CARSON CITY -- Hispanic immigrants contribute millions of dollars to the Nevada economy and make up an inextricable part of the work force, according to a new report commissioned by a local group.

The report seeks to refocus the immigration debate by studying the economic benefits of Hispanic immigration, both legal and illegal, rather than concentrating on immigrants' costs to society.

"We want to reframe the way that Nevadans view immigration and immigrants," said Bob Fulkerson of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, which commissioned the report, to be released today.

"We want to help people understand the huge contributions immigrants make to Nevada and understand that immigration is vitally important to our state," he said.

According to data gathered in the report, Hispanic immigrants paid $1.6 billion in state and local taxes in Nevada in 2005. Hispanic immigrants make up 18 percent of the Clark County work force, the report states.

The report notes that, by way of comparison, the state's annual budget for the coming year is $3.4 billion. However, not all local taxes go to state coffers.

"The idea is to look at what immigrants contribute to the economy -- how much of the work force, how much of the economic output," said Robert Ginsburg, a Chicago-based researcher for the Center on Work and Community Development, who compiled the report.

"You hear a lot of anecdotes -- they do this, they do that, they're a drain on society," Ginsburg said. "But what's been missing is the numbers. This shows that for Nevada, which is a relatively small state in terms of population, there's a huge positive impact."

Opponents of illegal immigration say the report proves nothing. They point out that it analyzes the benefits of immigration without taking a corresponding look at the potential costs.

Assemblyman Ty Cobb, R-Reno, has a bill in the Legislature that would deny some state benefits to those who can't prove they are American citizens. He acknowledges that immigrants, even illegal immigrants, contribute in some ways economically.

"I don't mind looking at it from the perspective of what are some of the benefits," he said. "There's pros and cons to everything. But there are also significant costs, and if you do a cost-benefit analysis, I'm pretty confident it's not a net benefit because of the enormous costs to our state."

Cobb pointed to the state money spent on the Millennium Scholarship, on K-12 education for illegal immigrants and their children, and on prisons. The state prison system, he said, houses about 1,530 illegal immigrants at a cost of $29 million.

Elsewhere in the country, studies purporting to show the costs or benefits of immigration in the aggregate have come under heavy fire and reached conflicting conclusions.

Cobb pointed to a study done by the state of Minnesota in 2005 that looked at "costs and population trends related to illegal immigration." It explicitly did not consider potential benefits of immigration.

The Minnesota study found that the state's population of about 80,000 illegal immigrants was costing the state about $150 million per year in public education, public assistance for health care and incarceration.

Nevada's PLAN report does not distinguish between Hispanic immigrants who are in the country legally and those who came illegally. However, most estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in Nevada range from 150,000 to 250,000.

A report in Texas tried to look at costs and benefits together. The state controller last year conducted an analysis and concluded that illegal immigrants contributed $240 million more to the state than they cost the state.

That report's methodology and conclusions were criticized nationally by groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which countered with its own estimate: It said illegal immigration was a net loss to the state of Texas of $3.7 billion.

The group made a rough estimate of the cost of illegal immigration to Nevada, based on abstracting national statistics to fit the state's demographics, and came up with a figure of $518 million per year.

"The costs just from education, emergency medical care and incarceration significantly outweigh any taxes collected from the illegal alien population," said Jack Martin, Washington-based special projects director for the federation.

After reviewing the PLAN report, Martin called it "a pretty slick effort," but said it was "fundamentally misleading."

Ginsburg, the researcher, said it would have been too difficult to measure the costs of immigrants' presence.

"It's much harder to estimate what do they take, what services do they use," he said. "It's very hard as an economist to say what services you're talking about. What we tried to do is make the point that Nevada needs immigrants."

Assemblyman Mo Denis, D-Las Vegas, said PLAN's report should be viewed as "a good start."

Denis hopes to secure funding for an independent, objective, academic study of immigration's costs and benefits, along the lines of the Texas report.

"What we need is a full economic impact study," Denis said. "But the important thing in this report is what I've always realized, which is that the Hispanic immigrant population is contributing to the economy in Nevada."