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.

https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-government-budgets-1994-2023

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49646392)

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).

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.8

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49646439)

its just a fact, birdshits

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49646400)

Jfc and that's just scratching the surface. It's like the study that said on avg immigrants commit less crime. When in fact they compared socioeconomic groups, so all immigrants were basically compared to a ghetto in Chicago.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49646407)

libs lie

also, let's not count all the little welfare birthright children because

durr durr they're not immigrants!

also, let's only focus on households where everyone is an immigrant!

also, let's just blend in rich legal immigrants paying full tuition at all colleges as part of the calculus

libs have scum for brains

libs lie

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49646645)

they try to argue that some illegals are filing fucking tax returns.

when confronted about this, they argue that they are paying sales tax and having withholdings that never benefit them taken from their salaries (I doubt many illegals are w2 employees but what do I know)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49647089)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49646588)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49650496)

few things are more predictable than CATO publishing bullshit analysis in favor of open borders.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49647394)

134 The percent of property values from immigration (the bottom row in Table A2) that has come from immigration was then multiplied by residential property tax revenue attributed to the US-born in the NASEM–Cato model. In this way, we estimate the property taxes paid by the US-born population that are the indirect result of immigration-generated higher property values. These revenues are added to immigrants’ property tax revenues

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49647063)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49647191)

Also, I'm sure in this they are accounting for the fact that not only do their kids go to public school, they all get aides because they don't speak the language. But yeah, I'm sure somehow the math works out that a gardener making $13,000 a year pays enough in taxes to cover 3 full time aides for his kids at school.

This is all just such an obvious thought experiment. Take a wealthy suburban zip code with 10,0000 people and an average HHI of $450,000. Now add 10,000 illegal immigrants making $25,000 per household per year. I'm sure the level of services, and the cost of such services, stays exactly the same right?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49647482)

even if illegal immigrants were a net benefit, the principled response would still be to deport every one of them.

of course they aren't, but it's a red herring

we are a country. we have a border. we have a legal means of entry and we have legal immigration.

libs have shit for brains

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49647750)

What's the max IQ to actually believe this, and what % of smug shitlibs who completely buy into this are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that they are extremely intelligent?

(I'll bet that both of those figures would be hilarious.)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49647805)

=====

CATO Institute Peddles Pathetic Poppycock

Willis Eschenbach / 13 hours ago

CATO has just released a very shoddy piece of work called “Immigrants’ Effects On Government Budgets, 1994-2023“.

To start with, the CATO report is doing the usual sleazy, underhanded trick of conflating legal and illegal immigrants. Bad researchers, no cookies.

In addition, the report claims to analyze the “fiscal effects” of legal and illegal immigrants, which only measures costs to the government (welfare, etc.). But the government has no money. Every cost to the government is a cost to the taxpayers, and they ignore the taxpayers.

They NEVER measure direct costs to the populace, such as increased housing costs, emergency room congestion, reduced wages, highway congestion, costs of illegal immigrant crime, displacement from jobs, and lots and lots more effects on taxpayers.

In any case, here are the major problems with the highly biased CATO analysis.

Regards,

w.

===

Almost everything the Cato Institute says about illegal immigrants’ “fiscal surplus” rests on contestable modeling choices, partial data, and omission of large categories of cost; the illegal‑specific piece is especially fragile.

1. Illegal immigrants as a residual category

· The paper never directly observes who is illegal; it treats “noncitizens” and “low‑skilled noncitizens” as proxies and then narratively asserts that about half of noncitizens and “most” low‑skilled noncitizens are illegal.

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· Any illegals who are misreported as citizens in CPS, or who avoid surveys entirely, will be lumped into “US‑born” or “citizen” categories, shifting both their taxes and their costs away from the “illegal” bucket and biasing illegal‑immigrant fiscal effects upward.

2. Non‑filers and off‑the‑books work

· They lean heavily on the fact that payroll and sales taxes are hard to avoid, and they note that many illegal workers have taxes withheld (stolen SSNs, borrowed identities, or temporary work authorization).

· But they do not try to estimate the share of illegal workers paid entirely in cash with no withholding and no income‑ or payroll‑tax remittances; these workers’ use of local services (roads, policing, schools for their US‑born children, etc.) plus any ER or charity care is not offset by recorded tax payments in the model.

· Because the model allocates aggregate tax receipts to groups in proportion to observed income, any under‑reporting of earnings among illegals mechanically over‑assigns taxes to them and under‑assigns to others.

• The study assumes “a 60 percent illegal immigrant income and payroll tax compliance rate (measured by taxes owed versus taxes actually paid)”. But then it actually uses a 67% tax compliance rate.

In addition, since illegals often work at below-standard rates, even if they pay taxes, they are paying at a lower rate, which is a cost to the Government. The study claims to adjust for that, but the adjustment makes no sense. A proper adjustment would perforce end up with a tax compliance rate LESS than the 60% stated above.

The study also assumes that only 5% of illegal immigrants get any form of welfare or benefits …

3. Policing, crime, and under‑detection

· The justice‑system category is narrow: “felony policing, courts, and prisons” based on incarceration and serious‑crime data, with per‑capita costs scaled down for immigrants and noncitizens because they are less likely to be incarcerated.

· That approach assumes that the probability of arrest and incarceration conditional on offending is similar across groups; if illegal immigrants are harder to identify (false IDs, use of aliases, reluctance of victims or co‑workers to report, fear of involving immigration authorities), then lower incarceration rates may partly reflect lower detection, not lower offending.

· The model ignores broader policing and regulatory costs: local traffic enforcement, code enforcement, investigations that do not lead to conviction, and specialized task forces (gangs, trafficking, document fraud) whose budgets are not obviously scaled into their roughly constant “felony policing” wedge.

• As to non-felony policing, the model says: “The NASEM–Cato model treats immigration enforcement like all other non-felony policing as a congestible public good, such that immigrants are deemed to cause a portion of enforcement spending equal to their share of the population. This premise is somewhat biased against immigrants. As the NASEM explains, it is sensible to argue that immigration enforcement “is not a cost of immigration but rather the cost of keeping immigrants out.” Political opposition to immigrants—not immigrants themselves—cause immigration enforcement spending.”

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This is a joke, right? The study claims that the cost of non-felony policing and immigration enforcement spending is assignable, not to illegal aliens invading our country, but to political opposition to illegal aliens?? Can they really keep a straight face when they say that?

· It also consciously excludes victim costs (lost productivity, medical bills borne privately, pain and suffering) and focuses only on the government’s narrow budget hit.

4. ICE, CBP, and immigration‑enforcement overhead

· They treat “pure public goods” (defense, pre‑existing interest on debt) as fixed and explicitly say immigrants do not add to those costs.

· In practice, they handle immigration enforcement similarly: only detention/incarceration that can be attributed to individuals shows up through the justice‑system category; the baseline budgets of ICE, CBP, and associated overhead (infrastructure, personnel, technology, litigation) are not charged to immigrants as a marginal cost, despite ICE and CBP only existing because of illegal immigrants.

· That means billions per year in federal immigration‑enforcement spending are treated as existing independently of the number of illegal immigrants present or crossing, which is a strong assumption if the question is “what do illegal immigrants cost taxpayers?”

• If there were no illegal immigrants, we wouldn’t need ICE, so the illegal immigrants’ actual share of ICE costs is 100% …

5. Health care, ER use, and cost shifting

· Public health costs are captured only where they appear as explicit government outlays (Medicaid, Medicare, state health programs, some uncompensated‑care pools).

· Illegal immigrants’ heavy emergency‑room use becomes a fiscal cost only if it triggers such a payment; when hospitals cross‑subsidize losses by raising prices or insurance bills for everyone else, those costs are invisible in the model.

· State‑only coverage for illegals (e.g., state‑funded Medicaid expansions, local safety‑net programs) is only included to the extent it shows up in CPS as “public insurance”; under‑reporting or misclassification again pushes costs out of the immigrant column.

• The analysis only includes “fiscal cost to Government”. But the government has no money—every dime comes from the taxpayer. This means that a “fiscal cost to Government” is actually a “fiscal cost to taxpayers”.

So there is no logical reason to claim that direct costs to taxpayers are not a fiscal cost.

6. Sex trafficking, smuggling, and organized criminality

· The model has no category for cross‑border smuggling and trafficking costs beyond whatever fraction of federal and local justice‑system budgets can be shoehorned into “felony policing and courts” and then allocated by incarceration shares.

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· The huge operational and investigative costs around border‑region smuggling networks, human trafficking, and associated organized crime (stash houses, document forgery, money laundering) are not separately identified and almost certainly under‑attributed to illegal migration dynamics.

· Victim services (shelters, medical care, counseling) funded by NGOs or private donations are omitted entirely; state and local victim‑assistance programs are likely small and diffuse enough that they disappear into broad “other spending” with no special attribution.

• This reveals an underlying shortcoming of the analysis—it is only counting the cost of illegal aliens to the government. This is deception by misdirection. It totally ignores the total cost of illegal aliens, which absolutely includes costs to the citizens directly.

7. Fraud (e.g., Somali benefits fraud, ID theft)

· The framework is not designed to capture fraud within needs‑based programs as a distinct immigrant‑attributable cost. Program outlays are taken as given and then allocated according to participation reported in CPS and statutory eligibility.

· Well‑publicized frauds (e.g., large benefit‑fraud rings in particular communities) show up, if at all, as a modest increase in total program costs but are not assigned specifically to illegal immigrants or to any national‑origin group.

· Identity theft used by illegal workers imposes substantial private and administrative costs (credit damage, IRS problems, legal fees, employer compliance costs), none of which appear in the government budget accounting except where they generate extra enforcement spending.

8. Taxpayers bearing costs for non‑tax‑paying illegals

· The authors stress that even low‑skilled illegals pay substantial payroll and sales taxes via withholding and consumption.

· But they do not attempt a distributional split between illegal immigrants who are reliably in the tax system (SSNs/ITINs, W‑2s) and those who are almost entirely in the informal cash economy; the latter group’s fiscal footprint is likely much more negative than the aggregate numbers suggest.

· Because the model works at the group level (e.g., “low‑skilled noncitizens”), substantial heterogeneity in behavior is washed out: a subset of illegal immigrants may be strongly net negative even if the group average is positive.

9. The proportional‑allocation shortcut

· The paper repeatedly uses proportional allocation logic: if noncitizens are X % of a population or receive Y % of a program, it scales total revenues or costs by that share; for illegals, it often makes an extra step (“most low‑skilled noncitizens are illegal, therefore…”).

· That implicitly assumes illegal immigrants are like other noncitizens in tax compliance, program use, and offending risk, just with different eligibility rules. Yet illegality itself changes incentives: greater fear of detection, more use of false documents, higher probability of working off the books, and different interactions with law enforcement.

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· Applying “illegals are Y % of noncitizens” to say “so they cause Y % of some cost X” ignores that their per‑capita effect could be systematically higher or lower than that of legal noncitizens; it’s a convenience assumption, not an empirically validated fact.

10. Crime‑rate comparisons and detection bias

· The study leans hard on lower incarceration rates for immigrants/noncitizens to argue for lower serious‑crime rates.

· But incarceration is a noisy outcome: it reflects policing priorities, plea bargains, deportation in lieu of prosecution, and under‑reporting by victims in immigrant communities. If illegal immigrants are better at avoiding detection or if local police under‑enforce to avoid federal immigration entanglement, observed incarceration gaps can understate true offending.

· The authors acknowledge that many noncitizens are incarcerated for immigration offenses that citizens cannot commit, but they do not seriously engage with the opposite possibility: crimes that citizens do commit but are more likely to be detected and prosecuted when committed by citizens than by undocumented people who can disappear or be removed.

11. Pure‑public‑goods and infrastructure assumptions

· Treating defense and pre‑existing interest as fixed “pure public goods” is defensible at the margin, but applying the same spirit to border security, immigration courts, and much of ICE/CBP effectively writes off large categories of illegal‑immigration‑driven spending.

· Similarly, congestion costs on infrastructure (roads, schools in particular districts, local jails and courts) are not modeled; the model treats “other spending” per capita as equal for immigrants and natives.

· If illegal inflows are spatially concentrated—border regions, specific metros—the local marginal cost of extra population (schools, police, jails, shelters) can be far higher than the national average the model uses.

12. Remittances and exporting income abroad

· The Cato framework treats immigrants’ fiscal impact purely in terms of U.S. government budgets, so money that illegal immigrants send home as remittances is not counted as a cost, even though it directly reduces the share of their earnings available for domestic consumption and tax‑generating spending.

· Other Cato work explicitly models scenarios where immigrants remit 20 percent of their income and simply reduces their assumed sales/consumption tax payments accordingly; this is a stylized adjustment, not a measurement of actual remittance behavior among illegals, and it does nothing to account for broader macro effects such as lower local demand, weaker multiplier effects, or the political optics of large outflows to sending countries.

· Evidence from remittance studies suggests undocumented migrants can send a substantial share of income abroad (with estimates for various groups ranging from low single digits to well over 30 percent of earnings), which implies that using a single assumed rate or ignoring status‑specific variation likely understates how much illegal immigrants are effectively diverting income from the U.S. economy while still generating local service demands and enforcement costs borne by resident taxpayers.

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13. Housing costs and crowding out

· The Cato fiscal model treats higher housing costs from immigration almost entirely as a benefit, because higher rents and prices raise property‑tax collections and “housing wealth,” and it credits immigrants (including illegals embedded in the data) with trillions in extra property‑tax revenue and homeowner equity; it does not treat higher rents paid by native renters or would‑be buyers as a cost to them.

· Outside evidence, including HUD’s own recent work and independent fact‑checking, indicates that immigration has materially increased rental demand in exactly the metro areas where supply is most constrained, with HUD estimating that foreign‑born inflows accounted for up to 100 percent of rental demand growth in some states and roughly two‑thirds of rental demand growth nationwide in recent years, which is consistent with a significant immigration‑driven upward push on rents and crowding in the lower‑end market where illegal immigrants are concentrated.

· By focusing on the fiscal upside of higher property‑tax collections and housing‑wealth gains and by not separately modeling illegal immigrants’ heavy concentration in already tight rental submarkets (multi‑family units, overcrowded housing, informal arrangements), the Cato framework effectively ignores the distributive cost to native and legal‑resident renters who face higher rents, longer commutes, and reduced housing affordability as millions of additional low‑income households compete for a constrained stock of units.

14. Opaqueness and limits of verification

· The authors do document their methodology in outline and claim an “exhaustive” Appendix, but they do not publish code or a full replication package; reproducing their numbers requires reconstructing a large NASEM‑style model from narrative descriptions.

· Crucial illegal‑specific claims (“most low‑skilled noncitizens are illegal,” “illegal immigrants are fiscally positive”) depend on status imputations and proportional allocations that are not fully transparent or empirically validated against independent illegal‑population estimates.

• They claim to be using the NASEM model, but they say: “The NASEM presented a snapshot of the fiscal impact of immigrants under different scenarios for 2013, and the results differ from ours. The Cato model for 2013 shows that the average immigrant had a positive net fiscal effect of $10,349. The NASEM baseline scenario was negative $6,424, a difference of $16,773 (both in 2024 dollars).” Given that, why should we believe the study at all?

· For a reader, the headline “illegal immigrants are fiscally positive” therefore rests less on directly measured illegal‑specific data and more on a stack of assumptions about status, behavior, and cost allocation that would swing results substantially if they were changed.

https://rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/2026/02/07/cato-institute-peddles-pathetic-poppycock/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49655945)

U ppl are retarded

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49656208)

libs have shit for brains

libs lie

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830938&forum_id=2!#49656450)