Estimates vary widely on how much the Biden administration’s border crisis is costing the country every year - but none of them are cheap.
In fact, the lowest cost estimate is similar to the amount of aid Congress has approved to Ukraine ($175 billion).
According to the New York Post:
In 2023, U.S. taxpayers shelled out some $150 billion in government services and support to help the 20 million illegal migrants in the country, according to a study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
They estimated the gross cost of illegal immigration at $182 billion a year, but netted out $32 billion in taxes paid by illegals (which is miniscule relative to their share of the population).
While most states’ accounts of migrant expenses focus on emergency housing and aid, FAIR’s assessment factored in the full breadth of state services they draw on while in the US. Services like education, medical expenses, law enforcement, legal costs and welfare were prominent factors FAIR looked at in its study. Those, coupled with the differences in tax revenue compared to expenses, helped contribute to the discrepancies between state reporting and the estimated true cost of hosting migrants.
Considering that the illegal alien population has only increased further this year, the 2024 cost estimates will surely come in higher.
And there’s some reason to believe that even the 2023 figures are conservatively estimated:
- For nearly two decades before Joe Biden took office, the federal government estimated the illegal alien population at exactly 11 million. Roughly 9 million have entered the country since he took office, hence the 20 million estimate FAIR is using. But the 11 million estimate was almost undoubtedly low to begin with.
- For example, a Yale study in 2018 found that there really were 22 million illegals in the country that year - meaning that there would have to be at least 31 million illegals in the country as of 2023.
An alternative estimate from the House Committee on Homeland Security in November 2023 was that; “$451 billion is being lost in the healthcare, law enforcement, education, housing, and other sectors due to an influx of illegal immigration in the past two years.” That figure takes into account illegals released into the interior by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and the roughly 2 million “gotaways.”
So out of control is America’s borders that even states that are barely impacted by illegal aliens on a relative basis to the rest of the country see record levels of illegal immigration relative to the developed world. For instance, the Migration Policy Institute estimates the illegal alien population of Virginia, hardly a border state, at just above 250,000, or nearly 1 in every 34 of the state’s residents. For contrast, according to Pew Research Center data from 2019, nearly every single country in Europe has an illegal alien population lower than 1% of their overall population. The countries with the largest shares of illegal immigrants, which are Austria, Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom, all have illegal alien populations equalling roughly 2% of their population (1 in 50).
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