The Greater the Illegal Migrant Population, the Stronger the Case Against Mass Deportation

Standard estimates of the illegal/undocumented immigrant population in the United States range from about 11 million to 15 million. But right-wing immigration restrictionists often assert the true figure is much higher, as with Donald Trump’s  claim that it is 25 million. The implicit assumption is that the higher the number, the stronger the case for mass deportation. But, as my Cato Institute colleague David Bier – a leading immigration policy expert – explains in a recent article (fuller, but paywalled version here) the exact opposite is true:

The math is simple. The more illegal immigrants, the more Americans would have to pay to deport them. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that a single deportation costs on average $18,245. This means that when Trump invents the presence of 10 million more immigrants, he’s adding a theoretical $182.4 billion to the price tag.

And that’s just the cost of deportation. The cost to federal revenue is even starker. Illegal immigrants pay sales tax — and, often, Social Security tax, income tax and property tax. The more illegal immigrants we deport, the more the cost of funding government would shift to American citizens and legal residents. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that recent illegal immigrant arrivals would have cut deficits by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, and  found that Trump’s crackdown in 2025 had already erased $500 billion of those savings.

Illegal immigrants receive very few taxpayer benefits because they are ineligible for all the largest federal public benefit programs, and most states also restrict eligibility for smaller state programs. Since the benefits being paid are a known quantity, a larger illegal immigrant population suggests that the cost per immigrant is actually far lower than we think.

But the taxpayer expenses are dwarfed by the broader economic impact: less stuff produced for the American people. The Peterson Institute for International Economics has estimated that just 8.3 million deportations would leave U.S. gross domestic product 7.4% lower than otherwise by 2028, the equivalent of about $2.5 trillion. Lower output means fewer goods and services — everything from food to childcare — for Americans.

Higher figures also imply that the illegal migrants have an even lower crime rate than under conventional estimates of their numbers (which already show them to commit crimes at a much lower rate than native-born Americans):

If the Trump administration’s hyperinflated figures were true, it would also suggest that illegal immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than we thought. Using a far lower estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the country, scholars had already calculated that, compared to native-born Americans, illegal immigrants  were far less likely to be incarcerated. But again, since we know who is in prison, if the free immigrant population were to grow, the immigrant incarceration rate would fall in turn.

In other words, the Trump administration apparently believes that illegal immigrants are far less represented in the crime data than anyone else. Of course, the rate of crime — not the absolute number of crimes — is what matters, because the rate is how we estimate the likelihood that someone will become a victim of a crime. More immigrants would mean a much lower victimization rate — that the presence of illegal immigrants reduces the likelihood that Americans will be victimized.

I would add that deporting larger numbers of illegal migrants (or even trying to do so) increases the already severe impact of deportation efforts on the civil liberties of US citizens, including through racial profiling, illegal detention, killing and injuring of protestors, and more.

Furthermore, deporting larger numbers of people increases the number sent back to what for many is a lifetime of poverty and oppression, and sometimes an early death. It is unjust to use force to consign people to such a fate merely because they were born to the wrong parents in the wrong place.

As David Bier notes, some illegal migrants nonetheless do commit crimes, even if at a lower rate than US citizens. The answer to that problem is simple: just punish them the same as anyone else! As I have explained in other writings (e.g. here and here), we can significantly reduce crime rates, overall simply by abolishing ICE and transferring its resources to ordinary police, tasked with fighting violent and property crime.

Ending, or at least curbing, deportation operations would further lower crime by making Hispanic crime victims more willing to report crimes to the police. When local and state police assist in federal deportation efforts, reporting drops, thereby increasing crime significantly. Given widespread racial profiling by immigration enforcement agencies, even legally present Hispanics may often fear interactions with law enforcement, if the latter are involved in deportation efforts. And, obviously, many citizens and legal migrants have relatives who are undocumented, or who have been rendered so by the Trump Administration’s massive effort to strip legal status from many immigrants who had it before, including Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who fled communism, Iranian Christians who fled radical Islamism, Haitians who fled one of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest and most violent societies, and more.

In sum, the greater the number of illegal migrants, the stronger the case against mass deportation.