Roughly six in ten households headed by an illegal alien are using at least one major welfare program. That is the headline finding of a February 2026 report from the Center for Immigration Studies, which estimates the rate at 61 percent, and it is the number now making the rounds in the immigration debate.
A quick note on sourcing, because accuracy matters. The 61 percent figure traces to the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors lower immigration levels, and not to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The report was written by research director Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler and titled Welfare Use by Immigrants and the U.S.-Born, 2024.
The analysis uses the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which tracks who is actually receiving benefits. The authors define a household as using welfare if anyone in it participates in at least one major program, and the unit of measurement is the household, not the individual.
The wider immigrant picture is striking too. The report estimates that 51 percent of households headed by legal immigrants use at least one major program, and that the rate for all non-citizen households is 59 percent. For households headed by someone born in the United States, the figure is 37 percent.
That means illegal-alien-headed households use welfare at a rate far above what native-born households do. It also means the gap is wide even for people who came the legal route, which shows the question is bigger than illegal immigration alone.
The programs involved matter. The report found illegal immigrant households have especially high use of cash assistance, mainly the Earned Income Tax Credit, along with food programs and Medicaid. Housing, SSI and TANF were the exceptions where their use was not statistically higher.
Here is the detail that surprises many readers. Illegal immigrants are not typically signing up for benefits on their own behalf. The research explains that they can receive welfare for their U.S.-born children, who are citizens and eligible, and earlier work from the same group found more than half of illegal immigrant households include at least one U.S.-born child.
The authors also say the high rate does not come from an unwillingness to work. According to the report, 86 percent of all immigrant households have at least one worker, compared with 74 percent of U.S.-born households. The report states that the authors have no evidence that the high use is due to fraud.
The benefits are being collected legally under rules written by Congress. The issue for taxpayers is not that people are breaking welfare rules. It is that the rules, combined with a large population of low-wage workers and citizen children, produce a system that costs the public a great deal.
Another number sharpens the point. When the report excludes the widely used school lunch and breakfast programs and the WIC nutrition program, it still finds that 47 percent of all immigrant households and 34 percent of U.S.-born households use at least one of the remaining major programs.
Even families that fit the traditional mold show a gap. Among households made up of only a nuclear family, 48 percent of immigrant households use the welfare system, compared with 33 percent of nuclear-family-only households headed by native-born Americans. The report also says extended family and unrelated roommates do not explain the difference.
When tax credits are added, the share rises. Including the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Additional Child Tax Credit, welfare use among immigrant households climbs to 54 percent, according to the report.
Education is a driver. In earlier CIS research, households headed by an immigrant who had not graduated high school used the welfare system at a rate of 80 percent, compared with 25 percent for those headed by an immigrant with at least a bachelor’s degree. Low earnings and large families make benefit programs more likely to apply.
The authors are open about the limits of the data. The Census survey likely undercounts illegal immigrants, and the status of respondents is estimated rather than directly reported. That means the 61 percent is a best estimate, not a precise measurement. Earlier CIS work using similar methods put the figure at 59.4 percent, so the range is roughly 59 to 61 percent.
Those caveats do not erase the main point. A country that admits or tolerates large numbers of low-income workers, and then offers public benefits to their families, is making a fiscal decision whether or not it admits it. The report’s own numbers show that legal immigrant households use welfare at high rates too, which points toward the rules that govern who is admitted.
Fiscal responsibility is the core conservative principle here. Every dollar the government spends is a dollar taken from a working taxpayer, and a safety net built for citizens in need should be sustainable, targeted and honest about who it serves. A system that cannot say who it pays for, and at what cost, is a system that has lost control of its own budget.
