The cost to U.S. taxpayers of providing housing, education, health care, and other benefits to migrants who entered the country illegally over the past three years could exceed $451 billion per year.
That’s according to a new report released by the Republican-led majority of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
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“Every day, millions of American taxpayer dollars are spent on costs directly associated with illegal immigration and the unprecedented crisis at the Southwest border sparked by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ policies,” the interim staff report reads.
Only a “small fraction” of those costs, the report states, are ever recouped from the taxes paid by illegal aliens, with the rest “falling on the shoulders of American citizens and lawful residents.”
The 50-page report, compiled from expert testimony, federal and state records, media reports, and other publicly available information, details the costs of health care, law enforcement, education, housing, and other benefits for migrants.
The annual cost just to care for and house the migrants who entered into the country illegally and were released under Secretary Mayorkas — including the 1.7 million known “gotaways” since January 2021, could be as high as $451 billion, according to an estimate by the Center for Immigration Studies cited by the House GOP report.
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Another study cited in the report, published by the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), found that illegal immigration’s annual net burden on the U.S. economy as of 2022 totaled more than $150 billion.
The FAIR report found that the tax burden from illegal immigration on the federal, state, and local levels totals approximately $182 billion, while illegal aliens pay an estimated $31 billion in total tax contributions.
“It is unconscionable for Secretary Mayorkas and President Biden to force the American people to pick up the tab for the crisis their border policies created,” House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., said Monday.
“Communities across this country, from the smallest border town to our largest city, are dealing with depleted emergency resources, public housing crises, overwhelmed public-school systems, damaged or destroyed property, and overwhelming law enforcement costs—burdens these hardworking taxpayers were never prepared for, and should not be forced to pay,” Rep. Green said.
The House report, citing a 2019 estimate from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) which reported approximately 53 percent of the illegal alien population in the U.S. is uninsured, estimated a total of nearly nine million uninsured illegal aliens in the country.
The total Medicaid costs for “emergency services for undocumented aliens” in Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 exceeded $7 billion, and $5.4 billion in FY 2022, the report claimed, based on figures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
According to CMS, improper Medicaid payments totaled over $80.57 billion in 2022, around $8 billion of which the House Committee estimates went to illegal aliens.
In early October, NBC News reported that in the past year alone medical centers across New York City — which has taken in over 130,000 migrants since the spring of 2022 — have received nearly 30,000 visits from illegal aliens.
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Based on data from the National Institute of Corrections and Bureau of Justice Statistics, the report estimates that police expenditures associated with illegal aliens cost states approximately $8.95 billion in 2022, split between $3.72 billion in judicial costs and about $6.2 billion in prison costs.
Citing a Department of Justice report, the House GOP Committee found that 24,954 criminal aliens were in federal incarceration.
Calculating from the average annual cost per individual incarcerated in federal prison in FY 2020 being $39,158, the report estimates a total cost of nearly $1 billion to incarcerate criminal illegal aliens in federal prisons.
In the 2021-2022 school year, approximately 5.1 million public school students nationwide, around 6.5 percent of the total school age population, were the children of illegal aliens or illegal aliens themselves, according to FAIR.
FAIR estimates that at least 3.8 million illegal aliens qualify as Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students, costing taxpayers nearly $59 billion.
Several school districts across Maine have allocated tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to assist English Language Learner (ELL) students.
In the FY 2024-2025 supplemental budget sign into law by Gov. Janet Mills in July, a total of $3.5 million in state funds will be directed to ELL programs across the state’s school districts.
The Portland School District alone was allocated $784,174.25 from the “ELL Hardship Fund” for FY 2024-2025.
The City of Auburn released a report in October which found that the city received a total of 426 applications for General Assistance welfare benefits from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023, including 112 “asylum-related cases” — 509 percent more than the previous year.
Additionally, during the same timeframe Auburn’s General Assistance Budget directed $233,375 in leveraged funds to federal housing programs, a 237 percent increase over the previous year.
The full House Committee on Homeland Security interim staff report can be read here, and a fact sheet on the report here.
2 Comments
Blame businesses and the Chamber of Commerce who all want cheap labor…..and they donate heavily to pols on both sides of the political aisle.
The Leftists running the scam have always told us that the contributions as a whole made by illegal aliens far outweigh the costs. They have also pushed the “cultural enrichment” narrative. Could they have been fibbing all along? No, that can’t possibly be!