David J. Bier
Welfare fraud cases in Minnesota involving some Somali immigrants are part of what led President Trump in November to state that he “will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” As I explained earlier this month, welfare fraud is an issue that has received less attention than it deserves, but immigrants are not a leading cause.
In my earlier analysis, I used data from the US Sentencing Commission to show that noncitizens were 8 percent less likely to be convicted of welfare fraud in 2024 and that the number of noncitizens who were convicted of welfare fraud had fallen by 57 percent since 2015. In this analysis, I expand on those results to examine the dollar amounts stolen from the federal government over the period 2013 to 2024.
The US Sentencing Commission data start in 2013. In inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars, the average citizen was convicted of stealing $1.68 per year from government benefits programs from 2013 to 2024, while the average noncitizen was convicted of defrauding $1.16 per year, 31 percent less than the average citizen.
Altogether, the US Sentencing Commission reports on $5.5 billion in benefits fraud losses attributed to convicts during this period—or $6.5 billion in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars. Of this amount, citizens accounted for 95 percent of the losses in real terms. Noncitizens do commit benefits fraud, but they are not a significant part of the problem.
The US Sentencing Commission does not record a person’s birthplace or whether a citizen has naturalized. But we have reasons to believe that the noncitizen results shed light on the naturalized citizen rate since all naturalized citizens start as noncitizens. Indeed, naturalized citizens have a much lower rate of criminality measured by their propensity to commit crimes, their rate of conviction, and their rate of incarceration because serious noncitizen criminals are barred from naturalizing.
These results are counterintuitive since public benefits fraud is one area where we should naturally expect noncitizens to be overrepresented. Noncitizens are subject to unique restrictions on eligibility for benefits that do not apply to citizens, so we should naturally expect the additional limits would lead to a higher rate of fraud by noncitizens.
As I said in my prior blog post on this topic, benefits fraud is not a compelling justification for broad-based restrictions on immigration. The primary economic benefit of immigration to Americans is the goods and services that they produce. But on the whole, immigrants also reduce budget deficits and lower the debt-to-GDP ratio, and their positive fiscal impact will only grow as the US debt burden rises.
Benefits fraud is a serious issue, and whoever commits it should be held accountable, including through deportation in the case of a noncitizen. Unfortunately, this current Congress chose to spend hundreds of billions on a chaotic, indiscriminate mass deportation program in July that will increase the deficit rather than invest in better systems and investigations to control benefits fraud. Congress should redirect that money toward welfare fraud enforcement.
See also: Noncitizens Were Underrepresented in Welfare Fraud Convictions in 2024