President Trump posted data on Truth Social this week breaking down the lifetime fiscal contribution per immigrant by country of origin, figures that show wide variation from a positive $573,000 for immigrants from North America to negative $1.1 million for immigrants from Somalia, with other regions falling at various points along that spectrum.
Brian Lonergan, director of strategic communications and content at the Federation for American Immigration Reform and co-host of the No Border No Country podcast, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss the data alongside a new FAIR report quantifying the fiscal costs of illegal immigration specifically.
Lonergan said the Trump figures sound accurate and reflect a principle that once formed the basis of American immigration policy, which is that assimilation capacity and likelihood of self-sufficiency are legitimate and central variables in evaluating immigration applications. He said that is not a racist standard but a sensible one, and that the country’s abandonment of that framework under successive administrations has produced the fiscal and public safety consequences now visible in the data. He added that sheer numbers matter independently of any per-person calculation, and that the country needs a significant cooling-off period to absorb and process those already here rather than continuing at the pace the Biden years established.
The FAIR report’s findings on illegal immigration specifically are stark. Illegal immigrants contribute approximately thirty-one billion dollars annually in tax revenue while costing an estimated one hundred and eighty-two billion dollars per year when all benefits are accounted for, including welfare, education, healthcare, and housing. The net annual deficit is approximately $150.7 billion. Lonergan said this figure directly undercuts the argument from open-borders advocates that illegal immigrants pay more in taxes than they consume in services, and that an honest accounting of all costs and benefits makes the fiscal case against the status quo straightforward. He also said it provides a direct rebuttal to the argument that deportation operations are too expensive to pursue at scale. The country is already spending one hundred and fifty billion dollars a year on the current situation, and the one-time costs of enforcement and removal would be substantially more economical than continuing to bear that annual deficit indefinitely.
He said workplace enforcement is a critical but underutilized tool, and that a number of whole industries including construction, meat packing, and hospitality have effectively built their business models around access to illegal labor at below-market wages. He said this is not an accident but a deliberate choice by corporate America to exploit the absence of enforcement, and that the losers in the arrangement are American blue-collar workers who are squeezed out of jobs they would otherwise hold at wages they would otherwise earn. He said mandatory E-Verify implementation would be a significant step toward unwinding that arrangement, and that the federal government has additional tools available including denying federal contracts to companies found to be systematically employing unauthorized workers. He said the political alignment on this issue is notable, with corporate America and chambers of commerce effectively allied with the left in opposing enforcement, while the historical natural constituency for immigration enforcement, organized labor, has been slow but is beginning to recognize that open borders serve corporate interests at workers’ expense.
He addressed Representative Pramila Jayapal’s remarks at a Mayday rally in which she claimed credit for defunding ICE and Customs and Border Protection from the DHS budget and announced that her organization’s Resistance Lab has trained thirty thousand people in what she called effective nonviolent resistance, calling for ongoing expansion of that organizing infrastructure. Lonergan said the significance of the statement is that it removes the pretense that the Democratic left merely objects to enforcement methods rather than enforcement itself. He said they are now openly stating that they do not want any immigration enforcement, do not want criminal aliens deported, and have a structural political interest in maximizing the illegal alien population in the United States. He noted their fierce opposition to ICE presence at polling places and said that hostility is difficult to explain if their claim that illegal immigrants do not vote is accurate.
He also referenced a Washington Post analysis projecting that if the Save America Act’s voter registration requirements had been in effect, President Trump would have won New Mexico and states like Connecticut and Maryland would have become competitive. He said even a left-leaning outlet publishing that projection is conceding the underlying premise without explicitly acknowledging it, which is that the current voter registration system has no meaningful check on non-citizen registration and that fixing it would materially change electoral outcomes.
On workplace raids specifically, Lonergan said ICE Director Tom Homan has indicated they are coming, and that the administration’s primary concern is avoiding a repeat of the Minneapolis situation where protesters inserted themselves into enforcement operations and people were killed. He said there are ways to conduct workplace operations that minimize those risks, and that the Trump administration appears genuinely committed to following through in ways that no previous administration has been willing to do.