Public Expenditures on Immigrants to the United States, Past and Present

Good data show that in the 1970s immigrants to the United States contributed more to the public coffers than they received in public services. The data, displayed here in fuller detail than in an earlier article in this journal, confirm the conclusion set forth by the author more than a decade earlier. This conclusion is corroborated by Canadian studies for the 1980s and 1990s and by the crude US data available for the most recent period. Any excess in welfare expenditures on immigrants relative to natives is probably limited to the narrowly defined category of welfare payments, which are relatively insignificant compared to expenditures on schooling and social security, and probably occurs only among older immigrants.