Biden's border policies cost American cities $202 billion in one year

FPI / February 7, 2023

U.S. cities will be billing American taxpayers to the tune of about $202 billion due to Joe Biden's open border immigration policies, a report said.

That price tag "increases by $159 million every day," Andrew R. Arthur wrote for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) on Feb. 3.

New York City Democrat Mayor Eric Adams said each of the 43,000 migrants in NYC will cost the city, on average, just over $65,000 in the coming fiscal year.

"Extrapolating those costs over all 3.1 million migrants who have made it to the interior under Biden, you get to a total one-year price tag of just less than $202 billion per year for migrant assistance," Arthur noted.

And that figure will only increase.

Fox News reported that gotaways, those who evade capture as they illegally cross the U.S. via the southern border, entered at a rate of 2,450 per day in the first 120 days of this fiscal year.

"That means that yearly costs to municipalities are increasing every day by more than $159 million, even assuming that Biden’s DHS detains every new apprehended migrant (which it won’t)," Arthur wrote.

"To put that into context," Arthur continued, "Congress in its recent omnibus spending bill appropriated $858 billion for defense spending in FY 2023. In other words, municipal migrant costs are equivalent to more than a fifth of the Pentagon’s entire budget (and aircraft carriers ain’t cheap, either)."

From February 2021 through the end of November 2022, Border Patrol agents at the southwest border apprehended more than 4.2 million illegal immigrants.

Of those 4.2 million-plus, about 2.039 million were expelled under CDC orders issued pursuant to Title 42 of the U.S. Code in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. That leaves just short of 2.176 million illegals who were processed under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Approximately 1.8 million of those migrants processed under the INA were released into the United States. In addition, about 389,000 gotaways evaded agents and also entered the country successfully in FY 2021, as did some 599,000 more in FY 2022, and, according to Fox News on Jan. 28, nearly 294,000 others in the first 120 days of FY 2023.

Adding the 1.8 million aliens who have been apprehended and released by CBP to the 1.282 million gotaways since FY 2021, you get to nearly 3.1 million new illegal migrants in the United States on Team Biden's watch.

"Today it’s NYC. Tomorrow it will be towns and cities nationwide," Arthur wrote. "In addition to creating a humanitarian and national-security disaster at the Southwest border, the Biden administration through its feckless policies has also created a municipal spending crisis, as well. The reason the mayor of the world’s financial capital is speaking out about the border is that even NYC can’t pay its migrant costs anymore. Soon, no other city or town will be able to bear those costs, either."

Free Press International
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