Do you want to reduce debt and reduce the crime rate? Bring in even more immigrants.

WASHINGTON – If the national debt is to be reduced, more immigrants, both legal and illegal, must be allowed in. And if the country’s crime rate is to be reduced, even more immigrants of both categories should be allowed to enter.

Such are the counterintuitive lessons of a pair of Cato Institute studies that refute the underlying logic of the demonization of immigrants in general and illegal immigrants in particular by President Donald Trump and his top adviser Stephen Miller.

“Look at the benefit that can be,” said David Bier, an immigration policy researcher at Cato. “If there are people who are a problem, fine, focus on them. But in general, we should look at the positive side. There is no reason to have this hostility that we are seeing now.”

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The right-wing 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 populations, 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 released this month found that immigrants use fewer services on average than U.S. citizens and therefore have a greater positive impact on local and federal budgets through the taxes they pay. Illegal immigrants, because they cannot get services like Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare while still paying taxes on all three, represent an even greater net benefit.

And while it is true that it costs more to educate the children of legal and illegal immigrants in schools because many need help learning English, that is more than offset by the fact that most immigrants arrive in the country as teenagers or young adults and do not have school-aged children, the study found.

In total, noncitizens generated $4.6 trillion more in taxes than they consumed in benefits during the two decades between 1994 and 2023, according to the study, and $1.7 trillion of that positive budget impact came from illegal noncitizens.

“America’s debt to this point is less than it would have been without these immigrants,” Bier and his co-authors wrote.

Cato’s analyzes subvert the Trump administration’s fundamental premise that most immigrants who come to this country illegally do so to commit crimes against Americans or to take advantage of the welfare state.

By contrast, 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 one-third work in the underground cash economy.

“The government should quickly remove noncitizen violent and property offenders, whether legal immigrants or illegal immigrants, but a blanket policy of mass deportation indiscriminately targeting all illegal immigrants will not reduce crime rates, nor will reductions in legal immigration,” the Cato 2025 report concluded.

Neither White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt nor deportation policy architect Miller responded to questions from News themezone.

Trump began vilifying immigrants from the first day of his political career in June 2015, calling those crossing the southern border “rapists” and “drug traffickers” in his speech at Trump Tower announcing his candidacy for the presidency. The attacks have continued since then and violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants are a staple of their speeches to this day. They are often described in pornographic detail, a favorite device for Miller, who began writing his speeches in 2015.

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

“He was accused of decapitating a man, mutilating his body and kicking his head like a soccer ball in a public park,” he told rallygoers about a murder in New Mexico 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 amputated.”

Other members of the government have joined in the widespread description of immigrants as violent criminals.

Leavitt opened his Feb. 5 briefing with a long tirade suggesting that illegal immigrants are responsible for much of the country’s crime.

“Deporting these people is one of the main reasons America’s streets are safer today than they were a year ago when President Trump took office,” he said.

Miller, who before working for Trump had pushed his anti-immigration agenda as a top adviser to then-Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, has in recent months begun to claim that, in addition to being disproportionately violent, illegal immigrants are also bleeding taxpayers dry.

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

“The administration knows the truth, but chooses to exaggerate immigrant crime to justify its deportation policies,” said Alex Nowrasteh, co-author of the crime study and senior vice president of policy at Cato. “Few would support ICE removing women from their cars in the middle of busy streets if they were simply violating immigration laws, so the Trump administration pretends they are all murderers.”

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

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