Cost of Illegal Immigration in Connecticut

As domestic security has tightened and the economy has weakened, Americans have focused on solving the issue of illegal immigration and recovering the costs associated with it. Unfortunately, Connecticut suffered sustained negative impact from the cost of illegal immigration in recent years due to an unchanged undocumented population.

An estimated 130,000 illegal immigrants lived in Connecticut in 2012, according to data from the Pew Research Center. They made up 3.5 percent of the state's population.

Connecticut’s annual costs to taxpayers were estimated at $957 million, according to data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform. This deficit was calculated after state revenue from illegal immigrants totaling $32 million was deducted.

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FAIR reported the following costs associated with illegal immigration in Connecticut, broken down as such:

• $548 million went to education
• $104 million to healthcare
• $61 million to justice and law enforcement
• $88 million to public assistance
• $157 million to general government services

Nationally, according to the Pew Research Center, the undocumented immigrant population had "leveled off" after dipping some during the Great Recession.

In 2012, "an estimated 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the U.S., down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 but unchanged since 2009," Pew noted.

In Connecticut, those figures reflected that reality as population trends there indicate no significant change in the number of unauthorized immigrants in 2012 from 2009.

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