Immigration

David Bier | 11.24.2024 7:00 AM

President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on "Mass Deportation NOW!" His justifications for the necessity of this policy were easily dismissed by experts. New immigrants aren't behind a murder spree, aren't driving up crime rates, aren't eating our pets, aren't taking "black jobs," and—in many cases—aren't even here illegally. One area that is more difficult to assess, but also rarely mentioned by Trump: how mass deportation would affect U.S. government debt.

If Trump is looking for better intellectual cover for mass deportation, he could find it in a preelection report from the conservative Manhattan Institute (MI). Their report found that the influx of illegal immigrants since 2021 will add $1.1 trillion in federal debt over the lifetimes of the immigrants and that "mass deportations would significantly reduce the national debt over the long run." This conclusion was seemingly at odds with a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that found a big and growing fiscal upside to the recent influx of nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.

The author of the MI study, Daniel DiMartino, generously shared his data and calculations, allowing me to see whether it was the CBO's shorter timeframe or something else driving the divergent results. Last week, the Cato Institute published the results of my replication. I identified nine methodological problems in MI's model that make deportation seem to benefit government budgets. Rather than a $1.1 trillion loss from recent arrivals, I find these immigrants provide a positive $4.9 trillion in net........

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