The sweeping executive order Governor Carcieri issued last month reignited a charged debate over illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants are costing Rhode Islanders untold millions, he said, compelling him to take action in the absence of federal immigration reform.

Carcieri’s order directs the state police and state correctional officers to work with federal authorities to enforce some aspects of immigration law. It also requires electronic verification of the legal status of executive branch employees, and of employees hired through vendors who do business with the state.

Immigrant advocates, Hispanic leaders and many of Rhode Island’s top clergy members have sharply criticized the order, saying it has created a climate of fear in Rhode Island’s immigrant community and is based on flawed assumptions and inaccurate numbers.

But the reality is, no one can say with certainty how many illegal immigrants live in Rhode Island or how much they drain — or add to — the economy.

Given that illegal immigrants often live in the shadows, accurate counts are impossible. State and federal laws block hospitals, schools and some social service agencies from asking about applicants’ legal status, turning the question of how much illegal immigration costs Rhode Island into a guessing game.

So, too, is the question of how much illegal immigrants add to the economy through paying taxes, buying consumer goods, paying rent and providing inexpensive labor to businesses.

Jeff Neal, spokesman for Carcieri, said this lack of data is “a significant issue” thwarting efforts to deal with the problem.

“Many people will argue that illegal immigration is a huge financial drain on state and local governments. Others will argue that the costs are minimal. Without the ability to collect the data, there is no way to know for sure.

“What we do know is this: illegal immigrants are entitled by federal law to a number of government-funded services such as education and emergency health care. Illegal immigrants also impose other unavoidable costs, including the price of incarcerating them when they commit crimes. State and local governments are forced to pay much of those costs.”

A Journal examination of some of the data cited by both sides in the debate illustrates the complexities of the issue.

Population

There are several varying estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in Rhode Island.

In issuing his executive order, Carcieri cited estimates of 40,000. He attributed that figure to the Pew Hispanic Center. (Four days later, on a talk radio show, Carcieri put that figure at 42,000.)

But the current figures from the Pew Hispanic Center –– based on 2004 government data, the latest available –– put that estimate at between 20,000 and 35,000. Asked about that disparity, Neal said, “I will concede that point, that the high end is 35,000.”

William Shuey, executive director of the International Institute of Rhode Island, in Providence, says that illegal immigrants probably make up between 2 and 4 percent of the state’s population, which is about the national proportion. By that calculation, Rhode Island would have between 20,000 and 40,000 illegal immigrants.

Education

Carcieri argues that taxpayers are bearing the brunt of the cost of educating undocumented children, as well as U.S. citizen children born of illegal immigrants.

Clearly, a significant number of Rhode Island’s schoolchildren have immigrant backgrounds. Rhode Island Kids Count, citing 2006 federal figures, says 23 percent of Rhode Island’s children live in immigrant families, meaning the children or at least one of their parents are foreign-born. While most of those children –– 88 percent –– were born in the United States, the Kids Count report says nearly 9,500 were foreign-born. About 21 percent of the foreign-born students are naturalized citizens.

Elliot Krieger, spokesman for the state Department of Education, says there are 75 native languages spoken in Rhode Island’s public schools. A total of 5,747 students statewide are enrolled in English as a Second Language courses, at an extra cost of $3,800 per student.

But just because a student’s primary language is not English does not mean the student is an illegal immigrant or the child of one. Rhode Island’s ethnic — and language — diversity reflects the thousands of immigrants and refugees who arrive, or are resettled, in this state through legal channels. Last year alone, more than 450 refugees were resettled in Rhode Island through the International Institute of Rhode Island.

Regardless of their citizenship status, all children of school age are required by law to enroll in school –– and the schools are required to provide an education. In 1975, in Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools are required to to educate undocumented immigrant students.

Rhode Island requires parents who are enrolling a child in a public school to submit proof of the child’s date of birth, and most do so by submitting a copy of the child’s birth certificate. They must also present immunization records. If children are not immunized, they are usually not allowed to start classes.

Krieger said a 2006 decision by the Rhode Island commissioner of education prohibits school officials from asking questions of students or parents about a family’s status as legal residents.

“Immigration status is immaterial with regard to school enrollment,” said Krieger, “so it is not sought.” The 2006 ruling “takes that a step further, saying [to ask that question] would have a chilling effect” on the exercise of a child’s constitutional right to attend school.

Prisons

Carcieri’s executive order requires the Department of Corrections to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to more quickly identify suspected immigration violators in state custody, which could speed deportation proceedings when they are released from state custody.

Of the more than 3,800 inmates currently held at the ACI, about 194 are being held on immigration detainers –– meaning the immigration officials either know or suspect they may be in the country illegally, say corrections officials.

Currently the federal government keeps closer track of immigration violators at the Adult Correctional Institutions than do corrections officials, tapping into the prison’s records each day to determine which new inmates may have violated immigration laws and might be held for possible deportations.

Prison officials hold those inmates on detention warrants –– after they have served their time or been freed by a judge — until immigration officials pick them up.

Rhode Island, like other states, is reimbursed by the federal government for some of the expense of housing immigration violators, based on a complex formula.

For fiscal year 2007, Rhode Island received $1.1 million from the federal government for housing foreign-born inmates. The program “is designed to be a portion of the cost” and not full reimbursement, said Ellen Evans Alexander, assistant director of administration for the state Corrections Department.

How much the state spent to house foreign-born inmates at the ACI is a difficult number to come up with, said Alexander, not only because of the unknown immigration status but also the varying lengths of stay they serve, which could range from a few days to years.

Of the 194 inmates held last week on immigration detainers, 68 are awaiting trial and 126 are serving sentences that average a few months, said Alexander.

If you assume that on any given day the number of inmates awaiting trial is about 70 and then multiply that figure by $40,000 –– the rough annual cost of housing an inmate –– then that population alone costs the state about $2.8 million annually, Alexander said.

And if even a quarter of that sentenced population, roughly 32, are held for a year, that’s another $1.2 million.

But that total cost of about $4 million assumes that every inmate on an immigration detainer is here illegally.

“That isn’t the case,” said Alexander, “though a good percentage of them” probably are.

“So we are spending more than $1.1 million a year” but how much more is impossible to know, says Alexander.

Health care

No one knows how much money illegal immigrants cost the health care system in Rhode Island.

Rhode Island’s hospitals provide millions of dollars in free care to people who can’t afford treatment, although the total cost is in dispute. The Rhode Island Department of Health put it at $26 million last year; the Hospital Association of Rhode Island put it at $124.9 million. While some opponents of illegal immigration say much of the free care –– subsidized by taxpayers –– goes to illegal immigrants, there are no figures to support or refute that claim.

But non-citizens, whether or not they have legal status, receive much less health care than citizens and are significantly less likely to visit emergency rooms, according to analyses of national data by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. That may be because immigrants face language and cultural barriers to care and because they are more likely to be young and healthy, according to the commission, which is part of a foundation concerned with health policy.

Hospitals in Rhode Island provide millions of dollars in free care to people who can’t afford treatment. But hospitals have no data on how many illegal immigrants get free care, said Edward J. Quinlan, president of the Hospital Association of Rhode Island. That’s because hospitals do not ask patients about their immigration status.

Federal law, state law and most hospitals’ charters mandate care for every patient who comes to the emergency room, without setting any conditions. Merely asking patients whether they’re citizens could scare them away from care they need, hospital officials say.

These requirements were established for both humanitarian and public-health reasons, Quinlan said. There’s “a societal benefit to keeping the population healthy,” he said; health problems that go untreated can lead to greater sickness. “What if it’s a contagious disease?” he said.

“We never ask a patient’s immigration status,” said Gail Carvelli, spokeswoman for the Lifespan hospital group. “We would never want to deter anyone from seeking care.”

At least for the past year, all hospitals in Rhode Island ask patients who are applying for free care to provide a Social Security number, but they don’t require it. Failure to provide a Social Security number gives no useful information about a person’s immigration status, Carvelli said. People with student visas or green cards don’t have Social Security numbers. Others may have numbers but decline to provide them for privacy reasons.

The Lifespan hospitals, including Rhode Island, Miriam and Newport hospitals, have not kept tabs on how many people have failed to provide Social Security numbers. Quinlan checked with three other hospitals, and all said that they, too, were not keeping track of how many people gave Social Security numbers.

Much of the cost of providing health care to the poor is borne by the Medicaid program, which is financed jointly by the state and federal governments. But immigrants are not a big factor in Medicaid costs, because federal law bars undocumented immigrants and documented immigrants in the country less than five years from receiving Medicaid coverage.

States, however, can choose to cover immigrants using state funds if they choose. Starting in 1998, Rhode Island covered illegal and recent immigrant children under its RIte Care program, which is part of Medicaid.

But on Dec. 31, 2006, the state stopped enrolling new immigrant children in RIte Care; those who were already enrolled were allowed to keep their coverage.

Now, Governor Carcieri wants to cut these children as well. Approximately 2,800 children would be affected. Nearly 1,300 of them are estimated to be legal permanent residents on track for citizenship; the remaining 1,500 are here illegally. The governor says the cut will save $667,000 in the current fiscal year and $4 million next year.

Dr. Mack Johnston, chief medical officer of Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island, which covers families on RIte Care, said many of the children who would be cut are in the midst of treatment. “Having them off health insurance isn’t going to take away their illnesses,” Johnston said. Instead, they will get sicker and may need hospital care, adding to the hospitals’ free-care burden.

“Eligibility cuts shift costs; they don’t eliminate them,” Johnston said, adding: “These children are not the reason we have a problem in health-care costs in the state.”

Welfare

Both the state’s Family Independence Program, which provides cash assistance to low-income Rhode Islanders, and the federal Food Stamp program are open only to citizens and legal immigrants who have established residency in the state.

“If you are undocumented or otherwise illegal, you cannot participate in the Food Stamps program,” said Robert McDonough, administrator for family and adult services at the state Department of Human Services. The department requires that applicants produce immigration papers or a birth certificate and other documents, he said.

The FIP program has similar requirements, said Edward P. Sneesby, a DHS associate director –– applicants must be citizens or immigrants admitted legally for permanent residence.

THERE HAS BEEN at least one past attempt at getting solid facts and figures in the state.

In the 1990s, Mark G. Brown, then working at the now-defunct Housing and Human Services Unit of Statewide Planning, set about determining the impact of illegal immigration in Rhode Island.

He spent at least eight months combing limited data and struggling with a rudimentary new computer system at the Department of Human Services.

He released his issue brief in 1995. Though he came up with some numbers, at the outset, Brown recognized that the real numbers are anybody’s guess, since “documented statistics relating to participation in publicly-funded programs by illegal aliens are generally not available.”

Brown currently manages the Statewide Data Center. Thirteen years after he published his briefing paper, he still has the same opinion. Hard and fast numbers don’t exist.

Illegal immigrants are “a hidden population. It’s a fluctuating population,” said Brown. “They come and they go, and they come and they go … they don’t want to be counted.”

The Congressional Budget Office grappled with these same issues in preparing its report on “The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments,” released in December. The budget office reviewed 29 reports written in the past 15 years –– including Brown’s 1995 briefing paper.

At the outset, the budget office raised a key issue: who exactly is an illegal immigrant?

Though the terms “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” are commonly used to categorize the 11 to 14 million people Homeland Security estimates are now in the country without authorization, the Congressional Budget Office noted that an unknown number are considered “quasi-legal immigrants.” Those include, for example, people who are in the process of getting expired visas renewed.

The budget office cited other stumbling blocks, including the uneven nature of analytical methods and scope in those 29 studies that made it nearly impossible to determine “an aggregate national effect” of unauthorized immigrants to state and local budgets.

Among its major conclusions: the amount state and local governments spend on services for unauthorized immigrants represents “a small percentage” of the total spent on services to all residents.

In part because of state and federal court decisions, the budget office noted that state and local governments “have limited options when it comes to avoiding or reducing what they spend on services to unauthorized immigrants.”

With reports from Amanda Milkovits, Tom Mooney, Felice J. Freyer, Mark Arsenault and Jennifer D. Jordan

kziner@projo.com