Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman scolded the Wall Street Journal for cheerleading an open-border immigration policy. “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” he warned.
This leads to a “transfer state,” as the Heritage Foundation describes, the government taxing the upper and middle classes, transferring money to lower economic classes via subsidies and benefits.
In other words, “The transfer state redistributes funds from those with high-skill and high-income levels to those with lower skill levels.”
Heritage makes the assumption, “It takes the entire net tax payments (taxes paid minus benefits received) of one college-educated family to pay for the net benefits received by one low-skill immigrant family.”
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What happens when that ratio changes to one financially sound family supporting not one, but two, three, or more families through ever-increasing taxes and families to support?
Which is why a welfare state in an open-borders country will eventually reaching a tipping point. Are we already there?
As reported by Fox News’s Griff Jenkins, “Encounters with illegal immigrants at the southern border have topped over 300,000 in December.” Do the math. That’s 3.6 million per year, more than the population of every U.S. city except Los Angeles and New York.
How many migrants are not encountered? Those are called “gotaways” and Border Patrol estimates 1,000 per day, or 365,000 per year. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledges, “600,000 illegal ‘gotaways’ crossed border in 2023, calls immigration system broken.”
These are estimates. But the real number is unknowable. Let’s say a million gotaways a year, making the total 4.6 million migrants a year, more than the population of L.A. added to America each and every year.
As most migrants are unskilled, unable to speak English, many illiterate and unemployable, they are by necessity, supported by American taxpayers for food, shelter, education, travel, health care, and clothing.
What does that cost? “NYC’s daily per-person cost to house migrants climbs to nearly $400.” What about health care? California plans to provide free health care insurance to all illegal migrants, at an annual cost of about $4,000 for each adult.
According to Judicial Watch the “Net cost of illegal immigration is greater than the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of 15 different states.”
Clearly this is not sustainable. U.S. national debt recently topped $34 trillion. With the current interest rate on the debt at about 3 percent, interest on the debt is more than $1 trillion per year. Interest alone consumes about a quarter of the $4.4 trillion in annual federal receipts, more than defense spending.
We will be borrowing money to pay the interest on previously borrowed money. Economist Herbert Stein observed, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop“.
The something is America as we know it.
There is no interest in securing our national border. In a hyper-partisan Washington, D.C., this is one of few examples where Republicans and Democrats actually agree.
Democrats want new voters. Their policies and leaders are not so popular these days. Some 63 percent of likely U.S. voters think the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction, according to Rasmussen Reports. Only 24 percent of voters strongly approve of the job President Biden is doing.
Creating a new dependency class of tens of millions of potential voters serves Democrat electoral interests. Republicans don’t mind ceding power to the Democrats as long as their wallets are thick with cash.
Open borders provide cheap labor for the Chamber of Commerce Republican establishment. GOP lawmakers are rewarded with generous campaign contributions and other financial perks in exchange for looking the other way from an open border.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson visited the U.S.-Mexican border with a gaggle of Republicans, huffing and puffing about what a “catastrophe” exists at the border. So what? Lots of talk but no action.
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Going back to his predecessor Paul Ryan, Republicans have fought Trump on building a border wall and applied no pressure on Biden to secure the border. They could defund any responsible agencies including Homeland Security and Customs and Border Enforcement until the border was secure,
They will probably vote to reward DHS with a new building, rather than holding them accountable, as they did with the weaponized and corrupt FBI. The DHS secretary, rather than securing the homeland per his job description, blames climate change rather than his inaction and incompetence.
The power of the purse and impeachment are unknown or enigmatic concepts to Congressional Republicans. Instead, the Republican Speaker is “advocating” for solutions. What a tough guy he is.
Financial ramifications are a fraction of the problem. What about the fact that there are millions of young, military aged men, from all over the world, including countries not friendly to U.S. interests, unvetted, with unknown backgrounds or intentions, now in this country?
How many are, as Trump would describe, “bad hombres”? Intent on crime or terrorism? The number of Chinese migrants crossing into America has risen dramatically.
If 4 million to 5 million migrants come to America each year, and 10 percent are troublemakers, that’s 450,000, the same size as the active duty U.S. Army.
Our enemies would not need to attack us from the outside, their militaries may already be embedded in America.
