Q&A of the Day – The Cost of Illegal Immigrants to You
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
Social: @brianmuddradio
iHeartRadio: Use the Talkback feature – the microphone button on our station’s page in the iHeart app.
Today’s Entry: Submitted via Talkback asking about the long-term cost of illegal immigrants.
Bottom Line: Yesterday I brought you the news that Florida isn’t just number one for net migration by Americans but also for asylum seekers. Here’s a quick refresh. An updated look at Syracuse University’s Immigration tracker revealed that entering 2024 there were a total of 481,376 pending asylum cases in Florida’s pipeline. The next closest state was Texas with 458,000+ followed by California at 348,000+. A typical backlog of cases in Florida is under 20,000. In the midst of a record illegal immigration crisis nationally, we now have greater clarity on what it specifically means to Floridians. Asylum seekers are being brought into Florida by the Biden administration at a rate that is 220% higher than the national average. And the total influx and legal backlog of asylum seekers in Florida is now over 24 times higher than usual. What’s more is that most asylum seekers are illegitimate. Over the past decade asylum has only been granted in 13% of the cases that have been heard – with many migrants never reporting for court dates. The net result is that well over 90% of asylum seekers aren’t legitimate and are determined to be illegal immigrants. At a minimum that means that under the first three years of the Biden Administration, at the Administration's direction, at least 418,000 new illegal immigrants have been brought into our state at our expense. First, there’s the taxpayer expense of processing and relocating these illegal immigrants in our state. Then there’s what happens once they establish themselves in our communities, which takes us to today’s question.
Having extensively covered the border crisis for two decades, including having previously worked in exposing and stopping the covert dumping of illegal immigrants in Broward and Palm Beach County, prior to the Biden Administration, there’s a lot that isn’t known or reported that should be. There are three basic ways in which asylum seekers/illegal immigrants create cost burdens for our society. The first is if they’re under federal custody in detention centers. From the detention centers to the relocation costs of asylum seekers and what happens once they get here the costs have become astronomical.
Based on data from the Center for Immigration Studies:
- 63 percent of households headed by a non-citizen use at least one welfare program
- Compared to native households, non-citizen households are more than twice as likely to end up on government assistance
- The longer an illegal immigrant is in the US, the more likely they are to end up on assistance (of households headed by non-citizens in the United States for fewer than 10 years, 50 percent use one or more welfare programs; for those here more than 10 years, the rate is 70 percent)
The programs being exploited run the gambit of welfare programs. Among them...
- Financial welfare
- Housing
- Medicaid
- SNAP
- WIC
- School lunch
In Florida, we have the 4th highest rate of abuse of these programs by non-citizens. In answer to today’s question... According to the National Academies study of the fiscal impact of illegal immigrants – the average net financial impact of each illegal immigrant is $68,000.
Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveals what’s likely the most alarming information relating to illegal immigration to date. Illegal immigrants, or “non-citizens” as the report identifies them, are nearly ten times more likely to commit a federal crime than the average American. Here are the key figures...
- Non-citizens are over 7% of the estimated population
- Non-citizens account for 64% of federal arrests
That makes non-citizens 914% more likely to commit a federal crime than the average American. Imagine how much less crime we’d have if we didn’t have an illegal immigration crisis. And what crimes are we talking about? These are the top crimes prosecuted.
- 28% of all federal fraud
- 25% of property crimes
- 24% of all drug trafficking arrests
More than a quarter of all federal fraud is now coming from illegal immigrants. Nearly a quarter of drug trafficking as well. The estimated low-end cost of the crimes and processing within the criminal justice system (to speak nothing of the impact on the lives of victims) is approximately $28 billion annually. When we put the whole ball of wax together here’s the entire picture.
The net effect of asylum seekers/illegal immigrants – according to last year’s study from FAIR, which includes contributions to society – including taxes paid by illegal immigrants – totaled $151 billion. To put that in perspective, that’s about $35 billion more than the budget for the entire state of Florida. That leads to a cost per taxpayer of $1,156 per year. This crisis is real, it’s growing, and it won’t just magically work out and its cost is very real in hard dollars to all of us and to the many victims that are created as a result of the actions of many. There are two sides to stories and one side to facts. These are the facts.