Ohio Immigration

< Back to Ohio Immigration Resources

legal Immigration in Ohio

An estimated 40,000 illegal aliens resided in Ohio as of 2000, according to INS figures. This is 173 percent higher than the previous INS estimate in 1996 and 220 percent higher than the estimate for 1990.34 In the mid-1990s, central Ohio’s immigration office in central Ohio had only one staffer; today, the office has 22 employees and is struggling to keep pace with the workload.35

Ohio authorities requested compensation of $3.5 million from the federal government in FY’99 for the incarceration of illegal aliens in state and local jails and prisons (under the federal State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, or SCAAP), but it received only $1.3 million in compensation, leaving $2.2 million in uncompensated costs to be borne by Ohio taxpayers.

In more recent years, the federal government has stopped releasing data on how much states requested, but records do show that Ohio received only $1.5 million, $900,000, and $1.2 million from SCAAP in FY’00, ’01, and ’02, respectively. Payments to the states have become much lower, so local taxpayers were forced to absorb a much larger share of the cost of criminal alien incarceration.

Contact Ohio Immigration Attorneys