The Trillion Dollar Trick
How a single study is being used to bully Christians out of the immigration debate.
Earlier this year, the Cato Institute released a study that’s about to dominate every Christian and progressive case for open immigration through the next election cycle.
The headline numbers do the work for them: Immigrants paid $24.2 trillion in taxes between 1994 and 2023 against $13.6 trillion in benefits, and the country saved another $3.9 trillion on debt interest because it borrowed less than it would have without them. The total: $14.5 trillion. Even illegal immigrants come out as a $1.7 trillion positive.
You’d be forgiven at this point if you are thinking, “Wow, how could anyone be against this?” But stick with me, there is more to the story than the headlines.
Created Equal // Equally Create?
I studied cross-cultural ministry as an undergraduate at Messiah University and got my master’s in humanitarian disaster leadership at Wheaton College. I bring that up to tell you, I am no stranger to the economic and moral case for immigration. I have sat through this lecture dozens of times, made by the same types of people, in the same kinds of rooms. The Bible commands us to welcome the sojourner, the alien, the immigrant. It is our duty. And also, if you are the cold stingy type, the economics prove it’s a no-brainer (see Cato study for proof). So basically, if you’re against it, you’re either un-Christian or you’re stupid.
I want to push back on that framing of immigration as an unmitigated moral and economic good. I believe it is possible to ask the question, “do all immigrants contribute equally?” while still upholding the truth that all immigrants have been created equal. I believe the answer to this question should change how we think about immigration policy as Christians and as a country.
Cato and the numbers:
The first thing worth knowing about a study like Cato’s is that the headline shifts dramatically when you change one or two accounting assumptions. Two examples will show you how.
Cato does not “charge” immigrants for what they call “pure public goods”: defense, interest on past debt, foreign affairs, space, R&D. Their logic is that one more immigrant in Houston doesn’t require an additional aircraft carrier or NASA satellite. I think that is defensible in some ways but it gets absurd when considering the 29 percent of all federal spending Cato bundles in. Dutch researchers running the same kind of analysis allocate that spending per capita and find that only about 18.5 percent of all the “public goods” spending is truly independent of population growth. If you make just that adjustment to Cato’s numbers, you would put roughly $7.8 trillion of additional cost on the immigrant ledger before touching anything else.
The second is the kids. Cato classifies U.S.-born children of immigrants as natives, putting their schooling, pediatric Medicaid, and refundable tax credits on the native ledger (meaning that they do not count as a “cost” of immigration). The legal point is fair, the kid is American at birth, an interpretation currently being tested in Trump v. Barbara, though the executive order at issue applies only to children of illegal immigrants and birth tourists. But even what makes sense as a legal distinction cannot hold water as an accounting decision. When the US chooses to admit a parent in childbearing years into the US, that is a decision to pay for their future children, especially when immigrant fertility runs higher than the native rate. Saving you the back of napkin calculations, that decision alone erases the rest of Cato’s surplus, swinging trillions of dollars into the negative camp. Whether that classification choice actually belongs in part on the immigrant ledger or the native one is a real methodological argument. It is also the single accounting decision doing the most work to make the headline as positive as it is, and you deserve to know that.
Then finally we get to the impossibly complicated welfare state itself. Having already wiped out most of the positive impact before arriving. Just in researching for this article, let me tell you, federal benefits are an impossibly complicated landscape (even for those born here. Throw in the fact that you don’t speak English and I honestly cannot imagine being in the shoes of a recent migrant trying to sort through it all.
Now stay with me: legal immigrants are barred from federal benefits like Medicaid, food stamps, and TANF for five years after arrival, UNLESS they’re a refugee or asylee (or one of a few other niche classifications), in which case they’re eligible immediately. Their kids and pregnant wives can be enrolled from day one in 37 states under a federal opt-in Congress passed in 2009. Illegal immigrants (not their kids) are blocked from almost everything federal except emergency Medicaid, K–12 schooling, school lunch, and WIC, but more than a dozen states cover them with state dollars anyway, and California enrolled roughly 1.7 million before its budget hole forced a partial freeze starting in January 2026.
Cato numbers cannot include other things like emergency rooms at hospitals absorbing costs nobody can tracks and schools enrolling millions of kids without asking about status. It also cannot contend with fraud and abuse like the tens of millions in federal childcare funding flagged as fraud in Minnesota, or the over a billion dollars vanishing into home health care fraud in New York. And finally, the fact that many states established work arounds for benefits—temporarily covering them on their own.
Where does this leave you trying to calculate whether a certain group is a net positive? The honest answer is that nobody knows the real number, including Cato.
I also, think it is worth highlighting what’s underneath all of this and unspoken. Even in its best light, any positive numbers derived depend on a fiscal model whose headline depends on a class of workers paying in (as legal or illegal) and being statutorily blocked from collecting what citizens collect. This is in essence describing a working underclass. Celebrating that arrangement as some sort of economic win says more about our values than the math itself does.
One more thing…
Now for a second, let’s set the accounting aside and look at the population. Cato’s window closes in 2023. Under the Biden administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded roughly 10.8 million encounters in four years, against about 3 million in the four years before that combined. The dominant entry channel shifted from work and employment to asylum and humanitarian parole. By DHS’s own count, the department issued more than 1.3 million parole grants in FY2023 alone through a categorical use of parole authority that goes well beyond what Congress intended when it wrote the statute. The kind of people coming shifted just as dramatically. Latin Americans went from 39 percent of new arrivals in 2018 to 62 percent by 2024, and the share of new arrivals with no education beyond high school rose from 36 percent to 46 percent. Median earnings for newly-arrived immigrant men fell from 80 percent of U.S.-born earnings in 2018 to just 52 percent in 2024.
Whatever Cato’s data captures, it does not capture these fundamental changes which will drastically affect the calculation negatively.
What are other countries saying?
The European studies become useful here. Most American fiscal analyses, including Cato’s, measure the positive negative calculation in the middle of immigrants’ working years and stop. European researchers measure the entire arc, from childhood through working years, retirement, and end-of-life care. The picture changes considerably when you do.
One of the most comprehensive lifetime studies ever done in Europe, published in 2024 by Dutch researchers using complete tax and benefit records on every legal resident of the Netherlands, found that asylum migrants ran negative across every entry age, with the worst-performing regions (the Horn of Africa and Sudan, covering countries like Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea) clearing roughly €606,000 per person in lifetime cost. Native Dutch citizens come out at roughly zero. Only labor migrants from Western countries generated positive lifetime contributions. Asylum and family migrants ran negative no matter the entry age.
The standard rebuttal is that the Netherlands has a more generous welfare state than ours. There is something to that. But the lesson cuts the other way. Anyone we let in today will be subject to the legalization fights of tomorrow. When those fights are won, and the political pressure is in that direction, the same workers Cato counts as fiscal positives become eligible for the benefits they’ve been paying into. The cost of that conversion is enormous, and Cato’s data does not see it. The exact thing pro-immigration advocates want most, meaning full legal status, full benefit access, and full membership, is the thing that further converts Cato’s “surplus” into a deficit.
Not all contribute equally.
What the Dutch researchers found, and what every honest fiscal study before them found, is that three things drive the result more than anything else: country of origin, reason for migration, and education level. Certain origin countries assimilate culturally and economically far better than others, and that matters beyond the dollar figures. National unity depends on shared values and on people choosing to become part of the country they joined. Origin shapes that, and pretending it doesn’t is a fiction nobody actually lives by. Labor migrants outperform asylum migrants by hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. Education is the master variable across every study.
For example, The National Academies' own 75-year projection puts a less-than-high-school recent immigrant at roughly −$200,000 over a lifetime when the cost of public goods is allocated per capita. An immigrant with an advanced degree clears positive $726,000 under the same assumptions. The roughly $1 million spread is the size of the difference education makes to the lifetime fiscal balance.
We are not an infinitely abundant country. We do not have unlimited Medicaid dollars or unlimited shelter beds or unlimited school district budgets, and the last several years have shown us what happens when we pretend otherwise. New York Mayor Eric Adams told an Upper West Side town hall in 2023 that the surge in immigration “will destroy New York City” and ordered 15 percent across-the-board agency cuts to absorb a $12 billion three-year migrant cost. In Chicago, Black alderwoman Emma Mitts said in council chambers what most of her constituents had been saying for a year: “I don’t see the Black folks getting that kind of help. I don’t see my kids and my children and my neighborhood getting that type of support.” The fault line that has opened up around the country is the political consequence of pretending dollars are not finite and choices are not real.
So, what do we do?
I am proposing two buckets and one principle.
The first bucket is economic immigration. We admit a Filipino registered nurse, a Mexican machinist, a Salvadoran electrician running his own shop, because if the math works, and the job is needed, the country gets stronger. The case Cato makes is honest for this bucket. We can be generous with this category and still come out ahead.
The second bucket is benevolent immigration. We admit a Honduran family fleeing gang violence, an Afghan interpreter who helped our troops, a Venezuelan dissident, because as a wealthy nation we have an obligation to share our abundance with people in need. These admissions are an act of national mercy and in cases like the interpreters who fought alongside our troops—also a duty. But like all mercy and duty they often carry a cost. There is nothing wrong with paying that cost. There is something wrong with hiding it.
The principle is honesty. Generosity that hides its cost sets up the backlash that follows when the cost finally surfaces. Right now we are not living in a world of honesty and generosity. We are living in a world of confusion and resentment, much of which has been driven by an air of suspicion that more is going on than meets the eye. Papers like Cato’s do not help. They make confident claims about a system that is too complicated for anyone to actually measure, and they encourage the reader to treat a single contested number as the end of the argument.
The American people are generous when the case is made honestly. We have always been. What we will not continue to tolerate is being told that all immigration is fiscally identical, that every admission equally serves the national interest, and that anyone who asks which immigrants and under what conditions is morally suspect.
We can be generous and we can be selective. The kind of welcome that lasts is the kind we choose with our eyes open, knowing what it costs and choosing to bear it anyway.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.
