Immigration Debate

Los Angeles - The immigration issue is a hot button... Some people want illegal immigrants sent home, while others say California's economy needs them.

LA County spends more than 1.5 billion dollars a year on health care, welfare payments and jail costs for illegal immigrants... Those numbers are going up and they do not include education, but that may be only one side of the story.

This weekend, in the first of a series of articles, the Orange County Register published an unprecedented statistical analysis of census data going back 40 years. They conclude that, like it or not, we've become "addicted" to immigrant labor.

Here are some of the facts:

*California has more immigrants, legal and illegal, than any other state and more than nearly any other country in the world.

*Immigrants have filled most of the new jobs created in California since 1970 and nearly one in ten of those workers are illegal immigrants.

On Monday, Tony Bell, a spokesman for supervisor Mike Antonovich and Mike Garcia, the president of Service Employees International Union - United Service Workers West, were live in the FOX 11 Newsroom for a debate on immigration.

Watch the debate in the media player.