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It’s good that the average household income in Martha’s Vineyard is $133,000 a year because, hoo-boy, the illegal immigrants who arrived there from Florida this week are going to cost taxpayers a bundle. Over their lifetimes, all the illegal immigrants Biden has so far added to the United States will cost us about $100 billion.
Immigrants don’t create such a large cost for taxpayers because they’re bad or lazy. Immigrants, legal or illegal, are just regular people trying to make it through the day. But their relatively low level of education means the kinds of jobs they can get don’t pay much. That in turn means they pay relatively little in taxes and use more in government services.
The costs at the state level come mainly from children in illegal immigrant-headed households using Medicaid and enrolling in public schools, plus births to illegal-immigrant mothers. Florida alone spent an estimated $1.6 billion in 2019 on public schooling for children from illegal immigrant-headed families — and the number of such students has certainly increased since then.
But immigrants, even illegal ones, also pay taxes. So what’s the bottom line?
The congressionally chartered National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine looked at this question in 2016. Using their numbers, we estimate the lifetime cost to taxpayers of an illegal border-crosser is $75,000 — that’s services used minus taxes paid.
We also estimate that since Biden’s inauguration, the illegal-immigrant population has increased by at least 1.
