Here’s What Biden’s Border Crisis Is Going To Cost Us

The Democrats’ Disastrous Open Border Policies: How Biden’s Immigration Agenda Could Cost Taxpayers Billions

The Biden Administration has taken a lax approach to immigration enforcement, creating a situation where anyone who manages to get across the border is allowed to stay. Unfortunately for taxpayers, this could end up costing us billions of dollars.

An internal City Hall memo says that if Biden’s open border policies remain unchecked, New York City taxpayers could be on the hook for an estimated $4.2 billion through the middle of next year – double what Mayor Adams previously estimated. It’s a cost that will only keep growing, as millions of illegal immigrants are already here.

One of the reasons the number is so high is New York’s “right to shelter” law, which requires the city to house all comers. But even without that provision, and even after the border-jumpers start working and paying taxes, the cost to taxpayers will still be huge.

The Center for Immigration Studies used data from the National Academies of Sciences to estimate the lifetime net fiscal impact (taxes paid minus services used) for each illegal immigrant, not counting their US-born children. Adjusted for inflation, the lifetime cost to taxpayers of each illegal immigrant is over $80,000.

With the 2 million illegal border-crossers who have been released into the US under Biden’s orders, that’s a whopping $150 billion. Add in another 1 million got-aways – border infiltrators who were detected but not apprehended – and the lifetime cost for taxpayers soars to more than $200 billion.

That’s a huge number, and it’s equal to the entire gross domestic product of New Zealand, Greece, or Peru. It’s enough to buy every NFL team and still have $60 billion left over. To put it in perspective, it’s also the entire budget of New York, a city of 8.5 million, for two whole years, or five years of funding for NYC’s schools.

It’s true that some of these immigrants are asylum-seekers awaiting their hearings, but the huge costs to taxpayers are not generally the result of moral shortcomings on the part of the illegal immigrants.

Studies show that illegal immigrants tend to be significantly less educated than legal ones or the native-born, and less-educated people, whether they’re immigrants or native born, on average make less money and thus pay little in taxes, while making greater use of taxpayer-funded government services.

It’s clear that the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies have put taxpayers in a tough spot. The costs of their agenda are already staggering, and they could keep increasing. We need to demand that our leaders take responsibility for their actions and put an end to these disastrous open border policies – before it’s too late.