A June 5 report by the Congressional Budget Office has found that illegal immigrants have received billions of dollars in taxpayer money, far outweighing their net contributions.
The report covers 2021 to the end of 2023, and attributes the surge of illegal immigration during this period to the Biden administration’s open border policies. The Federation for American Immigration Reform and the CBO have estimated the influx to be approximately 4.3 million individuals over the three-year time period.
According to this report, illegal immigrants paid roughly $10.1 billion in federal taxes; however, $7.1 billion of this figure included sales tax.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform notes that actual economic growth due to the surge of migrants, as reflected in income tax, amounted to only $1.6 billion, and that this lackluster growth is in part due to “a lack of English language and other skills limiting illegal aliens’ work prospects and thus their contributions to the economy.”
The addition of this revenue to the U.S. economy is largely overshadowed by the fact that these millions of immigrants have enjoyed the full benefits of taxpayer funding, to the tune of $19.3 billion in the studied timeframe. Even when counting sales tax revenue as fiscal gain, the CBO reports that the net cost to state and local governments was $9.2 billion in the report’s sample.
The expenditures by governments within the sample include services such as health care, policing, and other social services. Many states are required to provide shelter to illegal immigrants, which costs $3.3 billion in 2023 alone. According to the CBO, this amount was twice what the same group of immigrants provided in income taxes.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform states that current legal precedent requires schools to afford the same level of education to illegal immigrants as to U.S. residents. The schooling allowances tallied $5.7 billion, the largest expenditure in the study.
A September 2024 study by the Manhattan Institute revealed other ways in which Biden’s mass acceptance of undocumented immigrants would cost the United States over time. The study, which analyzed the costs of illegal immigration to the economy, states, “The real concern from this finding is that the fiscal future of the U.S. is dire.”
Results were also extrapolated to the long term: “This report finds that the border crisis will cost an estimated 1.15 trillion over the lifetime of the new unlawful immigrants.”
These high expenses associated with the influx of illegal aliens into the U.S. highlight the monetary consequences of the Biden administration’s lax border, and how American taxpayers are paying the bill.
President Trump’s immigration policy, on the other hand, has resulted in an immediate and continuous reduction in the number of illegal entries to the United States. The National Immigration Forum concluded in April that Trump’s immigration approach “contributed to record-low border encounters, with just 7,181 apprehensions in March 2025, a 95 percent decrease from March 2024.”
READ MORE:
Illegals Posing as Minors Imperil Our Children
Media Focused on South While Cartels Move to the Northern Border