Scapegoating immigrants has long been an electoral strategy – one that proved somewhat successful in the last election and continues to have traction in parts of the country and our state. But not only does this strategy sow divisions, it’s also one that may well prove to be fiscally unsustainable, backfiring on the U.S. economy. 

In their zeal to demonize immigrants, right-wing politicians and their supporters fail to realize that the U.S. economy would be in much worse shape than it is today were it not for foreign-born workers. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that immigrants saved the U.S. economy.  

Immigrants contribute more in taxes — by a lot — than they consume in public services, according to a recent analysis by the CATO Institute. The libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. estimated that between 1994 and 2023, immigrants paid $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes combined than they cost the government. They also saved the U.S. Treasury another $3.9 trillion in reduced debt-servicing costs, resulting in a net savings of $14.5 trillion. 

Why do immigrants have a net positive fiscal effect? An important part of the reason is that immigrants are more likely to be employed than those born in the U.S., and have paid 17% higher per capita in payroll and sales taxes than the average U.S.-born person. Another reason is that they use fewer government services. Sadly, federal law makes them ineligible for most government benefits, even though they contribute to the funding of those systems. In other cases, fear that providing their information will make them targets of immigration authorities keeps immigrants from accessing public services.  

The Trump administration’s deportation policies have created chaos and unnecessary suffering in communities throughout the United States. Its targets and tactics have been expansive and not limited to those undocumented immigrants with criminal records. From business owners like Moises Sotelo, to farmworkers, construction workers, restaurant cooks, and service industry workers, immigration enforcement agencies have detained an array of people who pose no danger to society. They are people who have created whole lives and become part of the fabric of their communities. 

The tactics employed by the Trump administration have created a sense of fear and uncertainty, particularly in immigrant communities. The ultra-aggressive, even deadly, actions of immigration enforcement officers in Minnesota led many immigrants to shelter in place, preventing them from leading their normal lives and contributing to the state’s productivity. Should immigration operations ratchet up in communities across Oregon, they would hurt the economic vibrancy of local communities. 

Apart from depressing economic activity, which would lead to lower tax collections, the administration’s hard-line deportation actions are likely to directly worsen the nation’s deficit. Last year, the administration engineered a data-sharing agreement between the Internal Revenue Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help identify undocumented immigrants, a move likely to have a chilling effect on the number of immigrants who file taxes. While a U.S. federal court rejected the data-sharing agreement as unlawful, the perception among immigrants that the administration is weaponizing the IRS is not likely to go away anytime soon. As the authors of the Cato report put it, it would have been “impossible…for policymakers to close the [federal] budget gap by slashing immigration over the last 30 years.”  

The bottom line is that the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations hurts us all. For sure, undocumented immigrants have the most to lose, living in constant fear of being deported, or worse, actually having their families torn apart. But everyone else also pays the price, including in the form of weaker government finances.