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Q&A of the Day – The Cost of Illegal Immigration to Floridians
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
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Today’s entry: Brian, Question, GOVERNOR DeSantis. What the "HELL" were you thinking? The governor wasted taxpayers monies for a political stunt. The situation marked the latest instance in which federal coronavirus aid appeared to enable Republicans’ immigration crackdowns — a far cry from what congressional lawmakers had envisioned when they reserved stimulus money for. Monies were earmarked for FL public transit! The governor needs to spend his $177 MILLION DONATIONs to sponsor THE NEXT “voyage” of MIGRANTS; NOT THE taxpayers' monies!
Bottom Line: This note reflects what’s commonly being reported by legacy news media and is being shared and spun in leftist circles. What it doesn’t reflect is reality. As I mentioned on Friday, there’s no doubt that what Governor DeSantis did when he shipped two planes of illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard was a political stunt. At the same time, what he really did was elevate the awareness of the reality on the ground. The reality that once you have these illegal immigrants placed in your backyard something must happen with them. As we saw in the case of Martha’s Vineyard, they literally declared a humanitarian crisis for just fifty people. They then quickly ushered them out of Martha’s Vineyard. To the listener who sent this note and all who are advancing the leftist narrative. There’s a reality you must account for, the reality which was brought to light on Martha’s Vineyard. What happens when these illegal immigrants arrive in Florida? What’s the cost and the impact on our society? It doesn’t just somehow or another work out. It doesn’t just pay for itself somehow.
Having extensively covered the border crisis for two decades, and having previously worked in stopping covert dumping of illegal immigrants in Broward and Palm Beach County, there’s much that isn’t known or reported which should be. There are three basic ways in which illegal immigrants create cost burdens for our society. The first is if they’re under federal custody. Based on the government data, the cost is $134 per person per day. Total illegals detained over the prior twelve months totaled a record 1.7 million with an average of 42,000 which remained housed and sheltered daily. That costs us over $2 billion in just the normal cost of encounters. The direct cost to Floridians via our tax dollars just from the processing at the border is about $138 million annually. Then you have the cost of transporting the illegals across the country. Unsurprisingly, the godless, soulless slanderous news media which set DeSantis up as an evil doer of sorts, fails to report that President Biden tasked Congress with providing $1.8 billion this year alone to transport illegals to our backyards. The cost to Floridians just to move illegals around is $121 million. Then there’s what happens once they arrive.
I’ve addressed this question previously based on research from the Center for Immigration Studies. Here’s a quick recap.
- 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 most abuse of these programs by non-citizens and the estimated annual abuse is $26.8 billion nationally (this is dated info with numbers far lower than what we’ve experienced over the past year plus).
So, Florida’s piece of the cost of illegal immigrant government assistance... Over $1.8 billion annually. Having fun yet? But wait there’s more because we’ve yet addressed the impact of crime on our society.
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 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 is 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 $24 billion annually. Florida’s share of that pie is a cost of greater than $1.6 billion.
So, in summary, the low-end cost to Floridians due to illegal immigration is about $3.7 billion annually. There are 7.9 million households in Florida which means each Florida household is paying a minimum of $468 annually just to support illegal immigration in this country. Those who want to complain about the $12 million allocated by the state legislature for Governor DeSantis’ relocation program, which highlights the reality of these issues, aren’t at all informed and aren’t serious people related to this subject. This crisis is real, it doesn’t just magically work out and its cost is very real in hard dollars and in terms of victims. There are two sides to stories and one side to facts. These are the facts.