Karl Denninger works out that at most 14.5 percent of illegal immigrants “work and pay taxes”.
Ok, 2 million people have been removed.
These are all (or mostly; nothing is ever “all”) productive working people just trying to make an honest living, right? That’s the line run by people who are against deporting those here illegally.
Really? Is that true?
Let’s ignore January because Trump didn’t take office until the 20th, and nothing really happened until February.
February 2025, Employed: 162.544 million
August 2025, Employed: 163.288 millionHmmm…. 744,000 more people working in August of this year than in February.
Now let’s look at 2024, when Biden was in office and before this operation began, same months.
February 2024, Employed: 160.315 million
August 2024, Employed: 161.348 millionHmmm…. 1,033,000 more people working in August than in February in…. 2024.
So….. 289,000 more people went to work from February to August of 2024 when illegal aliens were flooding the country than in the last seven months.
In other words of the 2 million illegal immigrants that have been expelled by one means or another it is a reasonable argument that a mere 14.5% of them, or about one in seven, were working in a form and fashion that was recorded in the household survey, which is a clean survey of people, not of employers who are paying everyone above the table on W2s. I’ve been following said survey since the 1990s privately and reporting on it monthly since 2007.
The rest of those who have been removed or self-deported were being showered with the proceeds of armed robbery committed by local, state and federal governments against everyone else here in the United States, including you and I, or they were living on outright criminal activity that is not counted as employment at all.
Oh, and beyond that 14.5% they were not paying any employment or income taxes either so spare me that tripe as well.
All of the economics-based pro-immigration arguments assume a much, much higher percentage of working and tax-paying immigrants than is actually the case, which, of course, is why the net drain on total economic resources is inevitably much higher than the pro-immigration “it’s good for the economy” idiots anticipate.
Even without the relevant statistics, it’s very, very easy to observer how deleterious mass immigration, legal or illegal, is for an economy, as all one has to do is look at the economic history of the USA post-1965, and the economic history of the UK and the European countries post-2010, to see how opening the borders to less-intelligent, less-productive peoples lowers the wage rate, reduces overall societal wealth, increases state spending, enlarges state debt, and shrinks the economy in real per-capita/debt terms.