The real impact of illegal immigration
Following the shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington DC by an Afghan national, attention is focusing again on immigrants.
It has long been an established fact of economics that immigration strengthens a nation in just about every way. It expands the labor force, drives innovation and entrepreneurship, reduces crime, and contributes to government revenue through taxes. Immigrants often fill labor shortages, start new businesses at high rates, and contribute to long-term economic growth.
Yes for reasons that are murky at best, the America First movement seeks to reverse these benefits by curbing immigration. I don’t quite follow how self-destructive behavior puts you “first”, but nevertheless, that’s their policy.
Learn to discriminate between what’s true and what’s merely popular, and it will directly benefit you.
The recent shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington DC by an Afghan immigrant has prompted doubling-down on this across the America First sphere. Within just hours of the shootings, the administration announced an immediate halt to immigration case processing for Afghans; pausing the processing of green card applications; and re-examining all existing Green Card holders from Afghanistan and 18 countries. Will this help or hurt the US? Well, let’s see — because we have centuries of data to guide us.
Here are some facts on immigrant crime statistics that might surprise many.
Native-born US citizens commit crimes at 1,000-1,100 arrests per 100,000.
Legal immigrants commit crimes at 800-900 arrests per 100,000.
Undocumented immigrants (“illegals”) commit crimes at 400 arrests per 100,000 — the most law-abiding class of all.
Why is this? Largely because they’re here to work, for the most part. They also watch their step out of fear of deportation. They also tend to have stronger family bonds, are more likely to be employed, and are more likely to be married with children than native born citizens — all factors associated with lower crimes rates.
Immigrants, including both legal and undocumented, are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than native citizens.
Reducing immigration increases crime.
Immigrants contribute $100 billion to the US economy each year through the state, federal, and local taxes they pay.
But the real boom comes not from the taxes they pay, but through the growth in GDP that their labor drives. The Congressional Budget Office projects that increased immigration will boost the GDP by $8.9 trillion over the next decade: immigrants increase the labor force and they consume goods and services, which drive economic activity.
Yet in the face of these Economics 101 facts, the America First movement claims the opposite — that immigrants somehow consume so many social services that it more than offsets these gains. In fact:
The average immigrant consumes 21% less social services (welfare and other entitlements) than native born citizens.
The reasons are pretty simple, and again, they are Economics 101 stuff. Illegal immigrants don’t consume benefits because they don’t qualify for them; and legal immigrants consume less because, as stated above, they are more likely to be employed and in good health than are native citizens.
The narratives that immigrants are rapists, drug dealers, and fentanyl traffickers are trivially falsified. So why do they persist? I find four basic reasons:
Political rhetoric. Politicians trying to “fire up their base” will just say whatever gets the crowd pumped up. And unfortunately, such rhetoric is rarely informed by good data.
Historical xenophobia. Humans have always been good at this. All humans (and most animals too) tend to trust the familiar and distrust the unfamiliar, even when the data shows we’re wrong.
Distrust in education. There’s long been a growing sentiment among some Americans that “knowing things” or “understanding crime/labor/economic statistics” makes you some kind of elitist, whatever that means; and that you’re better off without it.
Psychological factors — such as confirmation bias exactly like we saw this week. One member of the most law-abiding class of Americans commits one horrible crime, and we project it onto everyone else in that class.
How do we combat this and overcome it? The first step is the hardest: recognizing that we’re all wrong about some of the things we believe. None of us want to be, but all of us are. Nobody is infallible. Accepting that some stuff you believe is false — possibly even including some of your most cherished beliefs — is the first step toward improving your knowledge, and consequently improving your own situation in life.
An April 2025 episode of my show Skeptoid made these points and more with complete references and citations.
Illegal immigrants also help fund Social Security because they have to pay into the system, yet are ineligible to draw benefits from it.
In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt wrote that people will punish a cheater, even if it means harming themselves. If a bit of xenophobia, confirmation bias, and whatever silo you live in tells you immigrants are cheating (and, illegal immigrants are cheating, even if our laws exacerbate the problem)... that's all it takes. That book's over ten years old, but I still think about it from time to time.