President. I expect that Senator DEMINT Will come to the floor to address his amendment. but in the next 5 minutes that we have before he does so. I would say his amendment is basically saying there will be no adjustment in status unless all these individuals are going to be able to buy into the highdeductible HSAs. health savings accounts. and that because of the fact that immigrants are a burden on the health care system. that they should be required to do this additional kind of work to meet their responsibilities under this legislation. There are a couple factors I wish to mention. First of all. if you take the fact that you have 12 million of these individuals. the 12 million who are the undocumentable. they are going to. as part of their fine. pay S500 per individual. That comes to some $6 billion$6 billionthat can go for support for various health care offsets into local communities. That is not an insignificant amount of resources. We anticipated this possibility. No. 1. No. 2. we ought to make an examination of what happens to these undocumented individuals. What is the utilization by the undocumented? We know they are basically healthier. they are younger. and the various information and statistics we see says there is not an overutilization of the health services. I have statistics for undocumented immigrants in one of the border States. this is in Texas. and I will read this and Include the appropriate part in the RECORD. The Comptrollers office estimates the absence of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in Texas would have been a loss to their gross State product of $17 billion. Also. the Comptrollers office estimates State revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceed what the State spends on services. with the difference being $424 million. That is today. one StateTexasin the utilization of services. So we find this population where there has not been an overutilization of services. and we have provisions in the current legislation to deal with this problem and deal with it generously.
Keywords matched
immigrants undocumentable undocumented