[jhp123]

Progressive taxation will generally mean that anyone under the median income has a negative net impact on the government's finances. All this study is doing is reflecting the obvious fact that immigrants are by and large working class.

[rayiner]

Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population. That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.

[quasse]

> Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population

Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.

> That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.

If the surplus economic value created by immigrants who are employed is generally not returned to them in the form of high wages, then yeah, they're not going to be paying it to the government as taxes.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that a lot of people in this thread seem to be conflating per-person net economic benefit and net tax payments. The first can be significantly positive while the second is negative.

[jhp123]

there are many indirect effects. Imagine a factory employing 80 low-wage "takers" (line workers etc) and 20 high-wage "makers" (managers etc). The owners of the factory make $1 million in profit every month as a taxable dividend. Well if you get rid of the line workers: no more factory, no more managers, no more dividend. This is why honest analyses go beyond simple tax balance accounting.

The other big impact is on price level. When you have an inverted population pyramid, fewer workers need to support more retirees and this shows up as inflation concentrated in labor-intensive industries like healthcare. So even if a program like Medicare really had more tax receipts per beneficiary after reducing immigration, it would also be spending much more per beneficiary under a labor shortage.