• Mississippi State Auditor Shad White estimates that immigrants without legal status cost state taxpayers $100 million annually.
• The estimate is based on a conservative figure of 22,000 undocumented people living in Mississippi.
• The report calculates costs in three main areas: education ($25 million), health care ($77 million), and prisons ($1.7 million).
• The health care total includes $28 million for Medicaid services for U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents.
• The auditor’s report does not factor in taxes paid by undocumented immigrants.

When some lawmakers in the Mississippi Legislature took their immigration bills to the floor this session, a question emerged among opponents. Are these measures really necessary?

Mississippi has a smaller population of immigrants than its other southeastern counterparts, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and the state has mainly remained in the background as its neighbors have been targeted by task force raids.

The lack of federal attention to the Magnolia State hasn’t stopped many Republican lawmakers and state officials, including State Auditor Shad White, from maintaining that immigration without legal permission presents a major threat to Mississippi. At the crux of White’s argument for stronger local and national enforcement is money. One hundred million dollars, to be specific.

That amount, $100 million, is what White said immigrants without legal status in the country cost Mississippi taxpayers every year. He explained the math behind the total and its significance to residents in an April 22 interview with the Clarion Ledger.

The first piece of the puzzle was to estimate the number of people living in the state without legal status, White said, a calculation guided by data from the U.S. Census and Department of Homeland Security.

“We settled on 22,000 illegal immigrants living in Mississippi,” he said. “It’s important to mention that that is a very, very conservative estimate. It’s the lower bound of what that number could be.”

Both the number of immigrants in the country illegally and the amount that they cost taxpayers could be, and likely are, greater than the estimate, White said. The numbers have also almost definitely changed since the auditor’s office first researched and compiled the report at the end of 2024.

When the office reached a consensus on the number of people, White said, analysts looked at three major cost buckets: education, health care and prisons. These areas were the ones with the largest potential price tags, he said.

Every child, regardless of immigration status, is entitled to a public education in the United States. The office estimated that around 2,500 children, roughly 0.57% of the total public enrollment last school year, were in the country without legal status.

The cost for these students, based on the Mississippi Student Funding Formula approved in 2024, is $17 million. On top of that, White said, many of these children would likely receive funding supplements for low-income students and English language learners.

The total taxpayer cost in education totals around $25 million a year, the report stated. Neither the report nor White detailed how analysts determined the number of students who would qualify as low-income or English language learners.

The health care total is likely an even more conservative number, White said, in part because the office didn’t have enough data to make an estimate as comprehensive as he would have preferred.

“If you walked into an emergency room right now, you’re going to be treated. It doesn’t matter who you are,” he said. “Add onto that the cost of anyone who is an illegal immigrant mother who walks into a hospital and gives birth. Of course, we’re going to treat her, but that cost will flow back to taxpayers.”

Citing numbers from health policy organization KFF (formerly known as Kaiser Family Foundation), the report stated that those births would likely cost around $4 million each year. Emergency room visits would probably total around $45 million annually, assuming about half of the undocumented population goes to the ER once a year.

The total estimate in the health care section of the report is $77 million, because it includes approximately $28 million spent providing Medicaid services to the U.S. citizen children of immigrants without legal status. Without the Medicaid treatment for U.S. citizens, the health care cost is around $49 million.

More on immigration: Mississippi legislature moves immigration bills to work with ICE

The final area is criminal justice, White explained, which used detention data collected from prisons and jails to estimate that 79 incarcerated people did not have legal status in the country. Multiplied by the daily cost of incarcerating a person in Mississippi, the report stated that taxpayers would contribute around $1.7 million every year to keeping them in jail.

This amount is also likely much higher, White said, because the office didn’t have the means to include the costs incurred before a person goes to prison.

“When we looked at the prison costs, we did not look into the cost of investigating crimes committed by illegal immigrants,” he said. “The cost of the criminal investigation was some non-zero number, we just don’t know what it was.”

When the report as first released, White recounted, some people told him that it should have included the amount that undocumented immigrants contribute in local and state taxes. He dismissed that as people “trying to distract from the larger point” that people without legal status “drive costs higher.”