Marty Levine
February 16, 2025
“For the most part, all MAGA will do is help make the United States backward, poorer, sicker and irrelevant.”
That’s how Paul Krugman ended his Substack ended his post on climate change on February 16th, 2026. That’s the outcome that we are heading toward when we are led by a government that sees facts and truth as irrelevant to their personal, short-term interest.
Krugman’s conclusion seems to be applicable wherever we turn our attention, wherever I find myself screaming in protest.
In 2016, while he was running for President, Donald Trump said this about immigration
“Illegal immigration costs our country more than $113 billion a year. And this is what we get. For the money we are going to spend on illegal immigration over the next 10 years, we could provide 1 million at-risk students with a school voucher, which so many people are wanting.”
By 2018, Trump, in tweeted that the cost had doubled.
Could somebody please explain to the Democrats (we need their votes) that our Country losses 250 Billion Dollars a year on illegal immigration.
A year later, he tweeted that the cost had grown again.
Illegal Immigration costs the USA over 300 Billion Dollars a year.
We knew this was untrue when he first started building it into the foundation of the MAGA movement. Politifact, at the moment he said it, rated it MOSTLY FALSE after looking at a wide range of studies by both progressive, pro-immigrant and conservative sources. Yet this did not stop Donald Trump and his MAGA movement from continuing to demonize immigration.
Analysis after analysis showed us that immigrants, documented and undocumented, added to our nation’s wealth. Just weeks ago, the CATO Institute summarized its conclusions after reviewing economic data about immigration since 1994 with the same conclusion.
This analysis is the first to estimate the cumulative fiscal effect of immigrants on federal, state, and local budgets over 30 years.
The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. The data show:
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- Every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
- Immigrants generated nearly $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they produced in total government spending.
- Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.
- Immigrants cut US budget deficits by about a third from 1994 to 2023, and fiscal savings grew to $878 billion in 2023.
- Noncitizens accounted for $6.3 trillion of the $14.5 trillion debt savings.
- College graduate immigrants accounted for $11.7 trillion in savings, while non–college graduates accounted for $2.8 trillion.
- The cohort of immigrants entering from 1990 to 1993, just before data collection began in 1994, was fiscally positive $1.7 trillion, and was still positive after 30 years in 2022–2023.
- Even including the second generation, who are mostly still children who will become taxpayers soon, the fiscal effect of immigration was positive every year.
- Immigrants in all categories of educational attainment, including high school dropouts, lowered the ratio of deficit to gross domestic product (GDP) during the 30-year period.
- Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.
That it is the CATO Institute that is issuing this report is important. They are anything but a liberal, progressive, “woke” organization. Their “mission is to keep the principles, ideas, and moral case for liberty alive for future generations, while moving public policy in the direction of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.”
If facts mattered, we would recognize that MAGA’s current war on immigrants, its goal of ridding our country of them, is not only brutal and inhuman but frankly self-destructive and costly.
Is this stupidity? Is this just racism and xenophobia?
Perhaps some of each, but it is also a good measure of greed and autocracy.
There is money to be made when Homeland Security spends its huge budget on arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants. Last October the Brennan Center looked at two large DHS contractors.
This month, the two largest private prison corporations reported significant profits during their second quarter earnings calls.
CoreCivic reported total revenue of $538.2 million during the company’s second quarter, an almost 10 percent increase from the same time period in 2024. GEO Group, ICE’s largest contractor, reported second-quarter revenue of $636.2 million, a 5 percent increase over the same time period last year…
CoreCivic and GEO Group have both taken steps this year to increase detention capacity. The companies have signed contracts with the federal government to add additional beds to current detention facilities, in addition to signing new contracts with the federal government to reopen idle facilities.
The Intercept recently reported that “10 companies have made over $1 million to date — and stand to make over $1 billion by the contract’s end in 2027” as immigrant bounty hunters.
This is not a unique feature of our immigration policy. It is mirrored across the platform of the MAGA movement and the way our government is currently functioning.
Policies where money can be made are in place because people are getting rich (or richer) from them. And, because our rules allow wealth to have immense power to influence the result of elections and to personally massage our President’s ego and make his family richer, they stay in place. And they even get stupider and worse.
Electing people who will fight against this slide into autocracy is a first step come this November. Forcing them to enact laws that will actually deal with wealth hoarding and curb the political power of money is step two and perhaps the most important step because promises are cheap and the action I think we need is hard.
It is hard because we need to hold those we elect to their promises. We need to support actions, like changes to our tax code, that may cost us money. It’s hard because we may not be so popular by standing up against long-term elected officials who speak but do not act.
The cost of not doing this is clear. Donald Trump won his election because the entrenched Democratic leadership chose the status quo over substantial change. The problems remained unsolved, and voters felt lied to. If we fail to get the change we can see clearly is needed, more Donald Trumps will be the result.
