The limited value of most immigrants' labor in our information-driven economy means that they often work at jobs that do not provide health insurance, and their low incomes make it difficult for them to purchase insurance on their own. As for illegal immigration, the study found that only about one-fourth of the uninsured in immigrant families were in the country illegally. It also found that the 1996 welfare reform law seems to have had little effect on rates of insurance coverage. Lest you think that all this is just the immigrants' problem, it's clear that a larger uninsured population affects us all. Americans who do have insurance end up paying higher premiums, as health care providers pass along some of the cost of treating the uninsured.
Taxpayers also pick up some of the bill.
Many public hospitals around the country are going broke trying to provide care to an ever-growing uninsured population. Perhaps most troubling is that by dramatically increasing the size of the uninsured population, mass immigration makes it much more difficult to provide care for the uninsured already here, immigrant or native. A recent study by the Institute of Medicine concluded that hospitals and clinics caring for the uninsured are at greater risk of failure that ever before, partly because of the growing size of the uninsured population. Clearly, there is a high cost to cheap labor. None of this is to suggest that individual immigrants are to blame.