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New Texas study says illegal immigrants are net benefit to economy

The Texas Controller, Carolyn Strayhorn, issued on 12/9 what she calls the first comprehensive financial analysis by a state of the impact of undocumented immigrants on a state's budget and economy, looking at gross state product, revenues generated, taxes paid and the cost of state services. Thanks to Cliff Treese for alerting me to it.

A supporter of a guest worker program, Stayhorn concludes that the absence of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in Texas in fiscal 2005 would have been a loss to our gross state product of $17.7 billion. Undocumented immigrants produced $1.58 billion in state revenues, which exceeded the $1.16 billion in state services they received. However, local governments bore the burden of $1.44 billion in uncompensated health care costs and local law enforcement costs not paid for by the state.

You can find the report here. I have not yet analyzed it.

The Washington Post ran a story on the study. One thing the Post reporter noted was that since Texas does not have an income tax (I didn’t know that) the Texas analysis did not have to deal with unreported cash wages.

I have posted below section VI, the economics benefits analysis

VI. Economic Benefits

This section analyzes two issues:

* the economic impact of undocumented immigrants in Texas, including their contributions to state employment, wages and revenues over a 20-year period (2005 through 2025); and
* the contributions of undocumented immigrants on Texas government revenues.

Economic Impact

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that between 1.4 million and 1.6 million undocumented immigrants resided in Texas in March 2005.[58] To achieve a conservative estimate, this analysis relies on the lower boundary of this range.

Using 2000 Census data for the number of foreign-born residents in Texas counties, it is possible to estimate how many undocumented immigrants reside in each of Texas’ 24 Council of Government regions, based on the assumption that immigrants are distributed in the same proportion as the foreign-born. Based on an age profile of foreign-born immigrants into the U.S. from Mexico, it is possible to further disaggregate the estimates into age and gender groups.[59]

These data then can be put into the Comptroller’s Regional Economic Model, Inc. (REMI) model to investigate the impact of undocumented immigrants on the Texas economy. This is accomplished by instructing REMI to act as if these immigrants were to suddenly vanish from Texas and then to examine the degree to which the underlying economic forecast for the state and for each region would be affected. The implicit assumption is 1.4 million undocumented immigrants have employment and spending patterns consistent with Hispanics in Texas with similar age and gender profiles.

To gauge the economic impact of undocumented immigrants, one additional change must be made in the REMI model. Because REMI is a general equilibrium model, it tries to compensate for changes in a variety of ways. In the case of workers eliminated from a region, the model assumes new workers will be recruited to make up for their loss.

While this is an expected “real-world” result, a true test of the effects of unauthorized immigrants would be seen only if the REMI model were prevented from importing additional workers into the state in compensation. The model eliminates the impact of all undocumented immigrants on the Texas economy. Some in-migration was allowed, but drawing in new Hispanic in-migrants in numbers disproportionate to their share of the indigenous population in the U.S. was prohibited. Effectively, this shut off return in-migration from Mexico and other Latin-American countries.
Model Results

Probably the easiest way to summarize the contribution of undocumented immigrants to the Texas economy is to consider the percentage changes that might occur in various economic indicators as a result of their removal. (As a yardstick, it should be noted that 1.4 million people account for slightly more than 6 percent of the total Texas population.)

Exhibit 14 and 15 summarize the changes in key economic indicators, and summarize the economic impact.

Without the undocumented immigrant population, Texas’ work force would decrease by 6.3 percent. This decline is actually somewhat lower than the percentage of the work force actually accounted for by undocumented immigrants, since REMI assumes some additional immigration would occur to replace the workers lost. The most significant economic impact of losing undocumented workers would be a noticeable tightening in labor markets.
EXHIBIT 14
Estimated Effects of the Loss of 1.4 Million Undocumented Immigrants from Texas in 2005 [ 2010 only – PFR]
(Percent Change from Baseline Forecast)

Total Employment -2.1%
Total Gross State Product -1.8%
Personal Income -2.0%
Real Disposable Personal Income -2.2%
Relative Cost of Production 0.3%
Relative Labor Intensity -0.1%
Exports to Rest of World -0.3%
Average Annual Compensation Rate 1.0%
Population -4.2%
Labor Force -3.6% [in 2005, 6.3% - PFR]


This tightening would induce increases in wages, as indicated by a rise in average annual compensation rate. Wage rates would rise by 0.6 percent in the first year and stay above the forecast rate throughout the entire 20-year period.

While pay increases can be viewed as a positive social and economic development, when they rise due to labor shortages they affect economic competitiveness. In this case, it would be expressed as a modest decline in the value of Texas’ exports.

The remaining broad economic measures all point to an initial impact of undocumented immigrants of about 2.5 percent in terms of the value of production and wages in the Texas economy. Eliminating 1.4 million immigrants would have resulted in a 2.3 percent decline in employment, a 2.6 percent decline in personal income and a 2.8 percent decline in disposable personal income in 2005. This change also would generate a 2.1 percent decline in the gross state product (GSP), the broadest measure of the value of all goods and services produced in Texas.

While none of these changes are surprising, the one finding that may appear unusual is the persistence of the decline. If no in-migration were possible other than from natives or authorized immigrants, employment would remain 2 percent below the baseline forecast 20 years later. The impact lessens over time, but remains sizable throughout the 20-year forecast period.

The primary adjustment the model makes to compensate for the loss of these undocumented migrants is initially a rise in the wage rate, which would induce some new in-migration into Texas and some additional participation in the labor force from current residents. Moreover, with wages rising relative to capital, there would be some substitution of capital for employees so the need for additional workers is lessened through productivity increases. But the fact that the Texas economy cannot adjust completely to the loss of this labor through these changes and retain its competitiveness ultimately means that relative to the rest of the world the cost of production in Texas is higher, making our goods less competitive in the international marketplace and decreasing the size of the Texas economy.
Regional Distribution

Assuming that the current distribution of unauthorized immigrants is similar to the distribution of the foreign-born population in Texas from Central America and Mexico, as detailed in the 2000 Census, the economic impact of unauthorized immigrants varies substantially across Texas. As detailed in Exhibit 16, the loss of 1.4 million undocumented immigrants from the work force would produce work force declines ranging from 22.7 percent in the South Texas COG region (the Brownsville-McAllen area) to 1.7 percent

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