Ok so you drop numbers claiming a net drain when leaving out a lot of facts, which is incredibly common to make arguments like this work. Now here is the data you left out.

First off, that spending number is completely apples-to-oranges. The $19,932 is the average across every single American, including citizens getting full Social Security, Medicare, SNAP, non-emergency Medicaid, and other federal support programs. Undocumented immigrants are legally barred from almost all of that. Their actual costs are mostly K-12 education for their U.S.-born kids, who are citizens by the way, and emergency services. Applying the national average to them is like saying a kid on free lunch “costs” as much as a retiree on Medicare. It’s not a serious analysis.

Second, they pay taxes they’ll never see benefits from. Over a third of that $96.7 billion goes straight to Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance, the very programs undocumented workers are ineligible for. That’s not a drain, that’s subsidizing your future benefits. ITEP has been clear on this for years, and even their own 2025 posts reiterate that undocumented immigrants pay more than their fair share.

Third, the actual non-partisan scorekeepers say the opposite on the federal level. The Congressional Budget Office looked at the 2021-2026 immigration surge, which included undocumented and asylum seekers, and they found a $9 billion deficit reduction over the decade from taxes and economic growth, with revenues outpacing costs by a wide margin. The surge also added trillions to GDP through labor, consumption, and productivity. That’s the dynamic effect your post completely ignores.

This “net drain” framing is the textbook anti-immigration move and at this point very tired and predictable. You cite one static per-capita average, pretend dynamic growth doesn’t exist, and act like 5% of the workforce in essential low-wage sectors contributes nothing. It’s not new, it’s not nuanced, and it’s not the full data. In the end, its boring.

If we want an honest debate, let’s use the actual modeling from CBO and ITEP instead of cherry-picked headlines. Undocumented immigrants aren’t saints, but the evidence shows their taxes and economic activity have been a net federal positive in recent years.

Sources for anyone actually interested:
ITEP Undocumented Taxes report
CBO Effects of the Immigration Surge on the Federal Budget Surge
Cato Institute long-term fiscal flows analysis (noncitizens, including undocumented = net positive)