With all the consternation about how much illegal immigrants cost the taxpayers of Virginia, argue Michael Cassidy and Sara Okos with the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, it’s important to remember that they pay taxes, too.
Virginia’s undocumented population numbers between 250,000 and 300,000, they guesstimate in a new report, and it pays between $145 million and $174 million in state income taxes, sales and excise taxes, and property taxes. Further, undocumented immigrants working “on the books” pay an additional $114 million to $137 million in Social Security and Medicare taxes, a sum that their employers match.
There’s a lot of guesswork in those estimates, as the authors readily admit, but the numbers are as reasonable as anyone else’s. Let’s assume they’re accurate. Taking the high end of each set of estimates, that works out to about $580 in state and local taxes per illegal.
Bacon’s bottom line: Big whoop. Nobody said that “undocumented workers” don’t pay taxes. The problem is the perception that they pay significantly less than they and their families receive in services and the fact that, I know it’s just a technicality, they are here illegally. Trouble is, we still don’t have any reliable numbers on how much illegals cost, so we can’t say for absolutely certain that they are a drain on the public fisc. Let’s develop some credible numbers, compare them to the Cassidy/Okos numbers and see what we get.
