Immigration is one of those peculiar topics in US policy debates that produce durable myths. They sound like plausible claims in theory, but collapse under the slightest bit of empirical evidence. Over the years, immigrants have been accused of spikes in crime, overwhelming public services, and draining this country's finances. These claims are so hard-wired into the political discourse that they harden into "conventional wisdom." Last year, I examined the "migrant crime wave" claim and refuted it by showing how immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes.
Schrödinger's Immigrant and the Myth about Immigrants and Welfare
The welfare argument is no exception. In policy debates, you see what is jokingly referred to as Schrödinger's immigrant: an immigrant who is too lazy to work but manages to take all the jobs, which is a paradox that plays into an inaccurate, nativist caricature of immigrants. The nativist crowd at the Center for Immigrant Studies argues that immigrants consuming welfare and working can go together, thereby trying to refute the idea of Schrödinger's immigrant. While rhetorically clever, it only focuses on the theoretical possibility of the two co-existing rather than actual welfare consumption patterns.
This is where research from the Cato Institute that was released last week comes into play. They actually did the work to see how much welfare and means-tested benefits are consumed by immigrants versus native-born US citizens. It turns out that immigrants consume about 24 percent less in welfare benefits than native-born citizens on a per capita basis. This finding lines up with a National Bureau of Economic Research paper from 2020 that looked at welfare use from 1995 to 2018. Guess what? Those researchers found that immigrants consume much less welfare than their native-born counterparts.
Why Immigrants Consume Less Welfare
Immigrants consuming less welfare makes sense when you think it through. Immigrants are younger, healthier, and are more likely to either be working or actively seeking work. Because they come with a higher labor force participation rate and fewer chronic health conditions, they are less likely to need disability benefits or unemployment insurance. Furthermore, immigrants face legal and administrative barriers to receiving benefits.
Immigrants as Net Contributors to Society
When you hear this anti-immigrant diatribe of immigrants draining the welfare system, it ignores the other half of the conversation, which is what immigrants contribute to the economy and to society. In 2024, I illustrated how immigrants contribute billions in income, property, and sales taxes every year. When you look at both the costs and the benefits, the picture flips. Immigrants do not merely "pay their own way." It turns out that immigrants are actually a net positive for government budgets.
The Real Problem: The Welfare State
The evidence is clear. Immigrants are not the ones bankrupting this country. Immigrants use less welfare than native-born citizens and also contribute significantly in taxes. In net, immigrants are a benefit to the economy, not a burden. I have been consistent in critiquing the welfare state, whether it has been Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, or TANF. The anti-immigrant crowd rails against immigrants supposedly "draining the system" (which they don't), yet pays far less attention to the programs that drain this country's finances. If anti-immigrant nativists want to get at the real problem, they would go after the real problem of a large welfare state that costs the American people hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Otherwise, that is not fiscal responsibility or concerns about taxpayer dollars. That's just scapegoating dressed up as moral outrage.
