In addition to this being a human crisis, it’s also an economic one. These illegal immigrants are not working enough.

A recent study by the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank isolated Census Bureau survey data of prime-age immigrants without college degrees, the majority of whom recently arrived. Or, the Atlanta Fed concedes, are indeed undocumented. While the self-reported employment status of these immigrants has trended upward over time, annual hours worked have trended downward. The average immigrant in this category who has been in the country for two years — and do note that the majority of illegal immigrants who have entered during the Biden-Harris administration fall into this category — only worked 1,400 hours in 2022.

The issue has become embroiled in the presidential campaign, now in its final two months ahead of Election Day, Nov. 5. Former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, laments that the majority of new jobs created in the last two years have gone to illegal immigrants. Yet the larger problem is that at least half are likely living on taxpayer largesse.

A little more than half of the prime-age immigrants without college degrees studied by the Atlanta Fed are in the labor force at all, compared to 5 in 6 Americans aged 25-64. Whereas the foreign-born population increased by nearly 4 million from July 2022 to July 2024, foreign-born employment only increased by 2.32 million. And when this recent influx of illegal immigrants do work, they generate lower labor productivity than previous waves of immigrants. So who’s paying for these millions of unemployed? We are.

For the nation’s most extreme example, consider California, which now offers illegal immigrants free (taxpayer-funded) health insurance, subsidized in-state tuition rates, food stamps for women, infants, and children, and possibly a new $150,000 handout for down payments on new homes, a proposal endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Even before Medi-Cal coverage went into effect for California’s undocumented population, illegal immigrants generated just $8.5 billion, according to the pro-immigration Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, in state and local taxes in 2022 but cost $22.8 billion, according to the immigration-restrictionist Federation for American Immigration Reform.

The chasm has likely grown, and even federal taxpayers are on the hook. National taxpayers foot the majority of the bill for Medi-Cal and all of it for the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children. And so long as the IRS allows the state and local tax deduction, which was capped at $10,000 by Trump’s 2017 tax reform, to exist at all, federal taxpayers are further funding benefits for illegal immigrants in states such as California.

All in all, the Center for Immigration Reform determined that 59% of illegal households used at least one major welfare program compared to 39% of native-born households. And all of this is before the dramatic escalation of direct spending from the Department of Homeland Security and localities to nongovernmental organizations and hospitality agencies to house, clothe, and feed swaths of migrants bused into anywhere from Times Square to Boston.

This nation was indeed built by immigrants who followed the laws of entry to take jobs, not handouts. While legal immigration is a boon to any economy with pending demographic doom as ours, illegal immigration influxes into a welfare state as fungible and flabby as ours come at a cost that we are not recouping.