For example, the young and the elderly consume more government benefits in the form of education and welfare when young and entitlements and health care when older. They also pay less in taxes when younger and older. The Cato Model finds that immigrant individuals who arrive at age 25 and who are high school dropouts have a net fiscal impact of +$216,000 in net present value terms over the next 30 years, which does not include their descendants. Including the fiscal impact of those immigrants’ descendants reduces those immigrants’ net fiscal impact to +$57,000. By comparison, native‐​born American high school dropouts of the same age have a net fiscal impact of −$32,000 that drops to −$177,000 when their descendants are included (Table 31).

On the opposite side of the educational spectrum, the positive fiscal impact of immigrants with more than a bachelor’s degree is $1.254 million in NPV terms and $1.114 when including their descendants. To show how much the age of arrival matters for the net‐​fiscal impact, a high‐​school dropout immigrant who arrived at age 50 imposed a −$37,000 cost, but his descendants only cost −$1,000 due to the limits of the 30‐​year projection and because not many people have children at age 50 or later. An immigrant with more than a bachelor’s degree has a positive impact of +$589,000 – less than half if he’d arrived at age 25. An immigrant’s age of arrival and level of education matter the most for predicting their net‐​fiscal impact.

[This is an enormously complicated question, so be sure to click through and read it all. — Ed]