Vicky Arias, FISM News
A report published Wednesday by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found that illegal immigration is costing taxpayers roughly $150.6 billion per year.
FAIR reached that number by totaling combined government expenditures on illegal immigrants at the federal, state, and local levels, which was just over $182 billion, and subtracting the tax revenues the government receives from illegal immigrants, roughly $31.4 billion.
A breakdown of costs paid out by the government put the cost of “uncompensated hospital expenditures” at just over $8.1 billion, Medicaid births at nearly $1.6 billion, and expenditures for federal incarceration pertaining to the country’s “illegal alien population” at approximately $1.6 billion.
According to the Daily Wire, “the report noted that illegal immigrants typically fall into the lowest tax brackets and therefore receive a considerably higher payout from federal and state programs than tax expenses incurred. Many also ‘work in the underground economy’ and ‘avoid paying any income tax.’”
In October 2022, the president of FAIR, Dan Stein, stated that “some 2.7 million migrants, those who illegally entered or were otherwise inadmissible at a port of entry, were encountered at our borders in [fiscal year] 2022, bringing the total [number] under President Biden to a whopping 5.5 million [encounters].”
The nation’s southern border is currently in peril as migrant surges continue, with many conservatives blaming President Biden’s ‘open border policies’ for the ensuing crisis.
During a recent House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Representative Byron Donalds, R-Fla., called out several Biden administration immigration policies that he believes have run as counterproductive to effective border enforcement.
“There was somebody that became President of the United States in January of ‘21,” Donalds said. “In January 2021 this gentleman got rid of the migrant protection protocols, the MPP program, he stopped border wall funding, he actually gutted the interior enforcement against illegal aliens, [and] he put a 100-day moratorium [on deportations] to study border security protocols.”
According to Vox, the Department of Homeland Security announced in January 2021, “that the moratorium will allow it to ‘review and reset enforcement priorities’ after the Trump administration sought to ensure that no undocumented immigrants, including families and longtime US residents, were safe from deportation.”
Donalds proceeded to ask the Chief Patrol Agent for the Tucson Sector, John Modlin, whether or not these changed policies contributed to the current migrant crisis.
Modlin responded by saying that upon interrogating individuals in the Tucson sector “post-arrest, what became the most common response was that they believed when the administration changed, that the law changed and policy changed and that there was an open border.”