The illegal immigration crisis at the southern border has not only created a culture of lawlessness at the Southern border, it has also adversely affected the labor and housing markets.
That’s according to the testimony of Center for Immigration Studies director of research Steven Camarota at a hearing of the House Oversight subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, “The Border Crisis: The Cost of Chaos.”
Camarota said at the hearing that the amount of illegal immigration in recent years has been “unprecedented” in scale. He said that a recent report by the House Judiciary Committee found that at least “5.6 million illegal immigrants have been released into the country since January of 2021.”
That was when President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office.
In addition, he said, there were an estimated 1.7 million “got-aways,” who were never apprehended from fiscal years 2021 to 2023.
Camarota said that the enormous amount of illegal immigration has consequences for housing and labor markets. For one thing, the increased demand for housing drives up prices.
“My own analysis suggests that a 5-percentage-point increase in the share of a community [comprising] recent immigrants will cause a 12% increase in what the average U.S.-born household pays for rent,” he said.
In addition to the increased housing cost for American families, Camarota said that there’s a significant fiscal and societal cost to bringing in illegal immigrants at such a large scale.
“Using estimates by the National Academy of Sciences, we calculate that the lifetime fiscal drain considering all the taxes an illegal immigrant may pay, and all the services and costs they would create, is about $68,000 per illegal immigrant, or if you like, $68 billion for each 1 million illegal immigrants,” Camarota said.
This net drain is due to the “modest education levels” of most illegal immigrants. He said that nearly 80% of them have no education beyond high school, double the share of U.S. born citizens.
The result is generally low incomes, low tax payments, and high use of public services, Camarota said, qualifying that statement by saying that most illegal immigrants aren’t lazy and aren’t coming for welfare. Instead, this “simply reflects what happens when you add large numbers of less-educated people who have modest incomes to a modern economy that spends a lot on social services,” he explained to the House panel.
Camarota disputed the oft-stated claim that illegal immigrants will do jobs that native-born Americans won’t do.
“Of the 474 occupations as defined by the Department of Commerce, only six are majority immigrant, and practically none that are a majority illegal immigrant,” he said. “There’s good evidence that immigration, by increasing the supply of workers, reduces wages and unemployment for some American workers.”
The most important takeaway from these numbers, Camarota stressed, is how it has coincided with the “long-term increase in the share of working-class men not in the labor force.” They are not showing up as unemployed because they aren’t seeking work at all, he said.
He said that 1 out of every 9 men without a high school education is not in the labor force.
The Center for Immigration Studies expert laid out the depth of the growing crisis for male unemployment in his written testimony to the committee:
For example, 4 percent of “prime-age” (25 to 54) U.S.-born men with only a high school education or less were not in the labor force in 1960—neither working, nor looking for work. By 2000, it was 13 percent, and in 2024, it is 18 percent.
Competition for jobs with illegal immigrants is only part of the reason for this change, Camarota said, but tolerating illegal immigration “has allowed employers and, frankly, policymakers to ignore this huge social problem.”
But having huge numbers of unemployed men is linked to social maladies, he said, including “drug-overdose deaths, crime, suicide, and alcoholism.”
Camarota concluded that reducing illegal immigration would force the country to finally deal with that crisis.
