Twenty-four states have created government offices dedicated to funneling tax dollars and services to migrants, including people who entered or remained in the country illegally. The offices are called “Offices of New Americans,” and they now operate in New York, Illinois, Colorado, Maine, New Mexico, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, Iowa, Washington, Vermont, Alaska, and Utah, among others.
These are mostly Democrat-run states, though a handful of nominally red states have adopted the model too. The offices coordinate across state agencies to direct healthcare, free legal representation, food assistance, education programs, and job placement services toward migrants.
A nonprofit called World Education Services has built an instruction packet to walk state lawmakers through setting one up. In its own words, the group describes these offices as state-level departments that “focus on policies, programs, and services supporting immigrant and refugee integration,” working “across agencies and sectors to advance inclusion, workforce participation, and community engagement.”
Many Democrat-controlled cities layer their own versions of these offices on top of the state programs, adding another stream of taxpayer money aimed at migrant services.
Free Lawyers to Fight Deportation
One of the central functions of these offices is providing free legal counsel to migrants contesting deportation. That means taxpayers are directly bankrolling legal efforts to keep people in the country after the federal immigration system has moved to remove them.
More Migrants, More Money
The offices don’t exist in isolation. They work alongside a broader financial incentive structure: the more migrants a state or city takes in, the more tax revenue flows its way, particularly through school funding formulas tied to enrollment numbers. Districts that enroll more migrant children receive larger budgets as a result.
That dynamic creates a built-in motive for officials in these states to keep migrant numbers climbing, since population growth translates directly into larger public budgets to administer. Critics see it as a system where increasing the number of new arrivals, legal or illegal, pays off politically and financially for the governments running it, often at the expense of taxpayers who had no say in the policy.
