There seems to be continuing interest, likely because of the looming fight in Congress over the wall funding, about a FAIR report pegging the annual budgetary net costs of unauthorized immigrants at $100 billion. Folks who are in favor of building a wall argue that because a wall costs less than $100 billion, the wall will "pay for itself."
Fact checkers have emailed and called me about this, and my heart goes out to them, because the problem here really isn’t the imprecision of the facts per se. (They are indeed imprecise.)
The real problem is that comparing one-time costs of constructing a border wall to annual costs of net government benefits paid in excess of taxes received is a really silly comparison. That’s because building a wall doesn’t magically remove unauthorized immigrants already in the country. Only deportations do.
Without expanding the funding of removal, all you get is an expensive wall and 11 million unauthorized immigrants still living in the country and still absorbing more in benefits than they pay in taxes, probably to the tune of about $50 billion per year, mostly paid by state and local governments in the form of K-12 education.
But don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of displacing 11 million people. The human and economic costs would be very large.
It's just that it's silly to compare the costs of a wall with the costs of something that a wall would not reduce.
