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.
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