How much to undocumented aliens add to the national GDP
Executive summary
Undocumented immigrants do not have a single, universally agreed‑upon line item in GDP tables, but recent analyses place their direct economic footprint in the hundreds of billions annually: researchers and advocacy groups estimate undocumented households held about $299 billion in spending power and nearly $389 billion in combined income in 2023 [1], and paid roughly $89.8 billion in federal, state, and local taxes that year [2] [3]. Broader macroeconomic work shows that removing or sharply reducing immigrant flows (legal and unauthorized together) would shave modest but meaningful fractions off GDP growth in the near term and trillions off output over a decade if mass departures occurred [4] [5].
1. What the headline numbers mean: income, spending power, and taxes
Estimates most often cited for “how much undocumented immigrants add” focus on a handful of measurable quantities: combined income (about $389 billion in 2023) and spending power (about $299 billion), figures highlighted in recent syntheses and cited by policy groups [1] [3], while tax analyses put annual tax contributions of undocumented households in the neighborhood of $89.8 billion [2] [6]. These figures are useful for gauging direct demand and revenue effects—consumer spending supports businesses and jobs; taxes bolster federal, state, and local coffers—but they are not the same as an official GDP line item, since GDP counts total value added across the economy rather than “income of a population subgroup.”
2. How that spending and income translate into GDP impact
Macroeconomic studies show that immigrant labor—legal and unauthorized—affects GDP by expanding the workforce and consumer demand; Brookings estimates the decline in output from reduced migration as roughly 0.2 percentage points of GDP growth in 2025 and 0.1 percentage points in 2026, illustrating the scale at which immigrant flows move national growth [4]. Other projections emphasize longer horizons: the Center for Migration Studies calculates a potential $5.1 trillion loss to GDP over ten years if immigrant labor were sharply reduced, underscoring that impacts compound over time through lower labor supply, disrupted supply chains, and diminished consumption [5].
3. The implicit size comparison: undocumented vs. all immigrants
Context matters: immigrants as a whole were responsible for roughly 18.0% of total U.S. output in 2023—about $2.1 trillion—according to economic researchers [7]; undocumented immigrants are a subset of that total, so their direct contribution will be materially smaller but still sizable in absolute terms [7]. Because many studies aggregate across legal status, disentangling the undocumented share requires combining population estimates (which have trended upward to record levels in recent years) with per‑capita income and spending estimates [8] [1].
4. What economists disagree on and why estimates vary
Estimates vary because of data limitations and methodological choices: some studies measure income or consumer spending (giving the $299–$389 billion figures), others total tax payments (around $90–$100 billion), and macroeconomic models estimate dynamic GDP effects of immigration flows or legal status changes, producing very different horizons and magnitudes [1] [6] [9] [4]. Researchers also warn that many published numbers blend legal and unauthorized immigrants or project counterfactuals (for example, GDP lost under mass deportation scenarios), so headline figures must be read with attention to scope and assumptions [9] [5].
5. Bottom line and reporting limits
The best available, cited authorities indicate undocumented households contributed on the order of hundreds of billions yearly in income and spending—roughly $299 billion in spending power and about $389 billion in income in 2023—and paid near $90 billion in taxes [1] [2] [6]; extrapolating from those flows and macroeconomic models implies that undocumented workers add meaningfully to national GDP, with larger, cumulative effects over time if their labor and consumer demand were removed [4] [5]. This account is constrained by the fact that official GDP statistics do not break out “undocumented” as a distinct category, and many influential studies combine legal and unauthorized immigrants or model hypothetical scenarios rather than report a single definitive GDP contribution for the undocumented population [7] [9].