Look, I am going to level with you. I hadn’t expected to write about immigration and money today. But I was sipping coffee last week with my friend Ken, who owns a roofing business in Michigan, and he was moaning about labor shortages. He said he has contracts for work and can’t find enough workers to fill the jobs. Then he pointed out that half his crew are immigrants and he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on without them. Got me thinking. We talk a lot about immigration but we don’t ever really talk about the actual dollars and cents. So I began looking into the numbers, and you know what? They’re wild.
Let’s Talk Real Money
Immigrants paid $580 billion in taxes in 2022. I had to read that three times because it seemed crazy. That’s more than the entire economy of Sweden. And that number includes people who are here illegally, by the way. They’re still buying stuff, paying sales tax, and paying rent that covers property taxes. But wait, it gets better. Or worse, depending on how you feel about this stuff. The total economic activity from immigrants that year was around $1.6 trillion. That’s bigger than the economy of Australia or Spain. Now here’s where my brain started hurting. Immigrants are about 14% of everyone living in America, but they’re creating 18% of the economic output. They’re doing more per person than the average. That’s just math.
What My Neighbor Taught Me
Remember Ken? The roofing guy? Turns out his situation isn’t special. One in four construction workers in America is an immigrant. The industry’s already short about half a million workers right now, and it’s getting worse. I’ve got another friend who works in a hospital in Houston. She says a quarter of the nurses and healthcare support staff at her hospital are immigrants. The government projections say we’re going to need about 275,000 more immigrant healthcare workers by 2033 just to keep up with demand. That’s not political opinion—that’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics is trying to figure out how we’re going to take care of sick people.
Breaking It Down
So how much do immigrants contribute to the US economy in ways that actually matter to regular people? Let me tell you what I found. In 2023, immigrant workers brought in about $2.1 trillion. Not from government handouts or anything like that—from working and running businesses. The Congressional Budget Office looked ahead and said over the next ten years, that’s going to add up to somewhere between $7 trillion and $9 trillion to the economy. I know these numbers are so big they stop meaning anything. Let me make it smaller.
The average immigrant paid about $8,889 in taxes in 2022. That’s federal, state, and local combined. And get this—people who are here illegally paid about $96.7 billion in taxes that year. They can’t even use most of the programs their taxes pay for. There’s this whole thing where people work with fake Social Security numbers or these special tax ID numbers. They’re paying into Social Security, $25.7 billion worth in 2022, knowing they’ll never collect a dime of it. They paid another $6.4 billion into Medicare. Can’t use that either. My cousin got mad at me when I told her this. She thought I was making it up. I wasn’t.
The Business Thing Nobody Mentions
You know what REALLY blew my mind? Immigrants start businesses a lot more than people born here. They’re under 14% of the population but they’re one in five entrepreneurs. In 2022, immigrant businesses made $110 billion in revenue. Consider the Indian guy who works at the gas station down the street from you. Or the Korean family who owned that great BBQ place downtown. Or the Mexican woman who started a cleaning company and now employs fifteen people. That’s happening everywhere, all the time. Some of the biggest companies in America were started by immigrants or their kids. Not going to name names because this isn’t an ad, but you use their products every day.
The Tech Situation
About 27% of computer and math jobs in America are done by immigrants. Those are the people making sure your bank app works. The folks keeping your medical records secure. The ones designing the GPS that stops you from getting lost. I asked my nephew about this—he works in software in San Francisco—and he said his entire team are either immigrants or first-generation Americans. He said without them, his company couldn’t function. They can’t find enough qualified people who were born here to fill all the positions.
What About the Money Going Out?
Yeah, okay, immigrants use public services. Their kids go to school. They drive on roads. They go to emergency rooms. That costs money. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. But here’s what the Congressional Budget Office figured out: how much do immigrants contribute to the US economy per year ends up reducing the federal deficit by about $897 billion over the next decade. They’re paying more in than they’re taking out, at least at the federal level. It gets more complicated at the state and local level.
Schools and emergency rooms are expensive. But here’s the thing—immigrants without college degrees use more services than they pay for. But so do American-born people without college degrees. That’s not really an immigration issue. That’s a “people without good education or high-paying jobs need more help” issue. College-educated immigrants? They’re paying way more in taxes than they use in services. Millions more over their lifetime, according to some studies.
The Texas Situation
Something’s been happening in Texas lately that’s pretty telling. They’ve been doing heavy immigration enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley, and construction sites that used to have crews of ten people now have two people. Or nobody. Houses aren’t getting built. Businesses can’t get work done. California did a study about what would happen if all the people here illegally got deported.
The state would lose $275 billion in economic output. Construction would tank. Agriculture would be devastated. And we’re talking about California, where the economy is huge. Another study said that if we did mass deportation nationwide, GDP would drop between 5% and 7% by 2028. That would jack up inflation and actually decrease overall employment because of how the economy is connected. You can’t just remove millions of workers and expect everything else to stay the same.
The Social Security Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
This is the part that should really worry people thinking about retirement. Social Security works because younger people working now pay for older people who are retired. Pretty simple system. But Americans are having fewer kids and getting older. The math stops working if you don’t have enough workers paying in. Immigrants—especially younger ones—are basically propping up the system right now.
They’re paying in today, but most won’t collect for decades. If you start kicking out millions of people who are paying into Social Security, you’re going to make that funding crisis come faster. Some researchers think it could speed it up by several years. My dad’s retired and collecting Social Security. When I explained this to him, he got real quiet. He hadn’t thought about it that way.
What How Do Immigrants Contribute to the United States Actually Look Like
Here’s what it comes down to. You’ve got millions of people paying hundreds of billions in taxes. They’re working jobs that Americans either don’t want to do or can’t do because there aren’t enough of us with the right skills. They’re starting businesses and employing people. They’re keeping Social Security funded. They’re growing the overall economy by trillions of dollars. Does immigration have problems? Yeah, obviously. Should we have better border security and a system that makes sense? No question. Are there costs? Absolutely.
But when you actually look at how much do immigrants contribute to the US economy per year, instead of just listening to politicians yell at each other, it’s pretty obvious they’re adding way more than they’re taking. Ken, my roofing friend? He said something that stuck with me. “I don’t care about the politics. I care that I can finish jobs and feed my family. Without my crew, I’m done.” That’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it? Strip away all the political BS, ignore the talking heads on TV, and just look at what actually happens in real towns and real businesses with real people.
The numbers don’t lie. Immigrants aren’t some drain on America. They’re making the economy bigger. They’re filling gaps that desperately need filling. They’re paying taxes and starting businesses and doing all the stuff that makes a country function. I’m not saying we should have open borders or anything extreme like that. But maybe we should stop pretending immigration is just this huge problem and start recognizing that it’s also a huge benefit. Because that’s what the actual data shows when you bother to look at it honestly.
And what if we start removing millions of people from the economy because of political talking points instead of actual economic reality? We’re all going to feel that in our wallets. Ken’s going to lose his business. My friend’s hospital is going to have even worse staffing problems. Your Social Security checks might get smaller or disappear faster than expected. That’s the real conversation we should be having. Not the emotional stuff. The practical stuff. The money stuff. Because at the end of the day, this affects everyone’s wallet, whether they realize it or not.
