focus of an in-depth article "...Activists Find Their Values And Tolerance Can Conflict." The focus was on city decay and local activism to try to turn the problem around. Much of the problem-causing demographic change was identified as due to the influx of immigrants, often working in services to the Disneyland industry. The side effects of large scale immigrant settlement, the largest group being from Mexico, include apartment overcrowding, school overcrowding, rising crime rates, and falling property values. In addition the role of English instruction in the schools has engendered strong emotions.
(Source: Wall Street Journal, March 5, 1998)
The San Diego sheriff's department is seeking help from the Latino community in Visa to help fight an influx of brothels (over 20) in the north county city. According to the local authorities more than 200 prostitutes and customers have been arrested and deported to Mexico over the past year. The brothels have been found to often be run by illegal aliens.
(Source: dailynews (Yahoo.com), August 18, 1998)
Narcotics agents apprehended six Mexican illegal aliens who were cultivating the largest marijuana plant found in California this year about three miles southwest of San Andreas in Calaveras County. The narcotics agents, who had been maintaining surveillance for more than a month, destroyed 11,643 marijuana plants.
(Source: Modesto Bee, August 28, 1998)
CARRYING CAPACITY
"Despite the ravings of some racist fanatics, immigration is not a racial problem; it is a population problem. It is projected to be a principal cause of U.S. population growth. Is it "immigrant bashing" or simply common foresight to ask what would be required for a doubled or tripled or quadrupled population? What about jobs, schools, parks, housing, air quality, open space, farmland and food production, transportation and infrastructure of all kinds?... In California the most conspicuous resource in short supply is water. In drought years, this state does not have enough available water for the present population at current rates of use."Harold Gilliam, San Francisco Examiner, June 26, 1998
The Water Constraint
A book by former Illinois Senator Paul Simon, now head of the Southern Illinois Univ. Public Policy Institute, focuses on the looming shortage of potable water as population expands. The book, "Tapped Out," describes water resource shortages around the world and in the United States. California is pinpointed as one of the trouble areas. Simon writes: "Every official California water plan projects a huge gap between need and supply. California's population will grow from 31 million today to somewhere between 48 million and 60 million in less than 40 years. Symbolic of California's problems is the story of Owens Lake. Early in this century, Los Angeles-area water authorities understood that they'd face problems as the population grew, so they purchased the third-largest body of water in the state, Owens Lake. Today it is called Owens Dry Lake, because L.A. has sucked it dry." (Source: Parade Magazine, August 23, 1998)
According to a new study on the population trend on the U.S.-Mexico border by the Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy, the border population could double by 2020. "These population trends portend serious problems for border communities in terms of infrastructure deficits, availability of water and energy, and negative environmental impacts on water, air and natural resources," according to the report. The Center, based in San Diego, notes that already sewage from overloaded Mexican systems spills across the borders occasionally, and that the most serious looming problem may be water shortages.
(Source: AP, San Diego, May 10, 1999)
ETHNIC CHANGE AND IMMIGRATION
According to the California Dept. of Finance (Change by Race, 1990-96), immigration to the state since 1990 has resulted in a net increase of 188,000 new Hispanic residents and 346,000 Asian and Pacific Island residents. From 1992-96 the state has experienced a net loss of 401,000 white residents. This has led to an increase in Hispanic (26% to 29%) and Asian (9% to 11%) population shares, while the white share declined (from 57% to 53%) and the share of black residents stayed the same (7%).
MIGRANT FOREIGN AGRICULTURAL WORKERS
Governor Pete Wilson told the annual meeting of the California Farm Bureau Federation in December 1996 that "there is no inconsistency whatever between strict enforcement of our immigration laws to secure our borders against illegal immigration and a program that lets legal guest workers provide needed harvest labor when...the domestic labor force proves inadequate to need."
The California Farm Bureau Federation took credit for trying to include a guest worker program in the 1996 immigration reform legislation and for requiring GAO to study the H-2A program when the guest worker program was rejected by the House.
(Source: Rural Migration News, January 1997)
URBAN INSTITUTE STUDY OF IMMIGRATION AND RURAL CALIFORNIA
Writing in the Summer 1998 issue of Immigration Review, Dr. Monica Heppel, Research Director of the Inter-American Institute on Migration and Labor, reviewed a 1997 Urban Institute (UI) study on Povety Amid Prosperity: Immigration and the Changing Face of Rural California. The research study was authored by agricultural-economist Philip Martin and UI immigration researcher Michael Fix. Heppel credits Martin and Fix with clearly demonstrating that today's increased agricultural employment in rural California does not equate with lower poverty levels, but rather the reverse -- higher agricultural sector employment coincides with higher levels of unemployment and poverty. She cites the study's observation that "Traditionally, rural poverty has been combined with cyclical crises that force farms into a downward spiral from which they rarely rebound....In California today, rural poverty occurs in an environment of agricultural prosperity, in the context of a growth industry." This context, she suggests, means that traditional programs designed to alleviate rural poverty need to be rethought.
RAND 1998 STUDY OF IMMIGRATION AND CALIFORNIA'S ECONOMY
The Rand Corporation issued a report in 1998 entitled Immigration in a Changing Economy: California's Experience. The authors were immigration researchers Kevin McCarthy and George Vernez. In general they found both positive and negative economic effects from the state's high levels of both legal and illegal immigration.
The publication was reviewed by Center for Immigration Studies researcher Steven Camarota in the Summer issue of Immigration Review. Among the studies highlights identified by Camarota are the fact that even though immigrants should be credited with creating many new jobs, "...few of these jobs went to natives; overall, in fact, immigration reduces job opportunities for natives." Other findings were that immigrant settlement in California has both significantly lowered wages for high school dropouts and caused unemployment and underemployment. The skills of new immigrants are increasingly out of step with the needs of the state's economy. Overall, immigrants pay less in taxes than they consume in public services, although this varies considerably depending on the immigration category. Vernez and McCarthy conclude that much of the negative effects of current immigration could be alleviated by some changes that would pare immigration back from the current level (near one million per year) to between 300,000 to 800,000 per year.
Writing in the same issue of Immigration Review, demographer Meredith Burke explores the future implications of today's California immigrants. Because Mexican-born women accounted for about one-quarter of all births in the state in 1990, and there is a strong correlation between the educational attainment of parents and children, she speculates that the trend will be large pockets of low-productivity workers and an exacerbation of current income inequalities and increased inter-ethnic strife.
COSTS OF IMMIGRATION
California is expending close to $600 million a year on jailing aliens, according to state officials. This expense has been partially offset by a federal reimbursement program that began in 1994. The total of the federal assistance has been about $500 million per year, and California received $183 million in fiscal 1998. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) says the expense picked up by California taxpayers is "really, in a way, an unfunded mandate." The cost borne by California taxpayers will be much greater next year if present efforts succeed in Congress to cut the appropriation back to $100 million. California, under that funding, would receive only about $31 million in compensation.
(Source: San Diego Union-Tribune, June 11, 1999)
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