The Department of Health and Human Services recently issued a report claiming that refugees and asylees as a group are net fiscal contributors, meaning they pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.
Asylees would need to have quite a positive fiscal impact to make up for the low skill level of refugees alone.
The report's authors argue that the marginal cost of congestion is negligible because refugees and asylees are such a small portion of the national population, but that's valid only if they are spread evenly throughout the country.
Based on prior research from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that the authors acknowledge on page 30, assigning refugees and asylees the average per-capita cost of congestible goods likely turns their fiscal impact negative.
Even without the exclusion of congestible goods, the report's findings would be of limited value due to the lack of policy-relevant subgroup analyses, such as the potential difference between refugees and asylees mentioned above.
The report combines recent arrivals with those who became refugees or asylees decades ago, reducing its usefulness for evaluating present-day policies.
While the U.S. once took in several groups of higher-skill refugees, such as Soviet dissidents in the 1980s and Eastern Europeans in the 1990s, today refugees come mainly from less-developed parts of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, which has caused the average refugee's education level to plummet.
https://cis.org/Richwine/Refugees-and-Asylees-Dont-Pay-Their-Own-Way
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