The Many Costs of Obama’s Amnesty

Seeing as the costs will come due only after Barack Obama has left the White House, I guess he doesn’t care how high those costs are. 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 immigrants to whom Obama is granting legal status will be about $1.3 trillion. Rector’s calculation is based on his assumption that at least 3.97 million immigrants will receive legal status under Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, and the average DAPA beneficiary has only a 10th-grade education.

DAPA recipients, according to Rector’s calculations, will receive $7.8 billion every year once they get access to the refundable earned income tax credit and the refundable additional child tax credit. Those EITC and ACTC recipients will also be allowed to claim credit for three years of illegal work, which will sock U.S. taxpayers for another $23.5 billion.

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Rector estimates that the combined cost of means-tested welfare benefits the immigrants who came here illegally 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 whether someone is trying to destroy America.

The Government Accountability Office has already reported that even the debate over legalizing the presence of certain immigrants 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 immigration plan. The Hispanic population is now almost equal to the white population, and almost 50 percent of babies born in California are Hispanic.

Nearly a third of “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 but also a big expense to taxpayers, who are hit with new costs of schools, hospitals and prisons.

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