Stopping just a tiny percentage of illegal immigrants surging into the United States would pay for President Trump’s wall by eliminating the lifetime taxpayer costs provided to those aliens, according to a detailed financial analysis.
The Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower levels of immigration, said that the border wall between Mexico and the United States would only have to stop 3 percent to 4 percent of potential illegal crossers, or about 60,000 of an estimated 2 million over the next decade, to pay for Trump’s $5 billion request.
The analysis highlights the huge price of illegal immigration and what it takes to protect the border, house, educate, and feed new immigrants, and the lifetime of having some 11 million on various welfare programs.
Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, used several financial databases to come up with a lifetime cost of $82,191 for every single new illegal immigrant.
It grows if children and grandchildren of illegal immigrants are added, to $94,391 — $103,826 in 2018 dollars, said CIS.
Camarota said that about 200,000 more illegal immigrants successfully cross the border yearly, a lifetime cost of $16.4 billion added each year.
The president is seeking $5 billion in new wall funding and the wall cost is expected to be under $30 billion.
He is making his case for the wall in a rare televised statement and he plans to follow up with a tour of the border on Thursday.
While Camarota said experts may fight over the assumptions, the wall will pay for itself in reducing taxpayer burden at some point.
He wrote, “the range of reasonable assumptions indicates that a wall would not have to come close to being anywhere near 100 percent effective to pay for itself. This would be true even if a wall cost twice as much. A wall that is only partially effective could pay for itself by offsetting the cost that otherwise successful illegal crossers would create.”
[Also read: Census confirms: 63 percent of ‘non-citizens’ on welfare, 4.6 million households]
