The Many Costs of Obama’s Amnesty
The Many Costs of Obama’s Amnesty
March 25, 2015
by Phyllis Schlafly
Since the costs will come due only after Obama has left the White House, I guess he doesn’t care how high are those costs. But the costs are horrendous, as just added up by our country’s foremost authority on such things, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation.
Rector told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week that the lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare benefits paid to the millions of illegal aliens to whom Obama is granting legal status will be about 1.3 trillion dollars. Rector’s calculation is based on his assumption that at least 3.97 million illegal aliens will receive legal status under DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents), and the average DAPA beneficiary has only a 10th grade education.
DAPA recipients, according to Rector’s calculations, would receive $7.8 billion every year once they get access to the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the refundable Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC). Those EITC and ACTC recipients will also be allowed to claim credit for three years of illegal work, which would sock the U.S. taxpayers for another $23.5 billion.
This was confirmed by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who told Congress on February 11 that illegal immigrants who didn’t pay any taxes, or who used fake Social Security numbers, will nevertheless be able to claim back-refunds under EITC once they get new Social Security numbers under Obama’s amnesty. Koskinen said he didn’t know how much these tax refunds will cost and the White House never checked with him before announcing the amnesty.
The average DAPA-eligible family already receives about $6,600 a year in means-tested welfare benefits. That includes food stamps, school lunch (and breakfast), Medicaid, S-CHIP, and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children).
Many Americans labor under the false assumption that, since most legal and illegal immigrants are hard-working, they therefore do not depend on welfare assistance. In fact, as Rector patiently explains, most welfare benefits go to households with children headed by a low-income employed adult.
Rector estimates that the combined cost of means-tested welfare benefits the illegals now receive, plus other goodies such as EITC and ACTC cash, will encourage increased illegal immigration in the future. The average American, whose children and grandchildren will end up burdened with this enormous debt, must ask themselves whether someone is trying to destroy America.
The Government Accountability Office has already reported that even the debate over legalizing illegals was “a primary cause” of last summer’s surge of Central Americans crashing our southern border. Even if those teenagers were not eligible for asylum or legal status when they arrived, they knew that deportations could take years, giving them the chance to disappear into the shadows.
Look at California for a preview of our future under Obama’s illegal immigration plan. The Hispanic population is now almost equal to the white population and almost 50 percent of all California births are now Hispanic.
Nearly a third of all “English learners” in U.S. public schools are third-generation Americans who still are not speaking English at home, and the Hispanic illegitimacy rate is 53 percent. The cheap labor welcomed by employers is not only a huge impediment for American job-seekers, it’s also a big expense to taxpayers who are hit with new costs of schools, hospitals and prisons.
The agency charged with approving the applications for Obama’s amnesty is getting ready for more than 800,000 applications in the first couple of months. This agency is facing the prospect of trying to process at least four million pieces of mail connected with the new amnesty, and all applications are supposed to be opened in the presence of two workers, one with a “secret” security clearance.
Obviously, we need a new bureaucracy for this awesome task, and USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) has already started to hire several hundred new employees and train them. Luke Bellocchi, a former deputy ombudsman for USCIS, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in February, “It’s going to be hard to tell how much fraud there is.”
Kenneth Palinkas, president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council, said, “How you could have proper adjudications this way is beyond my scope of reason. They want to cleric-alize the job, and they’re really not concerned about whether the documents entered are fraudulent or not. They just want to push the papers along.”
The two factors that Americans are most concerned about are jobs and vote fraud. The United States has accepted two new immigrants for each additional job created since 2000, according to federal data, and expert witnesses have testified that once the amnestied illegals are given Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses, there is no way to stop them from registering to vote.
