By David Lightman and Matthew Miranda | Sacramento Bee
Amid pledges for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants by presidential candidate Donald Trump, a new study has highlighted the increasingly positive economic effects of this community.
The report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington-based progressive research group, found undocumented immigrants nationwide paid an estimated $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022. About $37.3 billion was spent on state and local taxes, and the rest went to federal taxes.
California’s economy particularly benefits from the undocumented workforce. The population paid an estimated $8.5 billion in state and local taxes in 2022, according to this latest report. Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, said the numbers are unsurprising because California has the largest population of undocumented immigrants. More than 2 million undocumented immigrants are estimated to live in the state.
“There’s a lot of technology jobs that are being filled by immigrants, but also in the farming industry and the agriculture industry that’s so pivotal to California and the U.S. economy,” Ruiz Soto said.
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