Each illegal immigrant costs the U.S. more per year than it spends on the average food stamp recipient or Medicaid beneficiary, according to an analysis by the House Budget Committee that was shared first with The Washington Times.
The total net cost to the U.S. is more than $150 billion a year, with the lion’s share of that going to educate children who are here illegally themselves or whose parents are here without authorization, the Budget Committee says, citing data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Chairman Jodey Arrington, Texas Republican, told The Times the $150 billion figure is a “conservative estimate.” He said the burden falls heavily on states and local governments, who according to the data spend more than $73 billion a year on education, nearly $22 billion on law enforcement and almost $19 billion on medical care.
“And state and local governments don’t borrow from China, like the federal government, and they can’t print money, so the disproportionate burden here is on state and local governments,” he said. “They either have to cut services to their citizens, or they have to raise taxes.”
At a hearing Wednesday, Mr. Arrington will hear from Brent Smith, the county attorney in Kinney County, Texas, which has stood in the path of the migrant surge over the last few years.
The county of 3,200 residents recorded 134 criminal charges in 2020. But over the last three years it has averaged more than 5,000 charges a year, many of those trespassing charges the county brought as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, an attempt to plug border security gaps left by President Biden’s more relaxed approach.
Mr. Arrington called the cost “extraordinary” and “unsustainable” for counties like Kinney across the country by placing a “cumulative cost and the strain it’s putting on services to our fellow Americans.”
FAIR calculates that illegal immigrants bring in $32 billion in tax revenue to governments. But the gross cost of illegal immigration is $182 billion, covering spending on law enforcement, education, medical care and welfare programs at all levels.
That nets $150 billion, which is up nearly $35 billion compared to FAIR’s estimate from 2017.
“We would have well enough resources if we weren’t spending $150 billion a year to provide the necessary immigration enforcement and border security,” Mr. Arrington said. “In fact, $150 billion is almost twice as much as we spend on the Department of Homeland Security.”
FAIR figured there were more than 15 million illegal immigrants at the time of its estimate in 2023, so the per capita spending worked out to $8,776 annually.
Mr. Biden last week added another layer of benefits to some illegal immigrants when he granted “Dreamers” here under the DACA program access to Obamacare and its tax subsidies.
The government expects about 100,000 DACA recipients to sign up, and figures it will cost about $300 million a year.
The monetary costs are one of several complaints conservatives have lodged over the unprecedented surge of illegal immigrants.
They also point to high-profile crimes committed by illegal immigrants and worry over national security concerns about who might lurk among the millions of new arrivals.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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