A group of migrants seeking U.S. asylum crawl turn themselves in to authorities after crawling through razor wire on the banks of the Rio Grande. Credit: Shutterstock / Vic Hinterlang
Despite efforts by Gov. Greg Abbott and other GOP politicos to paint migrants as an economic threat to Texas, undocumented workers paid $4.9 billion in state and local taxes in 2022, according to a new study by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).

Indeed, undocumented migrants, whom Abbott referred to as “rapists” and “terrorists” earlier this month during his speech at the Republican National Convention, accounted for 6% of total tax revenues collected by the Lone Star State that year, according to data from the Federation of Tax Administrators.

ITEP, a Washington, D.C.-based public-policy think tank, used established techniques for estimating the size and tax-relevant characteristics of the undocumented population to assess the overall tax contributions of the estimated 10.9 million such migrants working in the U.S. in 2022.

The study found that undocumented migrants paid a total of $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes nationwide that year — or roughly $8,889 per migrant. In other words, for every million undocumented migrants in the country, public services received about $8.9 billion in additional revenue.

In Texas, undocumented workers’ contributions to public coffers largely came in the form of sales and excise taxes, which yielded $2.8 billion. Property taxes, which fund public schools, were the second highest tax bill for Texas’ undocumented migrants, coming in at $1.8 billion.

The state’s undocumented workers also paid nearly $181 million in personal and business income taxes, according to the ITEP.

The study comes as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump runs on a platform of deporting up to 20 million people who are in the United States without papers. Details about how the Trump White House would pull off such an unparalleled mass deportation remain scarce.

Even so, Abbott has been among Trump’s most vocal allies in the matter, and the state of Texas is spending billions on its own to repel border crossers. So far, the state has allocated more than $11 billion in taxpayer money for Operation Lone Star, the Republican governor’s sweeping crackdown on asylum seekers.

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This article appears in Best of San Antonio 2024.

Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...