We have great data on legal immigrants, skilled and unskilled, and the headline is that they use fewer benefits and create more tax receipts than similar native

We have great data on legal immigrants, skilled and unskilled, and the headline is that they use fewer benefits and create more tax receipts than similar native-born groups across the board. As discussed in this paper, due to sample sizes we have a hard time verifying anything with the undocumented population because it's a hard sample to study. But because we know more about adjacent populations, and we know that undocumented immigrants are eligible for far fewer benefits than those adjacent populations, we can have a strong sense of net fiscal impact. However, it's also uncontroversial that giving them legal status would drastically increase tax receipts as well, and that the net fiscal impact of their contribution to economic growth definitely outweighs the potential for net negative fiscal impact you'd get from direct receipts vs. benefits (if we could get good data for it). https://www.cato.org/white-paper/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-states#executive-summary https://www.cato.org/white-paper/fiscal-impact-immigration-u... And unskilled immigration has a considerable downward pressure on housing prices, because the single biggest bottleneck in increasing housing supply (other than policy) is the price and supply of labor.