A Cato study analyzes how immigrants affected total US government debt.
Please consider the Cato study, Immigrants Reduced Deficits by $14.5 Trillion Since 1994
Today, the Cato Institute published “Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023,” a study on the fiscal effects of immigrants—legal and illegal—that builds upon the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) fiscal effects model. The paper, which I coauthored with Michael Howard and Julián Salazar, is the first to analyze three decades of federal, state, and local government budgets to determine how immigrants affected the total US government debt and deficit.
In this paper, we wanted to accomplish two main things:
1) Provide the first-ever assessment of the total net fiscal effect of all immigrants from 1994 to 2023, rather than a one-year snapshot or forward-looking projection like many other studies. We wanted a sufficiently long period to assess claims like those by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, asserting that immigrants have already sucked us dry.
2) Provide the clearest explanation for the mechanisms driving the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets.
Immigrants Have Reduced the Deficit Every Year
Every year since 1994, when data collection began, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits from the federal, state, and local governments. The fiscal benefits have continued to rise, reaching their highest level ever in 2023.
The fiscal surplus from all immigrants from 1994 to 2023 was $14.5 trillion, compared with a deficit of $48 trillion without immigrants. That means that immigrants cut deficits by nearly a third in real terms over the last three decades.
Immigrants Pay More Taxes, Receive Fewer Benefits
Immigrants pay more in taxes than the average person. This is counterintuitive because they have lower hourly wages, but because they work at much higher rates (the blue line), they end up with higher per capita incomes (the gray line) and pay more in taxes than their share of the population predicts (the dotted line). Thus, immigrants have been better at generating revenue for the government than the average person.
Are their tax revenues overwhelmed by the costs they impose? Here’s everything the federal, state, and local governments spent money on over the last 30 years in per capita dollar amounts. Immigrants did not create significantly higher costs for any items and saved the government enormously in two areas: old-age benefits and education costs.
Immigrants cost less as retirees: First, the savings on old-age benefits are not because immigrants are significantly less likely to retire. Instead, it is because they are far less likely to receive a government pension, since they were less likely to have government jobs and thus less likely to receive expensive government pensions. The main reason, though, is that they were simply barred from applying for Social Security and Medicare because they either arrived too late in life to earn the necessary qualifying work history, or they are here illegally or in a temporary status and ineligible for that reason.
Immigrants cost schools less: Immigrants arrive in the United States at the average age of about 25, meaning that the United States gets workers without having to pay to educate them. Even though they are more costly when in school—due to bilingual education needs—they are much less costly overall because they are so much less likely to be in school. The result is that immigrants cost the US education system about half as much as the US-born population.
Immigrants aren’t big welfare users. The savings on education aren’t lost in the welfare state. Immigrants are much more likely to be in poverty but use roughly an average amount of what we call “needs-based” assistance. That includes traditional welfare, food assistance, Medicaid, refundable tax credits, and unemployment insurance. The entire reason for this disconnect between poverty rates and welfare use rates is that many immigrants are here illegally and so are ineligible to apply for welfare in most states. This conclusion, that immigrants use welfare at the same rate as the US-born population, matches the Trump administration’s conclusion in 2018.
Concluding Thoughts
For years, nativists in Congress and the administration have wrongly claimed that immigrants are behind the growth in debt and that the US immigration system allows foreigners to take advantage of Americans’ generosity. Our data completely repudiates this view. Immigrants are subsidizing the US government.
The best way to balance the budget is to reduce spending—particularly on wealthy retirees—but rather than hinder our efforts to control deficits, immigrants are helping.
The Study
Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023
This paper updates a model of these effects first developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to shed light on how immigrants, both legal and illegal, and their children affect government budgets. This analysis is the first to estimate the cumulative fiscal effect of immigrants on federal, state, and local budgets over 30 years.
The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. The data show:
- For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.
- Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.
- Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level.
These results, which do not account for any of immigration’s indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth, represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis.
The NASEM–Cato model shows the following:
- Every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
- Immigrants generated nearly $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they induced in total government spending.
- Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.
- Immigrants cut US budget deficits by about a third from 1994 to 2023, and fiscal savings grew to $878 billion in 2023 (Figure 1).
- Noncitizens accounted for $6.3 trillion of the $14.5 trillion debt savings.
- College graduate immigrants accounted for $11.7 trillion in savings, while non–college graduates accounted for $2.8 trillion.
- The cohort of immigrants entering from 1990 to 1993, just before data collection began in 1994, was fiscally positive $1.7 trillion, and was still positive after 30 years in 2022–2023 (Table 1). [lead chart]
- Even including the second generation (see Box 1 for definitions), who are mostly still children who will become taxpayers soon, the fiscal effect of immigration was positive every year.
- Immigrants in all categories of educational attainment, including high school dropouts, lowered the ratio of deficit to gross domestic product (GDP) during the 30-year period.
- Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.
Our results represent the lowest possible fiscal surplus that immigrants provide to US government budgets. This is because the NASEM–Cato model is a static accounting model that does not include indirect economic effects of immigration, such as improving the productivity of US workers.9 For instance, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that one-third of the fiscal surplus from the surge of immigration from 2021 to 2024 came from indirect economic effects,10 but none of these revenues can be attributed to immigrants in the NASEM–Cato model, as we are only tracing accounting payments to and from immigrants, not modeling the entire economy. The model also does not account for how accruing less debt would have reduced interest rates on debt, enhancing the savings on interest payments.11
Cato Figure 1 Immigrants
Box 1
Immigrant definitions
Immigrants/first generation: Foreign-born persons, including legal and illegal noncitizens and naturalized citizens. This category excludes those born abroad to American citizens, who are granted citizenship at birth.
Noncitizens: Immigrants without US citizenship, including legal and illegal immigrants.
Second generation: US-born persons with at least one first-generation parent.
Third-plus generation: US-born persons (including those born in US outlying areas such as Puerto Rico and Guam) of two US-born parents as well as those born abroad to American citizens and who are granted citizenship at birth.
Why Immigrants Were Fiscally Positive
The US government spends more than it receives in taxes and other revenue, so many people believe that deporting a person with average characteristics would improve the deficit. They reason that, with fewer US residents, there would be a commensurate decrease in government spending and thus a lower deficit.
However, a significant portion of government spending consists of items that do not causally increase or decrease with population. For instance, the US military, nuclear arsenal, and NASA spaceflight would remain the same regardless of whether the US population grew or shrank by a million people. In this analysis, we call these items “pure public goods” and refer to all other spending as “benefits.” Pure public goods are mainly national defense and interest payments on debt accrued before the immigrants arrived. As we explain in more detail in the Appendix, immigrants may benefit from this spending, but they do not require the government to spend more on these items. Indeed, immigrants may even decrease these costs for the US-born by lowering interest rates and decreasing military recruitment costs. And they certainly ease the fiscal load on the US-born, because immigrant taxpayers help shoulder the fiscal burden of these expenditures.
There is much more to the study with detailed analysis and charts.
Here is a second link to the White Paper Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023.
I do not doubt the study one bit. Those wearing MAGA hats probably did not get this far.
Could We Do Better?
Certainly. I do not advocate an open borders free-for-all.
We need better vetting of criminals and we don’t need an uncontrolled flood of people.
But without a doubt, construction, agricultural, hotel, meat packers, and many trades would have labor shortages without immigrants.
Deporting people who have been here in the US productively, for many years in morally and economically idiotic.
The racist Gestapo is rounding up people by looks and putting them illegally in unsafe conditions. Those with valid papers, even US citizens are caught in the snare.
24 people have died in ICE concentration camps in fiscal year 2025. There’s 14 so far in fiscal year 2026.
Food, medical supplies, and sanitary conditions are lacking.
What’s going on is sickening, morally and economically, but if you are a racist you cheer it.
I moved to Dallas in 1981. It was brimful of people who had just waded across the Rio Grande. This is what they did, and in a gigantic way: built every gawd damned thing you see and fed almost every open mouth. Work, work. work, work, work, work, work, work, work. They were like worker ants crawling all over every single Texas city building elaborate anthills. Everybody was happy and full of tacos and had clean sheets in clean hotel rooms and manicured yards. The Texas Miracle is what they built. Welfare my ass. Lol. Ditto for the Permian basin. Right now there is some rancher trying to raise investment to buy the recently abandoned Tyson meat packing plant. Great idea? Who is going to cut the meat? Because it was the undocumented Latinos and the war refugees from Somalia and SE Asia. Who is next? Recently graduated white kids from home schools?
Wages have been suppressed by immigration. Expenses for the citizens have increased due to supply and demand pressures from immigration. Not sure immigration should be encouraged to elevate government profits, or private profits for that matter. With higher wages, tax revenues would be higher, and government expenses would be reduced
Its not about immigration. Its about controlling the republican base to keep them voting red because republican policies dont help the average voter.
👌
This study is the biggest load of horse$hit that’s ever been written. There are schools throughout the country that are educating immigrants both legal and illegal. They are also receiving healthcare and in many cases welfare. There is a significant amount of fraud in welfare, unemployment benefits, Snap and Medicare that is driven by illegal immigration. Only in a democrat inspired political bubble like Washington DC. could such a ridiculous article be written. I’ve worked in the DC area for 30 years, the change is so obvious you have to have blinders on not to see it. Every school in the counties surrounding Washington are teaching English to a large number of illegal immigrant children. FFS compare the demographics from 2000 until now. This article must have been written by some nepo-babvy who never leaves their upper middle class bubble in Mclean or Bethesda.
And the evidence for your diatribe is: ???
Oh I forgot, the Cato Institute It is an Infamous radical Democratic institution
I did not believe the headline but the reported facts changed my bias. It’s lazy and convenient to believe that immigrants are a net expense – which is strange because I’m a productive immigrant (to Canada) and simultaneously hold the view that since it takes a lot of work and risk to emigrate, so immigrants are the people who would benefit their new country.
Did this article cover legal and illegal immigrants as “Immigrants” ?
Read it and find out! Then comment. You got the order mixed up!
Well over 90% of US population is immigrants or immigrant descendants.
This is discriminating against new immigrants by old immigrants.
Yes, and they used to all be vetted. Sort of like voting used to require a government issued photo ID…. you know, the archaic practice of one person, one vote.
My ancestors immigrated in the mid 1600s, and they were not vetted. As for the history of photo IDs, where are you getting that?
You got me. Before there was a country, immigration was not vetted by the US government.
Immigration was not truly “vetted” until the 1920s. White people used to pour across the Canadian border. Their descendants will look you right in the eye and claim Great Grandpa came through Ellis Island. No, he walked into North Dakota. Lol.
idiotic. ever heard of us WOPS and what it means. public or home schooled?
Digging deeper, good bet this follows 80/20 rule: 20% of immigrants make up 80% of gains. All cultures are not equal.
Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, yes.
This guy, not so much: Diaz Vera was charged with first-degree sodomy, kidnapping, and menacing, and ordered held on $100,000 cash bond. Federal immigration authorities are seeking custody of rideshare driver who was arrested for allegedly sodomizing a female passenger at gunpoint in Kentucky. He’s originally from Cuba, he’s here on a work permit. What sort of work permit WAS that?
Another tragic victim of fox news! So sad to see.
Great study!Let’s bring some more,this is good for the US finances,for the GDP and bullish for the stock market!
CATO is absolute GIGO
Check your source– CATO is a Democrat propaganda machine–or pull some data from the Hoover Institute to off set
Or just refute the research they did using arguments?
Too much work for the pedo crowd
Watching the real Trump is like a Saturday Night Live schtick!
It’s funny until you realize that he believes his own bullshit!
Sad, pathetic, wrinkled old criminal dumpling.
Painted orange on the top and hands!
Uh huh. I am still not buying.
I’ve seen so many studies (with respect to other OECD countries as well) purporting to support the tremendous contributions made by (illegal) immigrant flows.
And yet, I’ve seen many serious studies that come to the opposite conclusion
(Counter-counterintuitive).
When something yields ‘counterintuitive’ results, it’s time to start doubting.
And whip out the debugger for some breaks and watch variables.
Let’s do a little sanity test, reductio ad absurdem.
Immigrants have saved us ⅓ of our fiscal deficits the past generation.
In other words, if we had admitted 3× as many (il)legal immigrants, we would have no fiscal deficit and virtually no national debt (would have been paid for by saved debt interest service alone).
The article does not eschew this dubious logic, au contraire:
Putting it differently, without native born Americans, which are a dead weight, and 3× the current number [solve for x] of migrants, America would be sporting a $48Tr sovereign wealth fund and no fiscal deficit.
The study splits out many categories, but doesn’t deign to even differentiate legal from illegal immigrants; since even that number is subject to a wild wide range, it beggars belief that the data is accurate.
Such as the billions in remittances to the parent country or the pressure on schools, healthcare, and the existing housing stock.
It is refreshing to see someone who disagrees with the report present a counter-argument rather than just bash the source. Debate is much more valuable to everyone than ad hominem attacks.
The deficit is caused by the uniparty Congress that passes budgets that are unbalanced.
The point of this study is to encourage “less-immigration”* voters to willingly accept yet another Trump/Republican betrayal of his/their base, so that the uniparty can continue business as usual.
* There are practically no “anti-immigration” people, just like there are practically no “anti-vax” people. The Oceania regime always picks its own terms to misrepresent people who disagree with uniparty policies.
When I read the title I said must be another. Mish post. I don’t believe a word of it.
And yet here you are reading the post and writing comments.
Your detailed and introspective criticism of errors in Mish’s article [NOT] only prove you are qualified for the Dunning-Krueger Effect.
CATO has long been an open borders Libertarian looney bin financed by wealthy interests who want cheap labor.
Why aren’t open borders advocates offering bounties to immigrants f they are so beneficial?
In comparison to immigrants, how much are Musk’s AI robots and data centers going to contribute to tax revenues in paying down the national debt? Private non-bank lending companies who have arranged a large portion of the 300 billion dollar loans in 2025 for tech and AI projects(a 500% increase from 2024), e.g, Blackstone, KKR, TPG, and CVC have lost 33-45% of their peak value in the 7 April 2025 (53//107//19/44 of 48 day/?) terminal 1982 to 2026 13/33 year :: x/2.5x fractal growth and decaycycle. Like crypto valuations, these are the early canaries already dying in the asset-debt system’s macroeconomic coal mine. How low will the 20 Nov 2025 19/48 day SPX 26 Feb 2025 nadir valuation be? US Ten Year Notes are following a 25/58 of 62 day 1st and 2nd fractal series with an expected nadir (low interest rate) likewise on 26 Feb 2026 as money flows from equities into sovereign debt. (The date of the low is deterministic and will be true, true, and unrelated (other than temporally) to 24 Feb 2025 Liberation day 1.1)
They won’t. The already record-setting corporation profits are predicted to enter HEO (high earth orbit) levels once the majority of American worked are expelled and no more employer taxes need to be paid.
Of course, once the deficits go into solar orbit, Congress MIGHT pass a general welfare tax on all AI/android applications that displaced a wage-paying job in order to fill in those Grand Canyon-sized gaps, not to mention any UBI that likely will be required after vast swaths of Americans are unemployed.
No, AI/robots will make and provide everything we need for free. There will not be any further need for money.
I find it very, very interesting a lot of the names in these comments only ever show up to bash immigration and never post under the same name twice. Really makes you think.
You can see It in the post count when certain topics pop up… usually something that has a dog whistle.
They are the people that have often been banished or people that post comments here regularly that are too ashamed of themselves to post their regular name but we all know who they are anyway.
You may notice the names that suddenly go missing and new ones appear.
Arte Johnson thought so, top.
Cato studies “have faced, or been accused of, using flawed methodologies or subjective data sources, particularly on sensitive topics like immigration.” Just sayin…
Yeah, a right wing libertarian bend. That makes it even worse lol. This gestapo shit is stupid even by them.
I worked in a city years ago that was 85% hispanic. Part of what some paid for was to be transported illegally to CA then taken to a small warehouse for ‘orientation’. Part of the session was to be given a fake SSN and instruction on how to apply for all the free benefits in CA. I’m not sure this ‘study’ considers this type of activity.
You’ll find few that want to stop immigration. Illegal immigration another topic. I know MANY immigrants and most have a similar opinion: just do it legally.
They’re easier to exploit if they’re illegal, so that’s preferred.
Yes, absolutely.
It’s not about the financial impact.
It’s not about the legality.
It’s not about crime.
It’s all about the racism.
You are mentally ILL. Please get help.
Races
Best way to get a balanced budget is to cut military industrial spending by 85 percent
Pull our troops out of wars and out of other countries
Quit purchasing doomsday weapons
That would be sntisemitic.
Quit funding the idf warmonger machine and most foreign aid meaning cut foreign aid for unnecessary purposes
You can’t bomb the living crap out of Iran with that attitude!
That would cut refugees as well.
And the only way to do what you suggest is for neighbors to elect one decent person among them as an independent.
If there’s a whiff of money behind a candidate and they get any teevee or YouTube exposure, they’re probably backed by the same political cartel and don’t deserve a vote.
Just like Calhoun said.
Why doesn’t Cato do a study calculating the potential impact of restricted immigration AND job migration all those years? I suspect they would find there would be almost NO deficit if employers retained all citizen workers and collected the appropriate payroll taxes.
Instead, Congress allowed the manufacturing sector to slip out of the country, eliminating one big chunk of payments to the government, while the feds looked the other way while illegal immigrants were trucked in to overtake citizen workers in the fields and domestic services, chopping off another chunk of payroll taxes.
There’s no such thing as “jobs Americans won’t do.” That’s cover for the Extractor Class whose fat profit margins are padded by cheap labor and dodging employee taxes they would otherwise have to pay. Almost all American teenagers had jobs in the sectors now dominated by illegal workers. They might have been seasonal and part-time workers, but they paid into the system too.
Not anymore. Teenage underemployment is catastrophically low, and the lack of basic work experience shows itself when college grads head to job interviews with mom and dad, and the employer responds by asking ChatGTP how Gen Z can be replaced with AI or foreign labor.
The only way to fix the problem of illegal immigration and budget deficits is to send ICE after the employers who made all this possible — and also the conniving politicians that enabled them after receiving the proper bribes; I mean, campaign donations.
“I suspect they would find there would be almost NO deficit if employers retained all citizen workers and collected the appropriate payroll taxes. …”
You be trippin’ man.
The only teenagers working around here are Hispanic kids. Their (illegal) parents taught them the necessity of hard work.
Almost sounds as if we would be better of with a nation of immigrants and no native born!
Our immigrant ancestors tried hard to wipe out the natives, but they’re still hangin’ in there somehow.
We would be 100% better off of we could replace all trump voters 1:1 with young immigrants.
That’s right Phil, your ilk is “tolerant” and not the hypocrites.
Sorry buddy but nobody should tolerate fascists or pedophile apologists.
The Democrats are trying their hardest to achieve that. They even favor illegal immigrants over legal immigrants in terms of doling out benefits. No joke, unfortunately.
As Democratic Rep. Balint said last year, we need migrants to ‘wipe our asses’ in her cringey town hall, still on youtube.
The best that can be said about the study is that legal immigration was successful, and always has been. Extrapolating past experience to the Biden Pied Piper border less era and name calling anyone who questions today’s cost of illegal immigration is just more DNC propaganda based on ____.
Real Texas businessmen fully understood the extreme benefits of illegal immigration from the Alamo until 2024, at which time they lost their minds.
Yes, and I love how it’s always wiping asses, landscaping, or picking agriculture that Democrats bring up, as though that’s all immigrants are good for in our economy. Not racist at all… according to them.
Well what’s the conclusion, assuming all of this is accurate, which I am far from. One conclusion could be that we obviously need as many immigrants as possible. Can’t go for that one. An alternate conclusion is that we need more people in the US that either can’t or won’t take government money, either because they are ineligible or they are afraid of getting caught. That is obviously what the CATO guys have always wanted, less people taking government money. I’m not at all surprised that their study shows this.
Show me how visits to the ER are tabulated and attributed to illegal immigrants. These stats are worse than the governments
The bots are back, baybee!
The people in charge around the world simply dont want tp break the back of the commodity complex that has taken hold of the world. In fact governments have embraced it at the cost of everything else.
Most tech since the era of social media has been wholly a net negative. The truth of the matter is tech since 2009 has been unproductive from productivity growth standpoint. This is why the standard of living continues to get more expensive while declining for most people.
Everything Our Great Pedophile Leader does is calculated to destroy this country utterly and completely. It makes you wonder why? Who stands to gain? People by the millions follow a senile demented idiot wearing adult diapers?
Jared and Israel
Just to let you know: Brandon left office more than a year ago. I think he stopped showering with his daughter once she stopped being a tweenager.
Thanks for this!
Immigration, Social Security, healthcare, nation debt, consumer debt, climate change, etc. Lots of huge problems that neither party tries to mitigate when they are in power. Lots of can kicking by both parties until they become a crisis with no viable solutions available. One of the reasons is that voters vote for R or D no matter how terrible the candidate. Incumbents almost always win, even if they are useless for many decades. Here’s from google: In the U.S. House of Representatives, incumbent reelection rates are remarkably high, generally hovering between 85% and 100% over the last half-century, often averaging nearly 95%. U.S. Senate incumbents also enjoy high success rates, winning roughly 88% of their races since 1990
Like the old USSR there are no real elections in the US. Fake elections with fake candidates but the Mossad pull the levers.
“Immigrants cost schools less”
LOL! We have public schools here in Orange County, California that are well over 50% immigrant students. I’m pretty sure this is not isolated to our county, nationwide. Furthermore, 26% of all children under 17 in the US are immigrants.
I’m sure you have a valid undisputable accurate and precise justification of these claims.
(and Uncle Al told me so is unworthy)
Uncle Al told him? Hah… he IS Uncle Al. You’re getting bullshit strait from the fount here.
https://www.ed-data.org/district/orange/orange-county-department-of-education
Census Day Enrollment – Race/EthnicityOrange County Department of Education
2024-2025:
White 23.1%
Black 2.7%
Hispanic 48.2%
Asian 15.8%
2020-2021:
White 23.3%
Black 2.1%
Hispanic 53.8%
Asian 10.1%
They recently deleted access to immigration status, but the vast majority of hispanics and asians are immigrants.
and?
Do you just blurt stuff? Do you have MAGA Tourettes syndrome or something?
Immigrants don’t cost schools less. They cost schools *much* more. All the ESL support, special aides, etc.
And you have evidence to support this?
Of course you don’t. It’s just “obvious” if you’re a racist prick.
You’re funny.
“…but the vast majority of hispanics and asians are immigrants.”
You are aware that California and the entire southwest was once Mexico. You are aware that the Chinese essentially built all the railroads in the west right?
You do remember most of CA was once Mexico? Who is the native and who is the immigrant?
And you believe that the 11 million number of illegals is still the same as it was during the first term of Jorge W. Bush? Can I interest in a vacation time share?
Exactly. Just the number of illegal immigrants that applied for asylum in the US between 2021 and 2024 was 17 million people. The 10 million illegal immigrant *total* number that the media and certain politicians throw around is complete BS. All they do is lie, just like when they said it was “impossible” to close the open border.
In Santa Ana, Orange County and some nearby cities. Please don’t generalize. Most of OC near beach cities and Irvine have local born citizens
No, we’re getting a lot of corporate transplants and wealthy liberals that want sunshine and palm trees with their dysfunction.
you maybe right to some extent. My beach buddies have told me that
This report is mainly about legal immigration, not illegal immigration. This report is definitely not about the massive Biden wave of immigration through his unchecked usage of parole. This report does not address the costs of illegal immigration fully because data is simply not available, often because immigration proponents block data collection. This report does not include large costs for tax fraud by illegal aliens because the data is not available. I doubt that the authors include K-12 and other costs for anchor children because this data is difficult to obtain.
I do not agree with Mish on this conclusion at least for construction and trades. Illegal immigration has severely depressed wages in many construction and trades. US citizens got the message loudly with wage depression in the many areas of construction and trades. The labor shortages are a result of wage depression, not availability of US workers. I agree that consumers have benefitted from lower construction costs, but I do not think that unchecked immigration is fair competition. I support more flexibility for visa areas with temporary workers such as agriculture.
But without a doubt, construction, agricultural, hotel, meat packers, and many trades would have labor shortages without immigrants.
Any of you spotted a white boy out there cutting broccoli?
I did. When I was a teenager. Actually it was rhododendrons. Myself and forty other locals, mostly teens and grown women.
Next summer, the nursery was closed. Turns out, operations moved upstate to a secluded location where there were only illegal workers.
Rhododendron prices did not fall.
This sounds oddly made up.
In the 1960s they tried to get 20,000 California high school athletes to harvest fruits and vegetables, etc. The Jocks Harvest. It fell short by 17,000 jocks and half of the jocks who did sign up quit the team because it was too hard.
I’d rather pay to import it from Mexico to keep the illegals there.
Who pays for the schooling of the multiple children of illegals at $15000 a pop each year? Do they even pay $15,000 a year in taxes? And that doesn’t include SNAP, WIC etc. if there is an anchor baby involved.
$15k? CA is closer to $25k/head. And NY is pushing $30k!
Day care, childcare, babysitting, elder care, assisted living, nursing homes restaurants, janitors, backend office work, caregivers, hotels, moetls….long list of small, mid-size and even large businesses depend on illegal immigrants to keep costs down and everything affordable. If all of them ortheir replacements(not available) were paid minimum+wages+healthInsurance+WorkersComp+Otherbenefits then we won’t be able to handle the inflationary pressures and the shortages. Will happen soon. Nobody will connect the dots
Yep. Cherry picking some of the data.
This was an interesting study. Some views I had not seen. Hard to believe they reduced the deficit. I don’t think anyone reduces the deficit. Also, how much taxes have illegals not paid? How much free health care was been given out and written off. What happens when these non retirement aged immigrants do reach retirement and start taking out way more than they put in. That is when they will probably be a big deficit contributor.
This study suggests a net negative of $68k per person. But maybe that reduced the federal deficit. LOL
Camarota-Testimony.pdf
Boots on the ground people know the burden that illegal immigrants have on the economy. My church gives out 40k weekend meals a year so school aged kids are not hungry on the weekends when they are not receiving the free school lunch. I would say 70% are from foreign born immigrants and many are illegal. An estimated cost is $450k/year and this could have been given to U.S. low income elderly citizens who are getting killed by inflation. …etc.
Also, contrary to believe, illegals do not pay as much taxes that people think. . I have a friend in construction who hires low skilled laborers. She does 1099s so they employee is responsible to pay the tax. The IRS came after her and said $200k she paid to these contractors were fake SSNs or green cards. They said she owed taxes on this $200k as these were fictional people.
So she is contesting this but if she has to pay….it is not illegals paying the taxes it is her. Multiply this by thousands of employers experiencing the same thing.
You can believe whatever you want. Just look at labor shortages and higher prices of all the services and many others that I mentioned in states with strict enforcement of immigration laws. Most green card holders and even H1B or temporary legal workers pay taxes, social security and medicare which they will not collect unless they become citizens and most of them don’t. It is you who is cherry picking with few examples
Who says construction costs are lower due to illegal labor? Nothing’s lower in a black market. The cost is just shifted from paying employee taxes and a fair wage to straight profit.
Corporate profits are now at historic record highs. Do you imagine contractor profits remained flat?
But perhaps that would have helped advance robotic replacements sooner? Regardless, we are now on the cusp of a robot integration into our workforce that will, sooner than later, lead to many human blue-collar and service workers losing their jobs. These are the people that tend to have collections of guns and may have ot be disarmed by police/military robots.
I don’t think Americans are against immigration. I’m not and do not know anyone who is.
The issues before the rest of us is “how” responsibly (or not) mass immigration is and has been for (at least) the last four years – and how certain immigrant “groups” are socially more capable of assimilation into American culture and politics vs others.
The Biden administration did us a great disservice in these regards which left us with a problm that many of us want corrected.
The Roman Empire got rich with massive immigration flows.
And then it tottered, crumbled, and disintegrated.
Bingo.
I generally never trust Government Numbers.
They’ve been saying 11 million illegals haven’t changed since about 2003.
When people work they generally increase GDP. Although, I understand that US workers for private companies sometimes need or qualify for assistance because they don’t make enough? If true it would make this study quite ironic.
Taco will simply add it to his new tariffs.
Taco’s new tariffs are going to be declared illegal as well and refunded along with the $180 billion he just found out will have to be refunded (with interest).
;-).
And he stated that he read all the tariff law and understood it. Of course Trump failed to do his homework. I guess he thinks managing the country is like bullying a 14 year old girl into having sex with him.
Gosh! What could go wrong?
Correction RAPING a 14 yo.