The Center for Immigration Studies has a new report out about the continuing costs of illegal alien moochers titled Births to Legal and Illegal Immigrants in the U.S. [1]. As always, the dollar cost for open borders is high. As Breitbart News headlined on October 10, Illegal Alien Births of Anchor Babies Cost U.S. Taxpayers $2.4B Every Year. [2]
One gets the impression that not much has changed in the illegal alien scrounging category.
Tucker Carlson interviewed an author of the report, Steven Camarota.
TUCKER CARLSON: And then this: a fascinating new report by the Center for Immigration Studies [1] has found that helping illegal immigrants have children in this country is a bigger priority for our government than defending the border itself. Steven Camarota is Director of Research [3] at the Center for Immigration Studies, and he joins us tonight. Steven Camarota, thanks a lot for coming on. So how did you measure this priority?
STEVEN CAMAROTA: Right now we’re just looking at Census Bureau data; they ask people every year, a very large census, it’s several million people in this American Community Survey if they’re immigrants and if they had a kid in the last year, and then you can use the characteristics of people to pick out those who are likely illegal immigrants. That’s what the government does to estimate immigrants. So when you do that, you find that there are about 300,000 births to illegal immigrants each year at a cost of about $12,000 for the two-thirds that are paid for by taxpayers.
CARLSON: Per.
CAMAROTA: Per — right, it’s about $12,000 is what it costs to have a kid in the United States; that does include some of the care for the child after he’s born. So if you add all that up, it’s about $2.5 billion a year we pay for the births to illegal immigrants which, as you’ve pointed out, is more than we’ve spent on any kind of new wall construction or barriers at the border.
CARLSON: Does that make us good people or masochistic crazy people?
CAMAROTA: Well, a couple things I would say about that: look, if someone’s here and they’re having a kid, we’re gonna pay for it if they don’t have any well the thing that is a couple things I would say about that look, if someone’s here and they’re have a kid, we’re gonna pay for it if they don’t have insurance — in 2/3 of the illegal immigrants don’t have insurance, so we’re gonna pay for it and since the kids weren’t here as a US citizen, it may make sense obviously to do that, but the larger question is as a matter of policy year after year to tolerate this and not try to encourage people to go home and not try to stop them from entering that does seem masochistic.
CARLSON: So just as a metaphysical question: if you tolerate something consistently over decades, you’re welcoming it, aren’t you?
CAMAROTA: Right, I mean obviously if we have situation where legal immigrants can get anything from driver’s license to access all kinds of benefits on behalf of their children, get in-state college tuition — we have whole jurisdictions that won’t cooperate with immigration enforcement — you have to say that it’s almost amazing that we don’t have more illegal immigrants in the United States than 10 to 12 million that we estimate.
CARLSON: It’s because our political class wants them — that’s the conclusion.
Interestingly, CBS pointed out the problem in 2008: Illegal Immigrant Births – At Your Expense. The only difference is that the numbers and costs are higher now.