Recent report on the fiscal impacts of immigrants

Measuring the fiscal impacts of immigrants is complicated and there are very few studies that have attempted to do this. A 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides an up-to-date analysis of the fiscal impact of immigrants at the local, state and national level. The report is comprehensive but very long. An executive summary can be found here. Pia Orennius of the Dallas Fed also published a nice article in 2017 that highlights the key findings:"New Findings on the Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the United States." 

The Fiscal Cost of Protecting the Border

As Chapters 10 and 13 discuss, the US has spent literally billions of dollars protecting the US border. On the southern US border, we witnessed several different variations of the ‘fence’, which are pictured below.  Some of them are very tall and nearly impassible (which are located near large urban centers), while others (in more remote areas) represent only a marker of the border and would be extremely easy to cross.  Our ride-along with the US Border Patrol highlighted how the fence is mostly symbolic- that if people (migrants, drug smugglers, human traffickers) really want to get across it, they can.  In fact, we saw a section of the fence that was cut and then patched up by border patrol, indicating just how easy it is to get through much of the fencing.  However, technology is doing most of the work in protecting the US-Mexico border.  The Department of Homeland Security is employing video surveillance, drones, and motion sensors as their primary line of defense, along with 21,000 border patrol agents in 2014 (up from 4,000 in 1992, according to the US Customs and Border Protection website). The cost of this protection is $3.6 billion in recent years.  The technology exists along the border, but also in the interior with border checkpoints sometimes several miles away from the actual border.  A recent book entitled Border Patrol Nation  by Todd Miller discusses recent trends in border militarization.