Medicare and Medicaid spend more on native-born Americans than immigrants

When immigration opponents make the case for closing the country's borders, one common argument is the costs that immigrants incur. But recent statistics throw cold water on those claims, finding that the foreign-born actually use fewer public health dollars than people born in the U.S. "Immigrant households have much higher use of…Medicaid (42 percent vs. 23 percent)" than native-born households, according to a 2015 report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). "Prior research indicates that there are 5.8 million uninsured illegal immigrants in the country in 2019, accounting for...