The High Price Paid By Taxpayers To Support Illegal Immigrants; The Economist Admits Mass Migration is Costly and Increases Inflation

WATCH: The high price paid by taxpayers to support illegal immigrants:

Each illegal immigrant costs the U.S. more per year than it spends on the average food stamp recipient or Medicaid beneficiary, according to an analysis by the House Budget Committee that was shared first with The Washington Times.

The total net cost to the U.S. is more than $150 billion a year, with the lion’s share of that going to educate children who are here illegally themselves or whose parents are here without authorization, the Budget Committee says, citing data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Chairman Jodey Arrington, Texas Republican, told The Times the $150 billion figure is a “conservative estimate.” He said the burden falls heavily on states and local governments, who according to the data spend more than $73 billion a year on education, nearly $22 billion on law enforcement and almost $19 billion on medical care.

“And state and local governments don’t borrow from China, like the federal government, and they can’t print money, so the disproportionate burden here is on state and local governments,” he said. “They either have to cut services to their citizens, or they have to raise taxes.”

At a hearing Wednesday, Mr. Arrington will hear from Brent Smith, the county attorney in Kinney County, Texas, which has stood in the path of the migrant surge over the last few years.

The county of 3,200 residents recorded 134 criminal charges in 2020. But over the last three years it has averaged more than 5,000 charges a year, many of those trespassing charges the county brought as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, an attempt to plug border security gaps left by President Biden’s more relaxed approach.

Mr. Arrington called the cost “extraordinary” and “unsustainable” for counties like Kinney across the country by placing a “cumulative cost and the strain it’s putting on services to our fellow Americans.” --->READ MORE HERE

The Economist Admits Mass Migration is Costly and Increases Inflation:

Ever since it became painfully clear that post-Covid inflation was not “transitory,” the open-borders lobby claimed that high levels of immigration would help reduce inflation. However, a recent article in the otherwise socially liberal, pro-immigration, pro-globalization U.K.-based weekly, The Economist, argues that high levels of mass migration may actually exacerbate inflation.

Entitled “Immigration is surging, with big economic consequences,” the April 30 article makes many common-sense points that FAIR and others have long made about open-borders. In looking at several developed countries, the author points out that “immigration’s impact goes well beyond an arithmetical effect on GDP—it extends to inflation, living standards and government budgets. And recent arrivals differ from previous ones in an important way: more are low-skilled.” This is an important recognition that mass migration has many impacts, not just an addition of cheap foreign labor to the economy.

Regarding inflation, the article challenges the arguments of global policymakers. “Many policymakers,” the article writes, “have recently argued that migration is helping contain price rises by relieving labour shortages.” These policymakers include Gita Gopinath of the International Monetary Fund, Jerome Powell of the Federal Reserve, and Michele Bullock of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Nevertheless, “the evidence is weak and may, in fact, point in the opposite direction,” particularly since “there is no doubt that immigrants need things as soon as they arrive, boosting demand.”

The Economist article in particular notes the impact immigration has on rental housing, a serious concern for many Americans. Research recently published by Goldman Sachs suggests that in Australia, each 100,000 increase in annual net migration increases rents by about 1%. A paper by the Bank of Canada in December noted that: ‘The initial rise in immigration that Canada has experienced is more likely inflationary in the near term.’” This is backed up by evidence from other sources, including Mexico’s southern border where migrants from other parts of Latin America drove up prices for local residents.

The article also shows that although mass immigration may well increase the overall size of the GDP “pie” in absolute terms – by adding in workers and consumers – the more important metric is GDP per capita, i.e. how much of that economic “pie” everyone gets. Mass migration may cause the per capita GDP to decrease or stagnate, the author argues, due to the lower-skilled composition of the current immigration wave, especially the record numbers of illegal aliens. This is also true of new arrivals in the UK, Canada, and Australia. As FAIR has argued, the economic contributions of this demographic, being both low-skilled and low-wage, are unlikely to make an outsized addition to our GDP or to lower inflation. --->READ MORE HERE

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