Lawmakers in Oklahoma’s House States Powers Committee looked into how much money illegal immigration costs the state annually. They relied on inflated numbers from a partisan report and the testimony of state and local law enforcement officials, which took a conspiratorial turn.
Reps. David Hardin, R-Stilwell, and Danny Williams, R-Seminole, held a House interim study Tuesday to determine how much Oklahoma taxpayers are spending on illegal immigration.
With one exception, the meeting relied on some partisan opinions and a report showing inflated data from a group specifically intent on reducing immigration into the United States.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, is that group. Michael McManus directs research there and presented the findings of a report called “The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers | 2023 Cost Study,” introduced online as “the only comprehensive examination” of the sort.
McManus had some fast numbers on Oklahoma at the ready, having joined the interim study via Zoom.
“FAIR estimates there are 198,000 illegal aliens and their US-born children in Oklahoma,” he said. “Putting that in perspective, it is enough to fill Oklahoma Memorial Stadium more than twice over.“
And that, McManus said, amounts to hundreds of millions of Oklahoma tax dollars spent on supporting people in the country without permission and their children, who are often U.S. citizens.
“Every Oklahoma taxpayer spends $4,278 on the costs of illegal immigration [a year],” he said. “In total, the cost of illegal immigration to Oklahoma taxpayers is $770.9 million a year.”
FAIR’s website says its methodology uses government data where it can and research from non-partisan organizations and academic institutions where it must. But it also says the research conflates the number of unauthorized immigrants in the state with those of unaccompanied minors, holders of certain visas, and other temporary legal statuses.
It also includes tax dollars spent on supporting U.S. citizens who are the children of people in the country without permission into the tally of total costs.
The results show massively inflated numbers compared to groups that have done similar studies using recent census data.
The Migration Policy Institute, for instance, shows the number of foreign-born non-citizens in Oklahoma was between 142,000 and 146,000 as of 2022. That includes people with legal permission to be in the country.
While the Oklahoma state demographic data the institute shows doesn’t break down the monthly cost to individual taxpayers, it does paint a more robust economic picture of noncitizen immigrants in Oklahoma, regardless of their permission to be here.
Of Oklahoma's 142,000 plus foreign-born non-citizens, about 20% live below the poverty line. About 70,000 of them work full-time, year-round, and more than a quarter of those who do earn between $35,000-$49,000 a year. The median household income for the entire group is $51,783. Nearly half of non-citizens in the state own their homes, and just over half of them have private health insurance. While 12% rely on public health coverage, the rest are uninsured.
Regarding tax contributions, the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy released a study in July showing unauthorized immigrants in Oklahoma contributed around $227.5 million to the state in 2022.
Law enforcement perspectives take a conspiratorial turn
The law enforcement officials invited to speak, for the most part, stuck to briefing lawmakers on how illegal immigration affects their ability to maintain public safety.
They included Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics Director Donnie Anderson and Canadian County Sheriff Chris West. One is appointed by a state commission, the other is a locally elected official. Their online bios show they have about 70 years of shared law enforcement between them.
After about an hour of discussion about how illegal immigration and public safety are connected, West capped his testimony by saying he believes unauthorized immigrants are settling across the U.S. and planning a large-scale terrorist attack on Americans like the one conducted by Hamas militants in Israel on Oct. 7 that launched the retaliatory offensive by Israel in Gaza.
He also said he had no evidence supporting the claim.
Anderson, who did not comment at any point on West’s comment, started the discussion with an overview of the problem unfettered illegal immigration poses to law enforcement and the safety of all Oklahomans.
“The overview of the problem, obviously, is that drugs, weapons, currency and humans are trafficked into and across Oklahoma at a frequency not fully understood by any of us,” he said.
He said illegal immigration and the illicit smuggling trade “go hand in hand.”
What Anderson said is most commonly found among the criminally inclined unauthorized noncitizens they catch are their victims, who are in the country without permission and, one way or another, during their journey to the U.S., became entangled with nefarious elements. It’s the only way to get across the Rio Grande without using a legal port of entry, they said, and debts to smugglers are paid in cash, labor or sex.
“Almost every illicit drug that's on the market today comes through Mexico, except for marijuana,” Anderson said.
That’s because cannabis sold on the black market is often grown in Oklahoma, by what Anderson said are primarily Chinese crime syndicates exploiting Asian migrants for labor and sex. Other drugs are either shipped to the U.S. ready to consume or in the form of the ingredients needed to make them. The human cost then compounds.
“Dozens of Asian women were being trafficked into Oklahoma for commercial sex with marijuana owners and operators for 2022 to 2023,” he said.
Anderson said Oklahoma’s legalization of Medical Marijuana in 2018 was the impetus for a spike in criminal activity by unauthorized immigrants.
He said since medical marijuana became legal, OBN has seen a significant increase in the number of foreign nationals it has come across. Estimates, he said, show that of the 30,000 noncitizens who moved to Oklahoma in the last decade, about 8,000 of them were Chinese citizens who moved here to work in marijuana farms.
“And whenever I talk about China, I am not talking about a race. I'm not talking about individuals,” Anderson said. “I'm talking about transnational criminal organizations that have direct ties to the [Chinese Communist Party]. That’s not an accusation. That is a fact that we know of.”
West, the Sheriff of Canadian County just west of Oklahoma City, mostly backed up what Anderson had to say and added some context for lawmakers about how his local agency works with its state-level counterparts to combat crime caused in connection to illegal immigration.
He pointed to a partnership between the OBN and Canadian County that benefits both agencies. Two officers who work for and within the jurisdictional areas of the county sheriff’s office are equipped by the OBN. Marked with OBN icons and insignia, the officers are sometimes given jurisdictional leeway to interdict contraband outside the limits of their county.
The county incurs most of the costs associated with the personnel in exchange for a little extra jurisdiction, and the OBN gets more boots on the ground.
Lawmakers asked what state and local law enforcement agencies could do to identify criminal unauthorized immigrants and process them for later tracking.
They also asked whether Oklahoma has any of its own immigration processing centers and whether state law enforcement and corrections entities were billing the federal government for processing inmates in the country illegally.
In response, Anderson and West said immigration enforcement has, so far, been consistently found to be within the sole authority of the federal government, meaning that any unauthorized immigrants incarcerated in the state’s corrections system had to have broken a state law unrelated to immigration.
In other words, Oklahoma couldn’t have immigration processing centers if it wanted them because it would be violating federal law. Additionally, as it stands, no level of Oklahoma law enforcement can arrest people based on their immigration status alone. That could change, as the sweeping anti-immigration law HB 4156 remains tied up in federal court. The law would criminalize anyone in the state without legal authorization to be in the country if it was allowed to take effect.
Last month, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond appealed a decision by the U.S. Western District Court of Oklahoma to stop the measure. It faces action by a higher appellate court in Colorado, one step away from potentially going to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It was at the end of Sheriff West’s testimony that he stated his unfounded belief that people entering the U.S. illegally are plotting a Hamas-style terrorist attack across the country like the one that sparked the war in Gaza.
“My biggest threat is that they're trying to set up and organize a mass coordinated terrorist event in our country,” West said.
“Israel doesn't have a Second Amendment like what we have,” he said. “I tell everybody that my biggest fear is that there's going to be a coordinated event across our country, and thank God we have a Second Amendment.”
Rep. John Waldron, one of two Democrats in the House States Powers Committee, was at the meeting virtually. He questioned West.
“Who is the ‘they’ in that sentence, and what specific evidence do we have that they are planning a coordinated attack in the United States?” Waldron asked.
“‘They’ are terrorist organizations, whether it's Hamas, Hezbollah, whoever, the people that are coming in,” said West, who was in Washington D.C. during the January 6 Capitol storming, though he denies breaching the building. “I didn't say that I have evidence. I said it's my feelings based on the places that I've been, the things that I've seen.”
