House GOP: Biden’s Migration Imposes Huge Costs on Ordinary Americans

The Democrats’ migration policy causes a vast diversion of taxpayers’ funds to business interests, liberal advocacy groups, and migrants, according to data provided in a report by the Republican side of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

“It is unconscionable for [border chief Alejandro] Mayorkas and President Biden to force the American people to pick up the tab for the crisis their border policies created,” committee chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) said, and continued: 

Communities across this country, from the smallest border town to our largest city, are dealing with depleted emergency resources, public housing crises, overwhelmed public-school systems, damaged or destroyed property, and overwhelming law enforcement costs—burdens these hardworking taxpayers were never prepared for, and should not be forced to pay.

The spending “could cost as much as an astounding $451 billion,” per year, the report stated, citing research from the Center for Immigration Studies in May 2023.

The population of the United States is roughly 330 million, plus perhaps 15 million illegal migrants. Even if the federal and state governments are spending only $160 billion per year, the spending would be the equivalent of $500 per American man, woman, child, and retiree.

If the $500 per American was not spent on migrants, it would otherwise go to Americans’ needs, via higher wages, lower taxes, and lower rents, reduced government deficits, or more investment in Americans’ schools, technology, and infrastructure.

Instead, the spending diversion to migrants is a colossal boondoggle for private interests. They include landlords, hotel operators, non-profit groups, busing companies, teachers’ unions, groceries, government employees, healthcare companies, and many other vendors in the nation’s consumer economy.

The huge cost of Biden’s migration is driven by the daily welfare cost of caring for poor migrants. Even when migrants get jobs, their wages are often too little to pay off their smuggling debts, their rental checks, and their basic needs.

Many of the migrants are mothers and children. They spike taxpayer spending on schools and childcare. Many migrants are also ill or pregnant, fueling more spending on hospitals and clinics.

Much of the spending is invisible to Americans. For example, a WGBH report on November 10 downplayed the cost of Massachusetts’ spending to welcome migrants into valuable jobs and homes that would otherwise go to Americans:

The state said it will be partnering with the federal agency to host work authorization clinics for migrants in shelters during the weeks of Nov. 13 and Nov. 27, to help process the applications as efficiently as possible.

Now, heads of several organizations working at the clinics tell GBH News that the goal is to get eligible migrants work authorization within two to three weeks after they attend the clinic.

One of the groups involved is the Massachusetts-based Immigrant Family Services Institute. The center is funded by government agencies and charitable groups, and provides education, lobbying services, legal advice, and access to Americans’ aid and charity programs. The group declares:

We guide recent arrivals through the challenges of settling and social integration. This often starts with legal aid to resolve immigration status and public assistance applications for health care, housing and accessing public schools. Once somewhat stable we help with job training, employment and increasing self-sufficiency.

In 2021, according to the website, the center’s paid staff — many of whom are also migrants — provided migrants with:

125 Housing Units Secured Providing Shelter for Over 300 Families/Over 1,000 Individuals

2,011 Families Received Refugee Cash Assistance

5,108 Families Applied for Department of Transitional Assistance

2,260 Families Applied for Mass Health

2x/Week Vaccination Clinics and 200 Families on Weekly Food Distribution During the Pandemic

Without migrants, those resources would have been provided to ordinary Americans via cheaper housing, higher wages, lower taxes, and better healthcare.

The report does not discuss the additional cost on Americans, which includes higher rents and housing prices, shrinking wages, as well as the rising interest rates that are imposed to offset inflation caused by migrants’ spending.

The House committee’s report is built on various estimates of the daily costs paid by taxpayers.

One “key comprehensive study is published by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The group’s 2023 report found that illegal immigration’s annual net burden on the U.S. economy as of 2022 totaled more than $150 billion,” the report said.

In April, Real Clear Investigations reported:

That data was used by Andrew Arthur, the author of the cited March 2023 CIS study:

If you consider that last figure — $393.70 [per migrant] per day — and multiply it by the 3,138,887 migrants released under Biden and got aways as of mid-March (in toto), the total costs are $1,235,779,811.90 per day, or $451,059,631,343.50 per annum [$451 billion].

Applying my 30 percent discount for migrants in lower-cost locales than NYC, that per annum figure drops to $315,741,741,940.45.

“Whether the total costs to cities and towns for caring for migrants is $451 billion or my most [cautious] conservative estimate of more than $34 billion, it’s a lot of money for municipalities that are already trying to figure out how to pay for ordinary, day-to-day services and infrastructure for the non-‘newly arrived,'” Arthur wrote.