Obama’s health care plan is certainly sweeping and controversial in its own right, but Rep Wilson’s outburst brings up the point that immigration reform also must be addressed.  By simply excluding immigrants from his reform proposals, Obama is looking at half the problem.  Policies that restrict immigrants’ access to health care such as preventive services lead to the inefficient use of emergency room and other costly services.  The economics behind immigration and health care are addressed in the report by the Immigration Policy Institute, entitled, Unequal Accecss: Immigrants and US Health Care.

Dr. Sarita Mohanty, a professor of medicine from the University of Southern California , the author of the report, explains that although immigrants comprised 10 percent of the US population in 1998, they accounted for only 8 percent of US health care costs.  Further, she documents that, “despite the fact that all immigrants are eligible for emergency medical services, they had lower expenditures for emergency room visits, as well as doctor’s office visits, outpatient hospital visits, inpatient hospital visits, and prescription drugs.”

 Although this report focuses on immigrants and health care, it captures the essence of the immigration debate by underscoring the importance of immigrants to our economy and to our nation.  Even pushing aside the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, as besides the Native American’s our ancestors all hail from other nations, the hard facts speak to the importance of immigration.  Not only to illegal immigrants perform jobs that native born Americans cannot and will not do, they also contribute to paying taxes and paying into the Social Security system for benefits they will never collect.  In 2001, the Social Security Administration (SSA) found that undocumented immigrants pay a major portion of taxes into the Social Security system under names or social security numbers that don’t match SSA records and which payees can never draw upon.  As of July 2003, these payments totaled $421 billion.

 It’s time to give undocumented immigrants an earned path to legalization so they can obtain health insurance and continue to contribute to our country, rather than focusing the health care debate on a broken immigration system.