David J. Bier
Welfare fraud cases in Minnesota involving some Somali immigrants have led to demands for broad immigration restrictions. Former Trump official Gene Hamilton, for instance, claims, “It’s not just from that particular country but from so many countries.” Welfare fraud is an issue that has received less attention than it deserves, and immigrants certainly participate. However, the most recent available data show that noncitizen immigrants are less likely than US citizens to commit and be convicted of welfare fraud.
According to data from the US Sentencing Commission, 63 noncitizens were convicted of government benefits fraud by the federal government in 2024, compared to 874 US citizens. The figure below shows these figures per one million residents. There were 2.57 offenders per one million noncitizens in 2024 and 2.77 convictions per one million citizens. In other words, noncitizens were about 8 percent less likely to be convicted of benefits fraud in 2024.
About 21 percent of noncitizen fraud cases resulted in no loss to the government, compared to 1 percent of US citizen fraud cases. Setting aside cases with unspecified loss amounts shows that a noncitizen was about 28 percent less likely to receive a benefit fraud conviction in a case imposing costs on the government.
Noncitizens, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, comprised approximately 7.2 percent of the US population in 2024. They accounted for 6.7 percent of benefits fraud offenders and 6.6 percent of benefits lost to theft in 2024. This means that noncitizen thieves stole less, in absolute dollar terms, than the US citizen thieves per capita in 2024.
Obviously, some immigrants naturalize to become citizens and commit welfare fraud. But since all naturalized citizens start as noncitizens, the lower-than-average noncitizen rate should shed some light on the naturalized citizen rate for which we do not have data from the US Sentencing Commission. Indeed, naturalized citizens have a much lower rate of criminality measured by their propensity to commit crimes, their rate of conviction, and their rate of incarceration because serious noncitizen criminals are barred from naturalizing.
Public benefits fraud is one area where we should naturally expect noncitizens to be overrepresented. Noncitizens are subject to unique restrictions on eligibility for benefits that do not apply to citizens, so we should naturally expect the additional limits would lead to a higher rate of fraud by noncitizens. This implies a greater-than-normal compliance rate, given that noncitizens are subject to more limits.
Looking historically, we can see that the number of noncitizen benefits fraud offenses declined by 57 percent from 147 to 63 over the last decade, from 2015 to 2024, even as the number of cases involving citizens increased 63 percent. Therefore, in 2015, noncitizens were overrepresented, but they are not anymore due to both increasing fraud cases against citizens and decreasing cases against noncitizens.
We can see that noncitizen benefit fraud offenses declined the most during President Trump’s first term, from 2016 to 2020, so this phenomenon is not driven by administrative priorities. President Biden’s administration also initiated, prosecuted, and convicted the highest total number of fraud cases at 937 in 2024, including many cases involving Somali immigrants in Minnesota. Meanwhile, President Trump commuted the sentence of $100-million Medicare fraudster Salomon Melgen in 2021.
Rather than walling off the country to new legal immigrants who could benefit the United States through their work and entrepreneurship, Congress and the states should build a stronger wall around the welfare state. Immigrants should be told that they must support themselves independently of the government, but that is insufficient: the law must make noncitizens categorically ineligible for benefits. Naturalization should be reserved for those immigrants who have shown their ability to support themselves independently.
Better still would be to downsize the government’s role in charitable efforts, which should be left to generous individuals who will care and oversee where their donations go. The mere existence of so many government benefits displaces those voluntary and private options and disincentivizes work, while the taxes necessary to pay for all of it reduce the take-home pay of workers and drive entrepreneurs out of the country or out of business, obstructing paths for people to support themselves.
Regardless, benefits fraud is not a compelling justification for broad-based restrictions on immigration. The primary economic benefit of immigration to Americans is the goods and services that they produce. But on the whole, immigrants also reduce budget deficits and lower the debt-to-GDP ratio, and their positive fiscal impact will only grow as the US debt burden rises. Even in cases where a particular group of immigrants increases federal spending more than tax revenue, they still improve fiscal sustainability so long as their increase in debt is smaller, relative to their economic contribution, than the nation’s overall debt-to-GDP ratio. It wouldn’t be a good trade to shrink the debt by disproportionately shrinking the economy.
Benefits fraud is a serious issue, and whoever commits it should be held accountable, including through deportation in the case of a noncitizen. Unfortunately, this current Congress chose to spend hundreds of billions on a chaotic, indiscriminate mass deportation program in July that will increase the deficit rather than invest in better systems and investigations to control benefits fraud. Congress should redirect that money toward welfare fraud enforcement.
