The Washington Post once again proved why its journalists know as much about good economics as they do about “austere religious scholar(s)” by arguing President Donald Trump’s illegal immigration crackdown would somehow cause inflation to skyrocket. Just try unraveling that oxymoron.
Post writers Andrew Ackerman and Lauren Kaori Gurley bemoaned in a June 15, 2025, pro-illegal immigrant advocacy screed that “U.S. could lose more immigrants than it gains for [the] first time in 50 years.” The propagandists railed against Trump for daring to finally do something about America’s illegal immigration crisis, stoking fear among readers that “[n]et migration could turn negative, some economists warn, weighing on economic growth and fueling inflation.”
This is coming from the same rag that treated the Bidenomics disaster that instigated the 40-year high inflation crisis in the first place as some kind of stroke of genius. Somebody make it make sense, please.
Ackerman and Gurley warned that border control would hurt the economy:
A net outflow of migrants could stoke inflation, a risk economists already expect from Trump’s tariff policies. It also could renew the type of labor shortages the country experienced during the pandemic. Longer term, it could even have implications for fiscal policy, with fewer immigrants paying taxes and supporting entitlement programs such as Social Security, said one of the economists, Wendy Edelberg.
Of course, Ackerman and Gurley didn’t bother mentioning the word “illegal,” and only used the term “undocumented” once. Telling, isn’t it?
Of course, nowhere did the writers even mention the already extraordinary economic cost that the approximately 13.7 million unauthorized people in the U.S. as of February 2025 already posed to America’s economic health. As Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Director of Research Steven Camarota stated during a House Budget Committee hearing in January 2024, “While illegal immigrants often receive other services for their U.S.-born children, even when we estimate the net fiscal impact of just the illegal immigrants themselves, excluding their U.S.-born children, we still find they create a lifetime net fiscal drain of $68,000 on average (taxes paid minus benefits received).”
In fact, Camarota further estimated that the taxes that undocumented immigrants do pay the federal government get canceled out by their consumption of public services. Another analysis by the Manhattan Institute found that the “the border crisis is expected to cost $1.15 trillion over the lifetime of the new immigrants who entered the country unlawfully, overstayed a visa, or were paroled.” But did any of that matter to Ackerman and Gurley? Nope. Instead, the writers were adamant about pushing their out-of-context agitprop that “[a]ny lasting immigration slowdown could limit economic growth, because fewer workers leads to a weaker economic output.” In other words, don’t do anything about illegal immigration because the economy needs it!
It's the same kind of common sense butchering that occurred when Post columnist Catherine Rampell put out a nutty piece in 2022 declaring that then-President Joe Biden should let more illegal immigrants come over the border to — *checks notes*— solve the inflation crisis. No, you didn't misread that.
But like Rampell, Ackerman and Gurley behaved like they were completely oblivious to the catastrophic economic consequences of unchecked illegal immigration. Even the graphic they used as the featured photo for their propaganda was just peak cringe.
(Illustration by José L. Soto/The Washington Post; iStock)
The Federation for American Immigration Reform pointed out in a study that “[a]t the start of 2023, the net cost of illegal immigration for the United States – at the federal, state, and local levels – was at least $150.7 billion.” This dwarfs the nearly $90 billion that illegal immigrants reportedly paid in taxes that year.
Here’s our professional advice to The Post: deport Ackerman and Gurley’s pathetic excuse of a spin job straight into the paper shredder.
