Texas, 12 counties tussle over aid.

Say what you will about unauthorized immigrants, but they are not a drain on the Texas economy.

In fact, a new report from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy finds that from one perspective, Texas is getting the better end of the bargain in its dealings with this population.

The report’s analysis is straightforward. And although its conclusion is controversial, it shouldn’t be.

“I don’t remember growing up, when my family was undocumented, my parents having a tax exemption card at the grocery store,” said state Rep. Ana Hernandez, a Houston Democrat. “Immigrants do contribute.”

The report crunches the numbers as follows: Texas is home to some 1.6 million of the country’s roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants, about 70 percent of whom are from neighboring Mexico. These migrants made up 8.2 percent of the state’s workforce in 2018, the year on which the report is based.

In fiscal year 2018, it concludes, the state spent $2 billion on residents without legal status in this country, and collected roughly $2.4 billion from them, for a net gain of approximately $421 million. That’s not even counting the considerable contributions these residents make, directly and indirectly, to the state’s gross national product.

Some on the right bridled at this news.

“Even in normal times, the assertion that low-wage illegal aliens provide a net fiscal benefit to the state strains credulity,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, in a statement. “Under current circumstances, such claims are a laughable attempt to sell the people of Texas snake oil solutions to an unprecedented economic and fiscal crisis.”

As a Texan, it sounds to me like Stein and the organization he leads are based in Washing

ton, D.C.

It’s true that we are facing an unprecedented economic crisis, as a result of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Nearly 2 million Texans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past two months, and the state’s unemployment rate soared to 12.8 percent in April — a record.

But it’s long been established that, under normal circumstances, unauthorized immigrants are net contributors to Texas.

The report seeks to update a 2006 report from the Texas Comptroller’s office, then led by Republican Carole Keeton Strayhorn. That report found unauthorized immigrants in Texas were net contributors to the state’s piggy bank in 2005, as well as responsible for $17.7 billion in state GDP that year.

Every cost-benefit analysis of unauthorized immigrants in Texas — and there have been several, notes study author José Iván Rodríguez-Sánchez— has reached a similar conclusion. The Texas model gets the credit, or the blame, depending on your ideology. Like everyone else in Texas, unauthorized immigrants pay sales and property taxes, in addition to spending money on lottery ticket and utilities.

And — again, like everyone else in Texas — these migrants don’t benefit from lavish state spending.

In California, a state with high taxes and far more services, it may be a different story. But in Texas, you have to massage the data pretty aggressively to argue that unauthorized immigrants are hurting the economy.

Republican lawmakers have in recent years rejected several proposals from Democrats to update the 2006 comptroller’s study, perhaps because we all know the results would be at odds with the Texas GOP’s increasingly draconian views on illegal immigration and border security. Texas Republican leaders once took a pragmatic approach to these subjects, but that ethos was waning even before Donald Trump’s election.

Rodríguez-Sánchez’s conclusions aren’t surprising. But his report is timely, given that unauthorized immigrants are among the groups of Texans being hit hardest by the pandemic that Stein mentions, as well as the pandemic that triggered it.

Immigrants living here without legal authorization make up a disproportionate share of workers at the meat-packing plants that have emerged as hot spots for coronavirus infections. And those who have lost their incomes in the past two months aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits or the one-time federal stimulus payments that have helped sustain other displaced workers in recent weeks.

“Ignoring the health and economic needs of undocumented immigrants is dehumanizing, counterproductive to our collective efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19, and inhibits economic recovery,” argued Martin Martinez of the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin.

The new report is unlikely to cause a change of heart among the state’s Republican leaders.

Still, Rodriguez-Sanchez is right to remind us that unauthorized immigrants are all too often wrongly vilified as a burden on society.

If anything, it’s the opposite. Hernandez, the state representative, said: “It’s important to set apart the emotions and the demonization of immigrants and look at the data and the positive impacts that immigrants have on the Texas economy.”