by WorldTribune Staff, November 16, 2023
The annual cost to U.S. taxpayers to care for and house the millions of illegal aliens who have been released into the country on Joe Biden’s watch are approaching half a trillion dollars, according to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
The costs also include taxpayer funds that are supporting the 1.7 million known “gotaways” who eluded border authorities while crossing the border.
The cost to taxpayers could be as high as $451 billion per year, the CIS report said.
Meanwhile, the House Committee on Homeland Security released a report on Nov. 13 which detailed the “staggering” amount taxpayers shell out to fund illegal aliens’ healthcare, education, and housing. Additionally, with the influx of illegal alien encounters, taxpayers are left to bear the brunt of costly extra law enforcement.
“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 House report said.
The report comes after Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene proposed an impeachment resolution for Mayorkas. House Democrats, along with eight Republicans, voted down a motion to fast track the resolution, with Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck saying Mayorkas has not “committed an impeachable offense.”
The House report stated that “only a small fraction” of the taxpayer funds used to care for illegal aliens “is ever recouped” from the taxes they pay. The rest, the report said, falls “on the shoulders of American citizens and lawful residents.”
The report points out that several cities and states have passed their own legislation embracing “the concept of taxpayer-funded health care for illegal aliens.” Those jurisdictions in return “will often look to the federal government to reimburse them for the very programs those governments created in the first place, meaning the federal government is, ultimately, if indirectly, providing benefits to illegal aliens for which they are otherwise ineligible.”
Three examples provided in the report were out of New York City, Illinois, and California.
In New York, the mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs stated: “Every immigrant New Yorker has the right to get quality health care regardless of immigration status or ability to pay. Many city healthcare and social services are available to all New Yorkers, even if you are undocumented.”
Illinois instituted a program that offers health benefits to undocumented adults. State lawmakers originally estimated it to run from $2 million to $4 million per year. Now health officials say the state needs more than $1.1 billion to keep it running because the number of aliens using the service was far more than the state planned for.
California in May of last year expanded its Medi-Cal program to cover health care costs of more than 304,000 illegal aliens in the state, which costs more than $4.8 billion.
In a report for CIS, Andrew Arthur noted that “towns and cities fund all that through a variety of schemes, including sales tax surcharges, income tax surcharges (where they exist and are allowed), and, largely, property taxes. As municipal costs rise to pay for newcomers who can’t provide for themselves, those taxes rise proportionally.”
Arthur added: “All these tens of billions of dollars in municipal costs to house and care for newly arrived migrants are due to the president and his feckless border policies. Joe Biden could spare local taxpayers even more billions of dollars in additional expenditures tomorrow if he wanted to. He doesn’t.”
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