David Brooks has a column on immigration. As a grandson of an immigrant myself, I'm in essentially full agreement with him that immigration is a source of strength for America and should be encouraged. A passage in the article, however, is suspect. He writes:
Immigrants, both legal and illegal, do not drain the federal budget. It's true that states and localities have to spend money to educate them when they are children, but, over the course of their lives, they pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.
This is the same David Brooks who was telling us in another column published exactly a month ago that "The average Medicare couple pays $109,000 into the program and gets $343,000 in benefits out, according to the Urban Institute. This is $234,000 in free money."
It seems to me to be difficult verging on impossible for Mr. Brooks to hold both these beliefs simultaneously with any semblance of logical consistency. In one column he claims that immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. In the other column he claims that the "average Medicare couple" gets $243,000 more in benefits than they pay in taxes. At least with the Medicare "free money" claim Mr. Brooks cites the source, the Urban Institute. That's more than can be said for his claim in the immigration column, which is unattributed.
If the immigration column claim is accurate, it may be in part because so many immigrants to America are illegal and do work paid "under the table" or "off the books" on which no Medicare tax is collected. They also don't receive Medicare benefits. An immigration reform along the lines advocated by Mr. Brooks might change matters so that immigrants become more like the budget-draining "average Medicare couple" that Mr. Brooks wrote about in the earlier column. That, in turn, would undermine the "immigrants … do not drain the federal budget" argument for immigration.
If the difference in government-benefit consumption between immigrants and non-immigrants is as dramatic as Mr. Brooks would have us believe, and if the difference isn't simply a result of illegal immigrants not getting Social Security or Medicare benefits, it would make for a good follow up column. Maybe we could cure the entitlement problem and the federal deficit just by having natural-born Americans consume government benefits at the more moderate levels of immigrants rather than at the "$234,000 in free money" levels described by Mr. Brooks (though, as I wrote earlier, the "$234,000 in free money" claim has its own problems).