Part 1: Jobs lure illegal immigrants to state

Four hundred thousand strong and they keep coming, drawn by the jobs that North Carolina employers eagerly offer illegal immigrants.

Illegal immigrants mow our lawns, paint our homes, watch our children and cook our food for bottom wages. Doing so, they provide consumers with affordable services that people in most other industrialized countries can only dream of.

But as the wave of immigration continues and the benefits grow, the costs of illegal immigration also mount and become more painful. The losers in the United States' immigration-system breakdown are numerous. They include:

* Taxpayers who foot the cost of educating children of illegal immigrants.

* Hospitals that serve thousands of uninsured newcomers. They absorb some of the cost but pass much of it along to their paying customers and taxpayers.

* Legal blue-collar workers, whose wages are depressed by competition from immigrants willing to work for less.

So far, however, the federal government has chosen to look the other way -- and many businesses are glad it has.

Businesses are the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration and are the reason unauthorized foreigners are here in the first place.

Some employers say they have difficulty verifying immigrants' legal status, others that pressing labor demands force them to flout the law.

Few, however, express remorse.

"Let's say they got the National Guard to start pulling everybody over and sending every illegal person they find back home. Then where is your work force going to come from?" asked Paul, owner of a small landscaping and tree-cutting business in Raleigh.

Paul, who has employed two illegal immigrants from Mexico for more than seven years, agreed to speak provided he and his business were not fully identified.

"If we don't want them here, why doesn't the government send them back?" he said. "The government lets them cross the border, so why should we worry about it?"

In North Carolina, as in much of the South, any account of illegal immigration is essentially a story about Hispanics. Today, it's estimated that more than 600,000 Hispanics are in the state, roughly half of them without papers.

Of the estimated 395,000 illegal immigrants who made their home in North Carolina in 2004, 70 percent were Mexican, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a research group in Washington. Taking into account thousands who arrived from Central America and other Latin American countries, the Hispanic portion of the state's illegal immigrant population is probably at least 80 percent. That would put the number of illegal Hispanic residents in the state about 316,000.

Last month, researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill published a study on the economic impact of North Carolina's Hispanic influx. Among their findings:

* Hispanics, legal and illegal, cost state taxpayers $817 million in 2004, with education and health care being the biggest expenses. Meanwhile, Hispanics generated $756 million in tax revenue. According to the report, that averages out to a cost to the state budget of $102 per Hispanic resident.

* More broadly, Hispanic residents contributed about $9 billion to the state economy through purchases and taxes. Their spending has led to creation of 89,600 jobs.

* Because many Latinos work for below-market wages, they also depress North Carolina private-sector payrolls by $1.9 billion annually, the researchers found. In many cases, those lower costs are passed on to consumers as lower prices.

The study was released by UNC's Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and was underwritten by the N.C. Bankers Association.