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, Mississippi has suffered sustained negative impact from the cost of illegal immigration in recent years due to a flat undocumented population.
An estimated 25,000 illegal immigrants lived in Mississippi in 2012,
according to data from the Pew Research Center. They made up 0.9 percent of the state's population.
The annual costs to Mississippi’s taxpayers were estimated at $106 million,
according to data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform. This deficit was calculated before state revenue from illegal immigrants, totaling $00 million, was counted.
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FAIR reported the following costs associated with illegal immigration in Mississippi, broken down as such:
- $70.3 million went to education
- $11.5 million to healthcare
- $7.8 million to justice and law enforcement
- $6.1 million to public assistance
- $10.8 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.
Mississippi largely mirrored the national pattern as population trends there indicated a largely unchanged number of unauthorized immigrants; the state experienced a modest bump up to 35,000 in 2007 but no changes in size of "statistical significance" in the years afterward.
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