It’s all about the Headline
By Albert B. Kelly
I recently came across the headline “N.J. gave 500 undocumented immigrants tuition money. Here’s
where they are going to college”. It was an eye-catching headline placed over
an AP photo showing what looks like protesting “DREAMer’s”, meaning teens brought
here as young children after 2001- the ones now going to college.
The price tag for tuition aid to these 513 undocumented students
is $623,109 according to the piece by Kelly Heyboer for NJ Advance Media. Locally,
Cumberland County College had 8 of the 513 students at cost of $8,629. The
headline and photo might well have sparked anger and even outrage in the
average NJ taxpayer if the assumption was that the undocumented pay no taxes yet
they get education aid courtesy of us taxpayers.
But before we go there, consider that unauthorized
immigrants living in the state pay roughly $587 million in state and local
taxes per year according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. This
nugget also comes courtesy of Kelly Heyboer who covered the topic in a December
2018 piece which listed the top 13 counties in New Jersey where undocumented
immigrants pay the most taxes. Cumberland County was not in the top 13, but in
a group of 8 counties with roughly 29,000 undocumented persons paying an
estimated $42.9 million in state and local taxes.
If we dig around a little further on the issue, we find an
April 2013 report from the Social Security Administration that shows that
undocumented individuals paid approximately $12 billion into the Social
Security Trust fund in 2010. These monies won’t benefit them since federal law
prohibits undocumented individuals from collecting social security.
As far as the big picture nationally, a 2016 study by the
Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy estimated that undocumented
immigrants paid $11.64 billion in state and local taxes in 2013 which they
estimated to be the equivalent of about 8 percent of their total income.
I point this out to say that there are two sides to every
story and certainly more behind the headlines. At first glance, one might easily
conclude these students and their families were purely on the “takers” side of
the ledger contributing nothing, yet getting something valuable, perhaps at the
expense of everyone else, the “givers”. But things are never quite as simple as
stereotypes or even a headline might seem to imply.
There are many aspects to this debate about undocumented
persons and illegal immigration, including the fate of younger people who,
through no fault of their own, were brought to this country as youngsters and
who are, for all intents and purposes, Americans. I think we’re at our best as
a country when we’re willing to go past stereotypes or headlines and consider
issues in all their complexity and nuance.
Until I looked further, I didn’t know the amount in state
and local taxes collected from undocumented persons in New Jersey, nor did I
know that the sweat of their collective brows helps support the Social Security
Trust Fund each year. I had no idea that the IRS estimates that about 6 million
unauthorized immigrants file individual income tax returns each year or that between
50% and 75% of unauthorized immigrants pay federal, state, and local taxes
according to the Congressional Budget Office.
I’m not implying that there was bad intent by either the
journalist writing this story or the editor deciding on the headline- the goal
is to capture reader’s attention and to the extent that they captured mine,
they succeeded. But there are layers to this story and those layers matter
because if we’re willing to push past these specific students and whether
they’re getting something for which their families contributed nothing, which
doesn’t seem to be the case here, we might begin to talk about 30,000-foot issues
like the solvency of social security over the next several decades and an aging
population.
Consider that in the group of 8 counties mentioned above (Burlington,
Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Hunterdon, Salem, Sussex and Warren) with
29,000 undocumented persons that paid $42.9 million in state and local taxes,
this amount would have been $47.4 million had they been legal residents. For
the moment, $5 million might not be much, but if you educate undocumented young
people who’ve lived their entire lives here and provide a legal pathway so that
they can make maximum contributions- that impact would be no small thing.