The start of my recent piece at National Review Online:
The New York Times has posted an unfinished report by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that examines the fiscal impact of post-1980 refugees. Its preliminary finding is that refugees who have arrived since 1980 created a net fiscal benefit of $63 billion (taxes paid minus costs created) over the 10 years from 2005 to 2014.
Of course, the study was never formally released so we do not know what its conclusion would have been had it been fully vetted and completed. Its methodology seems to indicate that it was conducted by researchers (or a single researcher) who understand the data and the complexities of doing a study of this kind. However, by excluding a large set of government costs, the author(s) make it almost inevitable from the start that refugees will be net fiscal contributors. Moreover, the study does not acknowledge that the refugees currently arriving are much less educated that those who came in prior decades, which has profound fiscal implications.
Read the rest here.