Hillary Clinton wants American taxpayers to pay for the healthcare of all illegal immigrants who get into the United States, Chelsea Clinton told a health-care salesman.
Clinton “thinks it’s so important to extend the Affordable Care Act to people who are living and working here, regardless of immigration status, regardless of citizenship status,” Chelsea told the advocate March 15, at an event in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Roughly 14 million illegal immigrants are living in the United States, alongside 310 million Americans, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
Donald Trump quickly denounced the move.
American taxpayers pay roughly $5,000 per year for each person enrolled in Obamacare. So the addition of only 10 million current illegals to Obamacare would cost taxpayers at least $50 billion per year, or $500 billion over 10 years, partly because many migrants lack workplace skills or even the ability to speak English.
But Clinton has also promised she will largely stop deportations of foreigners who sneak into the United States. “I would not deport children. I do not want to deport family members either,” she said at a March 9 Latino political rally hosted by Univision and the Washington Post.
If Clinton’s open-borders policy encourages more migrants to enter the United States, American taxpayers will have to divert funding from their relatives — retirees, children, unemployed and disabled — to pay for the healthcare of many more millions of foreign people who choose to break the nation’s popular immigration laws.
At least 150 million more foreigners would like to migrate to the United States, according a 2012 survey by Gallup. If one-seventh of the 150 million migrants arrive in the United States, the 10-year bill would rise to $1.5 trillion.
In 2012, the Heritage Foundation predicted an amnesty for 11 million illegals would cost Americans $6 trillion over 50 years, including the cost of healthcare.
In contrast to Clinton’s lax-enforcement promise, Trump is on track to win the GOP convention because of his promise to protect funding for retirees, to repatriate foreign migrants, and to reduce companies’ use of foreign workers in U.S.-based jobs.
In fact, he’s even called a one or two-year pause in legal immigration, which now annually adds one million immigrants — plus 700,000 foreign temporary guest-workers — to the workforce. That’s a huge annual influx, which reduces pay for the four million Americans who turn 18 each year and begin looking for work.
During the Democratic and GOP primaries, the candidates have been forced to shift policies to meet their voters’ demands.
That pressure pushed Clinton and Bernie Sanders to promise an end to immigration enforcement, and has pushed Trump to disavow policies that allow American companies to hire foreign workers or to import foreign taxpayer-supported foreign consumers.
Trump’s shift has prompted an enormous push-back by the GOP’s business interests, who will lose revenue and cheaper workers if his policies are adopted.
But there’s been little pushback among elite Democratic funders to Clinton’s new open-borders promises, which will provide companies with cheap workers and more welfare-supported consumers.
Many polls show that Americans strongly oppose greater immigration, and very strongly oppose the use of foreign workers in lieu of Americans.
Here’s a transcript of the exchange.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: “Is she planning on expanding Obamacare as people know it, ACA, to include people who are not fully documented? Because when you get ill, your illness will not ask you if you are a permanent resident or not.”
CLINTON: “It’s such an important question. Thank you for supporting my mom. My mom has very strong feelings that we must push as quickly as possible for comprehensive immigration reform, and this is a real difference between her’s and Senator Sanders’ record, she supported comprehensive immigration reform at every possible chance and she was one of the original supporters and sponsors of the DREAM Act. She does not believe that while we are working towards comprehensive immigration reform we should make people wait, like the families you are talking about. Which is why she thinks it’s so important to extend the Affordable Care Act to people who are living and working here, regardless of immigration status, regardless of citizenship status. While we’re pushing for comprehensive immigration reform and reminding Republicans who are currently running for president that a couple of years ago they actually supported comprehensive immigration reform – something they seem to have forgotten during this election cycle – that we do whatever we can to solve challenges in the education system and the health system and elsewhere.”