WASHINGTON ― If you want to reduce the national debt, you should allow in more immigrants, both legal and illegal. And if you want to lower the country’s crime rate, you should allow in even more immigrants of both categories.

Such are the counterintuitive lessons from a pair of Cato Institute studies that refute the underlying rationale of President Donald Trump and top aide Stephen Miller’s demonization of immigrants broadly and illegal immigrants specifically.

“Look at how much of a benefit it can be,” said David Bier, an immigration policy researcher at Cato. “If there are people who are a problem, OK, focus on them. But overall, we should be looking at the upside. There’s no reason to have this hostility that we’re seeing right now.”

The right-leaning group’s April 2025 study found that immigrants as a whole commit significantly fewer crimes than native-born citizens. Examining incarceration rates in Texas and Georgia, the two states that specifically track the citizenship and immigration status of their criminal population, researchers found that illegal immigrants have a crime rate just over half that of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants have an even lower crime rate: just 26% of native-born Americans.

A second report published this month found that immigrants use fewer services on average than American citizens and therefore have a larger positive impact on local and federal budgets through the taxes they pay. Illegal immigrants, because they cannot obtain services like Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare while still paying taxes for all three, represent an even bigger net positive.

And while it is true that children of both legal and illegal immigrants cost more to educate in schools because many need help learning English, that is more than offset by the fact that most migrants come to the country as teens or young adults and don’t have school-age children, the study found.

In all, non-citizens generated $4.6 trillion more in taxes than they consumed in benefits over the two decades between 1994 and 2023, the study found, with $1.7 trillion of that positive budget impact coming from illegal non-citizens.

“The United States’ debt to this point is less than it would have been without those immigrants,” Bier and his co-authors wrote.

The Cato analyses upend the Trump administration’s fundamental premise that most migrants coming to this country illegally do so either to commit crimes against Americans or to take advantage of the welfare state.

To the contrary, the new report finds that immigrants, both legal and illegal, overwhelmingly participate in the workforce. Two-thirds of illegal immigrants even pay income and payroll taxes, Bier said, while a third work in the underground cash economy.

“The government should expeditiously remove violent and property criminals who are noncitizens, whether they are legal immigrants or illegal immigrants, but a general mass deportation policy indiscriminately targeted at all illegal immigrants will not reduce crime rates, nor will reductions in legal immigration,” the 2025 Cato report concluded.

Neither White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt nor deportation policy architect Miller responded to HuffPost queries.

Trump began vilifying migrants on the very first day of his political career in June 2015, calling those coming across the southern border “rapists” and “drug dealers” in his Trump Tower speech announcing his candidacy for the presidency. The attacks have continued ever since, and violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants are a staple of his speeches to this day. They are often described in pornographic detail, a device favored by Miller, who began as his speechwriter in 2015.

“They don’t like shooting people because it’s too quick, it’s too fast. I was reading — one of these animals was caught — in explaining, they like to knife them and cut them and let them die slowly because that way it’s more painful, and they enjoy watching that much more. These are animals,” Trump told police officers during a visit to Long Island in 2017.

“He was charged with decapitating a man, mutilating his body, and kicking his head around like a soccer ball in a public park,” he told rallygoers about a New Mexico murder committed by an illegal immigrant in 2024. “The victim’s head was found 30 feet from his body. He had been stabbed multiple times and his middle finger had been removed.”

Others in the administration have joined in the generalized depiction of migrants as violent criminals.

Leavitt opened her briefing on Feb. 5 with a lengthy diatribe suggesting that illegal immigrants are responsible for much of the country’s crime.

“Deporting these individuals is one of the primary reasons why America’s streets are safer today than they were one year ago when President Trump assumed office,” she said.

Miller, who prior to working for Trump had pushed his anti-immigration agenda as a top aide to then-Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, has in recent months taken to claiming that in addition to being disproportionately violent, illegal immigrants are also bleeding taxpayers dry.

“Each illegal family costs taxpayers one million dollars (far more over the course of a lifetime). Any Democrat saying we cannot remigrate illegals with children is saying we cannot have a border, laws or a nation,” Miller wrote in a Feb. 1 social media post.

“The administration knows the truth but they choose to exaggerate immigrant crime to justify their deportation policies,” said Alex Nowrasteh, co-author of the crime study and Cato’s senior vice president for policy. “Few would support ICE pulling women out of cars in the middle of busy streets if they just violated immigration laws, so the Trump administration pretends they’re all killers.”

Bier said a clear-eyed analysis of the value immigration provides to the country would produce a policy exactly opposite of the one Trump is pushing.

“The big picture is Congress can make an immigration system and build on the success that we already have,” he said.

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