The hosts of Fox News’ popular midday news program Outnumbered trotted out misleading statistics from the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform — doused with Fox’s own patented brand of paranoid xenophobia — to fearmonger about the supposedly unsustainable financial burden immigrants place on American society. The report underpinning Fox’s segment is an apparent reproduction of a 2017 FAIR study that was roundly criticized for methodological omissions and exaggerations. At no point did anyone at Fox acknowledge how much immigrants contribute to American society or how much immigration contributes to economic growth and prosperity.

During the April 16 edition of Outnumbered, co-host Emily Campagno introduced a segment about the supposed financial burden imposed by illegal immigration.

“As the bloated government processes our taxes, we are learning just how much of your money is going toward the migrant crisis,” she began, before pivoting to data from FAIR; “The total net fiscal cost of illegal immigration is $150 billion.”

“So let’s run through some of those numbers, guys,” Campagno continued. “At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers are shelling out about $14 billion for welfare, $42 billion for medical care for the illegal immigrants, and that boils down to each individual taxpayer paying an estimated $1,100 a year, which Americans, I think we well know, don’t have.”

Seemingly riffing on the findings outlined in the FAIR report, right-wing radio host Ben Ferguson invoked the xenophobic “great replacement” conspiracy theory, arguing that the “Marxist, socialist, and communist” Democratic Party understands “that if you bankrupt a country, and you bring in new voters in the process, which we’re doing literally by the millions right now, then you can fundamentally change the United States of America in one generation.”

Dialing up the paranoia, Ferguson then suggested that supporting migrants was related to the Democratic Party’s supposed efforts to hook Americans on government benefits. “The government’s there to hand you your food and your housing and your medical,” he said. “They own you like a modern-day slave.”

Outnumbered co-host Harris Faulkner then narrated an on-screen scroll of government programs and agencies that cost less than the $150 billion allegedly spent on so-called “illegal immigration.”

There’s just one problem. The entire set-up for this segment was based on false information. The study from FAIR — an anti-immigrant organization founded by a white nationalist and defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — is junk.

In fact, the 2023 study Fox cited in today’s broadcast — “The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers” — appears to follow the same methodology as a 2017 report that the libertarian Cato Institute comprehensively debunked the same year. From Cato (emphasis added):

FAIR’s report reaches that conclusion by vastly overstating the costs of illegal immigration, undercounting the tax revenue they generate, inflating the number of illegal immigrants, counting millions of U.S. citizens as illegal immigrants, and by concocting a method of estimating the fiscal costs that is rejected by all economists who work on this subject.

FAIR’s Errors

Merely using the correct numbers when it comes to the actual size of the illegal immigrant population, the correct tax rates, and the effect of immigrants on property values lowers the net fiscal cost by 87 percent to 97 percent, down to $15.6 billion or $3.3 billion, respectively.

Fox News relied on a report that seemingly overstated the actual costs of illegal immigration by “87 to 97 percent.”

In line with Cato’s 2017 findings, FAIR admits in its 2023 methodology that its estimate of the undocumented population “is higher than those offered by most mainstream immigration research organizations” and that it intentionally “includes costs incurred by minor, U.S.-born children” in its calculation even though those children are Americans with the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship. (Anti-immigrant groups often use statistical gimmicks to exaggerate the supposed problems created by immigration, like lumping American citizens in with those in the country without permission or speculatively extrapolating the costs of government programs.)

Fox News depicting immigrants as an unsustainable fiscal burden imperiling American society falls in line with the network’s other routinely xenophobic portrayals of migrants.

Just this month, a Fox guest warned that immigrants were “poisoning the bloodline in this country,” while a long-time Fox Business host used the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge to claim that migrant workers were “destroying the country.”

Earlier this month, a Fox prime-time host warned that immigration would turn America into a “third-world dumping ground.”

On another occasion, a Fox guest warned that “illegal immigrants” voting in elections was “part of a political endgame for the Democrats to hold power.”

Fox’s hard turn into anti-immigrant rhetoric, and its embrace of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, in particular, has only heightened as the 2024 election goes into full swing.