Who actually pays?

Fourteen documents, one Supreme Court case, and a live policy fight that mostly does not argue with itself by name. FAIR, CIS, the American Immigration Council, Penn Wharton, CBO, and a Supreme Court majority and dissent argue across six contested questions about the cost, feasibility, and legal status of unauthorized immigration and mass deportation. Some lanes are genuine volleys. Others are honest parallel claims about different populations, time horizons, and levels of government, and this map says so plainly rather than force a false symmetry.

Question

Enforcement/restriction side Pro-immigration/anti-mass-deportation side Nonpartisan estimates both sides invoke

Color marks the side of the volley, not who is right. K marks a source that is neutral either because it is a government or budget-scoring body both sides cite (CBO, Penn Wharton, DHS, CBP), or because no competing estimate of the same measurement exists in this source set (Warren-Kerwin), not because the finding itself favors neither side's policy goal.

A caution before you count silences. Whether a side holds the last recorded word in a lane usually reflects which document happened to be published last, not which argument was stronger. Several threads in this dataset are honestly labeled parallel claims rather than rebuttals, since the sources involved were never actually arguing with each other, only describing different populations, time horizons, or levels of government. Lane F is entirely parallel claims. Lane D, the one Supreme Court case in this set (Plyler v. Doe, decided 5-4), is the dataset's one true two-sided rebuttal chain, and even there Burger's dissent supplies more of the lane's cards than Brennan's controlling majority, a function of how much a dissent must rebut point by point, not evidence of a stronger case.