The true cost to Illinoisans of America’s nearly open border is gradually becoming apparent.
First, keep in mind that the 35,000 asylum seekers recently bused to Chicago from Texas, which usually dominate headlines in Illinois, are just the tip of the iceberg.
Probably around 680,000 undocumented aliens are in Illinois, which is the estimate last June from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Migration Policy Institute estimated Illinois’ unauthorized population at 425,000 five years ago. The Center for Immigration Studies estimated the illegal population nationally at 12.8 million in October. Illinois’ share of that, based on population, would be about 500,000, though we are probably getting more than our share thanks to welcoming and sanctuary policies. And the true number of “gotaways” is unknown. They are potentially the dangerous ones, who evaded contact with border patrols, and likely include criminals and terrorist risks.
The cost of that much illegal immigration to Illinois taxpayers is enormous when you consider total federal, state and local expenses they impose.
At Wirepoints, we recently calculated just the direct costs of Illinois welcoming programs for the undocumented. They include housing, food, legal services, transportation, healthcare and K-12 education costs paid by the state, Chicago and other municipalities. They total $2.2 billion for expenses already incurred or committed since 2022.
But that’s just part of the picture. Undocumented residents also impose their share of cost of all the other government services that every level of government provides, covering citizens and noncitizens alike. All-in costs include things like public safety, hospital and emergency services, federal childcare benefits and much more.
A study released last March by the Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated that total, net, national cost of illegal immigration to federal, state and local taxpayers at $151 billion per year. That’s after subtracting for the taxes migrants pay in.
Illinois taxpayers share of that national total would be over $6 billion per year, or $1,250 per Illinois household every year.
That estimate may be far too low according to a November report by the U.S. House Homeland Security committee, which says the total net, national cost could be as high as $451 billion per year. That would put Illinois’s share at a mind-numbing $18 billion, though that number is not adjusted for whatever taxes migrants pay in.
Stanford historian Victor Davis Hanson, in a recent column, asked these questions:
Is what’s happening all a bad dream? The wage of utter incompetence? A bad joke? Nefariousness? Perhaps the answer to fathoming the currently unfathomable is that the powers that run our national, state, and local governments must think something like this: “What is our next success after destroying the border and allowing in 8-million illegal aliens…? How else but insanity do we explain the inexplicable that has now happened to this once great country?
I have no answers to all that, but I am certain of this: The border must be enforced and the alternative is national suicide.
-Mark Glennon
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Unreal that the Communist Media refuses to report anything like this. These are not the drywallers and tapers or any kind of economic migrants. Young males of military fighting age with cartel tattoos all over their bodies. This invasion is conducted with military precision and communications. Intelligence agencies working with NGO groups with nebulous names like Doctors without Borders under cover of darkness. Get paid, get fed, get a place to sleep and gain access to the largest drug market in the world? All on our dime. What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/02/four-illegal-aliens-arrested-charged-strangling-robbing-chicago/
This is all about power and total control. This will not end well and they know that they need to provoke a civil war to then bring in the military and heavy hand of government in order to achieve this goal. It will be difficult to take the guns but this could be achieved under any number of false flag operations. All sources of media are potentially lies and look for any number of false flag operations, covert ops, psychological operations, viruses, emergencies, and virtually any narrative put forth by any politician, or media member. The military industrial complex will… Read more »
I like your thinking. Yes this insurgency is a prerequisite for bigger plans, those plans involve control, ultimately military control. Players are the Davos crowd, CIA, NSA, the military, pharma, military industry and anyone else you can throw in who is actively causing Americans to hate each other by group. Throw in the myriad of people who make our kids believe absurdities like men can be women or that bad math scores are a sign of climate change. It will take only one generation to make everyone believe in absurdities, believe that speech needs censoring, and all these things.
Here is an article from what’s going on in New York with migrants.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/facing-community-pushback-nyc-mayor-233525961.html
True story: I was approached by real life Gypsies today in a grocery store begging for money. I was shopping with my daughter and some moderately dark skinned lady approached me in the breakfast cereal aisle asking for money in very broken English. I gave her a nasty look, asked in Spanish, then English, where she was from, then she said “Mol-do-va” as in “Moldova”. She’s a freakin’ gypsy who apparently migrated to the US illegally during Joe Biden’s usurpation of the presidency. I was about to tell her to return to Moldova, but then I saw a flashbulb glimpse… Read more »
I know I always talk about my son, but i have a much older adult daughter from a previous marriage. My son is much younger and of school age now.
A few months ago in Walmart a young woman approached me and said in a piteous voice “Can you help me?” There was a young man or boy with her, face covered by a hoodie, typing on his phone. When I figured out that she was asking for money, I told her I couldn’t help her and they walked away. I couldn’t identify her accent or ethnicity, but now suspect she was a Gypsy. A few weeks later ~$150 of false charges appeared on my credit card. I suspect that her companion hacked it with his phone. Moral: don’t linger… Read more »
The board is set…the pieces are moving. We come to the battle of our time.
Just like children in a candy store Illinoisans’ want everything. Similarly they want public employees to have big pensions, want green this and that and want to open their hearts to the world to come live in sanctuary splendor. This is all well and good of course but things like this cost money and where is that going to come from? Naturally these good people do not think of that on election day as they focus on world perfect dreams and forget that, contrary to their politician’s leanings, there is no free money tree in Springfield
YOU are the money tree, and you’ll just have to work harder to earn it so you can pay their pensions.
While I agree that “the border must be enforced,” the feds could ease the financial strain if everyone physically present in the United States was permitted to start a business or take a job. Not that any employer should be required to hire them, but employers shouldn’t be prohibited from doing so.
As a practical matter, even without federal cooperation many do find work, which means they’re doing something useful.
That’ll go over well during the next recession, when tens of millions of illegal immigrants work for pennies on the dollar while natives can’t find work…
Republican and senate leaders went to Ukraine to further fund the Azov Nazi’s. And they go to Israel to fund a similar activity there. Will they bring pallets of cash? Checks? Either way democrats and republicans both don’t give a crap about us or the border. They are more interested in shoveling billions into wars, why, because wars are an unaccountable slush fund that feeds the Washington beltway and their d9nors in the MIC. This is your money folks, going to foreign places. Forget about fixing your border. Haley, Graham, Pompeo, McConnel, Schumer, they are ALL THE SAME, the little… Read more »
yes, the Republican party sucks. No doubt about it.
RE-READ………SCHUMMER AND HALEY???? ARE NOT REPUBLICANS.. YOU MUST BE A DEMO
THEY SHOULD USE THEIR OWN WAR CHESTS AND BANK ACCOUNTS…..SEE HOW FAST THINGS WOULD CHANGE!!!!! THEY ALL THINK THEY ARE ABOVE THE LOWLY TAX PAYER………NOT……AS YOU SAID THEY ALL COME OUT OF PUBLIC SERVICE MILLIONAIRES…….NOT A BAD GIG!!
Stop lying. Almost all of the money for “Ukraine” is spent in the USA, making new weapons to replace the old weapons being sent to Ukraine (made in the 1970’s-1980’s). There is no cash sent to Ukraine.
Personally, I think the USA should send weapons to Ukraine without replacement. The USA has enormous stockpiles of weapons. We could send half, and still have enormous stockpiles of weapons. The “funding” for Ukraine is just another congressional pork barrel spending project, but don’t lie and claim that Ukraine is getting any of that money.
No, there is cash going to Ukarine, but the bulk it is going straight into the pockets of Zelensky and his pals, just like it does in African nations where the warlords skim off as much as possible, then send the scraps down the line. It keeps them quiet to prolong the writing of blank checks, as in the pork barrel projects you mentioned. Early on, when the Ukrainians were begging for fighter jets, Poland told the US, „hey, we’ll give them our old MiGs which they know how to fly, if you sell us your older (but still newer… Read more »
We are paying all public employee pensions in Ukraine as well as much more. you’ve been watching CNN and FOX too much.
Assign a competent auditor to document how the Ukraine money is being spent. I want to see the proof.
No auditor can follow the money trail thru the many banks, shell companies, and so forth.
Maybe they can follow the 10% FJB gets.
I moved to Springfield IL from San Antonio a decade ago and the cost then on our home for property taxes due to illegal aliens was $120 per month in taxes to the county health system, which provided medical care to the illegal aliens. The $1,250 estimate for Illinois households is only going to get worse. The taxes on my former residence in San Antonio have more than doubled in the last decade.
This country has been captured. Buy guns and ammo.
The picture of the wave crossing the bridge looks like an invasion of army
Ants, they destroy everything in their path. The marabunta take everything and
Move on to the next area to ravage.
Mark Glennon is correct we had better
Get control over our border, it may be to
late the marabunta are at our doors now.
Voter Replacement Theory is very real. Democrats, and many RINO’s, have stated publicly that burning the house down (America) is just fine if they get their way – which appears to be a totalitarian state. Look for the Constitution to be turned into a relic if things don’t change very soon in America.
What we should want to know, is who is behind all of this? Look at the photo used in the article, it shows several thousand people crossing a bridge. Who organized this? How do thousands of dirt poor people cross thru the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere every day? These are the most lawless and treacherous places in the world. There is very little infrastructure in these countries yet hundreds of thousands of people make the journey every month. Is the Catholic Church organizing the caravans? Is this all being organized by the Mexican Drug Cartels? There is… Read more »
NGO’s Non Profit Groups, including the arm of the United Nations that we fund, the IMA.
Unvetted migrants, not welcome. Use the legal immigration system and use conventional transportation to get here. Incentivizing millions of people to embark on a dangerous journey is irresponsible. Change immigration laws if necessary to accommodate the flow. I am not asking too much.
Con, I have taken some time to research the migration. There is an independent journalist name Michael Yon that documented the migration in detail.
He can be found at;
michaelyon.com
And on X at;
#michael_yon
His conclusions are startling.
Everyone that read this article should go and look at his documentation of the migration. There is plenty of photography and video to support his writing.
Victor David Hansen often has his facts wrong especially concerning Ukraine and many other areas. But this time he’s right. The influx is totally intentional though. The influx is largely young males. The intention is to militarize them as the writing is on the wall for the US military being anything other than a great naval and air power. Faced with a ground war needing a massive infantry we are toast. This is why 500,000 Ukrainians have been sent to their death, by the US neocons, for US globalist goals. When Ukraine has no more husbands and sons left, what… Read more »
The war theory is a secondary thing. The primary goal is to flip a handful of purple states blue and then control the federal government for seven generations henceforth, with far left progressive BIPOC women as the girl bosses in charge of the Economic Zone formerly known as the united states of america.
That might be the political goal. But achieving a few blue states and putting democrats in power will not make much difference if republicans held those states. Today there is very little difference between republicans and democrats in the big issues that count. Both parties are warmongers. Both parties are totally beholden to the military industrial complex. Both parties will continue to print an excess trillion dollars of debt each year. Both parties will implement authoritarian control again if another pandemic comes along. And both parties will use their little “pet” issues like guns, abortion, gender, etc as kind of… Read more »
Are you saying that Nikki Haley is no different than a Trump or Biden running for President? While the concerns you have voiced are valid, there is no remedy offered either.
I am saying that Trump is my reluctantly favorite, but he is also a pushover who is not good at selecting his cabinet and listens to bad advice. This was demonstrated in his first term. Fauchi and Birx and the bureaucrats walked all over him shutting down the economy. In world affairs he surrounded himself with the very scumbags that the Democrats love, John Bolton a man who wants to bomb everything and get involved with every foreign entanglement, the very thing Washington and Jefferson warned us not to do. Pompeo, another Trump selection, CIA scum, he is a symbol… Read more »
While I agree with your characterizations of Fauci, Birx and Bolton, I think Pompeo was a fantastic Secretary of State. Apparently you feel that anyone that projects a strong US is a war monger, so this might explain the disconnect. I agree with Haley that Trump was the right person in 2016, but his divisive style of leadership is no longer a good one. Furthermore, criticizing Haley as a war monger for not being an isolationist is as naive as those backing Obama’s failed diplomacy over strength which has allowed autocratic regimes under Putin, Xi and Iranian mullahs to be… Read more »
I AM SURE TRUMP HAS LEARNED HIS LESSON AND WILL CHOOSE MORE WISELY THIS TIME
Based on what I’ve seen, I’m cautiously optimistic that Trump, and the people he is surrounding himself with now, seem to have learned their lessons and have learned from the mistakes they made the first time. Even the most ardent MAGA trump supporters will freely admit that Trump made huge mistakes in his first term, especially with hiring. And the people that will be entering his 2nd administration have been playing for years on how to fix the problems of the first time around. Everyone pretty much acknowledges what needs to be done the second time around.
All valid points when it comes to both parties having similar positions on fiscal and foreign policy but there are still massive differences between the parties. If they were really so similar there would not be such gridlock in DC. There are far more differences between the two, in as much as the Democrats hate you, deplorable, and they’ll give your jobs, home, money, equity, schools and livelihood to fellow Democrats, and let you suffer and die. Ask any Democrat in academia, tech, law or elsewhere if the two parties are really a uniparty and they’ll scoff at that suggestion.… Read more »
What comes to mind is “The Bridge on the River Kwai”
Or Camp of the Saints
I was thinking the bridge into Hell, as in Dante’s Inferno. “ As crowded as London Bridge, etc “. The narrator was aghast at the number of damned souls.