[blockmarker]

The costs incurred by the children of immigrants are obviously a cost of immigration, but in Cato's analysis, the more expensive the children of immigrants are, the better immigrants look in comparison to natives. If every child of immigrants increased the deficit by 50 million dollars, Cato says that immigration should be increased because citizens increase the deficit so much. This is clearly deceit to supoort their favored conclusions.

[Starman_Jones]

How is this calculated for citizens? Does my "cost to society" include my education, etc. or was that factored in to my parents' costs? The former seems like a much more natural way to calculate it, but I'm unfamiliar with how these are done in practice.

[blockmarker]

It's generally the former, your net fiscal impact includes your education and other childhood expenses. That is a reason why immigration is supposedly so good, another country spent their money raising them but your country gets the tax contributions from the worker. (This does not necessarily mean that the immigrant is actually a net taxpayer, as many european countries have found out.)

Such analysis generally distinguish between non-immigrants, first generation immigrants, and second generation immigrants. Rarely third generation too, and also separates based on the education level, legal or illegal, and country of origin.

Given than in western countries immigrants generally remain and have children who will get government assistance such as free education, one should take into account second generation data as part of immigration.

I am no erudite who has read a million papers, but I haven't seen any analysis for Europe that compares citizens and non-citizens, and for good reason, it's not informative. Here for example two different groups are mixed, non-immigrants and second generation immigrants. Given the lower socioeconomic status of most immigrants, the greater aid given to the second generation might eliminate any savings caused by the first generation, but in this article the cost of second gen is used to make the first generation look better compared to non-immigrants.

This might have been a mistake, but people on Twitter explained it to senior Cato members, and their answers make it clear that it was not a mistake but a deliberate decision. So they are deceivers, even if they do not technically say anything false.