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Cost analysis tallies annual burden taxpayers will bear for illegal immigrants since Biden took office

September 13, 2022 | | Print Article

With Congress routinely passing omnibus bills in recent years with trillion-dollar price tags, it’s reasonable to believe that many Americans have become desensitized to the exorbitant waste from the federal government, especially as corporate media downplays their actions in the names of crises.

Similarly, the inaction of President Joe Biden’s administration on the U.S.-Mexico border has treated illegal immigration as a matter of little concern and so, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has released a new analysis to break through that notion, looking at the billions in extra burden the unchecked border crisis has added to the nation’s citizens.

Fox News reported on the data provided by FAIR that found since Biden took office there have been an estimated 1.3 million illegal immigrants released into the U.S. following encounters with immigration officials and roughly an additional one million “gotaways” who otherwise avoided Border Patrol to the tune of an added $20.4 billion per year.

FAIR President Dan Stein stated, “Even in an age in which trillion dollar spending packages…are considered modest, the additional $20.4 billion the Biden Border Crisis has heaped onto the backs of American taxpayers is still staggering. $20.4 billion could address some very important needs of the American public, instead of covering the costs of the surge of illegal migration triggered by this administration’s policies.”

The analysis broke down those costs into some readily understandable numbers such as each illegal immigrant costs $9,232 per year to support and found alternative uses for that $20.4 billion would include the ability to provide an annual salary of $50K for an entire decade for every homeless veteran residing in the United States.

Alternatively, with reports of a teacher shortage of approximately 300,000 to begin the new school year, the money used to cover the added burden of new illegal immigrants could be used to hire 330,000 teachers while also expanding the National School Lunch Program and ensuring that 7 million more families receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Another option would be to give every family earning less than $50K per year a $410 grocery voucher.

Those dollars would also more than cover the cost to build the wall that Congress has refused to fund, and that doesn’t account for the annual $140 billion already being spent to cover illegal immigrants who were in the country prior to Jan. 2021.

Despite that reality, Biden’s border czar Vice President Kamala Harris said in her recent interview with Chuck Todd for NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “the border is secure.”

“I think that there is no question that we have to do what the president and I asked Congress to do, the first request we made: pass a bill to create a pathway to citizenship,” she responded to Todd when asked plainly “Would you call the border secure?”

“The border is secure,” Harris went on, “but we also have a broken immigration system, in particular, over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed.”

Repeatedly blaming former President Donald Trump for the crisis that she has yet to address, let alone travel to observe in person, she doubled down on her claim with her typical brand of inane prose, “We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation, including our and our administration.”

Kevin Haggerty
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