Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023. [REPORT]
February 11, 2026
Recent increases in immigration have rekindled concerns about their effects on government budgets. This paper updates a model of these effects first developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to shed light on how immigrants, both legal and illegal, and their children affect government budgets. This analysis is the first to estimate the cumulative fiscal effect of immigrants on federal, state, and local budgets over 30 years.
The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. The data show:
- For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.
- 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.
These results, which do not account for any of immigration’s indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth, represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis.
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