The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank. It just published a 30-year study showing immigrants paid 14.5…

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank. It just published a 30-year study showing immigrants paid 14.5 trillion dollars more in taxes than they received in government benefits. Every single year. For thirty years. Without exception. The country was lied to. Here is what the study found.🧵

In 2023, the most recent year studied, immigrants made up 14.7 percent of the United States population. They earned 17.4 percent of the income. They paid 17.3 percent of the taxes. That means immigrants pay taxes at a higher rate than their share of the population. They earn more in income per capita than the average American. They generate more government revenue per person than the average native-born citizen.

That is the opposite of what the country has been told for thirty years. Here is what the study says about the deficit.

Without immigrants, the United States would be running a deficit of approximately three trillion dollars right now. With immigrants, the actual deficit is about half that. Without immigrants, the country's public debt would already be above 200 percent of GDP. That is a level most economists call a debt crisis. Immigration did not cause our deficit. Immigration prevented our deficit from becoming catastrophic. Now I want to walk you through what this means about the last thirty years of American politics. For three decades, both parties have run on some version of the argument that immigrants drain American resources. Republican politicians made this argument loudly. Democratic politicians often conceded the framing while quibbling about specific policies. Cable news ran segments on it. Talk radio built careers on it. Campaign ads were funded with it.

The argument was always the same. They take more than they give. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that has spent fifty years arguing for smaller government and lower taxes, just published the most rigorous study ever produced on the question. The argument was false in 1994. It was false in 2003. It was false in 2015. It was false in 2023. Every single year. Without a single exception.

Now here is the part I want you to sit with. The deportation program currently underway is not just a moral question. It is also a fiscal one. Every immigrant deported under this administration is, on average, a person who paid more in taxes than they consumed in benefits. The Cato study found this is true even of immigrants without high school diplomas. Even of undocumented immigrants. Even of low-wage workers in service industries. Every deportation is the United States Treasury losing a net taxpayer.

The administration has projected mass deportations of millions of people over the coming years. Using the Cato Institute's own numbers, that is the United States government voluntarily walking away from hundreds of billions of dollars in net fiscal contributions. It is also a permanent loss. The labor of those workers does not return. The taxes they would have paid do not return. The local economies they supported do not return. The country is being told this will save money. The country is being told the math the other way.

Even by a libertarian think tank that has spent fifty years opposing big government, the math says the country was already saving money on every immigrant who came here. Now we are spending money to lose those net taxpayers permanently. The political argument was always cheaper than the policy. The policy is now collecting the bill for thirty years of false framing.

Here is what David Bier, the lead author of the Cato study, said in his interview with Marketplace. "It's really the main way in which immigration is attacked in the political sphere is saying it's a burden on our society, and it's really not. These people are working and contributing and helping to reduce the debt and deficit." That is not a left-wing think tank speaking. That is the Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute.

The country spent thirty years being told immigrants were the reason for our fiscal problems. The Cato Institute just published the receipts. Immigrants were not the reason for the deficit. Immigrants were the reason it was not worse. Never stop connecting the dots.