David J. Bier
Today Cato published my new briefing paper coauthored with Mike Howard and Jacob Vigdor on how immigration has affected housing wealth and property tax revenue in the United States since 1994. My main purpose for the paper was to show how considering the indirect effects of immigration on home values can affect the fiscal effects of immigration at the state and local levels.
The fiscal effect literature is in broad agreement about the positive fiscal effects of immigration for federal budgets, but there is more controversy about state and local effects, depending on whether the second generation is included. Our paper shows that immigrants generated $2.2 trillion in property taxes, either through directly owning or renting property, from 1994 to 2023.
But immigrants have also created or preserved $5.7 trillion in housing wealth for American households. Once we account for this effect, the property tax revenue attributed to immigrants increases about 50 percent—to $3.3 trillion over 30 years. In 2023, the total was nearly $143 billion in property tax revenue attributable to immigrants.
You can read the entire paper here.
