Something like two thirds of the US federal budget is spent on some form of welfare. Assuming you want to keep that ratio you could spend more per person with fewer people withdrawing from that system.
FWIW, social security and Medicare taxes are noticeably higher in the US than Canada. Pay more get more.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-data...
Switzerland has a per capita GDP exceeding the US while pursuing isolationist foreign policy. They are the world's most popular country in opinion polls.
All those European countries get to invest in those nice social programs and isolationism because the US has at least up until now acted as world police and handled their foreign affairs for the most part.
Less vindictively, the only economic interest the US has in the Middle East is oil. Relying on oil for your energy needs is, in 2026, a choice and not a requirement. Wind, solar, and the batteries you need to store them are continuously getting cheaper. And for the people who are net consumers of energy - primarily the US, Europe, and China - renewables are better for everything, but especially they're better for energy independence!
The only things that require oil are airplanes, plastics, and industrial chemical processes (like we make asphalt out of oil and certain inks out of naphtha). Eliminating most of the energy demand for oil would mean a significantly reduced dependence on foreign oil, and more specifically, the political dependence on low gas prices. America rebuilt all its cities in the image of the car and, as a result, made gasoline/petrol a necessary ingredient of urban mobility. This was, again, a choice - we absolutely could have retained and grown our dense urban cores and we can still rebuild what was destroyed.
But this requires an entire governing body at every level that is not a corpse paraded by the ghosts of Tammany Hall, Standard Oil, and Hitler. The primary crisis in America that is driving these wars is a fundamental lack of political will for alternatives.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=oil&met...
Translation - we bomb people for money. well thanks for being frank anyways. otherwise it is sick to hear all that moralizing about "us being a good guys"
https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-still-use-much-less-wel...
> Native-born Americans use an average of ... $3,638 in means-tested benefits in 2023. By comparison, immigrants used ... $3,370 in means-tested benefits.
The article also ignores state provided benefits, and thus the disparity between documented and undocumented migrant populations. The article 's "much less" headline is not really supported by the evidence provided.
I looked up the source for these numbers.
It's the Center for Immigration Studies, and they are notorious for being a right-wing think tank used to dress up up anti-immigration policy using misleading statistics.
How notorious are they? Well, they are listed as a hate group with the Southern Poverty Law Center[1].
The numbers you're citing aren't 'welfare,' the biggest thing is using the education system. The thing that, long term, makes they into productive taxpayers. CIS doesn't figure the long-term benefits into their numbers because that would destroy their thesis.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/center-i...
In any case, none of this amounts to immigrants using less welfare than native born residents, which is what I was asking sources for.
Looking at CBO numbers, CBO reports that recent immigration into United States is drain, in particular, at state and local level since that's generally budget that gets impacted the most by people. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61464
Depending on what gets counted, "public assistance" stats like this usually include medicare and social security. (Social security gets debated because of how it's paid-in, but I'm not here to argue that. The fact is, it gets included in these stats). Those two make up the dominant consumption of public assistance to the point that things we hear about in the media like food stamps are kind of a rounding error.
Medicare and social security are collected primarily by older people. Foreign born populations have much lower numbers of people in that age bracket than the general popualtion.
Combine those two facts and it's not surprising that when you look at charts of foreign born vs native born, the foreign born population uses less public assistance.
It's a statistic that is more about age distribution than anything. Like when you one of those bad maps trying to prove a point but really just showing population density of big cities.