The Economic Cost Of Open Borders
This article won’t stifle the immigration debate, it’ll simply lay out the tab.
Casey Harward | April 1, 2026 www.americanthinker.com
Immigration is one of America’s most contentious conversations. This post won’t stifle that conversation, it’ll simply lay out the tab.
Americans are starting to realize that accounting for rapidly shifting demographics is more uncomfortable than most expected. The numbers are large, and even more distressing when you consider the scale of the population shift underway.
The Scope of the Problem
There are approximately 14 million illegal aliens currently living in the United States, a record high. According to the Pew Research Center, that’s up 2.2 million from 11.8 million in 2022. The broader foreign-born population increased by 6.5 million over just 36 months (January 2021 to March 2024), rising from 45 million to 51.6 million. Foreigners now make up approximately 15.6% of the U.S. population, a proportion comparable only to 1890, when 14.8% of the population was foreign-born.
Systems, schools, emergency rooms, housing markets, and municipal budgets process people at a certain speed. When growth outpaces capacity, the real costs aren’t simply multiples of the original investment. They become exponential.
The Federal Fiscal Burden: $150.7 Billion and Counting
A study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) finds that illegal immigration costs American taxpayers $182 billion annually before offsetting taxes paid by these individuals. After applying that offset, the net loss is $150.7 billion per year. This represents roughly a $35 billion increase from FAIR’s 2017 estimate of $116 billion, driven by population growth and expanded state benefit programs. Broken down, that’s $957 per taxpayer per year, and approximately $8,776 per illegal alien (or U.S.-born child thereof) annually.
(An honest disclaimer: The Cato Institute challenges FAIR’s methodology, arguing it incorrectly double-counts unauthorized immigrants and their citizen children. Cato estimates net costs in the range of $3.3 billion to $15.6 billion per year, a significant departure. FAIR’s figures are the most widely cited and serve as the baseline here, but this debate deserves acknowledgment.)
At the federal level, 2023 spending totaled $66.4 billion, including $23 billion on medical services and $11.6 billion on welfare programs such as food stamps, child nutrition, and Supplemental Security Income.
State and Local Governments: The Hardest Hit
While federal figures grab headlines, state and local governments bear the sharpest pain. A Congressional Budget Office report on the 2023 migrant surge found that while revenue from the influx increased by $10.1 billion, spending rose by $19.3 billion, a net loss of over $9 billion. The three primary cost drivers were K–12 education, emergency shelter, and border security.
California spends $21.76 billion annually to absorb the consequences of illegal immigration. Texas spends $8.88 billion. Former New York City mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, stated he needed $2.8 billion for a single fiscal year to handle the influx amounting to $65,116 per migrant.
Illinois offers a cautionary tale in unintended consequences. In 2020, the state expanded Medicaid to cover illegal immigrants. Program administrators projected $223 million in 2023 expenses. By 2024, spending was projected at $1 billion. After trimming the program, final costs came in at $550 million, still 90 percent over the original projection.
The Wages American Workers Never Received
There is another cost that never appears on a government balance sheet but it’s very real, and the people absorbing it are those who can least afford to.
When labor supply increases without a corresponding increase in demand, wages for native workers fall. It isn’t politics, it’s economics. Research from the Center for Immigration Studies found that for every one percent increase in the foreign-born share of an occupation, native-born workers see a 0.5 percent decrease in weekly wages. The heaviest losses are concentrated in construction, food services, maintenance, janitorial work, and agriculture, exactly where illegal immigrants and low-skilled native-born workers compete for the same jobs.
A national skill-cell methodology review found that a 10 percent increase in immigrants within a given education and experience group leads to a 3 to 4 percent reduction in wages for workers in that group. Workers without a high school diploma feel this most acutely.
The Heritage Foundation estimated wage impacts for this group ranging from 0.4 percent to as high as 7.4 percent. The range is wide, but the direction is not in question. The blue-collar workers, working poor, and minority Americans most likely to face competition from illegal immigrants are the very people who can least afford further wage suppression.
This is not new information. The Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by Democrat Congresswoman Barbara Jordan with then-Governor Bill Clinton on the Advisory Board concluded in 1995: “The commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser-skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.” The outlook is no rosier today.
The Lifetime Fiscal Drain
Annual figures are alarming enough. Projected over a lifetime, they become sobering.
Economist Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute modeled the lifetime fiscal impact of newly arrived illegal immigrants taxes paid versus government benefits received. The result: a $130,000 net fiscal burden per new illegal immigrant on average. For someone who arrives between the ages of 18 and 24 without a high school diploma describing a large share of illegal entrants that number climbs to $332,000 in lifetime taxpayer-funded benefits.
Scaled to the full population in question, the lifetime cost of the current immigration situation could reach $1.15 trillion roughly $3,000 per U.S. citizen, from this one phenomenon alone.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Advocates of open borders often cite GDP. The Congressional Budget Office projected that immigration would add $8.9 trillion to GDP over 2024–2034. That’s a real number. But as National Affairs noted, a high-GDP country isn’t automatically a high-standard-of-living country. India has a larger economy than Sweden, but that doesn’t translate to quality of life. What does translate is output per person, wages that cover rising housing costs, emergency room wait times, whether the local school has room for every student.
In those terms, the numbers tell a different story:
- A net annual taxpayer burden of $150.7 billion
- More than $9 billion stripped from state and local budgets in a single year
- Documented downward wage pressure on construction workers, warehouse workers, home health aides the people who most need a raise
- A lifetime fiscal exposure exceeding $1 trillion
These aren’t slogans dressed as statistics. Taken together, they don’t make a case for open borders. They make a strong case that the country has been quietly paying a very large bill that most people have never seen.
