A recent report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a non-profit organization that analyzes tax policy in the country, reveals that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. According to the organization, each of the estimated 10.9 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. paid an average of about $8,889 in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.
The states with the highest undocumented population in the country “collected over a billion each due to tax revenues generated by undocumented immigrants,” the report states, with California leading ($8.5 billion), followed by Texas ($4.9 billion), New York ($3.1 billion), Florida ($1.8 billion), Illinois ($1.5 billion), and New Jersey ($1.3 billion).
More than a third of the taxes paid by undocumented immigrants are on their wages, and these taxes fund programs that they, in most cases, cannot access such as Social Security – to which they contributed about $25.7 billion – Medicare – with about $6.4 billion – and Unemployment Insurance where they contributed about $1.8 billion.
Furthermore, when comparing the percentage of tax contribution from undocumented immigrants to that of Americans with a median income (between $55,000 and $86,000), there are not significant differences: 26.1 percent versus 26.4 percent respectively.
“Measured in relation to their income, undocumented immigrants nationwide paid an average effective state and local tax rate of 8.9 percent,” the report says. “To put this into perspective, the wealthiest taxpayers in the nation (those in the top 1 percent income scale) paid an average effective tax rate nationally of only 7.2 percent in their states of residence.”
To discuss the report and the tax contribution of immigrant communities in the country, we invite Jackie Vimo, an analyst at the National Immigration Law Center.
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