>The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments, The Congressional Budget Office

>According to available estimates, there are about 12 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Federal, state, and local governments spend public funds that benefit those immigrants, and those immigrants pay individual income, sales, and property taxes. Most available studies conclude that the unauthorized population pays less in state and local taxes than it costs state and local governments to provide services to that population. However, those estimates have significant limitations; they are not a suitable basis for developing an aggregate national effect across all states.

Note that that's restricted to state and local taxes vs. spending, it does not include federal taxes and spending, so isn't (aside from the additional explicit disclaimer of utility in the last sentence there) a basis for any conclusion about net impact to government overall.

It may not be terribly strong evidence but it's certainly evidence on the net impact on government. Illegal immigrants do not generally get the kind of high paying jobs it takes to be a net tax payer. As Mitt Romney infamously publicised, they're only 47%. And while adult illegal immigrants probably commit less property crime than citizens, their American citizen children are less law abiding than average.

Illegal immigrants are at best marginal payers into the fisc. They increase competition for land/housing and may have negative effects on labour market outcomes for natives by depressing wages. And they entered your country illegally.

If you want to argue for Open Borders or increased humanitarian immigration go for it. I'm sympathetic if not convinced. Illegal immigrants usually have a massive increase in standard of living. But most of America's illegal immigrants are from Central and South America, and the well educated portions of those countries do not immigrate to the US illegally.

> Illegal immigrants do not generally get the kind of high paying jobs it takes to be a net tax payer. As Mitt Romney infamously publicised, they're only 47%.

No, Romney didn't "publicize" that net tax payers considering all sources of taxes vs. all costs are "only 47%", he made some false implications based on a claim that about 47% pay no income tax (which was true, even if the implications he tried to make from it were not, if one assumes he was talking specifically about federal income tax.)

But federal income tax isn't the only tax, (or the only federal tax, or even the only federal tax on income), and the people not paying it aren't only the poor, and who is or isn't paying federal income tax isn't who is or isn't a net tax payer (and, even more clearly, who isn't paying federal income tax isn't equivalent to who is a net tax payer, which is what your presentation of the meaning of the 47% would claim.)

> But most of America's illegal immigrants are from Central and South America, and the well educated portions of those countries do not immigrate to the US illegally.

Sure they do; I've personally met several well-educated professionals who did that were later beneficiaries of the 1980s amnesty, and the fundamental reason why they did hasn't changed since then. For many decades, one of the major sources of illegal immigration from Mexico is that the waiting time in the main family preferences categories is decades long because of per-country limits that guarantee that the supply of visas for qualified, desirable immigrants under the basic purposes of the family-centered immigration policy is perpetually misaligned with demand.