Immigration Report: Floridians Pay $5.5 Billion a Year for Illegal Aliens

As an addendum to Monday's Senate hearing on immigration issues, the Federation for American Immigration Reform reported that Florida incurs nearly $5.5 billion in costs related to the estimated 950,000 illegal aliens residing in the state, along with their 186,000 U.S.-born children.

Here's the Florida breakdown from FAIR's 2010 study, The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers:

K-12 education $2.78 billion.
English (LEP) $559 million.
Medicaid $530 million.
SCHIP+ $129 million.
Justice $579 million.
Welfare+ $317 million.
General $568 million.

Following are tax collections received by the state and local governments from the illegal aliens and their employers that offset some of that estimated fiscal cost:

Property tax $101 million.
Sales tax $160 million.

"This leaves the net fiscal burden on Florida taxpayers at about $5.2 billion per year -- not including the share of their federal taxes that go for programs used by illegal aliens," the report concluded.

The full study is at www.fairus.org

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