A number of my friends who favor liberalizing U.S. immigration laws have liked to Edward Schumacher-Matos op-ed in the Washington Post on how much unauthorized immigrants cost taxpayers. The following is a frequently-cited paragraph:

The truth is that unauthorized immigrants are probably a net burden on taxpayers in the short term, but only if you consider education as a cost and not as an investment in the nation’s future, as it was seen a century ago.

Schumacher-Matos offers a hypothesis as to why so many voters are concerned about the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S.:

What all this suggests is that public anger over the unauthorized already living here has less to do with history and economics and more with what Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel says is the special “outrage” citizens feel when they believe people are getting something they don’t deserve.
“What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” goes the moral cry. But it ignores a competing moral. Until recently, illegal immigration was encouraged by American business and tacitly accepted by government as a needed temporary worker program in lieu of a legal one that didn’t exist. Still doesn’t.

It’s not obvious to me that this represents a “competing moral.” Rather, it seems like a straightforward case of the affluent consumers of the labor of low-wage workers having undue sway over public policy.

To give us a better sense of the actual fiscal balance, Schumacher-Matos is forced to use a study from 1997, a reflection of how little we really know about unauthorized immigration:

The study found that an immigrant high school dropout — which characterizes nearly half of today’s unauthorized people — received $89,000 more in services than he paid in taxes in his life. But an immigrant with at least some college — a quarter of today’s unauthorized — gave $105,000 more than he got. For the high school graduates left, those who arrived during their teens or earlier were slightly profitable for the government, while the children of those who arrived later paid off the small deficit of their parents.

This, of course, cuts in a rather different direction from Schumacher-Matos’s earlier contention that unauthorized immigrants only appear to be a net burden if we don’t count education as an investment in the future. It seems that it’s important to have a sense of how likely it is that a particular immigrant or a particular immigrant’s child is likely to have some college.

Schumacher-Matos states that a quarter of unauthorized immigrants have some college. What if we crafted an immigration policy that facilitates the entry of more college-educated workers and sharply reduces the number of high school dropouts? As we’ve discussed in this space, Mexican immigrants have unusually low rates of educational attainment — only 3 percent of men and 5 percent of women have a college degree while 63 percent of men and 57 percent of women haven’t finished high school. And low rates of educational attainment persist among the U.S. born children of Mexican migrants for a variety of reasons, not all of which are susceptible to policy interventions.

The op-ed ends on a sentimental note:

So, the main question may be: Are they deserving? Look around you at the people whose European-born ancestors were on the dole and overcrowding schools a century ago. You decide.

Sure, I’ll happily decide. But only after we do some rigorous thinking. The European-born ancestors Schumacher-Matos has in mind had levels of educational attainment that were far closer to native-born U.S. workers than is the case today. Given that the net fiscal burden varies so dramatically between immigrants with low and high levels of educational attainment, this seems like an important thing to keep in mind. And if our only goal is to help the poorest people in the world, we would reduce migration from Mexico to zero, as Mexico is an upper-middle-income country, and create a guest worker program that targets countries like Laos, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Haiti, and Pakistan, among others.