Report examines immigrant-led household incomes

HARTFORD » A new report shows that immigrant-led households in Connecticut earned $18.9 billion in 2014 — 13.9 percent of all income earned by everyone in the state that year.

The report, Map the Impact, was released by New American Economy. The report was compiled for all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., and was designed to highlight the impact immigrants have on the nation’s economy.

The report the organization released in August concluded there are 494,059 foreign-born residents in the state, and about 130,000 of those residents are undocumented.

Tony Sheridan, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut, focused on that statement in the report during Tuesday’s Legislative Office Building press conference.

Sheridan said many immigrants spend time in Connecticut getting their college education and then wind up going back to their home countries after they get their degrees.

“That is the height of foolishness,” Sheridan said. “We’re educating them and sending them back while our population is not growing.”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he hoped the report will help “defeat some of the misconceptions and myths that have been spread all too widely by less informed public officials and they will heed and hear the voices of reason and information.”

He added that more than half, 51 percent, of the Fortune 500 companies in the country have been started by immigrants.

“It is not just the groceries and the small and immediate size businesses,” Blumenthal said, that have immigrant roots.

“People come here because we are the beacon of opportunity and freedom,” Blumenthal said. “People come here to work, to build, to be free. The results are striking. Because they give to our community, they contribute, create new businesses and new jobs.”

The senator noted that immigrants pay taxes too.

The report found, in 2014, that immigrants’ household income in Connecticut was $5.5 billion; that immigrants paid $1.6 billion in taxes, $525.9 million of which was state and local taxes.

The report concludes that undocumented immigrants in Connecticut earned $3.1 billion in 2014 and paid $145.2 million in state and local taxes.

The report stated that in 2014 foreign born workers make up 21.3 percent of all entrepreneurs in the state, despite being only 13.7 percent of Connecticut’s population.

Those entrepreneurs employ more than 73,000 other workers in Connecticut.

Blumenthal said that immigrants generally become job creators, and entrepreneurs, and business owners, and then they give back to their communities.

Also at the press conference was Henry Talmage, executive director of the Connecticut Farm Bureau.