Cost of immigration varies wildly depending on education and age and could add up to over $1 trillion
Is immigration bad for America? Americans seem to increasingly agree it is. The U.S. southern border’s record-breaking immigration crisis has — for the first time in decades — led the majority of Americans to tell pollsters they would like to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. But the presidential debate focused more on whether immigrants eat dogs than on their effect on the economy. My new research answers the question of whether immigrants impose a net burden on the federal government or help us reduce the budget deficit.
No human’s worth should be measured by their effect on a federal budget, but public policy decisions should be based on measurable facts — not stereotypes — and the effect of immigrants on government finances should factor into any decision to admit them.
My research shows that rather than harm the economy, the average new college-educated immigrant would reduce the budget deficit by over $300,000 over their lifetime. Immigrants who arrive without a college education, however, as well as all those who arrive after age 55, are net fiscal burdens on the federal government.
The group causing the most positive impact on the federal budget is immigrants who, like me, arrived in their late teens or early twenties to attend college in America and stayed for a graduate degree. We reduce the budget deficit by more than $1 million over our lifetimes, as we tend to earn the most income, work for more years but not receive any public education here, and rely less on government benefits.
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Daniel Di Martino is a graduate fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Ph.D. student in economics at Columbia University, and the founder of the Dissident Project, a speakers’ bureau for young immigrants from socialist countries. Based on a recent report.
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