By Ira Mehlman
FAIR
As immigration has emerged as a key issue in the 2024 campaign, the discussion has turned to what we should do with the millions of illegal aliens who are living in our country. Inevitably, the options that are most widely discussed are polar opposites: mass deportation or mass amnesty.
There are many issues that must be addressed when considering how to deal with upwards of 16.8 million illegal aliens who are here. Cost is certainly one of them. In 2023, FAIR estimated that the presence of 15.5 million illegal aliens cost American taxpayers a net $151 billion annually. Undoubtedly, as the number of illegal aliens in the country have grown over the past 18 months (FAIR now estimates the illegal alien population to be 16.8 million), so too has the price tag.
In recent weeks, two new studies have been published that examine what it would cost to deport all (or nearly all) of the illegal aliens living in the U.S., versus how much it would cost, over the lifetimes of the illegal aliens, to grant mass amnesty. The first report was issued by the American Immigration Council (AIC), a well-established group that champions large-scale immigration and amnesty for virtually all illegal aliens who are here. AIC estimates that the illegal alien population stood at 13.3 million, as of April 2023, a figure that is significantly lower than FAIR’s estimate. To no one’s surprise, they conclude that any effort to apprehend and remove large numbers of illegal aliens would be prohibitively expensive.
The AIC study, Mass Deportation: Devastating Costs to America, Its Budget and Economy, sets the one-time cost of deporting 10.7 million illegal aliens (they assume that 20 percent of illegal aliens would self-deport in response to serious enforcement efforts by the government) at $315 billion. That figure includes the costs of arresting, detaining, processing and physically removing illegal aliens all at once – a timeframe that the report does not precisely define. AIC also looks at a more realistic goal of removing illegal aliens at a pace of about 1 million a year, an option that would stretch the total cost to $967.9 billion.
In addition to the costs of removing millions of illegal aliens from the country, AIC claims that doing so would have a significant negative effect on the U.S. economy and government revenues. These calculations are based on flawed assumptions that illegal aliens are essential and irreplaceable in our labor force and that they are net tax contributors. AIC estimates that the removal of illegal aliens from the country would result in a decline in U.S. GDP of between 4.2 percent and 6.8 percent, translating into a loss of between $1.1 trillion and $1.7 trillion a year to our economy.
Illegal alien workers are neither irreplaceable, nor are they net tax contributors. As numerous other studies have indicated, the presence of illegal aliens in the labor force reduces both job opportunities for American workers and their wages. Jobs that are essential to our economy would be filled by legal U.S. workers, earning higher wages and generating more tax revenues. In other words, as illegal aliens depart the country, American workers would move into those jobs (some would be automated), more than offsetting their contributions to GDP. Other benefits of removing illegal aliens from our workforce would include reducing the drain on social services and slowing the amount of money flowing out of our economy in the form of remittances – a figure that amounted to $200 billion in 2022.
On the other side of the ledger, the Tholos Foundation examines just one of the long-term costs of mass amnesty for illegal aliens: The impact on Medicare and the U.S. healthcare system. Tholos’ study, Immigration, Medicare and Fiscal Crisis in America: Are Amnesty and National Health Care Sustainable? estimates that in that one policy area alone, a mass amnesty would cost $2 trillion over the life span of the illegal aliens who would gain legal status and eventual citizenship.
The legalization of millions of illegal aliens – the majority of whom have a high school education or less and would continue to be low-wage earners – would increase pressure to adopt a Medicare for All policy that was supported by Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2019, she emphatically told CNN that under her vision of a Medicare for All policy, illegal aliens would be included. Even without the infusion of millions of newly legalized aliens, Medicare’s trust fund is projected to be depleted by 2036.
“The estimated cost of providing Medicare for All to newly legalized immigrants is at least a net present cost of $1.8 trillion for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants here now from 2026 to 2035, or about an average of $163,650 per recipient, but likely closer to $2 trillion with more recent entrants,” states the Tholos study. Notably, this estimate is likely low, as Tholos’ cost calculations are based on outdated estimates of the illegal alien population that would be eligible for legalization under an all-encompassing amnesty.
Tholos’ study is limited to just the cost of providing health care benefits to amnestied illegal aliens. As FAIR has detailed in our comprehensive assessment of the federal, state and local costs of illegal immigration, health care is just one of many areas in which illegal aliens pose significant cost burdens to the American public. Amnesty would likely drive all of these costs higher, as newly legalized aliens become eligible for all means-tested government programs.
FAIR has also been clear that we oppose amnesty for illegal aliens, with added cost burdens for the American public being just one of many reasons. The deportation of illegal aliens, which has been required by law for decades, is just one mechanism for dramatically reducing the numbers of those illegally in the country. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) job is to actively locate, apprehend and remove illegal aliens from the country and they must be empowered to carry out that mission. Many more illegal aliens (as AIC tacitly concedes in their report) can be convinced to leave of their own volition, especially if we systematically eliminate incentives for them to remain here and adhere to the rule of law.
These measures include adopting mandatory E-Verify to prevent illegal aliens from working in the U.S., and revoking (or not renewing) the millions of work authorizations the Biden-Harris administration has granted to illegal aliens. At the state and local level, sanctuary policies that protect illegal aliens and grant them nonessential, nonemergency benefits and services, must be revoked, creating further incentives for them to leave.
Like any complex problem, there is no simple solution to mass illegal immigration. Enforcing our laws and undoing the damage that has already been done will require time and cost. Opting for mass amnesty, however, would compound the damage and impose costs that Americans cannot sustain.
