Illegal Immigrants & Taxes
The View’s Sunny Hostin claims that “most undocumented immigrants pay more taxes than anyone.”
IN FACT, most illegal immigrants pay much lower tax amounts and tax rates than average Americans. Here are the details from credible primary sources:
- The chief actuary of the Social Security Administration estimated that 3.9 million illegal immigrants worked “in the underground economy” during 2010, thus avoiding all payroll and income taxes, which account for 86% of all federal taxes.
- Under an IRS program that provides illegal immigrants and foreign investors with Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs), 3.0 million of these tax filers paid a total of $0.9 billion in federal income taxes during 2010 while receiving cash payments of $4.9 billion from the IRS due to refundable tax credits — a net negative tax “payment” of $4.0 billion.
- Among the 3.1 million illegal immigrants who worked in 2010 with Social Security numbers (obtained by using fraudulent birth certificates, usurping other people’s numbers, and reusing old numbers from expired visas), their average education, income, and federal tax levels were all far below the U.S. average.
- The Congressional Budget Office doesn’t estimate “state and local taxes for individual households” due to the “complexity” of this issue and notes that “researchers differ about whether state and local taxes are, on net, regressive, proportional, or slightly progressive,” but regardless, total federal taxes are 89% greater than state and local taxes.
The fiction that illegal immigrants pay higher tax rates than Americans comes from think tanks like the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which uses fatally flawed methods to calculate tax rates. Nevertheless, many media outlets and AI chatbots cite such sources without any disclaimers or insights about their methodologies.
