INCÍSOS SPECIAL · HEIRS

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The fiscal burden argument is the most repeated case against the presence of immigrants without legal status. The available numbers point the other way, with an uncomfortable detail.

The numbers

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy published a 2024 study on the tax contributions of the immigrant population without legal status for the year 2022.

The total: $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes. Of that, $59.4 billion went to the federal government and $37.3 billion to state and local governments. The average runs around $9,000 per person.

Within the federal component, the largest share is payroll taxes: $25.7 billion to Social Security, $6.4 billion to Medicare and $1.8 billion to unemployment insurance.

These are three programs that, in most circumstances, the people who made those contributions are barred by law from accessing.

The figure that disorients

In 40 states, undocumented immigrants pay higher effective state and local tax rates than the top 1 percent of households by income in those same states.

The reason is structural and says nothing about anyone’s merit. State and local tax systems lean disproportionately on consumption taxes. Nearly half of what this population pays at the state and local level — roughly $15.1 billion — is sales and excise taxes: fuel, alcohol, tobacco, utilities.

Someone who spends most of what he earns pays proportionally more under that design. And someone who cannot access most available deductions and credits does not deduct them either.

Workers without legal status who file taxes but lack a valid Social Security number, for themselves or their children, are excluded from the federal Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit.

On the source

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy describes itself as a nonprofit, nonpartisan tax policy organization with a declared mission of tax fairness. It has a position.

Its methodology is public. It applies effective rates derived from its own Who Pays? report on the incidence of state and local taxes by income level, supplemented with the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey.

The study has not been rebutted by an alternative methodology producing a substantially different result, though its assumptions about population size and compliance rates are debatable and have been debated.

The point

Public conversation tends to pose the question backwards: what does this population cost.

The available data allow it to be posed the other way. Nearly $100 billion a year enters the system by way of people funding pensions they will not collect, medical care they will not receive and unemployment insurance they cannot claim.

That is not a burden the system bears. It is a subsidy the system receives.

And it is the part of the Hispanic contribution that no September proclamation mentions.

Primary sources: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants, published July 30, 2024, with 2022 data, identified as an organization with a declared mission. ITEP, Who Pays?, seventh edition, 2024. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey.

INCÍSOS SPECIAL · HEIRS

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Measured as an independent economy, Latino output in the United States would rank fourth in the world. It is the category with the bluntest figure of the set.

The figure and its scale

The annual US Latino GDP report, produced by researchers at California Lutheran University and UCLA, places that output at $4.4 trillion for 2024.

Measured as a separate economy, it would rank fourth in the world, ahead of Japan.

The scale figure is useful. The dynamic figure is more so. Latino GDP grew 6.4 percent in real terms during 2024, against 2.4 percent for the rest of the American economy. That difference means Latinos delivered 28.2 percent of the country’s total economic growth that year.

Close to three of every ten dollars of growth.

Consumption

Latino households in the United States consumed $2.8 trillion. Measured independently, that would be the world’s third-largest consumer market.

Geographic distribution concentrates the weight in two states. California’s Latino economy comes to $1.1 trillion. Texas’s, to $820 billion.

Either one, on its own, exceeds most national economies on the planet.

Why it grows faster

The explanation is demographic before it is entrepreneurial.

The Latino labor force reached 35.1 million people in 2024, up 46.5 percent from 2010. The median age of the Hispanic population was 31.1 in 2025, per the Census Bureau, in a country that is aging.

A younger population joins the labor market in greater proportion, stays in it longer, and forms households that consume. The growth differential comes not from competitive advantage but from an age structure.

That same feature carries a consequence usually overlooked: amid negative labor force growth across several of the world’s principal economies, a young working-age population is a structural asset, not a burden.

One necessary clarification

The reports producing these figures speak of a Latino population above 68 million. The Census Bureau counts 70.1 million as of July 1, 2025.

This is not a contradiction. They are different time cuts and different methodological definitions. They should not be mixed.

The issuers should also be identified. The Latino Donor Collaborative is an organization dedicated to documenting Latino economic contribution, with a declared position. The Latino GDP report is academic work from California Lutheran University and UCLA, with published methodology. The economic impact report was produced with Arizona State University’s Seidman Research Institute.

The point

Of all the categories in this special, this is the one needing the least argument. The figure speaks on its own.

Which is precisely why it makes the underlying problem visible: $4.4 trillion is not a heritage received from anyone. It is current output, generated this year, by people working now.

Primary sources: 2026 U.S. Latino GDP Report, Dan Hamilton, Matthew Fienup, David Hayes-Bautista and Paul Hsu, California Lutheran University and UCLA. 2026 U.S. Latino Economic Impact Report, Latino Donor Collaborative with Arizona State University’s Seidman Research Institute. U.S. Census Bureau, Facts for Features CB26-FF.07.

INCÍSOS SPECIAL · HEIRS

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Hispanic labor gets narrated every September as an ascending curve. The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics series points the other way.

The number

In June 2026, roughly 18 million Hispanic adults were out of the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The category grew by more than a million people from June 2025.

The phenomenon is not exclusively Hispanic. The national total of people classified as out of the labor force reached 105.8 million in June 2026, the highest on record, an increase of 2.6 million in a year.

The national labor force participation rate fell from 62.3 percent in June 2025 to 61.5 percent in June 2026. In July 2026 it stood at 61.4 percent, with an employment-population ratio of 58.9 percent. Since January 2026, participation has dropped 0.7 percentage points.

What the number does not say

Precision matters about what the statistic permits.

The out-of-the-labor-force category covers anyone not working and not actively seeking work. It includes retirees, students, stay-at-home parents, caregivers and people with disabilities or prolonged illness. It is not a synonym for unemployment.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not explain why any individual is outside the market. Its data record the fact, not the cause.

A temporal coincidence exists between this movement and the intensification of immigration enforcement activity during 2026. Establishing causation between the two would require a study that is not yet available. What can be stated is that both curves move in the same period.

Where those who do work, work

The Latino labor force reached 35.1 million people in 2024, up 46.5 percent from 2010, according to the annual Latino GDP report.

Concentration by sector is pronounced. In construction, Hispanic workers went from 23.6 percent of the sector’s labor force in 2010 to 31.1 percent in 2022, according to the American Community Survey. Across all industries they represented 18.7 percent.

Nearly a third of the sector that builds the country’s housing and infrastructure.

That workforce is geographically concentrated: 54 percent of Hispanic construction workers are in three states. Texas with 827,000, California with 775,000 and Florida with 373,000. New Mexico has the country’s highest share, at 64 percent of its construction workforce.

There is also disproportionate presence in hospitality, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing and health care.

The point

A sector that sustains a third of national construction and a substantial share of agriculture, transportation and personal care is not a cultural contribution. It is infrastructure of the productive system.

And that system recorded, in one year, the exit of more than a million Hispanic adults from its labor market.

The annual observance celebrates Hispanic work in the past tense, as legacy. The 2026 data describe something happening now, and contracting.

Primary sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation, June and July 2026 editions, Current Population Survey. American Community Survey 2022, construction workforce composition. 2026 U.S. Latino GDP Report, California Lutheran University and UCLA.