Cost of Illegal Immigration: White House $166,716 Figure Tested

The White House Council of Economic Advisers says each immigrant living in the country illegally costs taxpayers $166,716 over a lifetime. The number rests on assumptions the report itself discloses, and Congress’s budget scorekeeper has reached a very different answer.

The White House’s latest estimate of the cost of illegal immigration puts the price at $166,716 per person over a lifetime, or $1.4 trillion to $1.9 trillion for the population now in the United States. The figure comes from an October report by the Council of Economic Advisers, and on Oct. 23 the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, published a point-by-point challenge to it, reopening an old empirical fight just ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

Lifetime cost estimates are the numbers lawmakers reach for in fights over legalization bills, ICE budgets and benefit rules, so what the CEA measured, and left out, matters now.

What the CEA’s cost of illegal immigration figure measures

The estimate appears in The Real Cost of Socialism in America, which scores the 2026 platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, including its calls to end ICE detention and deportations and to legalize all immigrants regardless of status. The immigration chapter makes three claims.

• Lifetime cost: The average person in the country illegally imposes a net public cost of $166,716 by age 78, higher than a Manhattan Institute estimate of $130,000 for new arrivals that the report cites.
• Legalization: Amnesty would add $36 billion to $47 billion a year in SNAP, housing voucher and Medicaid spending, or $361 billion to $475 billion over ten years.
• Ending deportations: Citing a DHS estimate that about 2.5 million people left in 2025, the CEA puts the lost savings at $227 billion to $287 billion over ten years, offset by $148 billion in planned ICE spending.

All told, the report prices the platform’s immigration planks at $440 billion to $613 billion over a decade. Dividing the population-wide range by the per-person figure implies roughly 8.4 million to 11.4 million people, a calculation from the CEA’s own numbers.

The assumptions doing the heavy lifting

Nobody leaves and nobody dies early. A footnote on page 14 says the lifetime calculation “abstracts from reverse migration and mortality.” Everyone is counted as staying until 78, through the years when public costs run highest. Cato’s David Bier argues this inflates the result, citing estimates that about a quarter of immigrants leave before retirement and roughly 30 percent die before 78.

Benefit access. The same page states that people in the country illegally “are barred from most federal means-tested social safety net programs.” That is why the legalization scenario carries most of the benefit cost, and why that cost depends on how a bill is written. Under the 1996 welfare law, most new green card holders wait five years for SNAP or federal Medicaid, and Congress could lengthen, shorten or waive that wait.

The departure count. The 2.5 million figure comes from a December 2025 DHS release and includes people the department believes left on their own, which no published federal dataset lets outsiders verify. Removals alone are smaller: the Migration Policy Institute counted about 980,000 deportations in the first 18 months of the second Trump term. The CEA’s savings estimate scales with that number.

How the White House number compares

CBO, the only nonpartisan government scorekeeper in the group, projected the surge would add about $1.2 trillion in federal revenue and $0.3 trillion in outlays over ten years, a window that captures mostly working, tax-paying years. Lifetime models like the CEA’s reach into old age, when costs rise.

CBO’s figure also has limits that support the administration’s side. It leaves out about $0.2 trillion in discretionary spending needed to serve a larger population, and it excludes state and local budgets, where CBO says research finds immigration costs tend to exceed revenues. The Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, has also found that results swing with age and education at arrival, so the makeup of the population matters as much as its size.

Where the debate goes next

The $166,716 figure is likely to travel as a single quotable number, much as recent White House figures on the immigration court backlog and J-1 visa outcomes did. Both looked narrower once checked against federal data. The open question is whether the CEA publishes its model. Without it, outside economists can dispute the inputs but cannot reproduce the result.

For any bill that actually moves, the number that counts will be CBO’s. A legalization proposal or a large change in ICE funding would get a formal CBO score, and that score, not a White House report or a think tank rebuttal, would frame the floor debate.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

• Council of Economic Advisers, The Real Cost of Socialism in America (October 2026), Chapter 2
• Congressional Budget Office, Effects of the Immigration Surge on the Federal Budget and the Economy (July 2024)
• Cato Institute, The White House Council of Economic Advisers’ Imaginary Cost of Illegal Immigrants (Oct. 23, 2026)
• Manhattan Institute, New Report Evaluating the Lifetime Fiscal Impact of Immigrants (Sept. 19, 2024)
• Migration Policy Institute, U.S. Deportations and “Self-Deportations” in the First 18 Months of the Second Trump Term (October 2026)

About the Author

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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