Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

OLIVER And RODRIGUEZ: Biden Unleashed An Illegal Immigration Whirlwind And Texas Is Paying The Price

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As citizens and communities throughout the nation are fast realizing, the chaotic border policies of the Biden administration impose steep housing, transportation, health care, public safety and education costs on taxpayers.

In addition to the fiscal hit, these costs also include tragic and unexpected impacts on American families and basic public services. In our South Texas border region work, for example, we have learned of cases such as that of a heart attack victim who died due to lack of medical attention because all available local emergency services personnel were occupied attending to illegal aliens involved in one of the many vehicle crashes that have occurred when smugglers attempt to evade apprehension. (RELATED: HANKINSON: Here Are Three Takeaways From My Trip To Biden’s Open Southern Border)

Such examples illustrate just how, from the get-go, the border chaos unleashed by Biden and his accomplices in Congress has led to mounting death tolls and ruin, for Americans and migrants alike. There’s the enormous expense, ascending well into the tens of millions of dollars per day, that it takes for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to process, transport and house (among other services) hundreds of thousands of fraudulent “asylum seekers” and unaccompanied minors.

Meanwhile, state and local governments, in both Republican and Democratic-led jurisdictions, are reeling from the increasingly steep costs of out-of-control illegal immigration.

With nearly two-thirds of the country’s southwest border and the least amount of barrier impeding migrants from “just walking across” that border, Texas local and state governments are the first to feel the fiscal and quality of life impacts of the Biden administration’s across-the-board undermining of immigration law enforcement and its insane predilection for a catch and release policy that does nothing but add fuel to the fire.

The Democrat-led city of El Paso, Texas, alone is currently burning through a quarter of a million dollars a day to care for the thousands of migrants pouring into the city, with no guarantee of reimbursement by the federal government for all the costs involved.

As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has documented in multiple lawsuits against the Biden administration over this issue, residents of America’s Lone Star State are already on the hook to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollarsannually to provide education, health care and social services for illegal immigrants.

Public hospital districts that provide uncompensated care for illegal migrants cost Texans between $579 million and $717 million per year. These expenditures are on top of costs to simply house illegal criminal aliens, which have reached $152 million per year.

Additionally, to include illegal immigrants in the state Emergency Medicaid program, the cost is between $62 million and $90 million annually, in addition to another estimated $38 million per year on perinatal coverage through the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The cost of educating unaccompanied alien minors in Texas schools has also risen quickly and has been estimated at between $31 million to $63 million per year.

Based on average annual per pupil U.S. public education spending, the cost to taxpayers of the over 257,000 unaccompanied alien minors admitted into school districts across the United States since January of 2021 will top $3 billion annually for at least the next several years.

The costs to state and local taxpayers, much less to federal taxpayers who are already responsible for funding a government that is tens of trillions of dollars in debt, are simply unsustainable.

As New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently stated “though our compassion is limitless, our resources are not.” The reality is that whether at the local, state or federal level, the limited resources we have available to us should always be rationally and prudently prioritized to serve the needs and common good of our citizens first.

In sum, the out-of-control flow of millions of illegal immigrants and fake asylum seekers entering the country goes hand in hand with spending that is out of control and that must be put to a stop.

The situation is more than sufficient grounds for a border-based taxpayer revolt to get underway at the ballot box this November, booting to the extent possible, at every level of government, those who are responsible for aiding and abetting the madness.

Ken Oliver is senior director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Right on Immigration campaign. Selene Rodriguez is the campaign’s policy analyst.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.