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Pages 1-13

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From page 1...
... · What is the fiscal impact of immigration on federal, state, and local governments? This report summarizes the panel's work.
From page 2...
... This decline has accompanied a decrease in immigration from more prosperous Western Europe and a rise in immigration from Asian and Latin and South American countries. Recent legislation, notably the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, restricted access to public assistance programs for noncitizen legal immigrants, and set a lifetime limit on public assistance for all residents.
From page 3...
... In our projections, we used five alternative assumptions about the numbers of immigrants in the coming decades: a continuation of the current number of net immigration, high and low immigration (a 50 percent increase and decrease from current levels) , and two extremes zero net immigration and twice the current rate.
From page 4...
... Similarly, fueled by higher fertility, high rates of immigration, and high affiliation rates, the Hispanic population will grow substantially over this period. Assuming continued net immigration at current levels, and current rates of intermarriage and ethnic affiliation, the Hispanic population will rise from 27 million in 1995 (about 1 in 11 of the population)
From page 5...
... Existing research has not convincingly demonstrated that, in the aggregate, either decreasing returns due to fixed factors or congestion effects, or increasing returns, are more compelling alternatives. We caution, however, that we would not extrapolate far beyond current levels and say that immigration flows much larger that those considered in our demographic projections would always produce economic gains.
From page 6...
... Furthermore, in these studies the numerically weak relationship between native wages and immigration is observed across all types of native workers, skilled and unskilled, male and female, minority and nonminority. The one group that appears to suffer substantially from new waves of immigrants are immigrants from earlier waves, for whom the recent immigrants are close substitutes in the labor market.
From page 7...
... This relative decline in immigrant skills and wages can be attributed essentially to a single factor the fact that those who have come most recently have come from poorer countries, where the average education and wage and skill levels are far below those in the United States. Part of this growing wage gap may stem from the influx of illegal immigrants, who are generally more poorly educated, but it is not due exclusively to them.
From page 8...
... In addition, the panel made use of an existing study of annual fiscal impacts on New Jersey that also follows the same general methodology. These annual calculations provide one picture of the United States today as a consequence of past immigration policies, but they cannot be used to predict the long-run cost to taxpayers of admitting additional immigrants.
From page 9...
... The panel's calculations for the annual fiscal impacts were made for households as the unit of analysis, rather than individuals, because households are the primary units through which public services are consumed and taxes paid. Ideally, the revenues from and expenditures on U.S.-born chil dren of immigrants should be included in estimating the fiscal impact of immigrants, and this procedure was followed in the panel's estimates of long-run fiscal impacts.
From page 10...
... Looking forward, any fiscal burden from new immigration will be shared by the households of current immigrant residents as well as native households. For example, if the United States added 916,000 new immigrants per year an increase of about 10 percent in current immigration and with those households located the way current immigrants are, they would increase the annual net fiscal burden on New Jersey households by about $20 per household, and they would increase the burden for California households by about $90 per household.
From page 11...
... The panel considered a variety of assumptions, which in turn generated a range of estimates. These illustrate how estimates of the fiscal impacts of immigration depend on future decisions about how many and which immigrants are admitted and about how the United States deals with the serious budget imbalances expected when the baby-boom generations retire.
From page 12...
... Given that near-term fiscal burdens will be offset by later fiscal gains, the present-value estimates of the long-term fiscal impact will be sensitive to the choice of a discount rate for comparing future expenditures and revenues with current ones. Finally, under most scenarios, the long-run fiscal impact is strongly positive at the federal level, but substantially negative at the state and local levels.
From page 13...
... Studies at the local level have found no association of immigrant concentrations with crime rates, with the exception of high rates of nonviolent crime near the borders. Americans have always been ambivalent toward immigration, welcoming flows of foreigners in one era, blocking them in the next.


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