Q&A of the day – The 5-year cost of illegal immigration
It’s the Q&A of the day. Each day I’ll feature a listener question that’s been submitted by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
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Today’s note comes from Guillermo:
Brian, can you do a study on how many ILLEGALS have arrived each year for the past 5 years and how much more it is costing us now and how much will it cost in 5 years. How much more our pockets are going to be hurting. I am sure DEMOCRATS wouldn't like.
Bottom Line: I do happen to have that research handy. It’s a topic I’ve covered regularly over time having provided the most recent update in December based on the latest government data provided by the Center for Immigration Studies. The quick answer to your question is that the 5-year cost of illegal immigration has been approximately $134 billion. That’s not a typo. The average annual cost is running at $26.8 billion annually or in other words, the cost of the border wall addition requested by President Trump on behalf of the Border Patrol, every 2.5 months. But that’s just the net cost of illegal immigration to taxpayers once they’re inside the country.
Part of the farce of the “technology over a physical wall” argument for much of the southern border is the hard cost associated with processing illegal immigrants once they step foot on American soil.Once illegal immigrants cross our border and are detained by the Border Patrol,they still have to go through our legal process. According to ICE the cost is $134 per person, per day. We average around 31,000 detained undocumented immigrants daily. That’s a per day cost of $4,154,000 to simply service illegal activity detained at our southern border.
In terms of the anticipated five-year cost, it’s hard to know based on what future policy would look like,but without fixing anything...similar abuse of our system by illegal immigrants would equal $156 billion accounting for average inflation.