EDITORIAL: Illegal immigration’s financial burden should be shouldered by federal government

The federal government provides huge sums of money to states when hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires and other natural disasters strike. Federal lawmakers passed out piles of cash to the states hit hardest by the housing collapse, and they hand out big grants to police departments based on terrorism risks.

But when it comes to one of the federal government's greatest policy failures, one that unfairly burdens states and counties with astronomical costs while simultaneously prohibiting them from doing anything to address the problem, Washington won't own up or pay up.

Illegal immigration is a big issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. Both Democrats and Republicans acknowledge the country's current immigration system is broken, although the candidates have very different ideas on how to fix it.

None has advocated a position that would help states and local governments manage the rising costs of illegal immigration. Whether the next president and Congress strike any kind of agreement on reform or do nothing at all while allowing more undocumented immigrants to cross into our country, states will pay full freight for the federal government's refusal to enforce immigration laws — and its refusal to give states any authority to enforce immigration laws.

Because presidential candidates from both parties are regular visitors to Nevada to build support for February's first-in-the-West caucuses, the Review-Journal is publishing a 10-editorial series on policies we'd like them to champion. Our ninth recommended reform is intended to right a longtime wrong and build support for an immigration fix in a way that hasn't been tried before. The next president should advocate federal grant funding to states with high undocumented immigrant populations, so that all states share the fiscal costs of illegal immigration, not just an overburdened few.

No state has been affected by illegal immigration more than Nevada. According to the Pew Research Center, Nevada has the highest unauthorized immigrant population of any state by percentage. In a study released a year ago, Pew determined that 7.6 percent of Nevada's population was undocumented — about 220,000 people. That's 1.3 percentage points higher than the undocumented populations of California and Texas.

Not surprisingly, Nevada also has the largest percentage of K-12 students with parents who are undocumented immigrants. According to Pew, 17.7 percent of Nevada schoolchildren were the children of undocumented immigrants in 2012, 4.5 percentage points higher than second-place California. Nevada's figure makes sense, considering about 20 percent of Clark County School District students are classified as English Language Learners, and that about 90 percent of the county's ELL students are Spanish speakers. (Schools do not ask students or their parents if they are in the country illegally and cannot block student enrollment based on immigration status.)

Gov. Brian Sandoval and the Nevada Legislature this year passed the largest tax increase in state history to boost K-12 spending. A sizable chunk of that money went to "zoom schools," urban campuses where a majority of the students enrolled are English Language Learners. Those students are provided with fully subsidized pre-kindergarten, full-day kindergarten, longer instruction days and additional resources to quickly build the English proficiency necessary to master other material.

The cost of educating these students isn't merely fiscal. Because the Clark County School District and other systems were never prepared to properly teach so many students who aren't proficient in English, abysmal ELL student performance drags overall state achievement into the national basement. According to the U.S. Department of Education, last year just 13 percent of Nevada's ELL fourth-graders were proficient in math, and 8 percent were proficient in reading. Among ELL eighth-graders, 5 percent were proficient in math and a mere 3 percent were proficient in reading. The high school graduation rate for ELL students is about 20 percent. Their dropout rate is beyond tragic.

These numbers make the overall performance of Nevada schools thoroughly unappealing to many companies, greatly hindering the state's economic development efforts. That cost can't be measured.

There would be more urgency to address illegal immigration (and the myriad problems with the country's legal immigration system) if every state faced comparable burdens as a result of undocumented populations. But many states have very low undocumented populations. Making them contribute to the fiscal costs of illegal immigration assumed by other states would force them to find policy solutions all states can agree on.

The grants would have to be substantial, not like the Interior Department's Payment in Lieu of Taxes program, which compensates counties for federal acres that are not on property tax rolls. Although Nevada has a higher percentage of federal land than any other state, at more than 80 percent, it gets less per acre through PILT than any other Western state — a little more than $20 million per year. Whoop dee doo. Beyond schools, the grants should be available to justice systems to help cover the cost of incarcerating criminal illegal immigrants and to hospitals that provide uncompensated care to the undocumented.

So how about it, presidential candidates? If you can't stop illegal immigration, the least you can do is start paying for it.