(The Center Square) — Migrants in Virginia paid nearly $700 million in taxes in 2022, according to a new study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Though the institute didn’t include migrant population estimates for each state with its tax data, the Migration Policy Institute estimated, based on 2019 data, that approximately 251,000 migrants lived in Virginia.
More than one-third of the $700 million figure comes from sales and excise taxes, which accounted for nearly $248 million in migrant taxes in Virginia in 2022. However, the remaining $445 million is mostly from property, personal, and business income taxes.
The study notes that it included indirect taxes, like property taxes folded into rent payments, and automatic withholding that may or may not have been filed on an income tax return in its calculations.
“This study is the most comprehensive look at how much undocumented immigrants pay in taxes,” said Marco Guzman, ITEP senior policy analyst and co-author of the study. “And what it shows is that they pay quite a lot, to the tune of nearly $100 billion a year.”
One of the study’s key findings was that, despite contributing through their taxes to “major social insurance programs” like Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance, migrants are not considered eligible and thus cannot benefit from those programs.
Virginia is the 12th largest state, with an estimated population in 2023 of over 8.7 million people, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Its total foreign-born population – which includes people who have immigrated legally, as well as migrants – as of 2022 census data was over 1.1 million, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Virginia’s immigrant population is most concentrated in Northern Virginia, but there are pockets of diversity throughout the state.
