Sunny Hostin set off a fresh round of cable-news outrage this week after telling viewers of The View that undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than almost anyone else and are far less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. Conservative outlets pounced, accusing her of inflating the figures. But the underlying research she gestured toward is stronger than many of her critics are willing to acknowledge.
What Hostin Actually Said
During the segment, Hostin argued that undocumented immigrants contribute heavily to the economy through taxes while being statistically less likely to break the law than native-born Americans. Her framing leaned on sweeping absolutes — that they pay “more than anyone else” and are “five times less likely” to commit crimes. Those exact multipliers are where her argument gets shaky. No single peer-reviewed study pins down a clean “five times” figure, and “more than anyone else” is a rhetorical flourish rather than a documented statistic.
Strip away the on-air phrasing, though, and the direction of the data lines up with her broader point. The question isn’t whether undocumented immigrants contribute and offend at notable rates — the research is fairly settled on that. The question is how precisely you can state it.
The Tax Numbers Are Real
On taxes, the figures are striking. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants paid roughly $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. That includes income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes paid directly or through rent, and payroll deductions withheld from paychecks.
Here’s the part that often gets lost in the shouting: a large share of those workers pay into Social Security and Medicare through payroll taxes but are barred from collecting most of the benefits those programs provide. In effect, they are subsidizing safety-net programs they cannot use — propping up funds that millions of native-born retirees draw from.
The Crime Data Points the Same Direction
On crime, multiple independent studies reach a consistent conclusion. Research from the National Institute of Justice, along with a widely cited analysis of Texas arrest records published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at lower rates than native-born Americans.
The Texas study, which matched arrest records against immigration status, found U.S.-born citizens were roughly twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes and about four times as likely to be arrested for property crimes compared with undocumented immigrants. That’s not Hostin’s “five times” line — but it lands clearly on the same side of the ledger. The pattern shows up across different datasets and methodologies, which is why researchers treat the lower-offending finding as robust rather than a fluke.
The Reaction
Critics seized on the absolutes, framing Hostin’s comments as propaganda. Supporters argued she was simply citing well-established research that rarely gets airtime. Both responses, in a sense, are about the same gap: the difference between the precise statistics and the bigger directional truth. Hostin overstated the specifics. Her detractors, in dismissing her entirely, often overstate in the other direction — implying the underlying claims have no basis at all.
What This Means for Americans
For ordinary readers, the takeaway is less about one talk-show host and more about how immigration debates are conducted. Tens of billions in tax revenue and consistent crime-rate findings are facts worth weighing honestly. When the conversation collapses into a fight over whether a number was “five times” or “four times,” the larger, verifiable picture gets buried. The data deserves to be cited accurately — by everyone in the argument.
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