The migrant crisis currently plaguing the border and America’s major cities could end up costing taxpayers up to $451 billion, according to a new report from House Republicans.
In a Monday report, the House Homeland Security Committee tallied up the costs to taxpayers of illegal migrants who were released into the country or escaped from custody.
“Every day, millions of American taxpayer dollars are spent on costs directly associated with illegal immigration and the unprecedented crisis at the Southwest border sparked by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ policies,” reads the report.
“Only a small fraction is ever recouped from the taxes paid by illegal aliens, with the rest falling on the shoulders of American citizens and lawful residents,” the report states.
Each taxpayer is on the hook for an average of $956 due to illegal immigration, the report said.
The 50-page report looked at federal and state records, media reports, nonprofit reports, and other public information.
For all migrants who have entered the U.S. since 2021, the cost of government housing and care could end up being as high as $451 billion a year, the report notes, citing numbers from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a think tank that describes its vision as “pro-immigrant, low-immigration.”
The report noted that federal, state, and local costs of illegal immigration total about $182 billion a year, according to a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a nonprofit that seeks to reduce illegal immigration. Back in 2017, the cost was $135 billion, FAIR found.
Illegal immigrants make only a $31 billion dent in that cost with their tax revenue, the group said.
Education costs amount to $59 billion for at least 3.8 million illegal migrants who have limited English proficiency, according to numbers from FAIR that the report cited.
State police costs on illegal immigration have risen to $19 billion, up from $10.5 billion in 2017, according to data from the National Institute of Corrections and the Justice Department, the report notes.
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The report also pointed out that the opioid crisis cost $1.5 trillion in 2020 alone and was largely driven by the fentanyl flooding over the border through drug cartels.
There are currently between 16.8 million and 29 million illegal migrants living in the country, the report says, citing numbers from FAIR and Yale University.
About 3.8 million of those migrants have entered the country under the Biden administration, the data indicates.
Some of those migrants are the 900,000 people who entered the country legally and applied for asylum before they were released, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data shows.
Also, more than 600,000 migrants have entered the country since October last year without being apprehended by border agents, Mayorkas said during a congressional hearing last month.