Elon Musk knows “why the Democratic propaganda machine is so fired up to destroy me,” he said in an interview earlier this year with Joe Rogan that was pinned to the top of his X feed for several weeks.

“The main reason is that entitlements fraud — that includes, like, Social Security, disability, Medicaid — entitlements fraud for illegal aliens is what is serving as a gigantic magnetic force to pull people in from all around the world and keep them here.”

The endgame, he claimed at a political rally late last month in Wisconsin, is “to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people, and make it a permanent deeply one-party state from which there would be no escape.”

Most of this explanation is just dumb. Democrats have much better reasons to dislike Musk, nobody’s ever turned up credible evidence of voting by significant numbers of illegal immigrants, immigrants who do become U.S. citizens don’t reliably vote for Democrats, and one of the simplest ways to solidify support for a pro-welfare-state political party (which in the U.S. is usually the Democrats) is to reduce immigration.

Musk’s concern that Medicaid and other entitlements are drawing immigrants to the U.S. is less obviously silly and certainly has a better pedigree. “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” economist Milton Friedman famously said (on multiple occasions, with different wordings).

His words are frequently repeated by those who think U.S. immigration policy is too lax, but that wasn’t really Friedman’s view — he was fine with illegal immigration. “As long as it’s illegal, the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for Social Security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket,” he said. “So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs.”

Has something changed about illegal immigration to the U.S. that might render Friedman’s defense less valid? Well, yes. One is that some Democratic-run states have opted to extend health care and food aid to unauthorized immigrants. Another is that there are now several million recently arrived immigrants in the U.S. who didn’t come through traditional visa channels but aren’t exactly “illegal aliens.” The less-loaded term “undocumented immigrants” is if anything even less accurate, given how many of these people have Social Security cards.

This is a chart that investor Antonio Gracias, currently working with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency at the Social Security Administration, shared on X after showing a truncated version at that Wisconsin rally with Musk. The 2019 number matches a tally released earlier by the Social Security Administration, and I’m willing to trust Gracias that the rest are accurate. I find his interpretation of the numbers less credible, which I’ll get to in a minute.

The Social Security Administration created the Enumeration Beyond Entry program during the first Trump administration, in October 2017, for noncitizens already in the U.S. who receive work permits from the Department of Homeland Security. The idea was that because Homeland Security had already vetted these people, they could skip a trip to their local Social Security office and save the agency time and money. Those outside the U.S. whom the State Department grants visas that allow them to work here can get Social Security numbers through a similar program called Enumeration at Entry, which issued 224,000 Social Security numbers in the 2021 calendar year compared with 364,000 for the Enumeration Beyond Entry program.

Who gets work permits when already in the U.S.? Those who apply for asylum, including people who crossed the border illegally or overstayed short-term visas, can receive work permits 180 days later — and the number of U.S. asylum applications skyrocketed in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years.

Also eligible for work are about 1 million people from 16 countries designated as having Temporary Protected Status in the U.S., as well as 532,000 from four countries who were temporarily “paroled” into the U.S. by the Biden administration — programs that the Trump administration is rolling back. It is also reportedly contemplating effectively revoking many of the recently issued Social Security numbers.

The Social Security Administration expanded eligibility for the Enumeration Beyond Entry program in August 2021 to those applying for permanent residency and in April 2024 to those applying for citizenship. In 2021, a Social Security official told Congress these two changes “would automate the processing of an estimated 1.3 million SSN requests a year.” Some of those would be requests to replace previously issued cards that presumably don’t show up in Gracias’ count of new Social Security numbers issued, but this is clearly another factor behind the rise in Enumerated Beyond Entry numbers since the 2021 fiscal year.

Gracias said 1.3 million of the more than 5 million new Social Security numbers issued through Enumeration Beyond Entry are also linked to Medicaid accounts, which is unsurprising given that many states allow those applying for asylum or in the Temporary Protected Status or parole programs to get at least some state-funded Medicaid benefits.

He also said DOGE had identified “thousands” of Enumeration Beyond Entry Social Security number recipients who had registered to vote, and some who actually voted in the 2024 election. Gracias intimated that this was a clear sign of voter fraud, but remember, some — perhaps many thousands — of the Social Security numbers issued through the Enumeration Beyond Entry program since April 2024 went to people being naturalized as U.S. citizens, of whom there were 818,500 in the 2024 fiscal year. They should vote.

The nefarious-plot angle thus remains unconvincing. DOGE has also yet to offer any evidence that immigrants are responsible for significant entitlement fraud. That said, there are lots of non-conspiratorial reasons to criticize the Biden administration for allowing so many people to enter the U.S. without prior authorization — which it finally stopped doing around the middle of last year.

Is their consumption of government benefits one of them? Old-school illegal immigrants who don’t apply for work permits and use fake or stolen Social Security numbers to get work have actually been a cash cow for Social Security and Medicare because most never receive any benefits. Social Security’s chief actuary estimated in 2013 that unauthorized immigrants (and their employers) contributed about $13 billion a year in payroll taxes in 2010 and received about $1 billion a year in benefits, and a 2015 study by a group of public health scholars found a similar pattern with Medicare.

The Yale Budget Lab estimated that unauthorized immigrants paid $22 billion in federal income taxes in 2023, and they and their employers paid $44 billion in Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, although it didn’t try to estimate what they got back in benefits.

Even those with temporary work authorization won’t necessarily get back any of the money they put into Social Security and Medicare because you generally have to work here legally for at least 10 years to qualify. They are, as noted, eligible for some other, mainly state-funded benefits, as are illegal immigrants in a few states, and can use government services such as schools and transit that are open to all.

Apart from Social Security and Medicare, U.S. government benefits and services aren’t really international standouts, and I doubt they’re the main magnets for immigrants from troubled countries — most are migrating to jobs, as Friedman put it, as well as to safety and freedom and better opportunities for their children.

That leaves the question on whether they represent a drain on federal, state and local government resources, for which the best answer seems to be probably not, although it’s a little hard to say given how the array of benefits offered has changed over the years. In 2007, the Congressional Budget Office summarized that “most efforts to estimate the fiscal impact of immigration in the United States have concluded that, in aggregate and over the long term, tax revenues of all types generated by immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — exceed the cost of the services they use.”

A 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that assessed immigrants for their share of all government spending, and did so using a variety of different methods over different time frames, mostly concluded that first-generation immigrants were more of a fiscal drain than native-born Americans because their wages were lower. Their children, however, were for the most part a relative fiscal boon.

More recently, Alex Nowrasteh and Jerome Famularo of the libertarian and pro-immigration Cato Institute concluded after analyzing 2022 Census Bureau data that noncitizen immigrants consumed 54% less per capita in welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans, but that naturalized citizens consumed 17% more because they tend to be older and qualify for Social Security and Medicare.

That worked out to 21% less for immigrants overall. Interestingly, Nowrasteh and Famularo’s takeaway from this was that Congress should cut off noncitizens from all welfare and entitlements, which they estimated would save the federal government more than $109 billion a year. “Rather than reaching toward expensive mass deportations as a solution to fiscal issues,” they wrote, “the more free-market, libertarian, and fiscally responsible solution is to build a higher wall around the welfare state.”

Milton Friedman would certainly approve. I’ll admit that I find it overly harsh, but on the plus side it would at least force Elon Musk to find something else to feel victimized over.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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